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14 ACIP Members Who Voted to Jab Your Young Children — and Their Big Ties to Big Pharma

Here is a summary of an article by The Childrens Health Defense outlining the conflicts of interest between the ACIP members who approved the use of covid vaccines in children and the pharmaceutical companies. I have taken the parts of the article I found most important and included them here. These are the writings of the Children's Health Defense Team and not my own.


You can find the full article here


ACIP Chair Dr Grace Lee has been associate chief medical officer for practice innovation at Stanford Children’s Health and a pediatrics professor at Stanford School of Medicine since 2017. 

·         Stanford receives extensive funding from the Gates Foundation, including for the development of 3D-printed vaccine micro needle patches (a strategy that would allow “vaccination without a shot”).

University today announced that it has received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to accelerate efforts in vaccine development. The $50 million grant over 10 years will build on existing technology developed at Stanford and housed in the Human Immune Monitoring Core, and will establish the Stanford Human Systems Immunology Center.

·       Stanford is the second largest university beneficiary of funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which is aggressively funding COVID vaccination of U.S. Latinos.

The University of California, Berkeley received the largest sum from the Foundation ($15.4m), followed by Stanford University ($14.4m) and University of California, San Francisco ($11.9m).

 

Beth Bell is a clinical professor in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington (UW) School of Public Health

·       UW not only benefits from close ties with and extensive funding from the Gates Foundation 

Purpose To accelerate globally-informed and pregnancy-specific modeling to support drug development for maternal health Date OCTOBER 2021Committed amount$222,593

·       but also enjoys extensive support from Microsoft.

Microsoft Research, to announce a founding gift of $1.7 million from Microsoft for the new Lab

 

Oliver Brooks is chief medical officer and a member of the executive team at Watts Healthcare Corporation in Los Angeles

·       During the pandemic, Watts Healthcare has received millions in funding from Kaiser Permanente to promote COVID vaccination in L.A.’s Hispanic and African American communities.

Kaiser Permanente will spend $5 million in grants to support dozens of nonprofit and community-based organizations across the country – including two in Southern California – which will provide direct assistance to at-risk populations who are most impacted by COVID-19 The two local nonprofit organizations receiving funds from Kaiser Permanente are L.A.-based NALEO Educational Fund and Watts Healthcare, which will assist the Hispanic and African American communities respectively.

·       In March 2021, Watts Healthcare also received $4.3 Million via the American Rescue Plan to increase the federally qualified health center’s “ability to get more shots in arms.”

·       Since 2014, Brooks has received $118,439 (350 general payments primarily for consulting or speaking engagements) from biopharmaceutical companies that include Pfizer as well as Sanofi Pasteur, Novartis, Seqirus, Gilead, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Meda, AbbVie and Theratechnologies.


Wilbur Chen is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine

·       Chen is co-investigator for two entities funded by the Anthony-Fauci-led National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)

·       In 2020 alone, Chen accepted $437,251 from vaccine makers GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Emergent BioSolutions

·       Chen’s payments since 2014 total over $476,880 and include monies from Janssen, Seqirus, MedImmune, Astellas Pharma, Valneva Austria and BioFire Diagnostics in addition to the two companies already mentioned

·       Chen also receives research funding from the Gates Foundation and from the Seattle-based global health organization PATH.


Sybil Cineas a Harvard Medical School graduate, is an associate professor of medicine, pediatrics and medical science at Brown University, and, as associate program director of Brown’s combined residency program in internal medicine and pediatrics

·       CDC has given Brown researchers $4.9 million to study COVID vaccine effectiveness in seniors


Matthew Dale  is a senior investigator and practicing pediatrician at Kaiser Permanente Colorado


Camille Kotton is clinical director for Transplant and Immunocompromised Host Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School

·       Since 2014, Kotton has received over $304,000 in general payments and associated research funding from companies like Merck, GSK, Roche, Quiagen Sciences, Oxford Immunotec, Astellas Pharma, Shire, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, BeiGene and Biotest.


James Loehr owns Cayuga Family Medicine in Ithaca, New York.

·       In 2015, Loehr authored an article with detailed instructions telling physicians how to “minimiz[e] costs and maximiz[e] reimbursement” to “make immunizations profitable.” Describing how Cayuga Family Medicine “enjoys steady revenue from immunizations, with vaccine reimbursement sometimes exceeding that for the rest of the visit,” Loehr outlined a series of strategies to improve a practice’s financial viability through vaccination, including becoming a “savvy vaccine shopper,” taking advantage of manufacturer discounts and doing “a bit of additional work” when coding for the service to obtain extra reimbursement for “brief counseling” and multiple vaccine components.


Sarah Long is a professor of pediatrics at Drexel University College of Medicine and a physician at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia

·       Drexel University received half a million dollars from the Gates Foundation in June 2020 “to evaluate the use of a digital health platform to make care for COVID more accessible to marginalized populations.”

·       The Gates Foundation is also supporting the work of other Drexel researchers in areas such as diagnostic test development .


Katherine Poehling is a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at North Carolina’s Wake Forest University School of Medicine

·       Poehling has published on “ethics and acedemic pediatrics” but apparently sees no conflict in sitting on ACIP while receiving, according to Open Payments, over $523,000 in general payments and associated research funding from MedImmune and AstraZeneca since 2014.


Pablo Sanchez

·       Sanchez’s 80-page self-congratulatory curriculum virtae reveals that he is a consummate insider fluidly bridging academia, public health agencies and private industry. Sanchez’s invited participation and lectures include appearances at public health agencies like CDC, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO); COVID-vaccine-promoting trade groups like the AAP and March of Dimes; and biopharma companies like AbbVie, GSK (formerly Smithkline Beecham), ICN Pharmaceuticals, Inhibitex, MedImmune and Ross Laboratories.

·       Sanchez also lists hundreds of thousands in research monies received from these same entities.

·       Since the 1990s, Sanchez has been funded by Abbott Laboratories, American Lung Association, BioStar, Biosynexus, Burroughs Wellcome, CDC, F. Hoffman-La Roche, Gerber Foundation, MedImmune, NIAID, NICHD [National Institute of Child Health and Human Development], Pediatric AIDS Foundation, Ross Laboratories and Smithkline Beecham/Glaxo/GSK.

·       According to Open Payments, since 2014, Sanchez has pocketed roughly $221,000 in general payments and associated research funding from AbbVie, AstraZeneca, F. Hoffmann-La Roche, MedImmune, Medtronic, Merck, Novartis, Sanofi Pasteur, Seqirus and Sobi. The database lists AstraZeneca, MedImmune and Merck as the “top companies" making associated payments,” with notable payments from Merck in Fall 2020.

·       In 2010, Sanchez served as a “Pfizer visiting professor.”


Helen Keipp Talbot  is associate professor of medicine at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University

·       Talbot’s research and publications  (sometimes co-authored with fellow ACIP member Poehling) center on adult vaccination, influenza vaccination, human coronaviruses and vaccine trials for respiratory illnesses such as RSV. The focus on coronaviruses pre-dates COVID; from 2007–2009, Talbot was principal investigator on an NIH-funded study on the “epidemiology of human coronaviruses.”

·       According to Talbot’s curriculum vitaeher recent research funding comes from both the federal government (CDC, National Institutes of Health [NIH]) and Sanofi Pasteur, primarily for the study of pandemic preparedness (in 2015) and influenza vaccination.

·       Open Payments lists Talbot’s receipt of roughly $1.4 million in research payments and associated research funding since 2014 (417 total payments) from these companies, along with 29 general payments totaling $17,000.

·       In 2008, Talbot received a Sanofi Pasteur Advanced Vaccinology Course travel grant.


Rochelle Walensky  CDC Director

·       As reported by independent media outlet RedState (but not by the mainstream media), Walensky’s husband, Loren Walensky, became scientific co-founder and board member of early-stage biotech company Lytica Therapeutics in October 2019.

·       In December, the Biden administration announced Rochelle Walensky’s pending appointment as CDC director, and in February 2020, Lytica received the first installment ($5.3 million) of a $16.9 million grant from HHS, representing the “only funding this new company [had] received to date — nearly two years after its founding.”


Lynn Bahta is an immunization program clinical consultant for the Minnesota Department of Health, with a 25-year career focused on promoting vaccination.

·       When ACIP deliberated over Covid booster shots in September, Bahta was willing to recommend boosters for adults age 50 and up and individuals with underlying conditions but not for some groups of younger adults. At the time, Bahta argued for the need to “stay with the science,” stating, “I don’t think we have the data.”

·       By November, Bahta apparently was untroubled by the paucity of safety data available for the 5–11 age group, stating, “We know more than what we don’t know.”


Veronica McNallyHaving lost an infant to pertussis, McNally describes herself as a “public health advocate” in addition to being an attorney.founded the I vaccinate campaign, which, on November 16, excitedly reported that “nearly 1 million kids ages 5-11 will have their first COVID shots by the end of today.


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