THE American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is being accused of deceiving families about the safety of the US childhood vaccine schedule while receiving funding from vaccine manufacturers and providing financial incentives to doctors to achieve high vaccination rates.
In a lawsuitfiledin federal court, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and five other plaintiffs allege that the AAP violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) by making ‘false and fraudulent’ claims about the safety of the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) childhood immunisation schedule.
The AAP is the largest paediatric trade group in the US with 67,000 members.
‘For too long, the AAP has been held up on a pedestal, as if it were a font of science and integrity,’ said CHD CEO Mary Holland. ‘Sadly, that’s not the case.’ Instead, Holland said, the AAP ‘is a front operation in a racketeering scheme involving Big Pharma, Big Medicine and Big Media, ready at every turn to put profits above children’s health.’
According to the complaint, the AAP has worked to conceal the findings of studies that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) – now known as the National Academy of Medicine – published in 2002 and 2013. The IOM called for more research after concluding that no studies had ever been conducted to compare the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
The AAP’s conduct constitutes a pattern of fraud under RICO, a statute often used to prosecute organised crime, said Rick Jaffe, attorney for the plaintiffs.
‘The AAP’s actions parallel those of Big Tobacco, which misled the public regarding the safety of its products,’ Jaffe said. ‘Tobacco created false uncertainty to manufacture doubt. The AAP did the inverse – it created false certainty to foreclose questions. Both used the trappings of science to prevent actual science.’
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks financial damages for the individual plaintiffs. It also asks the court to require the AAP to disclose the ‘lack of comprehensive safety testing’ of vaccines, and bar the AAP from making ‘further unqualified safety claims’ about vaccines.
Drs Paul Thomas and Kenneth Stoller, who say their professional reputations were harmed for opposing AAP’s guidelines, and the parents of four children who died or were injured after receiving routine childhood vaccinations are among the plaintiffs.
According to the lawsuit, the AAP’s claims about vaccine safety rest on a ‘foundational fraud’, namely, a 2002 article by paediatrician Dr Paul Offit published in the journal Pediatrics. The article claimed that infants can ‘theoretically’ receive up to 10,000 vaccines at once without posing a health risk.
The AAP ‘deployed this theoretical reassurance’ to block the IOM studies and questions about the safety of the childhood schedule, to assure parents, doctors and policymakers that the vaccine schedule was thoroughly tested, the complaint states.
The AAP incorporated Offit’s claims into its ‘Red Book’, its guide to the prevention, management and control of paediatric diseases. ‘Pediatricians learned to cite the 10,000 vaccines figure when parents expressed concern,’ the complaint states.
‘The Red Book is their Bible. When AAP says the schedule is safe, that’s what parents hear in examination rooms across America,’ Jaffe said.
‘Offit’s theoretical PR article did not study, and could not prove, the safety of the cumulative schedule,’ according to the complaint. Yet pediatricians who deviate from this standard of care have faced professional and personal consequences.
According to the lawsuit, Top of Form
the AAP’s ‘Red Book’ vaccine recommendations contributed to the deaths and injuries of three of the plaintiffs’ children.
Idaho resident Andrea Shaw’s twins Dallas and Tyson both eight days after receiving their 18-month vaccines last year.
According to the complaint, the Shaw family’s physician dismissed the parents’ warnings about the family’s history of adverse reactions to the flu vaccine. The doctor was following AAP guidance ‘which does not generally recognize family history of vaccine reactions’.
A day after their vaccination, Shaw’s children were taken to the emergency room with a series of symptoms documented as ‘post-immunization reaction, initial encounter’.
A week later, the children died. Local authorities launched a homicide investigation against their mother, based on the suspicion that she caused their deaths. The investigation is still active.
New York resident Shanticia Nelson’s one-year-old daughter, Sa’Niya Carter, died last year of cardiac arrest after having seizures roughly 12 hours after receiving six ‘catch-up’ injections containing 12 vaccines.
Nelson told doctors she was concerned about giving her daughter so many vaccines at once, because the child was sick at the time. However, healthcare workers told Nelson that the ‘catch-up’ regimen and vaccinating a ‘mildly ill’ child were safe, according to the AAP.
Carter’s death certificate listed ‘sudden unexpected death in childhood’ as the official cause of death. However, the coroner found signs of encephalitis, a condition linked to the DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis) vaccine, which Carter had received.
The AAP maintains financial relationships with vaccinemanufacturers including Pfizer, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Sanofi Pasteur, and with the federal government. However, according to the complaint, the group doesn’t disclose these relationships in its policy statements and public safety assurances.
It is claimed that this has led to conflicts of interest, including the formation of an ‘association-in-fact enterprise’, referring to ‘individuals or entities that operate together for a common purpose without forming a formal legal entity’.
‘The same pharmaceutical conglomerates that serve as enterprise participants in manufacturing childhood vaccines have systematically acquired companies treating the chronicconditions those vaccines cause, creating a closed-loop system that financializes childhood illness,’ the complaint states.
The complaint alleges that AAP has resisted any changes to the childhood vaccination schedule, including those enacted under the leadership of US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Last year, the AAP and other medical organisations sued Kennedy and other federal health officials and agencies. The groups seek to roll back the changes the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) made to the childhood schedule. The AAP updated its complaint after HHS reduced the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 17 to 11 earlier this month.
In a separate lawsuit filed last month, the AAP demanded HHS restore $12million in research grants that HHS withdrew last year. Last week, a federal judge reinstated the funding. AAP has also called for the prohibition of religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccination.
When HHS ‘has attempted reform, AAP leads the opposition’, the complaint states.
The complaint draws parallels between AAP’s actions and tobacco companies’ efforts to conceal the dangers of smoking, which the US Department of Justice prosecuted in a landmark RICO case, U.S. v. Philip Morris USA.
A federal court found that the tobacco industry was liable for denials about the health risks of tobacco spanning several decades.
The complaint states there are parallels between the AAP’s actions and those of Big Tobacco, including ‘suppression of adverse research, use of ‘independent’ scientific voices to block studies, and coordinated enterprise activity to mislead the public’.
