Why You Can’t Trust the CDC on Vaccines
In Brief
As I have covered in previous articles for Children’s Health Defense,
the fundamental assumptions underlying the recommendation of the US
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that everyone aged six
months and up should get an annual flu shot are unsupported by
scientific evidence. Examining a case study from the New York Times, we’ve seen how the corporate media manufacture consent for public vaccine policy by grossly misinforming their audiences about the science—and how, in doing so, the media are just following the CDC’s example. We’ve seen how the CDC uses deceptive fear marketing to increase demand for influenza vaccines, and how the CDC’s claims that flu vaccination significantly reduces deaths among the elderly have been thoroughly discredited by the scientific community.
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As far as the discourse about vaccines
goes in the mainstream media, this problem doesn’t exist. The media
treat the CDC as practically the most credible and authoritative source
for information about vaccines on the planet and unquestioningly amplify
the CDC’s public relations messaging. We saw in our New York Times case
study just how blatantly the media participate in misinforming the
public, with health writer Aaron E. Carroll supporting his argument that
everyone should follow the CDC’s recommendation to get a flu shot by
citing a study whose authors actually concluded not only that
the CDC’s policy is unsupported by the scientific evidence, but also
that the CDC deliberately misrepresents the science to support its
policy!
As far as the mainstream discourse is
concerned, the idea that the public is being grossly misinformed about
the safety and effectiveness of vaccines requires belief in “conspiracy
theories”. But no conspiracy theory is required to explain how it can be
that the CDC is misinforming the public about vaccines. The media is
just demonstrably serving its usual function, as outlined by Edward
Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,
of advocating government policy rather than doing journalism. This is
not a conspiracy. It’s just an institutionalized bias stemming from what
Chomsky has called the “state religion”—an undying faith in the
fundamental benevolence of the US government and its agencies.
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
Likewise, no conspiracy theory is
required to explain how it can be that the government agency charged
with formulating public vaccine policy is misinforming the public about
vaccine science. On the contrary, the CDC’s behavior can be explained to
a considerable degree solely by good intentions. Public health
officials generally are simply convinced that, in performing their
individual function in the mechanisms of government, they are doing good
and serving the public interest.
But as economist Milton Friedman once pertinently observed,
“Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of
those who create it.” The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as
the saying goes; or, as reiterated in Psychology Today,
“If our interventions cause more harm than good, the interventions are
not moral regardless of the loftiness of our intentions.”
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Doctors working within the confines of the medical establishment, too, succumb to confirmation bias and fail to question the institutionalized way of doing things
It is only human psychology to be
resistant to ideas that challenge one’s own self-identity. It’s not
difficult to understand how public health officials might be unwilling
to acknowledge the possibility that they could be wrong—that they might
be doing harm. The idea that government officials are
susceptible to what is known as “confirmation bias”, or the tendency to
accept information supportive of one’s personal belief system while
dismissive of information that contradicts it, should hardly be
considered far-fetched or conspiratorial. Doctors working within the
confines of the medical establishment, too, succumb to confirmation bias and fail to question the institutionalized way of doing things.
And it’s not as though the medical establishment has not been wrong before! As Dave Sackett, “the father of evidence based medicine”, once quipped,
“Half of what you’ll learn in medical school will be shown to be either
dead wrong or out of date within five years of your graduation; the
trouble is that nobody can tell you which half—so the most important
thing to learn is how to learn on your own.”
Too many people just don’t think
for themselves, but succumb to groupthink. And this situation isn’t
helped by the pharmaceutical industry’s undue influence on the direction
of science. As BMJ editor Richard Horton has commented, “Journals have devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”
Studies examining this problem have
shown that an alarming proportion of medical literature gets the science
wrong. As a 2013 study published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation concluded,
“To serve its interests, the industry masterfully influences evidence
base production, evidence synthesis, understanding of harms issues,
cost-effectiveness evaluations, clinical practice guidelines and
healthcare professional education and also exerts direct influences on
professional decisions and health consumers.”
One of the authors of that study was John Ioannidis, who’s been described by The Atlantic as possibly “one of the most influential scientists alive”. In a 2005 essay published in PLoS Medicine, Ioannidis wrote that,
“It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.” And
false findings might not just be “the majority”, but could be “the vast
majority”. Rather than majority expert opinion representing scientific
truths, claimed findings “may often be simply accurate measures of the
prevailing bias.”
Among the numerous other problems
affecting the quality of research are financial conflicts of interests
and institutionalized prejudices. As Ioannidis elaborated:
“Conflicts of interest are very common in biomedical research, and typically they are inadequately and sparsely reported. Prejudice may not necessarily have financial roots. Scientists in a given field may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a scientific theory or commitment to their own findings. Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure. Such nonfinancial conflicts may also lead to distorted reported results and interpretations. Prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma. Empirical evidence on expert opinion shows that it is extremely unreliable.”
As The Atlantic noted,
Ioannidis has estimated that “as much as 90 percent of the published
medical information that doctors rely on is flawed”, and “he worries
that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so
riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically
resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a
problem.”
That certainly also applies to the CDC, where corruption and conflicts of interest are an endemic problem.
The Endemic Corruption at the CDC
Perhaps the most infamous example is how
the head of the CDC from 2002 to 2009, Julie Gerberding, left her
government job to go work as president of Merck’s $5 billion global vaccine division. Merck’s CEO understandably described Gerberding as an “ideal choice”. She held that position until 2014 and currently holds
the Merck job title of “Executive Vice President & Chief Patent
Officer, Strategic Communications, Global Public Policy and Population
Health”. That is to say, the former CDC director is now in charge of
Merck’s propaganda efforts. One might say she’s basically doing the same
job now that she did for the CDC, but even more lucratively. Apart from
her salary, in 2015, Gerberding sold shares of Merck worth over $2.3 million dollars.
A more recent example came in January 2018, when CDC Director Brenda Fitzgerald was forced to resign after Politico reported that,
after assuming leadership of the CDC on July 7, 2017, she “bought tens
of thousands of dollars in new stock holdings in at least a dozen
companies”—including Merck.
In August 1999, the House of
Representatives Committee on Government Reform initiated an
investigation into federal vaccine policy, the findings of which were reported in June 2000.
As its report stated, “The Committee’s investigation has determined
that conflict of interest rules employed by the FDA and the CDC have
been weak, enforcement has been lax, and committee members with
substantial ties to pharmaceutical companies have been given waivers to
participate in committee proceedings.”
Examples of the corruption included the following:
- “The CDC routinely grants waivers from conflict of interest rules to every member of its advisory committee.”
- “CDC Advisory Committee members who are not allowed to vote on certain recommendations due to financial conflicts of interest are allowed to participate in committee deliberations and advocate specific positions.”
- “The Chairman of the CDC’s advisory committee until very recently owned 600 shares of stock in Merck….”
- “Members of the CDC’s advisory Committee often fill out incomplete financial disclosure statements, and are not required to provide the missing information by CDC ethics officials.”
- “Four out of eight CDC advisory committee members who voted to approve guidelines for the rotavirus vaccine in June 1998 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.”
- “3 out of 5 FDA advisory committee members who voted to approve the rotavirus vaccine in December 1997 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.”
A US Senate report from June 2007 noted
how surveys showed that Americans “overwhelmingly” viewed the CDC as
doing a good job at keeping them healthy, as well as how the CDC took
advantage of that perception by seeking ever increasing levels of
funding year after year—and yet the CDC had little to show for its
exorbitant spending.
The Senate report named Julie Gerberding
as an example of the problem. Under her leadership, bonuses for the
people managing the CDC increased dramatically. The top three CDC
financial officers, for example, had “taken in more than a quarter
million dollars in bonuses” over the previous several years. A New York Times analysis,
the Senate report noted, had found that “The share of premium bonuses
given to those within the director’s office has risen at least tenfold
under Dr. Gerberding’s leadership.”
Contractors who previously were employed by the CDC appear to have found a lucrative way to make their CDC connection pay off.
Another problem was the “revolving door”
of Washington. Citing examples, the Senate report commented that,
“While CDC employees’ pay may not be equal to those in the private
market, contractors who previously were employed by the CDC appear to
have found a lucrative way to make their CDC connections pay off.”
The Senate report was appropriately
subtitled, “A review of how an agency tasked with fighting and
preventing disease has spent hundreds of millions of tax dollars for
failed prevention efforts, international junkets, and lavish facilities,
but cannot demonstrate it is controlling disease.”
A 2009 report from
the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Health and
Human Services found that “almost all” financial disclosure forms for
“special Government employees”—such as the people who sit on the CDC’s
vaccine advisory committee—were not properly completed. For 97 percent
of them, there was at least one omission, and most of the forms
“had more than one type of omission.” Furthermore, looking at the year
2007, 64 percent of such employees were found to have potential
conflicts of interest that the CDC had either failed to identify or
failed to resolve. The CDC also failed to ensure that 41 percent of such
employees received required ethics training, and 15 percent of such
employees “did not comply with ethics requirements during committee
meetings in 2007.” In sum, the Inspector General’s office found “that
CDC had a systemic lack of oversight of the ethics program” for special
government employees.
A particularly salient example was
the aforementioned June 1998 recommendation of the CDC’s Advisory
Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) that all infants receive the
rotavirus vaccine. We’ll examine that particular case in a forthcoming
article. Be sure to sign up for the Children’s Health Defense newsletter so you don’t miss it!
Conclusion
In sum, while the CDC is the mainstream
media’s go-to source for information on any vaccine-related story, the
public has every reason to be skeptical of the information coming out of
this agency. It is certainly no “conspiracy theory” to claim that the
CDC is misinforming the public about the safety and effectiveness of
vaccines. On the contrary, that the CDC does so is demonstrable and recognized in the scientific literature.
It also requires no “conspiracy theory”
to explain how this can be so. It certainly does not follow from the
assumption that government officials in positions of power are acting
out of benevolent intent that therefore their policies are not harmful.
The institutionalized confirmation bias and endemic corruption are more
than sufficient to explain how it can be that the CDC is misinforming
the public about vaccines.
Written by Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent journalist and analyst, publisher and editor of Foreign Policy Journal, author of several books, and father. Read more of his writings at JeremyRHammond.com. To stay updated with his work on vaccines and download his report “5 Horrifying Facts about the FDA Vaccine Approval Process”, subscribe to his free newsletter.
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