Claim: A Johns Hopkins scientist issued a "blistering report" on flu vaccine dangers in the British Medical Journal.
Verdict: REFUTES

Retrieved passages:
title: 2009 flu pandemic vaccine
text: of medical microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany, wrote in the journal, "Medical Microbiology and Immunology", of the possibility that immune stimulation by vaccines or any other cause might worsen pre-existing heart disease. Chris Shaw, a neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia, expressed concern that serious side-effects may not appear immediately; he said it took five to ten years to see most of the Gulf War syndrome outcomes. The CDC states that most studies on modern influenza vaccines have seen no link with GBS, Although one review gives an incidence of about one case per

title: Lynne McTaggart
text: drug Tamiflu for a vaccine and attributing deaths to a nonexistent avian influenza vaccine. Ben Goldacre has described McTaggart as "viciously, viciously anti-vaccine" and notes that "In a radical move, even for the vaccine fear-mongering community, this time she has people dying from a vaccine that "doesn’t actually exist"". "The Field" has been characterized by Mark Henderson of "The Times" as pseudoscience, focusing on her personal understanding of quantum physics as a misconception. McTaggart was reported to have threatened to sue Simon Singh after he contacted Comag, the distributors of WDDTY, complaining that the magazine was "largely unscientific" and "promoting

title: 2009 flu pandemic vaccine
text: pregnancy" and that high levels of immunization would avert "a significant number of deaths". A 2004 review of the safety of influenza vaccines in children stated that the live vaccine had been shown to be safe but that it might trigger wheezing in some children with asthma; less data for the trivalent inactivated vaccine was available, but no serious symptoms had been seen in clinical trials. "Newsweek" states that "wild rumours" about the swine flu vaccine are being spread through e-mails, it writes that "The claims are nearly pure bunk, with only trace amounts of fact." These rumours generally make

title: 1976 swine flu outbreak
text: to vaccine manufacturers. Bruce Dull states at a flu conference on July 1 that there are no parallels between the 1918 flu pandemic and the current situation. Later that month, J. Anthony Morris, a researcher in the Food and Drug Administration's Bureau of Biologics (BoB) is dismissed for insubordination and goes public with findings that cast doubt on the safety of the vaccine. Three days later, several manufacturers announce they have ceased production of the vaccine. In the latter part of the month, investigations into alleged swine flu outbreaks in other parts of the world find no cases of the

title: Vaccine controversies
text: out regarding whether the 2009 H1N1 flu vaccine was safe in, among other countries, France. Numerous different French groups publicly criticized the vaccine as potentially dangerous. Other safety concerns about vaccines have been published on the Internet, in informal meetings, in books, and at symposia. These include hypotheses that vaccination can cause sudden infant death syndrome, epileptic seizures, allergies, multiple sclerosis, and autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes, as well as hypotheses that vaccinations can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy, hepatitis C virus, and HIV. These hypotheses have been investigated, with the conclusion that currently used vaccines meet high safety

title: Bonnie S. Dunbar
text: with it. In June 2001, Dunbar lost everything she had been storing in her lab—"20 years of research" according to the "Houston Chronicle"—after Tropical Storm Allison devastated Baylor College of Medicine. Dunbar has vocally criticized the hepatitis B vaccine, which, she claims, may be more dangerous than Hepatitis B itself for a small portion of the Caucasian population. She began suspecting the vaccine was dangerous after her brother, Bohn, developed rashes on his face, fatigue, and a number of other symptoms after being vaccinated with it. In 2000, Dunbar said that her brother "hasn't been out of bed since" he

title: H. Hugh Fudenberg
text: on Vaccination, held by the National Vaccine Information Center in Arlington, Virginia in 1997. The origin of the claim is unknown, as there is no study published in a peer-reviewed journal making such a claim. One study found that past exposure to influenza vaccine actually decreased the risk of Alzheimer's. In 1995 Fudenberg's medical license was revoked. The Casewatch website states: "the South Carolina medical board found Fudenberg "guilty of engaging in dishonorable, unethical, or unprofessional conduct," fined him $10,000, ordered him to surrender his license to prescribe controlled substances (narcotic drugs), and placed his license on indefinite suspension." The

title: Neal Halsey
text: inactivated polio virus, pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae type B, tetanus, Lyme disease, rotavirus, Argentina Hemorrhagic Fever, human papillomavirus (HPV) and influenzae vaccine viruses. Measles control has been an interest of Halsey's, and he supports ongoing measles and polio eradication efforts. Halsey has worked internationally in many developing countries including Haiti, Peru, Guatemala, Kenya, Thiopia and Pakistan. A lot of his works in Haiti focused on maternal and child health issues. He collaborated with Reginald Boulos on many of these papers. Halsey is the director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety, which was established in 1997 at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School

title: 2009 flu pandemic vaccine
text: million vaccinations, a large study in China, reported in "The New England Journal of Medicine" covering close to 100 million doses of H1N1 flu vaccine found only eleven cases of Guillain–Barré syndrome, actually lower than the normal rate of the disease in China, and no other notable side effects. A 2009 review of the use of influenza vaccines in pregnant women stated that influenza infections posed a major risk during pregnancy and that multiple studies had shown that the inactivated vaccine was safe in pregnant women, concluding that this vaccine "can be safely and effectively administered during any trimester of

title: Judith Wilyman PhD controversy
text: journal "Vaccine" three months later, UoW's executive dean of the Faculty of Science, Medicine and Health, researcher and toxicologist Alison Jones, co-authored a paper in-part referring to Wilyman, and in discussing the balance of good public health versus unchecked academic freedom stated: Martin responded to Durrheim and Jones, arguing that they had misrepresented parts of Wilyman's work. McIntyre, a senior doctor at the Westmead Children's Hospital, said that Wollongong University "must bear the major responsibility for manifestly inadequate supervision", saying: "It is clear from even cursory examination that Wilyman’s thesis, although raising some legitimate questions about gaps in both the

title: Scare-line
text: women's magazines: She concludes that women acting as the effective gatekeepers of family health is why they have been increasingly targeted by this sort of writing and marketing, often based on "confusing, junk-science statistics" and the replacement of rigorous reporting with personal opinion and vague, exaggeratory implications with a lot of "wiggle room". Such articles also appear to be the leading source of unreasonable fears about vaccines (e.g., the debunked but persistent idea that childhood vaccination causes autism). Blyth concedes that her own former publication also ran such scare-lines, such as "Dangerous Medicine: When Cures Harm Instead of Heal", and

title: Judith Wilyman PhD controversy
text: with the examiners potentially being "out of their depth in dealing with questions of vaccination science". University of Auckland biological scientist Helen Petousis Harris, who has a PhD in Vaccinology, was highly critical of the thesis and writes: Saxon Smith, president of the NSW branch of the AMA, characterised it as "a thesis that’s talking about the science of medicine without any support of its argument from credible scientific literature", adding "the evidence is clear about the safety of vaccines." Alison Campbell, an associate dean and biological sciences lecturer at the University of Waikato, produced a blistering analysis criticising the

title: Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver
text: results by Thomas Verstraeten which showed that thimerosal might increase children's risk of neurodevelopmental delays were flawed, and how these results were discussed at the 2000 Simpsonwood CDC conference. (p. 404) It received a positive review from David Oshinsky in the "New York Times". It also received a positive review in the "Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine", where Michael Fitzpatrick wrote that Allen "does not ignore the history of vaccine disasters. He includes the fiasco in the US military in 1942, when yellow fever vaccine contaminated with hepatitis B caused 100 deaths, and the mass vaccination against smallpox

title: Judith Wilyman PhD controversy
text: directed ... towards a then student" Biological scientist Helen Petousis Harris writes that the thesis abstract contains conclusion, and quotes Wilyman's aim of her thesis as an attempt to "assess the rigour of the claims supporting the efficacy, safety and necessity for the use of an expanding number of vaccines in the Australian Government’s National Immunisation Program". Brull reports that according to supervisor Brian Martin, Wilyman's thesis makes four major points: Other, more specific, claims include that the World Health Organization (WHO) formed a secret committee, which in turn orchestrated "hysteria relating to a global swine flu pandemic in 2009"

title: 2009 flu pandemic
text: review of our performance". In June 2010, Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the "BMJ", published an editorial which criticised the WHO, saying that an investigation had disclosed that some of the experts advising WHO on the pandemic had financial ties with drug companies which were producing antivirals and vaccines. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the WHO, replied stating, "Without question, the "BMJ" feature and editorial will leave many readers with the impression that WHO's decision to declare a pandemic was at least partially influenced by a desire to boost the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. The bottom line, however, is that decisions

title: Pandemrix
text: occur. The vaccine has received coverage in the business sections of the mainstream UK and International press, including by The Press Association, The British Medical Journal, The Wall Street Journal, and also the Daily Telegraph. In the summer of 2010 the Swedish Medical Products Agency (MPA) and the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) received reports from Swedish and Finnish healthcare professionals that narcolepsy was a suspected adverse drug reaction to the Pandemrix flu vaccination. These reports concern children, aged 12–16 years, whose symptoms occurred one to two months after vaccination. Following thorough medical investigation these symptoms have

title: 2000 Simpsonwood CDC conference
text: 2000, at which point they were published by the ACIP. After the conference, researchers carried out a planned second phase to further analyze and clarify the study's preliminary findings. The results of this second analysis were published in 2003. The June 20, 2005, issue of "Rolling Stone" contained an article written by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., entitled "Deadly Immunity". The article, which was also published on Salon.com, focused on the Simpsonwood conference, and alleged that government and private industry had colluded to "thwart the Freedom of Information Act" and "withhold" vaccine-safety findings from the public. Kennedy said that the Simpsonwood

title: 2009 flu pandemic vaccine
text: Government has been criticized for relying on voluntary reporting for post-vaccination evaluation in other circumstances, since this is "unlikely to accurately measure the percentage of people who get adverse effect". , the World Health Organization (WHO) said that 65 million doses of vaccine had been administered and that it had a similar safety profile to the seasonal flu vaccine, with no significant differences in the adverse events produced by the different types of vaccine. There has been one report of an adverse event per 10,000 doses of vaccine, with only five percent of these adverse events being serious, an overall

title: Influenza vaccine
text: elderly. Tom Jefferson, who has led Cochrane Collaboration reviews of flu vaccines, has called clinical evidence concerning flu vaccines "rubbish" and has therefore declared them to be ineffective; he has called for placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials, which most in the field hold as unethical. His views on the efficacy of flu vaccines are rejected by medical institutions including the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, and by key figures in the field like Anthony Fauci. Michael Osterholm, who has led the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy 2012 review on flu vaccines, recommended getting the vaccine but criticized

title: 2009 flu pandemic
text: in preparation. On 12 April 2010, Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's top influenza expert, stated that the system leading to the declaration of a pandemic led to confusion about H1N1 circulating around the world, and he expressed concern that there was a failure to communicate in regard to uncertainties about the new virus, which turned out to be not as deadly as feared. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan has appointed 29 flu experts from outside the organization to conduct a review of WHO's handling of the H1N1 flu pandemic. She has told them, "We want a frank, critical, transparent, credible and independent