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IPFS News Link • Vaccines and Vaccinations

The Rotavirus Vaccine: A Case Study in Government Corruption and Malfeasance

• By Jeremy R. Hammond

 The very prospect is treated by the mainstream corporate media as a "conspiracy theory", but no such theory is required to explain it. On the contrary, the existence of institutionalized biases within the medical establishment and scientific community are well recognized in the scientific literature, and the Congress itself has criticized the endemic corruption within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

For example, we saw how both agencies were criticized by the June 2000 reportof an investigation initiated by the Committee on Government Reform within the House of Representatives. That investigation touched on a particularly salient example of government corruption and malfeasance: the case of the rotavirus vaccine.

Among the Congressional investigation's findings were that three out of five members of the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) "who voted to approve the rotavirus vaccine in December 1997 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine", while four out of eight members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) "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".