Meningitis vaccine linked to ME in Norway concerns investigators in New Zealand

Vaccines have long been suspected of triggering ME in some individuals. Now further controversy adds weight to that theory.

Award winning journalist Barbara Sumner Burstyn has been investigating the vaccination campaign in New Zealand and has called for a Royal Commission of Inquiry to investigate the Ministry of Health trialling an experimental drug on the public.

"We believe the integrity, ethics, safety and justifications for the mass immunisation of 1.15 million New Zealand children is deeply flawed, dangerous, a violation of the principles of public health and informed consent, contrary to the Nuremburg Code, in breach of the Health and Disability Commissioner's Code of Practice and various Acts of Parliament and therefore illegal," Sumner Burston said.

She said the public has a vested interest in being fully informed on all issues surrounding the administration of an experimental medicine to all New Zealanders under the age of 20 and this is required by international law.

"The MeNZB™ vaccine was approved under a loop-hole in the Medicines Act that allows for restricted use of experimental drugs in a limited number of patients.
This is anathema to good public health practice and is the very thing that international agreements signed by New Zealand, such as the Nuremburg Code, were designed to prevent," Sumner Burston said in a press release.

She said she was appalled by New Zealand's media ignoring the issue and the Government's lack of integrity.

"Two and half years later and I'm still outraged, not only by the fact of the vaccine and the way it was used in NZ but by the media and their co-option by government - who are, as I'm sure you know, no more than the executive arm of corporations."

She said they are not pursuing an anti-vaccination agenda, but rather drawing the public's attention to what they believe is a gross abuse of administrative power.

Norway's Warning Unheeded

Researcher at Norway's National Hospital's Department of Pediatric Research in Oslo, Ola Didrik Saugstad was deeply concerned when he found four students at the same highschool who had been vaccinated to have Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) or chronic fatigue syndrome.

Profesor Saugstad said a short time later a Norweigan TV station aired a progam linking the vaccine and ME. Around 160 students who had been vaccinated were diagnosed with ME, he said.

He said it was not known whether this number of cases of ME was higher than that of normal popualtions, but approximately one third of these students developed the symptoms of ME in close relation to the vaccination (1-3 weeks).
"This could turn out to be a big scandal. There was no systematic follow up of adverse effects - as in New Zealand. The students and their parents were told the vaccine was innocent."

He said because the health authorities in New Zealand will most likely try to avoid finding a link between ME and the MeningB vaccine it could be years before any detrimental affects could be realised.

"Most youngsters and their parents think, hope and believe that their initial symptoms of ME will disappear, and therefore it may take many years before a diagnosis is confirmed. In Norway it took 15 years before a relation was questioned."

"I do not have anything against vaccines. However, a careful follow up of the vaccinated subjects should be mandatory. Especially if there is a trial," he said.

"The effectness of this vaccine is really questionable. I wonder how the New Zealand authorities could just transfer the Norwegian experience to New Zealand."