[PROVE] Voting and Flu Vaccines

[Guest guest]

Please forward this far and wide:

Dear PROVE Members,

The internationally renowned Cochrane Collaboration came out with an independent

analysis published in the British Medical Journal last week stating that studies

fail to demonstrate safety or effectiveness of the flu shot while public health

bureaucrats are slapping “high fives” with each other for pulling off a coup

causing politicians in Houston Texas to duel over when and where to give flu

shots with some trying to tie them to voting.

Please immediately let your elected officials know about these findings and that

you are strictly opposed to vaccines tied to voting in any way shape or form.

See the following articles below.

Also, if you don’t yet know where your candidates stand on PROTECTING YOUR RIGHT

TO REFUSE VACCINES YOU FEEL ARE UNSAFE OR UNNECCESARY FOR YOURSELVES AND YOUR

CHILDREN – call their campaign offices now before the November 7th election! If

they don’t have a position yet, take some time to educate them on why this is

important to you and your family and your friends.

(Specific links for folks in Texas: first lookup your district numbers. You can

do this by either looking on your voter registration card, or looking it up

online by linking to: http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/ and filling in your

address in the square on the right-hand side of the screen that says “Who

Represents Me”. Write down the district numbers for the candidates. Then link

to the Secretary of State Web site at:

http://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/forms/candidates/2006gen.pdf

and look up the candidates in your districts and their phone numbers and get on

the phone and call them ASAP!)

Even if you know who you are going to vote for on Tuesday Novemmber 7th, still

make the calls to ALL the candidates to educate them. If you have any

particularly interesting conversations that you want to share, email them to us!

We’d love to hear how it goes!

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* Studies Fail to Demonstrate Safety or Effectiveness of Influenza Vaccine

in Children and Adults

http://www.nvic.org/PressReleases/pr1031flu.htm

* Houston Republicans have bad reaction to flu shots, Houston's Democratic

mayor halts the use of clinics at polling places

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-flu3nov03,1,4217703.story\

?track=crosspromo & coll=la-news-politics-national & ctrack=1 & cset=true

* Vaccine death: maker quizzed

http://www.eveningtelegraph.co.uk/output/2006/10/31/story8917245t0.shtm

* Influenza vaccination: policy versus evidence

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/333/7574/912

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Studies Fail to Demonstrate Safety or Effectiveness of Influenza Vaccine in

Children and Adults

National Vaccine Information Center Calls for Influenza Vaccine Policy Change

http://www.nvic.org/PressReleases/pr1031flu.htm

Oct. 31, 2006 -- An independent analysis by the internationally renowned

Cochrane Collaboration of worldwide influenza vaccine studies, published in the

British Medical Journal on Oct. 28

(http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/333/7574/912), concluded there is

little scientific proof that inactivated influenza vaccine is safe and effective

for children and adults. Citing the Cochrane Collaboration finding as well as

methodological flaws in a child influenza vaccine study published Oct. 25 in the

Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the National Vaccine

Information Center is calling on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to stop

recommending annual flu shots for all infants and children until

methodologically sound studies are conducted.

" There is a big gap between policies promoting annual influenza

vaccinations for most children and adults and supporting scientific

evidence, " said epidemiologist Tom Jefferson, Cochrane Vaccines Field,

Rome, Italy, who coordinated the comprehensive analysis for the prestigious

Cochrane Collaboration. " Given the significant resources involved in annual mass

influenza campaigns, there is urgent need for re-evaluation of these

strategies. "

The Cochrane Collaboration analysis found that the majority of

published influenza vaccine studies were methodologically flawed with

selection biases, confounders and heavy reliance on non-randomized studies. The

report points out that potential confusion between respiratory infections caused

by influenza viruses and those caused by non-influenza viruses can result in

misdiagnosis and gross overestimation of the true

impact of influenza on death and illness in a given influenza season.

The report concluded that too few clinical trials have been conducted to prove

vaccine safety and current evidence indicates that use of inactivated influenza

vaccine has only a modest or no effect on preventing influenza in the children

and the elderly.

" The CDC has pushed mass use of influenza vaccine in all children

without scientific evidence the policy is either necessary or safe, " said

NVIC President Barbara Loe Fisher. " Where is the good science to back up the

policy? If the recently published CDC-funded influenza vaccine study in JAMA is

the kind of flawed science public health officials are using to convince the

public the vaccine is safe, it is no wonder that many parents don't trust what

public health officials say about vaccination. The CDC should stop recommending

annual influenza vaccination of all young children when there is insufficient

scientific justification for it. "

The JAMA study, which was conducted by Kaiser Permanente doctors with CDC

funding, was a non-randomized retrospective analysis of the medical records of

children 6 to 23 months old who were given influenza vaccine as well as other

vaccines between 1991 and 2003. Vaccines were not randomly

administered and unvaccinated controls were not used. Children's case histories

were included in the study only if an HMO doctor had seen them within 14 days of

influenza vaccination. Dozens of convulsions and other adverse events, including

brain injury experienced by children after vaccination, were excluded from the

study if the children had not been seen by a doctor within 14 days of the

adverse event or were sick in the weeks before and after vaccination.

Because of arbitrarily chosen cut-off periods, adverse events which

occurred before and after different observation times cancelled each other out

and were not classified as vaccine-related. In some cases, convulsions and cases

of Guillain Barre Syndrome were dismissed as " coincidental " or caused by other

vaccines the children received by the 19 Kaiser Permanente and CDC authors --

nine of whom reported financial ties to flu vaccine

manufacturers and all of whom received CDC funding.

" Vaccine studies are using increasingly complex statistical techniques rather

than time-tested research designs, " said NVIC Health Policy Analyst Vicky

Debold, R.N., Ph.D. " The JAMA study is exactly the type of study criticized by

the Cochrane Collaboration. There were so many limitations and exclusions in the

study design that it is nearly impossible to interpret or replicate the

findings. The true effect of the influenza vaccine on health outcomes cannot be

identified in this single, flawed study, which should not be used as evidence

that influenza vaccine is safe for infants and toddlers or to justify national

vaccine policies. "

The Cochrane Collaboration (http://www.cochrane.org/), which maintains the

Cochrane Library and is the world's leading producer of systematic reviews of

scientific information about health care, is a UK registered international

charity. Cochrane reviews are considered the gold standard for determining the

effectiveness of health care interventions.

The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) (http://www.nvic.org) is a

non-profit, educational organization founded in 1982 and is dedicated to

preventing vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and defending

the informed consent ethic.

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Houston Republicans have bad reaction to flu shots

Houston's Democratic mayor halts the use of clinics at polling places.

By Bustillo

Times Staff Writer

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-flu3nov03,1,4217703.story\

?track=crosspromo & coll=la-news-politics-national & ctrack=1 & cset=true

November 3, 2006

HOUSTON — This city's Democratic mayor thought it was appropriate to mix polling

places and flu shots. This city's Republicans thought they were going to be

sick.

The administration of Mayor Bill White, former chairman of the Texas Democratic

Party, approved a privately funded plan to launch a series of " Vote and

Vaccinate " clinics during early voting in heavily Latino and African American

neighborhoods.

But the program, which began Monday, infuriated some conservative bloggers and

talk show hosts. They argued it would increase Democratic turnout in the midst

of a competitive Texas governor's race and boost the prospects of some city

propositions on the ballot in Houston.

By midweek, White announced that he was taking the immunizations out of the

polling places, but he maintained that " flu-gate " had been blown out of

proportion.

" They were saying this was a vote-for-vaccine project, " said Trahan, the

mayor's press secretary. " Our concern was that if it gave an appearance of

impropriety, this should not continue. "

Health groups have piggybacked on elections to immunize vulnerable people

elsewhere, and Houston officials thought nothing of doing it in the nation's

fourth most-populous city.

But Republicans argued that the selection of the polling places in minority

neighborhoods in Houston favored Democrats.

" Clearly, they targeted locations in Democratic strongholds, " said

Woodfill, County GOP chairman. " Their whole theme was: 'Exercise your

vote and get a flu vaccine.' In Texas, the law clearly states that you cannot

give out anything of value in exchange for a vote. "

Houston officials countered that the polling places were chosen where need was

greatest, based on statistics. They plan to offer the remainder of the 3,000

doses at other locations, away from any voting booths.

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Vaccine death: maker quizzed

Evening Telegraph, UK

10/31/2006

http://www.eveningtelegraph.co.uk/output/2006/10/31/story8917245t0.shtm

The Procurator Fiscal’s office in Dundee, investigating the death of a woman

following her devastating reaction to a flu jab, is seeking answers from the

German pharmaceuticals company that made the vaccine (writes Bruce Robbins).

Depute fiscal Kirsty McGowan said the firm has been asked if it is aware of any

other adverse reactions to the vaccine. Dundee woman Sylvia Thomson suffered a

fatal reaction to the injection in November last year and died a few weeks

later, on December 2, 2005.

The former PE teacher, who’d been bothered by an intermittent chest infection,

asked her GP for the jab as a precaution. A week later, she was taken into

hospital suffering from encephalitis — swelling in her brain.

Hospital officials have since admitted that other people may be predisposed to a

similar reaction.

Mrs Thomson’s husband, , has been pushing for a fatal inquiry into his

56-year-old wife’s death and is critical of the progress the fiscal’s department

has made into the investigation.

However, Ms McGowan told the Evening Telegraph she would be taking the matter

further if she didn’t hear back from the company in two to three weeks.

She added, “We have received a fax from one of the vaccine companies saying they

have referred our inquiry back to the parent company in Germany. Solvay

Pharmaceuticals is German-owned and has a base in Holland. They have to provide

us with a full answer and that couldn’t be done by the distributors in Britain.

“We’ve identified the batch numbers of the vaccine concerned and are waiting for

a report from the company. We are looking for other adverse reactions to the

vaccine and the company will have all those details.”

Ms McGowan rejected Mr Thomson’s claims the matter hadn’t been given a high

enough priority and said she had updated him at the beginning of October.”

Mr Thomson said he believed the fiscal’s department had spent a lot of time

speaking to Mrs Thomson’s GP and a doctor at Ninewells Hospital when they should

have been on to the drugs company straight away.

“There must be a Government body that approved the vaccine for use in the UK and

the fiscal could have contacted them straight away to find out what tests had

been carried out on it before it was made available.

“There was a report out recently saying that it couldn’t be proved that ‘flu

vaccines do any good. Here we are heading into the vaccination season and we

still don’t know if this particular vaccine is going to stop people getting the

‘flu or end up killing others.”

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BMJ 2006;333:912-915 (28 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.38995.531701.80

Analysis and comment

Public health

Influenza vaccination: policy versus evidence

Full content posted at:

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/333/7574/912

Summary points:

Public policy worldwide recommends the use of inactivated influenza vaccines to

prevent seasonal outbreaks

Because viral circulation and antigenic match vary each year and non-randomised

studies predominate, systematic reviews of large datasets from several decades

provide the best information on vaccine performance

Evidence from systematic reviews shows that inactivated vaccines have little or

no effect on the effects measured

Most studies are of poor methodological quality and the impact of confounders is

high

Little comparative evidence exists on the safety of these vaccines

Reasons for the current gap between policy and evidence are unclear, but given

the huge resources involved, a re-evaluation should be urgently undertaken

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Dawn

PROVE(Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education)

prove@... (email)

http://vaccineinfo.net/ (web site)

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PROVE provides information on vaccines, and immunization policies and practices

that affect the children and adults of Texas. Our mission is to prevent vaccine

injury and death and to promote and protect the right of every person to make

informed independent vaccination decisions for themselves and their family.

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This information is not to be construed as medical OR legal advice.

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