that created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, HHS is the defendant in Vaccine Court and is legally obligated to defend against any claim that a vaccine causes injury. Despite high hurdles for recovery, HHS pays out hundreds of millions of dollars annually (over $4 billion total) to Americans injured by vaccines. Hence, if HHS publishes any study acknowledging that a vaccine causes a harm, claimants can use that study against HHS in Vaccine Court. In June 2009, a high-level HHS official, Tom Insel, killed a $16 million-dollar budget item to study the relationship between vaccines and autism by the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. Insel argued that petitioners would use these studies against HHS in vaccine court.
Such conflicts are a formula for “agency capture” on steroids. “Instead of a regulator and a regulated industry, we now have a partnership,” says Dr. Michael Carome, a former HHS employee who is now the director of the advocacy group Public Citizen. Carome says that these financial entanglements have tilted HHS “away from a public health perspective to an industry-friendly perspective.”
In 1986, Congress—awash in Pharma money (the pharmaceutical industry is number one for both political contributions and lobbying spending over the past 20 years) enacted a law granting vaccine makers blanket immunity from liability for injuries caused by vaccines. If vaccines were as safe as my family members claim, would we need to give pharmaceutical companies immunity for the injuries they cause? The subsequent gold rush by pharmaceutical companies boosted the number of recommended inoculations from twelve shots of five vaccines in 1986 to 54 shots of 13 vaccines today. A billion-dollar sideline grew into the $50 billion vaccine industry behemoth.
Since vaccines are liability-free—and effectively compulsory to a captive market of 76 million children—there is meager market incentive for companies to make them safe. The public must rely on the moral scruples of Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, and Pfizer. But these companies have a long history of operating recklessly and dishonestly, even with products that they must market to the public and for which they can be sued for injuries. The four companies that make virtually all of the recommended vaccines are all convicted felons. Collectively they have paid over $35 billion since 2009 for defrauding regulators, lying to and bribing government officials and physicians, falsifying science, and leaving a trail of injuries and deaths from products they knew to be dangerous and sold under pretense of safety and efficacy.
Doesn’t it require a kind of cognitive dissonance to believe that vaccines are untainted by the greed, negligence, and corruption that bedevil every other pharmaceutical product?
"For American kids born in 1986, only 12.8% had chronic diseases. That number has grown to 54% among the vaccine generation (those born after 1986) in lockstep with the expanding schedule."
No safety testing
Such concerns only deepen when one considers that, besides freedom from liability, vaccine makers enjoy another little-known lucrative loophole; vaccines are the only pharmaceutical or medical products that do not need to be rigorously safety tested.