By Toby Rogers at Brownstone dot org.

I. Junk Science Clinical Trials as the Basis for FDA Licensure of Hepatitis B Vaccines in the U.S.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will discuss hepatitis B vaccines at their meeting on December 4 and 5. In this article I will lay out the case for removing hepatitis B vaccines from the CDC childhood schedule altogether.

As the Informed Consent Action Network has demonstrated, the hepatitis B vaccines Recombivax and Engerix - injected into the vast majority of American children at birth, one month, and six months of age - never should have been licensed by the FDA in the first place.

The clinical trials for Recombivax and Engerix:

did not include a proper saline placebo control group;

were too small to detect uncommon adverse events; and

were too short to detect the majority of harms (the Recombivax trials monitored safety for just five days, the Engerix trials monitored solicited adverse events for just four days).

II. Hepatitis B Vaccines Are Associated with Autism

The real world data that are available on the safety of hepatitis B vaccines are horrifying. When autism rates in the US exploded in the 1990s, the CDC looked into the possible role of vaccines. They assigned one of their senior scientists, Thomas Verstraeten, at the Epidemic Intelligence Service, to do the analysis. At the time, hepatitis B vaccines had mercury (thimerosal) in them. Dr. Verstraeten found that children in the highest exposure group had an 11.35x increased relative risk of autism.

Then, because the CDC works for the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. Verstraeten did four additional rounds of data manipulation, that were not scientifically warranted, to try to make the signal go away. We have Dr. Verstraeten's emails and the five different rounds of analysis because SafeMinds did a FOIA request to get all of Dr. Verstraeten's communication about the study (see SafeMinds Powerpoint presentation here). The corrupted data were used in the final published paper and the original findings were covered up.

The CDC had this information in 1999 and has lied about it for 26 years (which I mentioned in my recent Senate testimony). In 2001, Dr. Verstraeten was scheduled to present his findings to the Institute of Medicine but he quit on the morning of the presentation to go work for vaccine manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline in Belgium (see Evidence of Harm).

Mercury was eventually taken out of hepatitis B vaccines; however aluminum adjuvants remain. CDC/ACIP subsequently added several more aluminum containing vaccines to the childhood schedule. What we see in the autism prevalence data after the removal of mercury, together with the increase in total aluminum in the schedule, is that autism rates keep rising (owing to the increased aluminum) but the proportion of severe autism cases as a percentage of the total declined somewhat (owing to the removal of thimerosal which is even more toxic than aluminum).

III. Hepatitis B Vaccines Have Killed an Astonishing Number of Children in the US

I asked the warrior mamas at OpenVAERS (who are doing the work that the CDC should be doing) to calculate the total number of deaths from hepatitis B vaccines from 1990 to the present. The results that came back show that hepatitis B vaccines are a crime against humanity.

Hepatitis B is a component in many combination vaccines including Twinrix, Pediarix, and Vaxelis. When one looks at VAERS reports in the US for all vaccines containing a hepatitis B component there are 1,320 deaths in children age 5 and younger and 82,980 total reports of harm across all ages.

Just looking at Recombivax and Engerix, US reports, in children age 5 and younger, there are 620 deaths and 15,110 total injuries. There are 52,281 total reports of injury in the US across all ages for Recombivax and Engerix.

Remember that VAERS reports are a significant undercount of harms. The Lazarus and Klompas study for HHS in 2011 estimated that VAERS undercounts ...