During the 1998 ACIP session, Dr. Offit sat as one of five full voting members. (There were five additional nonvoting members.) His Rotateq codeveloper, Stanley Plotkin, also sat on the committee. The ACIP Committee unanimously recommended Wyeth’s RotaShield vaccine.
The August 2000 Congressional investigation found that the majority of ACIP members were conflicted in that vote.103 That report found that seven out of ten ACIP working group committee members who voted to approve the rotavirus vaccine in June 1998 had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.
According to the Congressional Report:
? The Chairman served on Merck’s Immunization Advisory Board.
? One member was under contract with the Merck vaccine division, received funds from various vaccine manufacturers, including Pasteur (now Sanofi), and was under contract as a principal investigator from SmithKline (now GSK).
? Another member (of that same ACIP panel) received a salary from Merck as well as other payments from Merck.
? Another member was participating in vaccine studies with Merck, Wyeth (now Pfizer), and SmithKline (now GSK).
? Another member received grants from Merck and SmithKline (now GSK).
? Another member shared a patent on his own rotavirus vaccine funded by a $350,000 grant for Merck to develop this vaccine and was a paid consultant to Merck.
The last of these bullet points referred to Paul “I Have No Conflicts” Offit. Dr. Fauci’s and Pharma’s corrupt control of those two panels allowed Wyeth to obtain both an FDA license and a CDC “recommendation” without having to genuinely safety test this product, a process that would have revealed terrible risks. Even the truncated trials of Wyeth’s RotaShield, conducted with no placebo, revealed serious side effects in babies, including “failure to thrive,” fevers high enough to cause brain injury, and a condition called intussusception, wherein a child’s intestines telescope into themselves, causing an agonizing blockage that, in some instances, results in death. The intussusception figures alone were statistically significant—cited as one in two thousand of the children who received the vaccine.104 At this time, there were around 3.8 million children in the target age group living in the United States; this translated to around 1,890 statistically likely cases of intussusception.105
Nevertheless, VRBPAC, under Fauci’s and Pharma’s tight control, approved the vaccine, and ACIP put it on the mandatory schedule. Less than a year after Dr. Offit and his confederates on ACIP voted to mandate RotaShield with no authentic safety testing, Offit again sat on the ACIP committee that revoked this earlier recommendation. ACIP pulled RotaShield from the market in October 1999 due to the many children who, predictably, suffered intussusception.106 VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, contains fifty reports of vaccine-related intussusception for the year 1999.107 Paul Offit’s shrewd maneuvering through this sequence of events opened an unobstructed path to approval and enormous riches for his own rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq.
Since its approval, Dr. Offit’s rotavirus vaccine has caused a wave of catastrophic illnesses and agonizing deaths in babies from intussusception.108
From 1985 to 1991, prior to the introduction of the rotavirus vaccine, the rotavirus disease caused only 20–60 deaths per year nationwide, mainly due to dehydration associated with diarrhea.109,110 Since dehydration is easily treated, virtually all deaths from rotavirus are avoidable with timely and appropriate medical care.
Reported adverse reactions from Dr. Offit’s RotaTeq vaccine range from 953 to 1,689 per year. These included fever, diarrhea, vomiting, irritability, intussusception, SIDS, severe combined immunodeficiency, otitis media, nasopharyngitis, broncho-spasm, urinary tract infection, hematochezia, seizures, Kawasaki disease, bronchiolitis, urticaria, angioedema, gastroenteritis, pneumonia, and death.111
The best evidence indicates that Dr. Offit’s rotavirus vaccine causes negative net public health impacts; in other words, Dr. Offit’s vaccine almost certainly kills and injures more children in the United States than the rotavirus disease killed and injured prior to the vaccine’s introduction.
Finally, in 2010, after its introduction, NIH learned that Offit’s vaccine, RotaTeq, also contained the porcine retrovirus that causes an HIV-like syndrome called “wasting disease” in pigs.112 Neither Dr. Fauci nor any other agency has ever funded a study to establish the safety of injecting their dangerous pig retroviruses into babies. Millions of American children have now been inoculated with the virus, thanks to Offit.
In 2006, ACIP added Offit’s vaccine to the schedule, allowing Offit and his business partners to sell his patent rights for the formulation to Merck for $186 million. Offit made a declared profit of over $20 million as a result of this series of transactions. Offit reported, in a gushing 2008 Newsweek story, that the millions he made from his rotavirus caper was “like winning the lottery.”113 In a less-adoring assessment of the scam, UPI journalist Dan Olmsted and coauthor Mark Blaxill accused Offit of “voting himself rich.”114
The disturbing saga of Paul Offit and his rotavirus vaccine illustrates how Tony Fauci’s PIs stuff the sausages at HHS.
How PIs Control Public Marketing
Dr. Fauci’s choice to transfer virtually all of NIAID’s budget to pharmaceutical PIs for drug development was an abdication of the agency’s duty to find the source and eliminate the explosive epidemics of allergic and autoimmune disease that began under his watch around 1989.115,116 Refereed science, surveillance data, and manufacturers’ inserts all implicate the very drugs and vaccines that Tony Fauci largely helped develop as culprits in those new epidemics. NIAID money effectively became a giant subsidy to the blossoming pharmaceutical industry to incubate a pipeline of profitable new drugs targeted to treat the symptoms of those very diseases.