FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, May 5, 2011
Contact: Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota
Wayne Rohde 651-705-5030 / 405-973-7049
CDC Failing To Investigate Vaccine Injuries
Mishandling of consumers’ reports decreases immunization trust
ST. PAUL, MN – Now that National Infant Immunization Week is over, May should be designated Vaccine Injury Prevention Month, says the Vaccine Safety Council of Minnesota.
“Infants and children are not being monitored adequately following vaccination,” said Patti Carroll of the VSCM. “Families’ vaccine injury reports are being denied or shelved. Ethically they should be investigated to learn more about prevention of vaccine injuries, and victims should be given medical treatment.”
For decades the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has worked with manufacturers, state agencies and media to build a network for vaccine sales and delivery. To focus on delivery and then fail to study vaccine adverse effects leaves a tragic void in the scientific process.
State agencies like the Minnesota Department of Health assure the public that vaccines are safe and effective. However the many vaccine injury reports in medical literature and the underused Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System prove otherwise. Some symptoms include swelling, tics, seizures, loss of mobility, difficulty breathing, and loss of consciousness.
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program as of 1998 identified 8 deaths in infants attributed to the measles vaccine, and 42 cases of brain inflammation resulting in mental regression and retardation, chronic seizures, motor and sensory deficits, and movement disorders. Other adverse reactions to vaccines include demyelination, neuroinflammation, autoimmunity, mitochondrial dysfunction, methylation disorder, and gastrointestinal disease.
Doctors often fail to recognize the signs of vaccine injury, and dismiss infant developmental delays by telling parents that their child’s serious symptoms or regression were unrelated to the vaccine, or that the child will grow out of it. Often the neuroimmune damage caused by vaccines remains undiagnosed until preschool educators see behavioral deficits and aberrancies.
Consumers are increasingly skeptical about the vaccine program after learning about its ethical and safety deficiencies. Yet vaccine policymakers deflect blame for their failures. “How did we get to the point where so many children are vulnerable?” asked MDH infectious disease director Kristen Ehresmann last month, commenting on parents choosing to skip children’s vaccines.
“We got to this point because a significant number of parents have witnessed their child having severe adverse effects from a vaccination,” said Jerri Johnson of the advocacy group National Health Freedom Coalition. “This damage has happened often enough that lots of grandparents, aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors have first-hand knowledge of vaccine injuries.”
Ironically families of vaccine-injured children are realizing that federal and state legislation will be necessary to enforce ethical behavior from administrators of the vaccine program. Unlike sufferers of other diseases, victims of vaccine injuries have no government clearinghouse for medical information or treatment and have had to band together for support.
“It should not take legislation and litigation to force healthcare professionals to stop writing off so many children as collateral damage in the war on disease,” said Nancy Hokkanen of the VSCM.
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Vaccine Injury Information
Vaccine-induced Injuries & Deaths
Hannah Poling
Ga. girl helps link autism to childhood vaccines
By Alison Young, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution / Thursday, March 6, 2008
http://www.ajc.com/health/content/health/stories/2008/03/06/autism_0306.html
Jade Ventura
http://www.jadefoundationmn.org/jstory.htm
Ian Gromowski (see photo progression)
http://iansvoice.org/default.aspx
Elias Tembenis
http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/LORD.TEMBENIS112910.pdf
http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/756/52/
Media Investigative Report
CBS News Investigates: The Search for Safer Vaccines
Sharyl Attkisson / January 19, 2011
“[G]overnment officials have said they have no plans to study [vaccine injury] cases…”
http://www.cbsnews.com/8300-31727_162-10391695.html?keyword=Elias+Tembenis
Government Agencies
Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS)
National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP)
http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/
Medical Journal Article
Adversomics: The Emerging Field of Vaccine Adverse Event Immunogenetics
Gregory A. Poland, MD, Inna G. Ovsyannikova, PhD, and Robert M. Jacobson, MD
The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, Volume 28, Number 5, May 2009
SUMMARY: “We believe that adversomics (the immunogenetics and immunogenomics of vaccine adverse events at the individual and population level, respectively) is critical to understanding and preventing serious adverse vaccine-related events, developing the next generation of vaccines, and to improving public con?dence in vaccine safety.”
Consumer Advocates
National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC)
Autism Research Institute
http://www.autism.com/index_b.asp
“Dr. Bernard Rimland — founder and director of the Autism Research Institute — testified before the committee that classic autism, (noticeable from birth) has largely been replaced by late-onset or ‘acquired autism’; a form of autism in which children are born normally developing but later regress into autism in the second year of life. He was one of the first to point to environmental insult through vaccine injury as a possible leading contributing factor.” [Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) speech to Congress June 19, 2007]