Vaccine Trial "Put US Babies At Risk"

The US National Vaccine Information Center and the Washington Office on Haiti are urging the US Food and Drug Administration to release all records, including raw data, on the high-dose Edmonston Zagreb measles vaccine experiments conducted by Kaiser Permanente, the Centers for Disease Control and Johns Hopkins University on babies in Los Angeles, Haiti, and more than a dozen other Third World countries.

The experimental vaccine given to babies as young as four months resulted in a higher than expected death rate, especially in girls. About 1,500 six-month-old black and Hispanic babies in inner-city Los Angeles were enrolled in the experiment before it was halted in 1991 after repeated warnings that babies were dying in greater numbers than expected up to three years after vaccination.

Informed Consent Regs Violated CDC chief David Satcher admitted last month that a National Institutes of Health investigation found that researchers violated informed consent regulations in the Los Angeles study. Parents were not told that the vaccine their babies got was experimental, and were not warned about immediate or long-term risks. Kaiser and the CDC deny that any Los Angeles infants were harmed, although one baby died from a bacterial infection they say was unrelated to the standard-dose EZ vaccination the baby received.