by Wayne Rohde
Health Impact News
Can I ask you the following three questions?
This spring will mark the 27th anniversary of one of the cruelest and most deceptive acts the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has ever conducted.
In partnership with Kaiser Permanente Health System and Los Angeles County Public Health Service, an experimental measles vaccine was given to approximately 1,500 inner city minority children in Los Angeles County. Most of these children were six months of age.
The planning for this inoculation program started in 1989 with the vaccination campaign commencing in June 1990. This program came to a halt in October 1991.
The measles vaccine, Edmonston-Zagreb (E-Z) high-titers, was administered mainly to African-American children in an attempt to curb the measles outbreak in LA County.
The parents were not told that the measles vaccine was experimental, and it was not approved for use in the US.
These children from LA County were the guinea pigs, the living test tubes of the research world. Yet the CDC and World Health Organization (WHO) were telling the parents the vaccine was being used in other countries. What was not explained was the fact that the vaccine used in Los Angeles was not the lower titers used in other countries but rather a super charged high-titers E-Z vaccine. And it was experimental. [i]
The E-Z measles vaccine was first used by UNICEF and other health organizations beginning in the late 1980’s, despite warnings of mortality increases in developing countries. [ii]
The consent forms given to the parents to sign did NOT disclose that the vaccine was experimental. The brochure that was included with the consent form stated “this vaccine has been shown to be effective in younger children.” [iii]
The CDC director, Dr. David Satcher, stated in a LA Times interview, regarding not informing the parents of the experimental status, that:
“a mistake had been made. Things sometimes fall through the cracks.” [iv]
And the parents will be unable to receive monetary compensation. More on this later.
CDC officials acknowledged that the omission was serious and attributed it to researchers’ knowledge that the lesser doses of the unlicensed E-Z vaccine had been used safely for decades outside the United States and that it had been recommended by the WHO. [v]
“Our doctors just didn’t think of it as being ‘experimental,’” said Barbara Reynolds, an agency spokeswoman. [vi]
According to Dr. Satcher, after contacting the families and reviewing post surveillance reports, in that same interview, “None of the Los Angeles children, most of them five years old when the interview was conducted in 1996, were injured by the unlicensed vaccine.” But how long did the CDC conduct surveillance on the 1,500 children? Most reports are stating less than 6 months.
In that very same LA Times article, a review by the Office for Protection from Research Risks, within the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), concluded that the study in LA County was scientifically justified but that the CDC, Kaiser Permanente, and LA County had erred in not informing parents that one of the vaccines was experimental……more here
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