NICHOLAS REGUSH

September 23, 2002

VACCINE CHALLENGE

RFW’S EDITOR REPLIES TO A HOSTILE ATTACK RELATED TO A VACCINE ISSUE AND DECIDES TO CHALLENGE A LARGE VACCINE MANUFACTURER

By Nicholas Regush

I receive a lot of e-mails every day. Some nice. Some not-so-nice. It’s part of the daily experience to have people dump on me. I’ve grown quite used to this, although it can become irritating. Usually the delete button is a neat way to say "farewell."

But when I get an e-mail from someone in the drug industry, and it’s not nice, I definitely pay attention, looking at every possible way that I can respond and make a big deal of whatever issue this person is raising. There is some history here. When I produced television segments for ABC News in New York (mainly World News Tonight With Peter Jennings), I would sometimes be the target of drug industry venom. It would sometimes come from a high-level executive who would call to complain bitterly about a piece that I had produced. My usual response was: show me your science. That often would put a damper on their enthusiasm to rock on. I would even offer the company executive the opportunity to supply ABC News with their absolutely, positively, wonderfully-conducted research that would surely make clear that their drug product was the safest and most effective known to humankind. I never heard from them again.

The other day I went about my usual business of writing my Health News Analyzer (HNA) for my many subscribers. My target was a story that focused on the shortage of vaccines. My point in analyzing this pathetic journalistic effort was that the two vaccines mentioned - one for chicken pox and one for pneumococcal disease were, as far as I am concerned, not really in short supply; they are not needed by most children, if any. In both cases, hype replaced science. I made that pretty clear in my assessment of the health news story, which, of course, never dealt with the issue of whether either of these vaccines was truly required.

I said the following about the pneumococcal vaccine - Prevnar:

Prevnar ranks as one of the biggest selling hype snow jobs in modern medicine. And I haven’t even touched on the safety issues, including the fact that this company, like other vaccine manufacturers, can’t seem to get around to conducting adequate safety studies.

And I added:

Is there a real shortage for the chicken pox vaccine and the pneumococcal disease vaccine? Sure, if you believe in the Tooth Fairy.

As it happens one of my subscribers to the HNA has a daughter who apparently works for Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories. She was sent a copy of my HNA on the vaccine shortage and wrote a tough reply, sent it to her father and to me. It included the following nuggets:

You can’t possibly believe the crap this guy dishes out.

And:

I work with the best Infectious Disease specialists in the United States. They are not conspirators. They have children and grandchildren themselves…

And:

This guy you keep reading has no medical degree. He is making unsupported allegations and possibly harming others by discouraging them from getting the proper preventive medicine. Now that’s a conspiracy.

Okay, I thought, I’m not going to let this one go away easily. This is the kind of innuendo and personality attack that characterizes so much of science these days. So, I wrote back and basically issued a challenge to debate the merits of Prevnar at RFW.

I indicated that I felt the "comments to your father are general and are all over the map, rude, personal (without knowing me) and typical of the reaction that people in the drug industry have when they are challenged."

The person wrote back and said there was no interest in debating me but offered a couple of scientific papers on Prevnar that I should look up - to be informed.

At the time ( I learned later to the contrary) I thought the writer was a male and said the following:

Guys like you throw around a ton of VAGUE horseshit, try to attack reputations, but in the end are totally gutless when it comes to dealing with the specifics of an issue…In any case, it’s just as well that you don’t want to get into a debate with me - consider yourself lucky - because you would find that someone with 30 years of investigative reporting experience in science and medicine is not an easy target - when it becomes a PUBLIC issue. I’ve cleaned the clock of many so-called experts who end up not really having a pot to piss in when it gets down to safety issues and mechanisms of action and all kinds of things that remain very poorly explored in the vaccine business.

I then suggested to this person that any expert could be a proxy in a debate with me. The best expert to be found on Prevnar.

The reply was that I was getting very personal about all this.

Yeah, I was getting personal about all this, on my behalf and on behalf of thousands of children who are forced to take vaccines that have been poorly tested for safety and efficacy and often are harmed because of this fiasco.

So, here’s what I’m proposing now to the top-ranking executives at Wyeth-Ayerst: Get your best expert on Prevnar and have that person debate me at RFW. We can set up some very basic rules.

I’m personally not anti-vaccine per se, but I am anti-stupid research and the lack of it.

So, come on Wyeth-Ayerst, show me the science on Prevnar!