The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) met on February 23 and 24 to review six new vaccines at its two-day meeting (Ticovac, Vaxchora, PreHevbrio, 2022 Influenza vaccines, Priorix, and Vaxneuvance).
As you know, ICAN and its legal team attend these meetings and compare ACIP proceedings against scientific best practices. And once again the ACIP’s review of these six vaccines was woeful. You can watch the video recordings of the meeting yourself and view the presentation slides.
Following the two-day meeting, ICAN, through its attorneys, sent a letter to the committee describing the deficiencies in connection with its review of each vaccine.
Watching these meetings is painful because ACIP has almost never met a vaccine it didn’t like and it routinely approves vaccines that offer little to no benefit but that come with extraordinary side effects. So, in addition to, once again, describing the inadequacies observed at their meeting, ICAN decided to take on the structurally flawed system itself.
As you’ll see in Exhibit A of our letter to ACIP, ICAN prepared an analysis that describes exactly how the evaluation frameworks used by the CDC/ACIP systematically introduce bias that favors the manufacturers and hurts the public interest. When CDC/ACIP review a vaccine, they take the data from the clinical trials and re-package it into a series of charts and tables that they call GRADE, PICO, and EtR. Unfortunately, these frameworks shroud bad data with bureaucratic buzzwords like “certainty”, “importance”, and “precision” that sound nice but are scientifically meaningless. In this way, dangerous and ineffective vaccines are dressed up and made to appear “safe and effective.” The CDC/ACIP review process amounts to data laundering on behalf of Big Pharma.
ICAN is demanding a complete overhaul of this process. Through consultation with its scientific experts, ICAN developed an evaluation framework based on scientific best practices. We call it TASQ which stands for The Appropriate Scientific Questions. You can read it in Exhibit B of our letter to ACIP. Our questions are straightforward and entirely data driven. For example, Question 3 reads: “Was the vaccine adequately tested in a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial?” As you know from following ICAN’s work, the answer is usually “No” – nearly all vaccine trials use toxic placebos or other vaccines that also were not adequately safety-tested as a control in their trials.
We think the TASQ framework is a game changer. It will enable everyone from Nobel Prize winners to politicians to busy parents to quickly understand the data and make appropriate decisions. None of the vaccines that were approved by ACIP on February 23 and 24 using ACIP’s frameworks would have been approved if they had used ICAN’s more scientifically rigorous TASQ framework which is designed to protect the public interest, not the interests of Big Pharma.
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