Most of us appreciate science in helping us understand the truth about health and disease. Unfortunately, much of the science we rely on today is colored and confounded by massive conflicts of interest.

Award winning associate profession Gayle Delong has an interesting perspective of this topic. While working in the Finance Department of the Baruch College in New York City, she has studied the influence of conflicts of interest as it pertains to vaccine safety and research.

“I have two daughters with autism,” she admits. “When they were first diagnosed—my older daughter was diagnosed in 2000, and my younger in 2003—there was this idea kicking around that vaccines might have some kind of association with autism.

When I first heard this I thought, ‘That’s crazy. That couldn’t possibly be the case.’ It was only in 2005, when the book Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy came out, that the association between vaccines and autism really made sense to me and my husband.

We were shocked by the idea that government regulators could allow vaccines that could have such devastating side effects. But it began to make sense after we read Evidence of Harm.”

Regulatory Capture—When Industry Influences Regulatory Decisions

The original theory was that mercury (thimerosal) was the main source of the problem. That theory has now been expanded, and as revealed in my interview with Dr. Lucija Tomljenovic, vaccine adjuvants, such as aluminum, as well as viruses and other ingredients, may play a significant role.

Not to mention the fact we’re now “carpet bombing” our children with vaccines, to use Delong’s expression.

Common sense would suggest that if we’re giving our children more than five dozen vaccinations (69 doses of 16 vaccines are recommended in the US) from day of birth to age 18, we’re probably overvaccinating them.

Yet, authorities continue to insist that “more is better” when it comes to vaccines, without providing adequate scientific evidence to justify that assumption.

“So, I began to think of this in terms of an economist. I began looking at something called regulatory capture,” Delong says. “It’s the idea that the industry influences the decisions made by a regulator.

The whole pharmaceutical industry is influencing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)… In this case… the FDA licensed vaccines. But they were also tasked with doing research on vaccines.

Here we have an agency that is approving vaccines, and then told to say, ‘OK, we’ll make sure these vaccines are safe.’ Once they’ve approved some, and once they’ve licensed them, very rarely are they going to turn around and say, ‘Oh, we made a mistake.”

After the FDA approves a vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decides whether it should go on the recommended schedule for American citizens. Until very recently this included mainly children, but now they’re expanding that to adults as well.

In addition to adding vaccines deemed necessary to the vaccine schedule, the CDC is also supposed to provide information about vaccine safety. That too is a conflict of interest.

Regulators are mandated to screen the product for safety, but in this case, they’re also promoting it. In addition to that, regulators keep moving through the revolving door between the regulatory agencies of the very industry they are regulating; a dangerous and reprehensible practice.

Examples of ‘Revolving Door’ Between Regulatory Agencies and Industry Abound

Dr. Julie Gerberding is a perfect illustration of this dangerous practice. She headed up the CDC from 2002 to 2009, after which she became the president of Merck’s vaccine division, a position she still holds today.

The influence her former high-level ties to the CDC wields is enormous, considering the fact that Merck makes 14 of the 17 pediatric vaccines recommended by the CDC, and nine of the 10 recommended for adults.

Dr. Thomas Verstraeten is another example. He was a researcher at the CDC working on a study looking at the safety of thimerosal back in the early 2000s. Before the study was even published, he transferred from the CDC to GlaxoSmithKline.

“Do you think that report said there was an association between thimerosal and autism? Heads up. No, it didn’t,” Delong says.

This type of disastrous revolving door policy doesn’t just exist at the national level; it’s happening at the state level as well. In New Jersey, Dr. Eddy Bresnitz went from being the state vaccine policy maker to working in Merck’s vaccine division.

This type of conflict of interest goes back over a century in the US and has been prevalent in all sorts of industries. For example:

“When railroads were first regulated, the industry tried to get their guys to become regulators. And then, of course, reward them after they have done a good job as regulator by giving them nice jobs.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKzQJgptW88