Inside Vaccines

Recent news stories about a link between MRSA and flu deaths in children raise some interesting questions in light of our Sisyphus series (Part I, Part II and Part III).

“Being a carrier of MRSA has increased a lot, especially among school-aged kids,” said Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at the CDC. “And being colonized may put them at risk for a severe staph aureus infection when they get the flu.”

This particular news story blames the problem on antibiotic overuse, and, of course, recommends the flu vaccine to save children from this dangerous situation.

At the CDC, investigators decided to review the medical charts of nearly all children admitted to Atlanta-area hospitals with the flu in the winter of 2006-2007. They found that 11 percent of the youngsters also suffered from staph infections, with a little more than half caused by the drug-resistant type.

Prevnar was introduced in 2000 and has probably contributed to the recent increase in staphylococcal colonization. As stated here:

Whether the current increase in severe community-acquired S. aureus infections, including methicillin-resistant S. aureus (6), is partially caused by the recent introduction of the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine is yet to be determined.

We are hoping that the CDC is aware of the connection between Prevnar and the rise in MRSA. Will they consider removing Prevnar from the schedule? Why hasn’t this issue turned up on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting agendas? So far, the only public attention the CDC has given to the increase in staph colonization is flag-waving for the flu vaccine.

While the rate of S. aureus continues to rise, and despite a strong link to vaccination as being a major causative factor, research is full-bore ahead for a new 13-valent (vs. the current 7-valent) Prevnar vaccine. In addition, this problem has the potential to spread worldwide, as there is a big push to include Prevnar on vaccination schedules in other countries.

Wyeth Sees Prevnar Vaccine Sales Reaching $3 Billion In 2009 - CNNMoney.com

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Wyeth (WYE) expects sales of its Prevnar vaccine to rise to $3 billion in 2009, driven by overseas growth and new launches, 

Insidevaccines is three months old today. In three months our team of writers, editors and proofreaders have put together 23 articles. In the days just before our opening on February 1st we also compiled 22 pages of useful information on a wide variety of vaccine related topics. We have linked to published scientific papers, to the Centers for Disease Control and to manufacturer’s product inserts.

We would like to thank all of the people who have spread links to insidevaccines across the web, with special thanks to Sandy Gottstein of Vaccination News and Ginger Taylor of Adventures in Autism for adding our link to their sites.

Disclaimer: Insidevaccines, although it is three months old, has not yet received any of the CDC recommended vaccines. Enter at your peril!

Before any doctor gives your baby vaccines, you should be given Vaccination Information Sheets (VISs) to read.

Developed by the CDC, they inform vaccine recipients, their parents or legal representative, about the benefits and risks of vaccines. (1) Federal Law requires their use. This is a result of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, 42 U.S.C. 300aa-26. (1) Before 1986, parents didn’t have any right to printed information about vaccines.

VISs sound like a good system. Parents get concise and easy to understand information on a vaccine’s risks and benefits so they can make an informed decision.

Is that really how it works? Let’s examine the nuts and bolts of VISs.
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Part III of a three part series. Parts one and two can be found here and here.

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The big question with these conjugate vaccines is “What is the overall effect?”

How many fewer cases of invasive bacterial disease are happening after replacement is accounted for?

The more narrowly you look, the better these conjugate vaccines look. The more broadly you look, the more the apparent effects melt away to nothing. With Hib and “replacement disease”, if you just compare h influenza serotype B to serotype A, it would appear that killing off Hib via mass vaccination was extremely successful in the grand scheme of things. When you look at nontypeable (also known as “non capsulated”) h influenzae plus Hia and Hif, that’s when you start seeing that we’re not really any better off now than we were before the Hib conjugate vaccine. [Read more →]

Insidevaccines will be posting occasional news stories related to vaccines with commentary by our team of editors. Here we go–
In 2002 Robert Goldberg wrote:

Despite significant activity in the area of vaccine design, vaccinology and immunology, vaccine development is on the verge of becoming a brackish backwater of other biotechnology and pharmaceutical enterprises. The market for vaccines is dominated by government purchasers that drive prices down to commodity levels, the regulations for the development and production of new vaccines are mired in the 1950s and sometimes cost more than producing vaccines themselves.

Public health officials and politicians are — depending on the day — either indifferent or outright hostile to the [sic] providing private companies with incentives for investing in new vaccines for a wide range of diseases. Indeed the solution de jour is to have the government — perhaps the Department of Defense (DOD) or some offshoot of the public health service — take over the development and production of vaccines, as if a U.S. government run National Vaccine Authority could magically and efficiently construct and operate billion dollar facilities without any glitches or major disruptions. Only scientists whose only brush with business is food shopping could concoct such an idiotic scheme.

Only a few years later and vaccines are spraying out of the pipeline and into babies, children, teens, and adults at an amazing rate. I guess the government listened to industry and we will all benefit. After all, there is just no limit to the number of vaccines the human body can absorb…is there?

March 17, 2008 07:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time
VacZine Analytics: Number of Available Vaccines Set to Double by 2015
LONDON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–

…number of available vaccines in major Western markets could double by 2015 to 75-80 products

….

With the success of its new Human Papillomavirus (HPV) quadrivalent vaccine Gardasil, Merck & Co experienced the fastest growth between 2006-07 reporting $4.2 bn of revenue in 2007 although GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Pasteur closely follow. Like Gardasil over the next few years many new vaccines are predicted to achieve blockbuster status (>$1 bn revenue) such as those for meningitis serogroups B and ACWY and pnuemococcal infections.

…focused on supporting key business franchises such as influenza, meningitis and pediatric combinations.

….

For example, new vaccines are being developed to prevent hospital infections caused by MRSA, Clostridium difficile and Psuedomonas aureginosa. Other vaccines are focused on serious infections in the newborn such as group B Streptococcus (GBS), respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and cytomegalovirus (CMV).

Warm thanks to Vaccination News for offering up thousands of vaccination article links over many years.

Chickenpox

Look back to the time of the earliest humans and you’ll find chickenpox. Anywhere you go on the planet, you find human beings who carry and share the virus. No remote village or tribe on Earth has ever been discovered to be free of this virus. Quite an achievement! For the virus…

Scientists have studied small, isolated populations, trying to understand how the virus survives; it has a unique survival strategy we call “shingles”.
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1. Antifreeze is an ingredient in vaccines: (False) Antifreeze is ethylene glycol. I have not seen ethylene glycol listed on one single vaccine ingredients list ever. What I have seen are:

Phenoxyethanol is in DTaP, Hep A and B,Td, IPV but is not the same chemical makeup as ethylene glycol and is an organic chemical compound.

EDTA (ethylene-diamine-tetraacetic-acid ) is an amino acid, also used as a preservative in the Rabies and Varicella (chickenpox) vaccines.
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Those of us used to trawling medical literature have long since come to the view that disease prevalence rates used to justify a vaccine’s introduction, have about as much credibility as a self-combusted crystal ball. The numbers quoted are usually imaginatively inflated, or a result of appallingly badly designed studies. This has been a provable pattern since statistical sculpturing tactics, which were used to inflate polio infection data during the 1950’s, were first revealed in 1960 (PMID 13857182). With previous jury-rigging in mind, the recent announcement that the number of AIDS cases in India, is only half of the earlier estimates, came as no surprise. Neither were we surprised to find that when the formula which the CDC used to over-inflate the numbers of hepatitis B cases in India was asked for, the CDC had to admit that it had gone “missing”. (PMID 15547938) Also, while the WHO used to advise mass vaccination for hepatitis B if the prevalence was more than 2 per 100, that advice has been dropped in favour of mass vaccination everywhere, regardless of disease incidence.

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The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is currently the only method of post-licensure surveillance for adverse reactions to vaccines in the United States. VAERS is a passive reporting system that allows physicians and parents to submit reports of potential adverse events post-vaccination. Unlike the mandatory reporting system for vaccine preventable diseases, there is no mandated system for the reporting of adverse events following vaccination. The FDA and CDC utilize VAERS for identifying adverse events associated with licensed vaccines (Chen, Rastogi, & Mullen, et al., 1994). Rosenthal and Chen (1995) note that vaccine trials “have sample sizes that are insufficient to detect rare adverse events” and “are usually carried out in well-defined, homogeneous populations with relatively short follow-up periods which may limit their generalizability (p.1706)”. Therefore, it can be assumed that accurate reporting of adverse events to VAERS is a critical issue in indentifying adverse events that occur in the general population. Unfortunately, current literature suggests that VAERS is, at best, poorly utilized (Rosenthal & Chen, 1995).

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Scene: A pediatrician’s office. Behind the desk is the doctor, a pleasant, middle-aged woman in a white coat. Seated in front of the desk are the expectant parents, prosperous, educated, self-confident, and, in the case of the woman, exceedingly pregnant.

Doctor: So, what questions did you have for me today?

Mother: We are concerned about the current vaccine schedule.* We know that babies should be protected from serious diseases, but the current schedule is getting…well, strange. (Pulls a scroll from her purse and starts unwinding it, reading off the schedule as she goes, and inserting comments) So, at birth, they want our baby to get a Hepatitis B vaccination. We both test negative and are not at risk for that disease.

Father: Does our baby really need that one?

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