Vaccine Whistleblowers File to Compel Merck to Respond to Federal Lawsuit

Health Impact News

In a brief mention in the mainstream media that as far as we can tell only Reuters reported, former Merck vaccine scientists, who have become whistleblowers and have had a federal lawsuit pending against Merck since 2010 for vaccine fraud, have filed another court document in their case accusing Merck of withholding evidence and not complying with court orders.

Brendan Pierson reports:  

Two former Merck & Co Inc scientists accusing the drugmaker of falsifying tests of its exclusive mumps vaccine said in a court filing on Monday that Merck is refusing to respond to questions about the efficacy of the vaccine.

Attorneys at Constantine Cannon, who represent the scientists, asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Lynne Sitarski of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to compel Merck to respond to their discovery request, which asks the company to give the efficacy of the vaccine as a percentage.

Instead of answering the question, the letter said, Merck has been consistently evasive, using “cut-and-paste” answers saying it cannot run a new clinical trial to determine the current efficacy, and providing only data from 50 years ago.

“Merck should not be permitted to raise as one of its principal defenses that its vaccine has a high efficacy, which is accurately represented on the product’s label, but then refuse to answer what it claims that efficacy actually is,” the letter said.

A representative of Merck could not immediately be reached for comment. (See: Merck accused of stonewalling in mumps vaccine antitrust lawsuit)

Mainstream Media Virtually Silent on 5 Year Old Fraud Case Against Mumps Vaccine

Merck has been trying for 5 years to get this case thrown out of court, so it is no surprise that it is being accused of “stonewalling” now. Back at the end of 2014 a Pennsylvania federal judge ruled in favor of the Merck whistleblowers who have accused Merck of lying about the efficacy of its mumps vaccine (currently only available in combo with MMR). We had to find this story posted on a couple of websites servicing attorneys.

This story did garner mainstream news coverage back in 2012, before Merck’s attorneys appealed and tried to get the case thrown out of court. Here is a report Forbes wrote on it back in 2012. Some quotes:

Anyone who falls on either side of the debate about vaccines’ alleged potential to cause harm is sure to have heard the big news this week — the unsealing of a whistleblower suit against Merck, filed back in 2010 by two former employees accusing the drugmaker of overstating the effectiveness of its mumps, measles, and rubella vaccine.

The scientists claim Merck defrauded the U.S. government by causing it to purchase an estimated four million doses of mislabeled and misbranded MMR vaccine per year for at least a decade, and helped ignite two recent mumps outbreaks that the allegedly ineffective vaccine was intended to prevent in the first place.

“As the single largest purchaser of childhood vaccines (accounting for more than 50 percent of all vaccine purchasers), the United States is by far the largest financial victim of Merck’s fraud.But the ultimate victims here are the millions of children who every year are being injected with a mumps vaccine that is not providing them with an adequate level of protection against mumps. And while this is a disease the CDC targeted to eradicate by now, the failure in Merck’s vaccine has allowed this disease to linger with significant outbreaks continuing to occur,” the suit alleges. (Source – emphasis added.)

The Wall Street Journal also covered the story back in 2012, but according to a report by Dr. Mercola,  the Wall Street Journal’s “elite” network of CFOs from the world’s top corporations met 3 days later (including executives from Merck), and the story was removed from their website.

More details from the whistleblower lawsuit claiming fraud:

Merck is the only manufacturer licensed by the FDA to sell the mumps vaccine in United States, and if it could not show that the vaccine was 95 percent effective, it risked losing its lucrative monopoly, according to the complaint.

That’s why Merck found it critically important to keep claiming such a high efficacy rate, the complaint states.

And, Chatom claims, that’s why Merck went to great lengths, including “manipulating its test procedures and falsifying the test results,” to prop up the bogus figure, though it knew that the attenuated virus from which it created the vaccine had been altered over the years during the manufacturing process, and that the quality of the vaccine had degraded as a result.

Starting in the late 1990s, Merck set out on its sham testing program with the objective of “report[ing] efficacy of 95 percent or higher regardless of the vaccine’s true efficacy,” the complaint states.

Chatom says Merck initially called its testing program Protocol 007.

Under Protocol 007, Merck did not test the vaccine’s ability to protect children against a “wild-type” mumps virus, which is “the type of real-life virus against which vaccines are generally tested,” the complaint states.

Instead, Chatom says, Merck tested children’s blood using its own attenuated strain of the virus.

“This was the same mumps strain with which the children were vaccinated,” the complaint states.

That “subverted” the purpose of the testing regime, “which was to measure the vaccine’s ability to provide protection against a disease-causing mumps virus that a child would actually face in real life. The end result of this deviation … was that Merck’s test overstated the vaccine’s effectiveness,” Chatom claims.

Merck also added animal antibodies to blood samples to achieve more favorable test results, though it knew that the human immune system would never produce such antibodies, and that the antibodies created a laboratory testing scenario that “did not in any way correspond to, correlate with, or represent real life … virus neutralization in vaccinated people,” according to the complaint.

Chatom claims that the falsification of test results occurred “with the knowledge, authority and approval of Merck’s senior management.” (Source.)

It is certainly understandable why the mainstream media does not want to touch this story, given the fact that one of the lead authors on a CDC published study in 2004 has also become a whistleblower, stating that the CDC withheld data from the public linking the MMR vaccine to a higher rate of autism among some children, specifically African American boys. The fraud surrounding the MMR vaccine is becoming a story way too hot to handle, and to report it would be to admit the media has been wrong, and reporting the wrong data, for many years now.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield is the world-renowned gastrointestinal surgeon and researcher who first proved that there were problems with mumps vaccine given in conjunction with two other vaccines, measles and rubella. But a massive smear campaign was waged against him and his license to practice was revoked in the U.K. With no trial or jury, the mainstream media simply went along with the trumped up charges, and to this day hold him up as a scapegoat to supposedly prove that there are no serious problems with the MMR vaccine or any link to autism.

The mainstream media seems united in their belief that vaccines do not cause harm, and that the rise of childhood diseases is due to unvaccinated children, rather than faulty vaccines. Even with inside testimony such as is provided by these whistleblowers from within Merck and the CDC itself, the mainstream media does not appear ready yet to come out and admit they are wrong and report this contrary news. Their credibility on reporting anything true in regards to vaccines is very quickly eroding.

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