Yesterday, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued a report called The Childhood Immunization Schedule and Safety: Stakeholder Concerns, Scientific Evidence and Future Studies. The report found that fewer than 40 studies published in the past 10 years address the 0-6 year old child vaccine schedule.
The non-profit National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC.org) website says that the report gives the public both good news and bad news:
There is good news and bad news in this report. Good news: the committee repeatedly pointed out the astonishing lack of quality scientific studies to support the safety of the CDC-recommended numbers of doses and timing of vaccinations for children 0 to 6 years old in the child vaccine schedule. The committee confirmed there are large knowledge gaps, especially about children with increased biological susceptibility to suffering vaccine reactions and injuries.
Bad news: The committee’s recommendation is that the CDC should conduct future vaccine safety studies using closed patient databases like the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), which unfortunately prevent independent replication of the findings. For more than two decades, NVIC has called for independent vaccine safety research by investigators without industry or government conflicts of interest.
In a Eon.businesswire.com press release, NVIC also stated the following:
NVIC does not agree with the last two committee recommendations (6-2 and 6-3) suggesting that prospective clinical trials, including cohort trials, are not useful for examining the safety of the child vaccine schedule. NVIC also strongly opposes the committee recommendation that future vaccine safety research be conducted by DHHS and its corporate partners exclusively using existing closed database systems, such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD).
Frequently citing a lack of enough quality scientific studies in the report, the IOM committee was unable to determine whether the numbers of doses and timing of federally recommended vaccines children receive in the first six years of life are - or are not - associated with health problems in premature infants or the development of chronic brain and immune system disorders in children, including:
asthma;
atopy;
allergy;
autoimmunity;
autism;
learning disorders;
communication disorders;
developmental disorders;
intellectual disability;
attention deficit disorder;
disruptive behavior disorder;
tics and Tourette’s syndrome;
seizures;
febrile seizures and
epilepsy.
In its report, The Childhood Immunization Schedule and Safety: Stakeholder Concerns, Scientific Evidence and Future Studies, the committee said, “No studies have compared the differences in health outcomes that some stakeholders questioned between entirely unimmunized populations of children and fully immunized children. Experts who addressed the committee pointed not to a body of evidence that had been overlooked but rather to the fact that existing research has not been designed to test the entire immunization schedule.”
NVIC has been calling for bench science investigating the biological mechanisms for vaccine injury and death and evaluation of long-term health outcomes for vaccinated and unvaccinated children for the past two decades. NVIC’s co-founders worked with Congress to secure vaccine safety informing, recording and reporting provisions in the National Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 and presented a parent stakeholder statement to this IOM Committee outlining public concerns about the safety of the current child vaccine schedule. NVIC is a 501C3 charity founded in 1982 and dedicated to preventing vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and defending the informed consent ethic.
Sources:
http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20130116006536/en/Vaccination/vaccines/immunization
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