UPDATE:  On Feb 8, WHO acknowledged that at least 12 countries were reporting cases of narcolepsy associated with swine flu vaccinations. From the Helsinki Times, what we already knew and blogged on in 2009 here, here, here, and here finally becomes public knowledge after a vaccine-related, serious illness is identified.  Governments that purchased pandemic swine…

Finland’s National Narcolepsy Task Force released its preliminary report today, and GSK’s swine flu vaccine is implicated.  From the Associated Press: The National Institute for Health and Welfare, which published the findings, said that 60 children and adolescents contracted narcolepsy in Finland in 2009 and 2010. Fifty-two of them — or almost 90 percent —…

Merck developed a clever scheme for marketing HPV vaccine:  it would lobby for laws that would add the vaccine to state Medicaid entitlements, require it be covered by private insurers and mandate the vaccine to attend school.  I know of two different approaches at the state level. In 2007 in Texas, Governor Perry simply issued…

From YLE: The Chief Medical Officer of Finland’s National Public Health Institute has conceded that children and young people should possibly not have been vaccinated against swine flu. Dr Terhi Kilpi told the Väli-Suomi newspaper group’s Sunday newspaper supplement that the vaccine perhaps should not have been given to 5-20 year-olds. Kilpi said that she…

It might not be murder, but there was definite hanky panky at the scene of David Kelly’s death.  Not only did the knife, the water bottle and the pill package on Dr. Kelly’s person lack any fingerprints.  Turns out his cell phone and a watch had also been wiped clean.  Since there were no gloves…

Autoimmune disorders encompass a large variety of illnesses, the fourth-largest general category of disease, it is said.  A rare lymphoma, or neoplastic disease of the immune system, has been associated with breast implants.  This article does not say the disease is autoimmune, and the mechanism by which the implant may lead to the disease is…

UPDATE:  This is a 2006 article.  Sorry. Too bad we have to get our science from the Mail, but in the era of Conflicts of Interest, maybe it isn’t so strange that we read about the flip side of pharmaceuticals from media outlets that don’t rely on pharmaceutical company advertising to survive. New American research…

From CBS News in September: … occasionally, vaccines cause injury or death. Very rarely, patients are left with what’s known as “encephalopathy”, the medical term for brain damage.  In fact, CBS News has found nearly 1,300 cases in which vaccine-related brain damage has been compensated in court over the past 20 years. The debate over…

Shades of Vietnam:  we had to destroy this village to save it.  And the  US plans to spend $1,000,000 to rebuild it.  Of course no civilians, only Taliban, were killed.  And we managed to save the pomegranite trees:  good aim, guys!  Read the WIRED story.  An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar’s…

The UK’s Telegraph is on a tear about flu vaccine.  Two weeks ago, the Telegraph complained that the UK government had dropped its flu vaccine advertising campaign.  Last year the UK spent 15 million pounds for swine flu vaccine ads.  But people are being vaccinated nonetheless: After earlier complaints that the failure to advertise flu…

BBC News reports that “France pledges reform after diabetes drug scandal”:   Mr Bertrand said it was his duty to rebuild the system to protect the public French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand has promised a complete revamp of the country’s medical regulatory system.He was speaking after an official report said a diabetes drug which caused…

The BMJ, a medical journal that is more open to controversial subjects than most, just published an investigative piece and editorial claiming that Andrew Wakefield et al’s research on children with developmental and gastrointestinal disorders and the MMR vaccine was “fraud.” Wakefield’s original research paper was retracted last year by the Lancet, following a decision…

• Defects in newborns 11 times higher than normal • ‘War contaminants’ from 2004 attack could be cause  By Martin Chulov at the Guardian White phosphorous smoke screens are fired by the US army as part of an early morning patrol in November 2004 on the outskirts of Falluja, Iraq, in preparation for an offensive…

From an exclusive interview with the WSJ: BAGHDAD—Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ruled out the presence of any U.S. troops in Iraq after the end of 2011, saying his new government and the country’s security forces were capable of confronting any remaining threats to Iraq’s security, sovereignty and unity. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sat down for…

From Bryan Bender at the Globe: Former officers and specialists say the defense industry’s political might is getting a new boost from an accelerating flow of retired generals and admirals. The Department of Defense… runs an exclusive job service to teach soon-to-retire generals how to land jobs in the defense industry. And military firms routinely…

From Carol D. Leonnig and T.W. Farnam at the Washington Post: Numerous times this year, members of Congress have held fundraisers and collected big checks while they are taking critical steps to write new laws, despite warnings that such actions could create ethics problems. The campaign donations often came from contributors with major stakes riding…

Bill Quigley (Loyola University Law Professor) and Vince Warren (both associated with the Center for Constitutional Rights) discuss Obama’s newest Executive Order:  one designed to uproot the 5th Amendment’s requirement for due process and the 6th Amendment’s rights of the accused, including the right to a speedy trial.  Here is their report on Huffington Post:…

The Washington Post team of Dana Priest and William Arkin have again pushed the envelope on what the mainstream media report on US government surveillance of citizens.  I expect that, as happened congruent to Priest and Arkin’s stories on “Top Secret America” published last July, the Post will build a site with a linked set…

Reuters makes big news of a study showing that Glaxo’s swine flu vaccine (which contains ASO3 adjuvant) induced a stronger immune response than an unadjuvanted Baxter vaccine. This is nothing to crow about.  Everyone agrees that adjuvants boost the immune response; the question is how much increased autoimmune illness or other adverse events occur as…

Surge seen only in Sweden and Finland (Helsingen Sanomet)   Forty one children and young people in Finland who were vaccinated for the H1N1, or swine flu virus last winter have been diagnosed with narcolepsy. In addition, there have been a few cases of the disease in which there was no record of a swine…

Coleen Rowley, retired special agent and legal counsel for the Minneapolis field office of the FBI, and Bogdan Dzakovic, former special agent for the FAA’s security division, wrote this interesting piece:   Frustrated investigators might have chosen to leak information that their superiors bottled up, perhaps averting the terrorism attacks. If WikiLeaks had been around in…

Today, the Daily Mail publishes for the first time the legal document which could trigger a full coroner’s inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly. The document, formally known as a memorial was written by group of campaigning doctors who have been trying to secure an inquest since 2004. It lists the sequence of…

As I told the audience at the Anthrax Letters Seminar on November 29, Please remember that the FBI “owns” the narrative of this case.  It has released piecemeal findings, contradictory facts, and withheld a large amount of information from the public record…  Most important, the facts of this case (as opposed to what the FBI…

Calls for an inquest are made anew as lack of fingerprints on the two items supposedly used to commit suicide, (3 packs of ten Co-proxamol [Darvon plus Tylenol] tablets and a pruning knife) becomes public knowledge. Note that blood levels of Darvon and Tylenol were therapeutic, and did not support any overdose.  Why Kelly would…

A 2010 update to Cochrane’s 2007 metaanalysis of the published clinical trial literature on influenza vaccinations found not a lot to recommend the vaccines.  Cochrane pointed out, “Healthy adults are presently targeted mainly in North America.”  The implication is that Europe, where most reviewers reside, is too smart to push mass flu shots on its…

The manufacturer of the only licensed anthrax vaccine (Emergent Biosolutions, a.k.a. Bioport) purchased the company from the state of Michigan in September 1998 immediately after the Army promised to indemnify the company (provide a free insurance policy) against claims for side effects, lack of efficacy and other potential problems. The language in the contract was…

This was my presentation to the University of California Institute on Global Conflicts and Cooperation seminar on the anthrax letters, Nov. 29, 2010 in Washington, D.C.  DVDs with the full video recording of the anthrax seminar can be purchased at cost ($12) from www.scientiapress.com. THE FBI’S ANTHRAX LETTERS INVESTIGATION:  POINTS TO CONSIDER MERYL NASS, MD…

From the war that never ends, has no endgame, in the country that destroys empires comes this little item courtesy of the NY Times.  We can’t even identify the enemy’s leaders to negotiate with!  But we can and do give them large chunks of money… KABUL, Afghanistan — For months, the secret talks unfolding between…

Like so much in today’s world of politics, there is no logic that can explain it.  Biodefense labs (whose value in the light of the risk they pose is questionable) are being built smack in the middle of large cities (Boston), in areas that flood (Galveston), and in the middle of a farming area dense…

From YLE print and TV in Finland: …  Thirty-seven children in Finland came down with narcolepsy soon after being injected with the vaccine against swine flu. Some of the children have sustained serious brain damage that has made it impossible for them to attend school. They suffer from symptoms including hallucinations, personality changes and cataplexy,…

Military tribunals (and places like Guantanama) for so-called terrorists transgress the 5th, 6th, 8th and 9th Amendments of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.   Goodbye to Habeas Corpus, Due Process and Geneva Convention protections, among others.  Olbermann provided amusing commentary.  But we can’t get convictions using real courts, real judges and real juries.  What a dilemma! …

Two articles, each reporting on a different study, found that uptake of subsequent doses of HPV vaccine, after the first, was poor.  Neither entertained the possibility that side effects might have something to do with this.  Maybe side effects had nothing to do with it.  But since vaccine effectiveness depends on 3 repeated doses, it…

Although a drug overdose was claimed to be a contributor to the death of Dr. David Kelly, a pharmacologist claims that Kelly did not have an elevated blood level of co-proxamol at the time of death.  This drug contained darvon and a “regular strength” tylenol, from which it would be very hard to overdose without…

From the BMJ blog comes this gratifying discussion of an important paper in the PLOS: … an important and fascinating paper in PloS Medicine shows how editors can be exposed to dramatic conflicts of interest.  The paper is suitably po faced, as is the accompanying editorial, but, as a blogger and ex-editor, I can spell out…

http://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/ The University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) and The UC Washington Center Cordially invite you to attend a seminar: The Anthrax Mailings Investigation Monday, November 29, 2010, 1:00 – 5:30 pm UC Washington Center, 1608 Rhode Island Ave. NW FBI has closed the 2001 anthrax mailings investigation.  The alleged preparer…

From Sydney Morning Herald and Medical Journal of Australia: The [following] editorial calls for the urgent establishment of a new national body to provide uniform monitoring and “active surveillance”, looking for adverse reaction cases in the community. “This is critical to ensure that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks,” Dr Gold said. Febrile convulsions…

“Similar to previous findings conducted in hospital healthcare workers and nurses, we confirmed that the willingness of community nurses to accept influenza A (H1N1) vaccination is low. Future studies that evaluate interventions to address nurses’ specific concerns or interventions that aim to raise the awareness among nurses on the importance of influenza A (H1N1) vaccination…

How “US Special Operations Forces are sabotaging the very strategy for reaching a political settlement that US officials claim to support” and murdering Taliban fighters who laid down their weapons and agreed to work with the government. Amy Goodman interviews the author on Democracy Now! here.

From Lew Weinstein’s blog The University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) and The UC Washington Center Cordially invite you to attend a seminar: The Anthrax Mailings Investigation Monday, November 29, 2010, 1:00 – 5:30 pm UC Washington Center, 1608 Rhode Island Ave. NW FBI has closed the 2001 anthrax mailings investigation. …

From Canadian Broadcasting:   “A computer failure caused a break in communication with 50 nuclear missiles at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming during the weekend, military officials said Tuesday.”  The military did not see fit to inform the President until today, 3 days after the incident.  You didn’t really think Obama was running this…

How the newly released US military files reveal an instruction to ignore detainee abuse by Iraqi authorities; what that meant on the ground; and just how far up the chain of command the order went, from the Guardian.

Excerpts from the Australian: The Health Department has exposed drug company “inconsistencies” but ruled them out as the cause of fits in children given a flu vaccine. CSL’s world-first combination of seasonal and swine flu strains was suspended for the under-fives in April, after it triggered febrile convulsions in young children at nine times the…

Excerpts from Bloomberg: GlaxoSmithKline Plc agreed to pay $750 million to settle a U.S. government false-claims lawsuit over the sale of defective drugs. The affected drugs included the antidepressant Paxil CR and the diabetes treatment Avandamet. “We regret that we operated the Cidra facility in a manner that was inconsistent with current Good Manufacturing Practice…

From the Guardian: [UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was] asked if there should be an inquiry into the role of British troops, [and] said: “I think anything that suggests that basic rules of war, conflict and engagement have been broken or that torture has been in any way condoned are extremely serious and need…

From the Bay Citizen: … An analysis of official death certificates on file at the State Department of Public Health reveals that more than 1,000 California veterans under 35 died between 2005 and 2008. That figure is three times higher than the number of California service members who were killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan…

From TodayOnLine: LONDON – The United Nations has called on United States President Barack Obama to order a full investigation of the involvement of US forces in human rights abuses in Iraq, after the massive leak of military documents by the WikiLeaks website. The intelligence logs show how the US authorities failed to investigate hundreds…

Why are we still turning Afghanistan into chopped liver?  Why are we spending our children’s blood, money we don’t have, and our reputation on Hamid Karzai and his country, which has been the destroyer of empires and may yet destroy ours?  What precisely is the treasure our leaders are seeking?  I feel like the USA…

From the October 20 Guardian (UK): Military contractors’ epic overcharging The government needs to know the true cost of the products it’s purchasing to avoid getting fleeced by unscrupulous suppliers A soldier being inoculated for anthrax in 2000. The Pentagon has paid the manufacturer of BioThrax $1.3bn, for a vaccine that an independent report calculates…

Tony Fauci (head of NIH’s NIAID), alsong with David Morens and Jeffrey Taubenberger, both renowned flu experts, have run the numbers and concluded that a majority of Americans are already immune to swine flu, either from last year’s vaccination (62 million) or a prior exposure.  Most of those exposed never got sick. In a paper…

UPDATE:  From the October 18 MailOnline: Ambulance chiefs face renewed pressure to explain the loss of a key medical record relating to the death of Dr David Kelly after the investigating police force said it had no record of ever having received the document. Bosses at South Central Ambulance NHS Trust were criticised last month…

More material has been released on the anthrax letters case by the Army: https://mrmc.amedd.army.mil/index.cfm?pageid=foia_reading_room.overview Contact for questions (the person overseeing the production) John P Mr CIV USA MEDCOM HQ Peterson   Also see:  http://www.newanthraxandalqaeda.com http://www.blurb.com/books/1443811 From: [redacted] To: [redacted] Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2007 12:30 PM To: Subject: Question about MRIID (UNCLASSIFIED) Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats:…

People in Australia are waking up to the evidence that in some cases, vaccines cause more harm than good.  Furthermore, the longterm sequellae from a seizure are likely to be more serious than from flu.  From the Sydney Morning Herald Sept 18: PUBLIC health experts have called for an independent body to monitor drug safety…

From Charlie Savage at the NY Times: WASHINGTON – Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone. Essentially, officials want Congress to require all…

Although CDC said it would not support mandatory flu vaccinations for healthcare workers (imagine the lawsuits if this were a federal government mandate), various organizations have recently published policy statements* in favor of such mandatory inoculations for all workers in healthcare facilities. What is truly strange about this effort is that you cannot find convincing…

Detailed in a book review  of “Obama’s Wars” by Bob Woodward in today’s Washington Post: We have not declared war against Pakistan, and Congress has not approved making war in Pakistan.  Yet we illegally send drones there to kill, and our CIA runs a mercenary army in Pakistan.  The American Rule of Law is what…

Recently there have been criticisms that BARDA has not spent much of the 6 billion dollars set aside for biological and chemical warfare treatments and preventive strategies after 9/11.  In fact, a plan was introduced to transfer some of the monies into other programs. In good bureaucratic fashion, BARDA responded by spending.  Emergent BioSolutions, aka…

From MEDSCAPE: Like all flu seasons, mortality in the elderly was highest from swine flu during the 2009-10 season Preexisting antibodies were common in the elderly:  present in 88% of those aged 90-99, present in 27% of those aged 79, and present in 4-5% in those younger than 60. Six studies from Canada consistently found…

http://mobile.nj.com/advnj/pm_31088/contentdetail.htm;jsessionid=324CEF6CC147295B74C534B1C27049AB?contentguid=Hg5hcoWW Matt Fair After years of questioning the conclusion and methods of an FBI investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people and sickened dozens of others, Rep. Rush Holt (D-Hopewell) announced yesterday that the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is opening an inquiry into the matter. Holt, along with a handful of…

New Review of FBI’s Work in Anthrax Letters Case By Devlin Barrett, Wall Street Journal The investigative arm of Congress will take another look at the science the FBI used to determine who mailed deadly anthrax-laced letters in 2001. The Government Accountability Office has notified Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, that the agency…

Despite a recent attempt to paint last year’s swine flu pandemic as more serious than thought, based on its higher attack rates and complications in a younger population, a new study using Wisconsin data, reported by Agence France Presse, calls those conclusions into question: Children, which the 2009 H1N1 pandemic infection appeared to disproportionately affect,…

Excerpts from today’s NY Times: Yet even as regulators investigate the causes of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the broader dangers posed by the industry’s push into deeper waters have gone largely unscrutinized. “Our ability to manage risks hasn’t caught up with our ability to explore and produce in deep water,” said Edward C. Chow, a…

From Therapeutics Daily: …  Although the cases of narcolepsy have been reported in temporal association with the use of Pandemrix, it is at present not known if the vaccine caused the disorder. The Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) will look carefully at all of the available data to determine whether there…

Hmmm.  What exactly is a textbook suicide, Dr. Nicholas Hunt?  The most common suicide in males would be associated with alcohol excess and a gun death.  Suicide attempts do frequently involve use of more than one drug in large quantities, but I have never seen someone try drugs and cutting an artery at the same…

Yes, this vaccine contains the swine flu antigen used last year and now, plus two other flu antigens.  It is very similar to the vaccine banned for children in the UK and Australia, and similar to the vaccine banned last week in Finland and Sweden.  But it will “protect the mission” and prevent parents from…

From the Telegraph: The safety of a swine flu vaccine is to be investigated by European drugs regulators (EMEA, the European Medicines Agency) after it was linked to a rare condition that causes people to fall asleep suddenly. The investigation has been prompted after health officials in Finland announced they were suspending the vaccination programme there…

Agence France Presse reports that Finland and Sweden fear that narcolepsy in children could be a consequence of receiving GSK’s Pandemrix flu vaccine.  Pandemrix is last year’s swine flu vaccine.  Its use has now been halted for all in Finland, despite Finland’s health minister saying last week that the vaccination programme would continue: Finland’s National…

From the UKPA: Former Conservative leader Michael Howard has thrown his weight behind demands for a full inquest into the death of the government weapons expert Dr David Kelly. His call came after a group of prominent experts described the official explanation for the scientist’s death seven years ago as “extremely unlikely”. Lord Howard –…

The 9 new experts wrote to ministers in an open letter to the London Times.  Because the Times charges for access to its content, coverage in the Daily Mail is excerpted below: Fresh doubts: There are calls for an inquest into the death of weapons inspector Dr David Kelly Nine of the country’s leading doctors…

Thanks to the Mail for pursuing this important case.  A more detailed piece the following day is here. Troubling: Dr David Kelly The death of Dr David Kelly still worries many thoughtful people. It is easy to see why. Dr Kelly’s concerns about the Government’s case for war in Iraq began a storm of controversy…

Doctors in the UK and Australia have been instructed not to give flu vaccines this year to children under five years old.  As reported by the Telegraph: The letter to all GPs from Prof David Salisbury, said: “Epidemiological information from Australia indicates that there has been a higher than expected increase in febrile convulsions in…

What a Catch 22: Once the US Government designates someone as a terrorist, it becomes illegal to provide the designee with legal assistance challenging the terrorist designation! The Obama administration announced to the world that it had the right to assassinate an American (Anwar al-Awlaki) citizen without any charges or trial last April. According to…

I have not been able to find the official announcement of this, but according to Medscape, the “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on June 22, 2010 that it would not endorse mandatory influenza vaccination for healthcare workers.“

This summer, Kellogg recalled 28 million boxes of Froot Loops, Apple Jacks, Corn Pops and Honey Smacks.  Dozens of consumers reported a strange taste and odor, and some complained of nausea and diarrhea.  The company blamed elevated levels of a chemical in the packaging. In a Washington Post article titled, US regulators lack data on…

Flu vaccine is being recommended for the entire US population over 6 months of age, starting this year. The (non-live) vaccines will contain 3 antigens, one of which is the antigen used for swine flu vaccines since late 2009. In 2009, DHHS Secretary Sibelius issued a Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act waiver of liability…

Excerpts from today’s NY Times make clear the Afghans we are supposed to be helping do not appreciate us, to put it mildly. KABUL, Afghanistan — The deaths of at least 66 soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen have made July the deadliest-ever month for American troops in the nine-year war in Afghanistan. The tally includes…

 From the Washington Post: The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. … what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy…

Excerpts from the NY Times article titled, “Budget Chief Tried to Tilt Power to Executive Branch” by Matthew Bai: Taken together, all of these proposals would seem to represent a clear exertion of executive power over the legislative branch from an administration that was supposed to have been more deferential to Congressional prerogatives. Somewhere along…

The Dutch health minister overbought swine flu vaccine, ignoring official advice of authorities in Holland.  What did WHO recommend at that point in time?  From Dutch News: Health minister Ab Klink ignored advice from both the Dutch vaccine and public health institutes when he bought 34 million doses of swine flu vaccine last year, RTL…

When we seem to be providing the operating expenses for those who bomb and shoot our children, what is the point of this war? From the Guardian: … The leaks have focused attention on Afghanistan at a time when the Obama administration would rather concentrate on the economy – the main issue among voters –…

From the BBC: Nine billion dollars “from the sale of Iraqi oil and gas, and some frozen Saddam Hussein-era assets” should have been in “a special fund administered by the US Department of Defense, the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), and was earmarked for reconstruction projects. But the report says that a lack of proper…

Ninety-two thousand Wikileaks documents were provided in advance of their public release today to the NY Times, the Guardian (UK) and Der Spiegel (Germany).  The NY Times opens with this comment:  A trove of military documents made public on Sunday by an organization called WikiLeaks reflects deep suspicions among American officials that Pakistan’s military spy…

From the Express: … Dr Fletcher, a highly ­respected retired pathologist and former chief scientific officer at the Department of Health, said: ‘‘From all the considerable reports I have read, Dr Kelly did not lose enough blood to cause his death. “He would have had to lose three to four pints of blood but all…

There has been almost no swine flu in the southern hemisphere so far this winter.  Finally WHO will announce we are in the post-pandemic phase.  From Bloomberg: … More than $14 billion was spent on vaccines and medicines to fight the germ, which shared features of the Spanish flu of 1918 while causing little more…

An FDA inspection uncovered multiple significant deviations from standard manufacturing processes, termed “good manufacturing practices” at CSL (previously known as Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, and previously an Australian government lab) in its manufacture of flu vaccine for the US market.  As is standard in these cases, a disclaimer was made to the effect that there is…

 Gardiner Harris @ the NY Times follows up on the FDA Avandia review: A federal medical advisory panel recommended Wednesday that Avandia, a controversial diabetes drug, should either be withdrawn from the market or have sales severely restricted because it increases the risks of heart attacks. The panel’s votes, taken after two days of intensive…

A letter to the BMJ questions the rationale for using certain new vaccines in India that fail to “result in significant reduction in disease burden” when older, cheaper and proven vaccines costing less than US $1.00 total per child are not being given to half the children in India. The letter also unmasks a scam…

The NY Times’ Gardiner Harris has covered a crucial issue unpinning the use of drugs in modern medical practice.  As I point out on the left side of this blog:  “Clinical data generated or presented by the manufacturers of drugs, vaccines and devices cannot be trusted: there are hundreds of studies proving this. But this…

French physician and pharmacoepidemiologist Marc Girard has penned a fiery letter to the BMJ about medical experts, clinical guidelines, drug regulation and the role of Pharma in creating a market for swine flu and hepatitis B vaccines.  Not to be missed, here are two excerpts: …how, during the development of a vaccine targeted against a…

Dramatic new testimony has heaped pressure on ministers to reopen the investigation into the death of Dr David Kelly. A female colleague claims that the UN weapons inspector could not have committed suicide as claimed, as he was too weak to cut his own wrist. Mai Pedersen, a U.S. Air Force officer who served with…

From the Washington Post: …frustration with the war is so widespread that two lawmakers in charge of shepherding the bill through the House, Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wisc.) and Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), who heads the Rules Committee that establishes the procedures for votes on legislation, both said that the war is unwinnable and…

According to the AP. in the US, “the government placed three orders last year for a combined total of nearly 200 million doses — an unprecedented amount and almost double the amount of vaccine made in recent years for seasonal flu.“ About a quarter of the swine flu vaccine produced for the U.S. public has…

From Kyodo News: TOKYO, Jun. 28, 2010 (Kyodo News International) — Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said Monday it has agreed with Swiss drug maker Novartis (NYSE:NVS) AG to cancel part of a deal for H1N1 influenza vaccine because of a larger-than-expected surplus. The cancellation agreement covers around 8.38 million doses, or 33.5…

After decades of discussion, the most important step has been taken by FDA to reduce the emergence and spread of multidrug-resistant bacteria. From the WaPo: “We have the regulatory mechanisms, and industry knows that,” he said. “We also think things can be done voluntarily. We’re not handcuffed to the steering wheel of a particular strategy,…

A Financial Times article tells us that Europeans are unlikely to want much flu vaccine this year.   But companies will do well regardless, in part because they will be able to use stocks of influenza antigen (made under contract for last season) in the coming season’s flu vaccines.

UPDATE June 17 from the Times of India: “The imported doses of the swine flu vaccine, specially procured by the Union government for doctors and paramedical staff, have found few takers in Maharashtra. Only 811 of the state’s 34,300 medical staff involved in treating H1N1 patients took the shots…” From The Telegraph, UK: One third…

From the Washington Post June 15: … Senior military and defense officials, none of whom was authorized to discuss relations with the White House, said congressional questions and a series of negative stories in the media have increased requests for explanations… Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who has…

WHO has published a formal response on its website to many of the criticisms published in the BMJ and by the Council of Europe last week. A few important points: 1.  WHO appears to acknowledge lack of disclosure of conflicts of interest by experts involved in its 2004 pandemic plan. 2.  WHO wiggles around the…

UPDATE June 14 (NY Times):  The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials. It turns out that the information on Afghanistan’s level of…

June 9 BMJ article by Luc Bonneux and Wim Van Damme: The decisions to stockpile antivirals and influenza vaccines to control avian flu (2005-6) and swine flu (2009) cost large amounts of money.1 2 Both epidemic threats were mostly iatrogenic pandemics of panic, which caused little human suffering, but the global plans to control them…