Are Vaccines Safe? An Honest Review of the Vaccine Approval Process by the FDA

Video highlights of the last Congressional Hearing on Autism.

Are Vaccines Safe? Bracing Ourselves for More Sham Vaccine Studies

By Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null
Global Research

Excerpts:

When we hear official reports released by the FDA and CDC, transmitted throughout major corporate media outlets and publications, that a particular vaccine is safe, we should immediately perk to attention, raise a red flag, and muster rational suspicion.

One of the most important questions is, what kind of studies are performed to determine that any vaccine is safe? And what evidence is there that vaccines are especially safe in infants, small children, pregnant mothers, the elderly, and those with asthma and compromised immune systems?

According to the statutes of the FDA’s Public Health Service Act, vaccine manufacturers are required to prove a vaccine complies with three criteria before approval and launch: safety, purity and potency. There are no requirements before FDA approval and licensing that a vaccine undergoes independent studies by researchers with no vested financial interests and industry ties in order to validate a vaccine maker’s claims. Rather, the entire approval process is nothing more than a good-faith relationship between the vaccine industrial complex and the FDA and the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice (ACID), the primary entity determining vaccine policies.

Clinical trials with at-risk individuals, including infants, small children, pregnant mothers and people over 65 of age are not mandatory for regulatory approval. So how do the vaccine makers determine whether or not a vaccine is safe for these at-risk groups? Well, they don’t except by predicting past incidences of vaccine effectiveness and safety using mathematical models. The vaccine industrial complex is under no federal obligation to give sound scientific evidence that their vaccines are safe in anyone except health adults.

Even for those unfamiliar with clinical trial jargon, we can all agree that the approval of any vaccine should rely on sound evidence-based medicine; that is, we would expect clinical trials for determining the efficacy and safety of a vaccine to rely on the best scientific methods in order to gain accurate data to protect and improve the lives of people. Instead, the vaccine approval policy relies on individual-based decisions, subjective quackery fabricated by the vaccine industry, and poor study designs for vaccine efficacy and safety that only serve corporate biases and commercial interests.

One of the criticisms raised against the CDC’s and HHS’s swine flu policy is that certain groups have been prioritized for vaccination when no definitive and sound medical studies exist to support the government’s claims that influenza vaccines’ are efficacious and safe. These include clinical trials on small children, pregnant mothers, individuals with compromised immune systems, such as asthma, and the elderly. The CDC’s hypocrisy lies in the fact that systematic reviews have already been performed on all available sound studies but the CDC doesn’t like their answers and prefers to ignore them. Dr. Tom Jefferson, head of the Cochrane’s Vaccine Field group, has shown that studies concluding flu vaccine’s efficacy were either poorly designed or “badly executed.” With respect to trials conducted on children under two years of age, the very sparse reliable studies show influenza vaccines are no more effective than a placebo.

Pregnant women are now being listed as a high priority for swine flu inoculation. Yet the product inserts so far from the package inserts state the disclaimer: “Animal reproduction studies have not been conducted with influenza virus vaccine. It is also not known whether influenza virus vaccine can cause fetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman.”[9] By their own admission, the vaccine industrial complex has not even performed clinical studies on pregnant animals, let alone pregnant humans!

Dr. Jefferson states, “There is no study of the vaccines on pregnant women—no randomized clinical trials.”[12] The real impact of flu vaccines’ perils was summarized in an article in the Summer 2006 Journal of the American Physicians and Surgeons. Drs. David Ayoub and Edward Yazbak conclude their review of the ACIP’s policy on vaccinated pregnant women with the flu vaccine: “The ACIP’s citations and the current literature indicate that influenza infection is rarely a threat to normal pregnancy. There is no convincing evidence of the effectiveness of influenza vaccination during this critical period. No studies have adequately assessed the risk of influenza vaccination during pregnancy and animal safety studies are lacking…. The ACIP policy recommendation of routinely administering influenza vaccine during pregnancy is ill-advised and unsupported by current scientific literature, and it should be withdrawn.”

It would seem that the pro-vaccination community abides by the prevailing myth that the placenta serves as a kind of barrier or wall protecting the fetus from toxic chemicals, metals and contaminants and pathogens in the pregnant mother. This belief has collapsed after one of the more important discoveries in recent years. The Environmental Working Group, an independent non-profit organization conducts laboratory research on environmental toxins. After testing umbilical cord blood for over 200 of some of the most dangerous chemicals found in our immediate everyday environment, the researchers came to the startling results that on average approximately three quarters of them were present in umbilical cord blood. The urgent importance of this discovery is that the placenta does not serve as a reliable filter and highly toxic neurological damaging chemicals, including those used in vaccines, such as ethylmercury and formaldehyde, will make their way to the developing fetus and can contribute to untold neurological and genetic alterations leading to long-term diseases as the child grows up. Unless we can fully appreciate the rate of cell division in an unborn child, which is astronomical and therefore more susceptible to mutations in the presence of highly toxic chemicals, we are unable to grasp the full extent of the dangers vaccines pose on the developing child. This in and of itself should force us to pause and reconsider the serious side effects being inflicted on unborn children from vaccine ingredients.

Read the Full Article Here: http://www.globalresearch.ca/are-vaccines-safe/15669