At the end of 2009, Julie Gerberding stepped down as director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to become president of Merck’s vaccine division. The move came a period of tumult, given that vaccine sales had dropped 2 percent amid manufacturing woes and controversy over the safety and marketing of the Gardasil vaccine for HPV, which can cause cervical cancer.
The challenges remain. The Merck vaccine division makes 14 of the 17 vaccines recommended by CDC for children and nine of the 10 recommended for adults. Nonetheless, Gerberding keeps a relatively low profile, but spoke earlier this week with Xconomy about innovation and funding for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (back story). An excerpt of their conversation is below.
However, she does not address a continued decline in vaccine sales, some of which can be traced to ongoing production problems, notably, for the ProQuad shot for Measles, Mumps, Rubella and Varicella (see page 29). Availability, in fact, is not expected at any time this year. Nor does she discuss setbacks Merck has encountered in broadening the market for Gardasil (read this). Nonetheless, she offers some views on the big picture...
Xconomy: What are the biggest challenges in this job? (The priorities include) getting vaccines we already have to people who need them, developing novel ones, optimizing existing ones, stockpiling for pandemics. What are your top priorities, and lower priorities? Gerberding: Our top vaccine priority is to get vaccines to the people who need them most. We are really working hard on access and coverage and completion. We have some products where we can give the first dose, but we need to make sure people get all the doses they need so they are completely covered...One of the things I think all the manufacturers face, whether they are in an emerging market environment or a multinational company, is that we need stability of forecasting. We can’t live in a situation where we might be able to provide 60 million doses to GAVI this year, but next year, they might not have money.
We need stable, long-term commitments so we can do our own production forecasting, and achieve those cost savings that will allow us to be able to offer vaccines at the access price. That seems like an easy thing to do. GAVI is talking about five years of funding, but one of the things people don’t understand about vaccine manufacturing is that they have a much longer runway than pills. Our planning horizon is 10 years, not five years. We’ve got to know what we are doing 10 years from now, because if we have to scale up our production capability or change something, it takes that long to commission a vaccine production facility, or de-commission one and change it to do something else.
Xconomy: When you talk about regulatory agencies, and government agencies that are the purchaser of vaccines, you get into politics. That brings the whole vaccine-denier world into the equation. How big of an obstacle is that, and how do you deal with it? Gerberding: On a global basis, it’s a small issue today. Most people in the world are so grateful to have their child immunized. They see the diseases, and understand how life-saving those vaccines can really be. If you are thinking globally, it’s not the most important obstacle we face. But it’s clearly a powerful local issue in many westernized or developed countries. It’s a growing issue. We have to work harder to engage people in the conversation. And that conversation needs to be led by trusted and credible people, not necessarily vaccine manufacturers.
5 Comments
The idea of Julie Gerberding encouraging "working harder to engage in conversation" with people who are becoming resistant to vaccinating would be a joke if it weren't so offensive. She presided over CDC for eight years, completely ignored vaccine safety concerns of the entire country, quietly admitted to congress that her administration's tent pole safety study (Verstraeten) was useless, drafted the likes of Poul Thorsen to gin up research to exonerate vaccines in serious damage, lied about the Poling case, refused to answer the questions that arose from it, and thought so little of the public with vaccine safety concerns that she actually went on CNN and spewed nonsense answers like this: http://youtu.be/Dh-nkD5LSIg She might just as well have said, "You the public, are clearly morons, so i feel completely safe saying that vaccines both can and cannot cause autism, and I am sure you won't even notice. You are suckers. Only 18 months left for me and I can cash in at Merck!"
... and she is spewing a line of garbage that they need to engage in conversation with those of us who don't trust vaccine makers and public health officials because they make safety and efficacy claims that are not even remotely supported by the literature?
She had eight years to do that and didn't. US vaccine resistance is her baby. Her bad faith relationship with concerned parents is THE biggest reason that vaccine rates are dropping.
If she had actually done good faith research, and told the truth about vaccine encephalopathy (and how often it is diagnosed as "autism" and how many encephalopathy/autism cases are being paid by the federal government), and brought reform to the VICP and vaccine program starting ten years ago when she became head of CDC, there would be no vaccine wars.
If she had not lied about vaccine injury then immediately gone to work as the head of vaccines for the country's biggest vaccine maker as soon as legally possible when she left CDC, then people might consider her a 'trusted and credible' person.
If she had not worked for Edelman (Pharma's PR firm) while sitting out her waiting period to work directly for Pharma, while appearing on TV, calling the H1N1 vaccine magical, and forgetting to mention that she was employed by Edelman... http://adventuresinautism.blogspot.com/2009/07/julie-gerberding-now-officially-paid.html...
if, if, if...
Julie Gerberding needs to be hauled before congress, put under oath and be made to answer for all the garbage that went on in the vaccine program and VICP during her tenure at CDC. And when exactly she was promised her nice, fat revolving door job at Merck.... was it before or after she got Gardasil and RotaTeq on the vaccine schedule? Was ignoring the now close to 100 deaths and 20,000 reported serious Gardasil injuries a prerequisite for her Merck job? Did her agreement extend to lying to hide MMR's role in the Poling case?
Wanna know why measles is coming back? Because this woman lied with all her strength for a decade, killed faith in the vaccine program, and everyone now knows that HHS's vaccine pronouncements are not worth the paper they are printed on.
There is a reason that she rarely comes out of her hole at Merck.
In case anyone is interested in a lengthy review of just how horrid this woman's actions have been, and just how much responsibility she has for the destroyed faith between the public and public health, I put this walk down memory lane of her abysmal track record when she was announced as the new head of Merck vaccines.
http://adventuresinautism.blogspot.com/2009/12/julie-gerberding-named-head-of-merck.html
Want to know why docs and mom's are arguing to the death in offices across the country every day? Because Julie Gerberding set it up that way.
Ginger, if it's any consolation, we generally farm out Medical Directors to the vaccine divisions because they couldn't cut it in small or large molecule development. The protocols are childishly simple, so that maybe there might even be hope for Gerberding down the line. The problem is that vaccines have real side effects, and epidemiologists are usually better with the retrospectoscope than they are in managing serious AE's in real time.
Professionally speaking this is why I admire former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler, who turned down numerous job offers from Big Pharma after leaving FDA in order to be able to maintain his independence.
Let it all out Ginger - you'll feel much better. LOL.
No really - I think your summary of why so many people are angry with this woman is excellent.
Lately I've really begun to wonder why so many people in power in the healthcare industry seem to be psychopaths. Do you think maybe early on, they themselves ate a bunch of the new generation of psych drugs, before they knew any better, and have brain damage like so many of the people who got hooked on them?
Something had to have happened to these people. I know greed is powerful - but allowing infants and toddlers to be killed and injured to make buck? That's as bad as it gets in my book.
But pharma companies have been doing it for years, with vaccines and drugs, and it doesn't seem to faze them a bit. There's got to be a special place in hell reserved for these kinds of people.
Evelyn may have a point. Pharma tends to attract a high percentage of introverted, driven individuals with antosocial personality disorder, which may or may not be fertile breeding ground for psychopathy. Fortunately most of the time their ex spouses spot it early on so that they have time to get of the relationship before too much harm is done.