PHA-Exchange> Issues on vacines

[claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn]

    From: Puliyel <puliyel at gmail.com>

The story of how poor countries are being made to use vaccines 'they
cannot afford – and do not need'   was brought out first by Save the
Children in the African context.  The effort was to promote the
interest of vaccine manufacturers. The Centre for Disease Control in
Atlanta has played a major role in exaggerating the need for vaccines.
It was felt that if poor nations could be persuaded to use these
vaccines economies of scale would bring the prices of vaccine down for
the rich countries .


CDC had previously inflated data on needs. Now, they deny they were 
extrapolating data from worst case scenaio countries thus exaggerating the need 
for vaccines; they said that the projections for each country was made on data 
from the country.
Now we know there is no such model. This admission from CDC is of international 
interest (they say the model has gone missing from all computers and web sites 
and not one hard copy of the model exists!) . So now, each small nation needs 
to know that they need to project their own figures and cannot trust the CDC 
figure.

Backsground: 
The charity Save the Children had shown how
poor countries were being induced to use newer vaccines 'which they
could not afford and perhaps did not need' (BMJ. 2002 Jan
19;324(7330):129.)

For example, Hepatitis B in India.

There are 2 figures for mortality.
1. One is based of the population based registry of the Indian Council
of Medical Research (ICMR) which says 5000 die each year in the
country.

2. The other is the estimate of the CDC and Nat Inst Of Health (NIH)
Bethesda, that 250 000 people die each year in India. It has been a
mystery how this figure was arrived at.It is based on this figure,
that the Government of India was being persuaded to undertake
universal immunization.

The Lancet published a model that uses Taiwan
data and came up with the figure of 250,000 deaths (Lancet. 2004 Feb
21;363(9409):659.) It suggested that overseas data was being projected
on the population statistics of India to exaggerate the need for the
vaccine in the country.

Now the journal Health Economics has published our
demand that the paper from the NIH, suggesting that 250 000 people
die, must be retracted or the model on which it was calculated, must
be produced.



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