The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which according to its website is “recognized as the nation’s premiere health promotion, prevention and preparedness agency,” is playing a leading role in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the fall issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, editor-in-chief Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., analyzes the problems of bias and conflicts of interest highlighted by this crisis.
“The CDC openly admits that it is fudging the COVID-19 death figures,” he writes. The statistics have been made to look really scary by adding speculative guesses to the official database. “Those false numbers are sanctioned by the CDC.”
Dr. Huntoon notes that the CDC became authorized to accept private gifts in 1983, opening wide the door to corruption and conflicts of interest. Ethics and disclosure requirements are ineffective and non-uniform. A report by the Office of the Inspector General, published in 2010, showed a “systematic lack of oversight” of the ethics program.
“Even when the CDC identifies conflicts of interest for advisory committee members, some allege that the CDC ‘automatically’ grants annual waivers to the participants. And the CDC’s policy on ‘prohibited sources’ of donations to the CDC Foundation, which allows ‘prohibited’ donations, makes a complete mockery of the CDC’s entire ethics process,” he writes.
Industry funding is likely to have influenced agency recommendations concerning viral hepatitis and influenza, to name two examples. Data manipulation has been alleged with respect to the Wise Woman (WW) program as well as studies pertaining to measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism, he states.
In 2016 a group of more than a dozen senior scientists at the CDC lodged an ethics complaint alleging that that the CDC was being influenced “by corporate and political interests in ways that shortchange taxpayers.” They noted “the pervasive nature of unethical practices throughout all levels at the CDC.”
“The CDC has a long history of bias and troubling conflicts of interest. This history calls into question the scientific validity of recommendations made by the CDC,” Dr. Huntoon concludes.
Read full article: https://jpands.org/vol25no3/huntoon.pdf
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a national organization representing physicians in all specialties since 1943.
