As part of its watchdog work, ICAN routinely monitors suspicious health organizations and NGOs. The latest organization on our radar is the Johns Hopkins Institute for Vaccine Safety (IVS). IVS claims its mission is providing “independent” assessments of vaccine safety to assist the public with healthcare decision-making. However, ICAN’s initial investigation revealed remarkably close ties with CDC, bringing into question the true nature of its “independence” regarding vaccine safety.
IVS first hit ICAN’s radar when a controversial vaccine safety article was published in the New England Journal of Medicine last July and the lead author was IVS’s director, Daniel Salmon. Despite its name, and despite the subject of that article, IVS has very little to do with monitoring vaccine safety. Instead, ICAN has uncovered what appears to be its main goal: simply assuring everyone that vaccines are safe. Almost all IVS employees have close ties to the government, and some possess serious conflicts of interest with pharma.
For example, while Salmon (who is not an MD) previously served as the Director of Vaccine Safety for HHS’s National Vaccine Program Office, he has also served as an advisor on policy boards for Janssen, Sanofi, and Moderna. Salmon devotes a lot of time to researching and writing about vaccine policy, not vaccine safety. The IVS site even has a special section devoted to discrediting religious objections to vaccines. Tellingly, it appears the “independent” IVS received its startup financial support from vaccine manufacturers in 1997 and 1998.
According to the IVS website, the institute is necessary because “government officials are often restricted in what they can say or release.” Interestingly, IVS’s vaccine information seems to closely mirror CDC recommendations and, in some cases, is copied verbatim from the CDC website. Is it coincidental then that the only two medical doctors on staff at IVS have strong ties to CDC? Or that Johns Hopkins has received over $259 million dollars from CDC (and over $4 billion from NIH) in the last 5 years alone?
It is clear that IVS is not an “independent” source of medical and scientific knowledge. It is plainly yet another covert government platform that has been perpetuating CDC’s vaccine narrative for decades. ICAN intends to find out how deep this improper relationship goes. To that end, our attorneys have issued FOIA requests to CDC regarding IVS. When we learn more, we will be sure to let you know.
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