But many of the parents had trouble getting their children’s reactions reported to the authorities and followed up.  Asking parents to report directly to government should reveal much more about adverse events following this vaccine.  Hopefully, the system developed to receive reports will remain in place after this flu season, so that enhanced adverse event…

Chicago Tribune blogger Eric Zorn wondered what was up with a “shock radio” commercial for swine flu vaccine this month.  So he investigated.  Apparently the US Government is not sufficiently in debt:  it made grants to all the states to educate us about swine flu.  Is there anyone left who needs to be educated?  Zorn…

The US and UK won’t tell what they spent.  But the US bought vaccine from 5 different manufacturers (Glaxo, Novartis, CSL, Astra-Zeneca (MedImmune was acquired by A-Z in 2007 after passing through multiple owners) and Sanofi-Pasteur, and bought antiviral drugs from 3 (Tamiflu (Roche), Relenza (GSK also) and Peramivir (BioCryst)).  They will have to report…

Why so many reactions following seasonal flu vaccination?  Some have suggested it is due to children who had had earlier, subclinical flu infections.  Such silent infections would have left them with robust immunity.  They may then have responded to vaccination with an excessive response, triggering fever, convulsions and potentially death.  This idea remains a theory at…

Launch Party:  ANTHRAX WAR By Bob Coen and Eric Nadler May 3,   7pm Melville House Bookstore Come celebrate the paperback release of Anthrax War: Dead Silence . . . Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail by Bob Coen and Eric Nadler. An in-depth look into the new biological arms race, Dead Silence conveys the…

Rob Stein at the Post discusses a “hint” that swine flu vaccine may have caused increased cases of Guillain Barre Syndrome, Bell’s Pallsy and thrombocytopenia. The US CDC, unlike its counterpart in Australia, manages the news on vaccine adverse events closely, especially for swine flu.  Remember that CDC hosted a meeting for invited journalists and…

Australia’s chief medical officer halted seasonal flu vaccinations for children under five, due to a high number of children in Western Australia experiencing fever and convulsions after the shot.  This will give the country time to ascertain whether the problem is due to “bad batches” or whether the makeup of the immunization itself is the…

The New York Times’ Scott Shane reports on the testimony of Henry E. Heine, former Ivins colleague, at the National Academy of Sciences panel reviewing the FBI’s science at its meeting today. … Asked by reporters after his testimony whether he believed that there was any chance that Dr. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008,…

Bobcast radio show in Frederick, MD

Op-Ed piece by Col. Lawrence Sellin, Ret. …Reinforced by a number of armchair detectives from academia, the FBI produced a profile of the anthrax mailer who was described as a lone person living within the United States, who had experience working in labs and was smart enough to produce a highly refined and deadly product. …

From AFP: But a year on, questions linger as to whether a decision by the World Health Organization to declare swine flu a pandemic, thereby unleashing the slew of health measures, was over-dramatic or even tainted by commercial interests “It’s a decision which costs huge amounts of money, which frightened people throughout the world unnecessarily,”…

From Glenn Greenwald’s blog at Salon.com: … It requires an extreme level of irrationality to read what happened to Hatfill and simultaneously to have faith that the “real anthrax attacker” has now been identified as a result of the FBI’s wholly untested and uninvestigated case against Bruce Ivins.  The parallels are so overwhelming as to be self-evident….

Steve Nissen, head of Cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic, authored an editorial in JAMA last month on the means by which GlaxoSmithKline tried to cover up increased cardiac events in patients on its drug Avandia (Rosiglitazone).  JAMA’s editor, Catherine DeAngelis, wrote her own editorial on this issue, noting: According to the article by Nissen,1 the…

Men enter the Arlington Convention Center to receive their H1N1 flu vaccinations in Arlington, Texas November 24, 2009. Credit: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi From Reuters: Doctors and minorities still have a dangerous mistrust of vaccines that became painfully clear during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on Monday… In…

From Politico, this story of how over $100,000 was spent to dig up dirt on the head of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research: For more than two months in late 2008, private investigators working for a drug company gathered information on a high-ranking official at the Food and Drug Administration — unearthing details about…

David Brown, M.D., described the most recent Institute of Medicine report on Gulf War Illnesses this week.  Brown tried to deny the existence of the illness back in 2006, with reporting that was either uninformed or misleading.  Here’s what he wrote in 2006: As recently as September, a panel of the National Academy of Science’s Institute…

This article from the Bucks County Courier Times doesn’t address how the 25 mcg. mercury-containing doses (in multidose vials) will be handled, since release into landfills and rivers is not safe or acceptable. Most swine flu vaccine used in the US was packaged in multidose vials, including a mercury preservative, with small stocks of single…

From the April 5 Medscape: … The testimony repeated charges that Dr. Nicholas made in a letter last December to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and FDA Commissioner Hamburg. He disclosed that he had sought an FDA warning label on the CT scanner in question that would highlight the risk for radiation-induced cancer, noting that between…

From Infectious Disease News: ATLANTA, March 18, 2010 — Mandatory vaccination policies increased the number of health care workers who received the influenza vaccine during the 2009-2010 influenza season, according to results from two studies presented here at the Fifth Decennial International Conference on Healthcare-Associated Infections… Researchers in the first study analyzed the outcomes of…

According to DNAIndia, … The programme was marred by controversy after four deaths and complications among 120 girls were reported after vaccination. The girls complained of stomach disorders, epilepsy, headaches and early menarche… More from The Hindu: Dr. Katoch said a memorandum was signed with PATH-International in February 2007 for a project allotted to it…

Excerpts from interview with Dr. Heine interview on wfmd and Lew Weinstein’s “Case Closed” blog: “It was clear that they were focused on a small group of us at USAMRIID, one of which was Bruce.   Of the 4 or 5 of us they were focused on, one of them was Bruce. Dr. Heine says…

The traditional seasonal flu vaccine may have increased the risk of infection with pandemic H1N1 swine flu, according to the results of four new studies by Canadian researchers, published in PLOS Medicine. If accurate (and now there are at least 6 studies that agree with this conclusion), this is not an anomaly.  Licensed vaccines have…

The UK government originally contracted for 120 million doses of swine flu vaccine; it was able to cancel some contracts (by agreeing to buy bird flu vaccine for an epidemic that does not exist, and buying extra flu drugs from GSK), but still purchased 44 million doses. Only 6 million doses were actually used.  The…

Professor Peter Collignan provides us with facts (finally we get to see some unvarnished information) on how bad the H1N1 virus was for healthy people, as well as learning of much higher adverse event rates for the vaccine than have been previously reported.  However, the CSL vaccines used in Australia were almost certainly different than…

From the Daily Mail, excerpts follow: The investigation into the death of Dr David Kelly would be re-opened under a Tory government, according to a senior Conservative.  Shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve said the public has ‘not been reassured’ that the Whitehall scientist took his own life. Mr Grieve said that, if the Tories take…

Op-Ed written by Meryl Nass, published April 6: A surprising tug of war has erupted between the Obama administration and Congress over transparency and oversight of the intelligence agencies.  In September 2009, the Senate passed the 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act, and on Feb. 26 the House passed a similar bill. They were about to be…

Recall that FDA’s Device Center was recently shown to make political decisions re medical device approvals, and to grandfather in devices on the basis of earlier approvals of very different devices.  GAO wrote several damning reports including this one from June 2009: Shortcomings in FDA’s Premarket Review, Postmarket Surveillance, and Inspections of Device Manufacturing Establishments. …

In 1993 the US Government knew that silicon was used to enhance dispersal of powdered microbial agents and toxins.  OTA produced some very useful research, but the agency no longer exists. U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction, OTA-BP-ISC-115 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, December 1993). CHEMICAL ADDITIVES The…

This show was broadcast March 29, 2010. It is now archived here  (But note that the linked website has an annoying “radio” in the upper right corner that turns itself on several times during the radio interview, and must be turned off immediately so the interview can be heard.)

SOFIA, Bulgaria, April 2 (UPI) — Bulgarian Health Minister Bozhidar Nanev resigned after being charged with corruption in the purchase of unnecessary H1N1 flu vaccine doses. Nanev, 57, was charged with overspending on 200,000 doses of vaccine from the highest bidder weeks after a flu epidemic had ended, The Sofia Echo reported. Prosecutors allege Nanev…

Science 19 March 2010: Vol. 327. no. 5972, p. 1435 News of the Week Yudhijit Bhattacharjee What about the silicon? That question has confounded investigators throughout the probe into the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, which the U.S. government formally concluded in February. Scientists inside and outside the government say there is clear evidence that the…

From the WaPo: Despite months of dire warnings and millions in taxpayer dollars, less than half of the 229 million doses of H1N1 vaccine the government bought to fight the pandemic have been administered — leaving an estimated 71.5 million doses that must be discarded if they are not used before they expire…(and 25 million…

by: Paul Sullivan and Anthony Hardie, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed.  Excerpts follow: Last week, the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) officially recognized several diseases as linked with deployment to the 1991 Gulf War… As Gulf War veterans, we applaud the VA’s proposed new regulations that streamline access to…