When it comes to drugs and vaccines however, the government has not fulfilled its responsibility. On the one hand, they have not tested any of these products. As hard as it is to believe, the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Administration) has no funding to test drugs and vaccines. All testing is performed overseas and it is mainly funded either wholely or solely by the pharmaceutical company. There is no real oversight since the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), the TGA’s American counterpart, has also decided to leave all of this testing up to the drug companies.

As we saw with VIOXX and now Zyprexa (and Celebrex and statins and many other very ‘popular’ drugs), since drug companies are profit-making ventures who answer first to their shareholders and Management Committees, if problems are found after billions of dollars are spent on development, these problems will be covered up and there is no independent oversight to catch them out.

The only way to find out if there are problems with drugs is in the euphemistically-named ‘post-marketing surveillance’. This is how all drugs are approved today. In other words, drugs are ‘tested’ prior to release using computer modelling, animal tests (which as most people know, are virtually worthless since most often, you cannot correlate responses in other animals to responses in humans) and then, limited short-term human testing. These sorts of tests will not pick up the rare but serious or even many of the common but less-likely reactions which will be found once a drug or vaccine is released to the mass market.

In addition, the human testing is generally very short – it is not unusual to only follow test subjects for as little as 7 days – not nearly long enough to determine if something they are taking is causing problems. And let’s not even mention the interactions between drugs with the average American senior citizen filling 27 prescriptions every year – most of which have never been tested for their suitability of use with each other.

It is not a surprise therefore that we find more than 18,000 Australians dying every year in the public hospital system from adverse reactions to properly prescribed medications and procedures and untold tens of thousands being permanently injured from the same cause.

Most of these deaths and injuries could have been prevented if reaction reporting was complete and mandatory. But the fact is, as admitted by ADRAC (the Adverse Drug Reactions Advisory Committee), the arm of the TGA responsible for compiling and investigating reaction data, less than 10% and perhaps as few as 1% of adverse reactions are ever reported.

Without the necessary information on reactions, we have no idea:

1. How safe a drug or a vaccine is.
2. Who should or should not be taking a particular treatment.
3. What the interactions are between various drugs and vaccines.
4. What to look out for when taking a treatment so that steps can be taken to stop as soon as certain signs become evident.

The Australian Vaccination Network maintains a database of adverse reactions to vaccines. Since 2002, we have reported over 1,200 adverse reactions and deaths to the Australian government – more than all of the doctors in Australia combined.

We have never had the ability to advertise this service widely however and know that there are many more children and adults out there who have had serious reactions which have gone unreported.

Big deal, you may think. After all, the reaction has occurred, what is the point of reporting it? It is a very big deal however and quite important. Without the reaction reports, we won’t know how safe vaccines are or how many people are being affected. We will not have as good a chance of convincing the medical community and the government that these items need further testing. And if we have a larger number of reactions reported to us, the media may take an interest in this issue and once that happens, a larger number of Australian families will hear about the problems with vaccination and will seek out information before they make their decision – not afterwards when it’s too late.

Luckily, the AVN reports all reactions to the government and is dedicated to continuing to do so. The action we would like to ask you to take is as follows:

1. Contact our office by phone on 02 6687 1699 or by email and request that we send you a copy of our reaction report form. We also have a downloadable version here on our website. If you have a printer and we can email the form or you can download it, that would save us the cost of postage, but if not, we are happy to send it to you. Then, keep it handy and give it out to anyone who you feel has been affected by vaccines. It doesn’t matter if the reaction was recent – all reactions need to be reported.
2. Alternatively, you can report a reaction here online or direct those affected to our site. Ask them to put in the details of the reaction – as many as they have available.
3. Keep a copy of our reaction reporting hotline phone number – 1800 007 468 – this is a toll-free service which is only to be used for reporting of reactions. Give this out to anyone who you feel has had a reaction.
4. If you are in a financial position to do so, take out a small ad in your local paper asking that reactions be reported and giving out our 1800 007 468 number as well as our web address. Most of these ads, in community papers, will only cost about $100 or less. The wording can be as follows (adjust to save money on the ad):
5. Have you reacted to a vaccine? This must be reported. Contact the AVN on 1800 007 468 or www.avn.org.au
6. If you are a health professional or business owner (eg health food shop, health supplier), consider getting photocopies of the reaction report forms (we are happy to provide these to you if you don’t have access to a photocopier) and keeping them in you office and/or waiting room. If you do home deliveries, slip a copy into your orders – they won’t go astray. Many of you will see people who have reacted to vaccines – give them a form to fill in and return to us. It is a non-confrontational way to provide this vital information to the government and will also inform them, perhaps for the first time, that they need to question why their child reacted and get more information before they give further vaccines – all this without you saying a word if you don’t wish to.

If all of you go out and do what you can, I expect that there will be a great raising of consciousness at both community and government levels. Hopefully that consciousness-raising will equate to more acceptance that vaccines do indeed cause serious reactions and a feeling or responsibility on the part of government officials that further testing and a stronger duty of care will be necessary before any more new vaccines are added to the schedule.