Quote:
Originally Posted by moonrambler  The only interest I had here was pointing out that placebo-controlled studies are indeed performed on vaccines, after you flat-out stated that has NEVER happened. |
I think the only interest you have is proving me wrong in some way, and since you have, I hope you feel happy and successful about it. LOL.
However, it is still true, isn't it, that the regular sort of drug test and trial isn't done on every single vaccine that is developed and put on the market.
Speaking of polio, has anyone else read researcher Janine Roberts' books or articles? She has some interesting ones:
Trouble with poliovirus The start of the hunt for the polio vaccine Virus WHO hides the continuing polio epidemicI have been told again and again by health authorities that the polio vaccine is a marvellous lifesaver - and I had accepted this on trust. As no one I knew doubted this, I had no reason to question it. I knew however that it is easy to invent history. If a false history is repeated often enough, the chances are that people will believe it. It is simply a matter of most of us not having time to check all the facts for ourselves.
But - now I knew of the possibility that pesticides might cause polio, I had a very clear question to answer. There were no great American polio epidemics after 1956. What stopped them: the withdrawal of the pesticides - or the introduction of the vaccine?
Most modern histories of the polio vaccine say its launch went smoothly - although many mention a brief hiccup early on called the ‘Cutter Incident,' describing this as a simple error that was quickly rectified. But what I learnt from reading contemporary newspapers and medical reports was very different.
I found the triumph and relief accompanying the launch of the Salk vaccine was extremely short-lived. A medical historian of the time, Dr. M. Beddow Baily, reported: ‘Only 13 days after the vaccine had been acclaimed by the whole of the US press and radio as one of the greatest medical discoveries of the century, and 2 days after the British ministry of health had announced it would go right ahead with the manufacture of the vaccine, came the first news of disaster. Children inoculated with one brand of the vaccine [the Cutter] had developed poliomyelitis. In the following days more and more cases were reported, some of them after inoculation with other brands.'
Within two weeks nearly 200 vaccinated children had gone down with polio. This produced near panic in the White House. It was not yet summer. Polio normally did not strike at this time. President Eisenhower had publicly endorsed this vaccine - and did not want any failures on his watch. US Health Secretary Oveta Hobby thus went to see the Surgeon General to sternly say the president needed to be spared further embarrassment!
Within days, on 8 May 1955, the Surgeon General suspended the entire US production of the vaccine and called for emergency meetings with Salk and the manufacturers. They then agreed that these cases were caused by polioviruses surviving the formaldehyde poisoning by being inside ‘lumps in the vaccine'. The manufacturers agreed to stir their vaccine better, the public were told they had no further need to worry, and the distribution of the vaccine resumed after only a five-day break.
However this was not the end of the trouble. It was now reported by the media that the vaccine still seemed to be causing a polio epidemic rather than preventing it.
In Boston during the next 4 months, more than 2,000 of the vaccinated went down with polio - yet in the previous year there were only 273 cases. The number of cases doubled in vaccinated New York State and Connecticut, and tripled in Vermont. There was a five-fold increase in polio in vaccinated Rhode Island and Wisconsin. Many children were paralyzed in the vaccine-injected arm.
I hadn't heard about the Cutter Incident until I read this excerpt from Roberts' book.
Here's some more information from Wikipedia:
Cutter Laboratories - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaThe Cutter incident
In 1955 Cutter Laboratories was one of several companies licensed by the United States government to produce Salk polio vaccine. In what came to be known as the Cutter Incident, a production error caused some lots of the Cutter vaccine to be tainted with live polio virus.
The Cutter incident was one of the worst pharmaceutical disasters in U.S. history and caused several thousand children to be exposed to live polio virus upon vaccination.[1]
Numbers affected
The mistake resulted in the production of 120,000 doses of polio vaccine that contained live polio virus. Of the children who received the vaccine 40,000 developed abortive poliomyelitis (a form of the disease that does not involve the central nervous system), 56 developed paralytic poliomyelitis and of these 5 children died as a result of polio infection.[2]
Other incidents
In the 1980s Cutter Laboratories produced unsafe blood products to treat hemophilia. The pharmaceutical product, which was produced from blood given by donors all across the US, was contaminated with HIV. These problems were the subject of lawsuits over the next twenty years.[3]
I wonder what fresh Cutter-type incident is in the works today? I'm glad I don't have to worry about it.