Autism Studies and Related Medical Conditions, January 2009 - TACA

• It is difficult to get a specific dollar figure from the CDC on how much they spend on vaccine
promotion. Funding dedicated to vaccine promotion is not broken out separately but is within
the $500+ million vaccine operations budget. (The operations budget includes a number of
activities including: delivery of vaccines, training of nurses etc.., front line public health
professionals, infrastructure support, immunization registries, producing and distributing
consumer information (promotion materials), and school-based and community-based delivery
programs.
• In addition to any “vaccine promotion” spending in the above, the CDC will spend over $19
million to encourage more Americans to get the annual flu vaccine. ($19 million just for
promoting the flu vaccine is roughly the same the CDC spends for all vaccine safety research.)
VACCINE SAFETY SPENDING
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) - Federal spending on vaccine safety is predominantly within
the CDC.
• Base funding within the CDC for vaccine safety research in 2007 was $21.6 million. (I am still
awaiting a breakdown from CDC as to how much of this $21.6 million is spent on actual studies
relating to vaccine safety, as opposed to simply paying HMOs to provide CDC with raw data.)
• Of the $21.6 million:
o$16.1 million was spent on the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) and the Clinical Immunization Safety
Assessment (CISA)
o $2.7 million was spent on the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS)
o $2.8 million was spent on an international collaboration known as the Brighton Collaboration.
• Of the $21.6 million outlined above, only a small percentage is actually spent investigating adverse
reactions, the bulk of the funding is spent on data collection.
• Also, CDC’s vaccine safety research mostly consist of epidemiology (statistical) studies as opposed to
looking at specific potential biological mechanisms. Even Dr. Gerberding and top NIH officials
acknowledged in an October 2004 Congressional Appropriations Committee hearing that if there is a
subset of children who have a genetic susceptibility, the type of statistical (epidimological) studies that
the CDC conducts would not detect a vaccine/autism association.
• Only the CDC’s CISA program looks at biological mechanisms and focuses on understanding specific
ways in which a vaccine may cause a certain reaction. But, CISAs represent a very small amount of
spending (roughly $2-$3 million range the last time I looked) and even then the CISAs are not looking
at many of the issues that are being raised by parents in America today.
National Institutes of Health (NIH)- The NIH will fund a vaccine safety proposal if it gets through
peer review and is in the top 20% of grants when scored. Very few vaccine safety studies reach this
threshold, because it is not a priority within NIH. The NIH has no coordinated effort to consider
vaccines safety issues. If NIH funds any such studies it is haphazard.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – The FDA runs the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting
System (VAERS) in conjunction with the CDC. The FDA does a few studies within VAERS, but the CDC
generally takes the lead.
VACCINE PROMOTION SPENDING BY CDC
It would be safe to say that the CDC spends tens of millions of dollars on vaccine promotion. Here is
why:
• It is difficult to get a specific dollar figure from the CDC on how much they spend on vaccine
promotion. Funding dedicated to vaccine promotion is not broken out separately but is within
the $500+ million vaccine operations budget. (The operations budget includes a number of
activities including: delivery of vaccines, training of nurses etc.., front line public health
professionals, infrastructure support, immunization registries, producing and distributing
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