Biologists Make Huge Vaccine Research Donation, Italian Scientists Angered

Italian scientists are furious over a donation made by the country’s most influential biologist to a vaccine safety advocacy group. The vaccine safety group, Corvelva, opposes Italy’s controversial mandatory vaccination laws. The donation comes at a time of health agenda instability in Italy. The country’s health minister recently fired 30 health council members, some administration critics believe the mass firing was due to council members’ strong positional support over mandatory vaccines.

The Italian National Order of Biologists (ONB) made an official donation of $11,350 to Corvelva on October 26th. Corvelva intends to use the donation to help fund exploration into the safety and efficacy of commonly used vaccines.

Corvelva contends that prior testing reveals that some vaccines do contain impurities, though the group has not published all past tests. One of the tests was published at F1000Research, however, it wasn’t approved by a single reviewer. The reviewer who declined to approve the test requested more information. Corvelva says it will take years to analyze all the collected data of current vaccine research projects. Infanrix Hexa was found to have six toxins present, according to one of Corvelva’s research projects.

National Order of Biologists president Vincenzo D’Anna told nature.com that independent testing is needed because traditional vaccine testing is often influenced by pharmaceutical companies.

“The goal is to contribute to complete the biological and chemical analyses on vaccines,” D’Anna said in an ONB release.

Many Italian scientists critical of the ONB’s donation and position believe that vaccines are already “rigorously tested.”

“There’s solid evidence that vaccines work and are safe,” says virologist Giorgio Palù at the University of Padova.

The newly elected Five Star Movement extended a law allowing parents to self-certify their children’s vaccine records. This bypasses the need to prove vaccine record authenticity via a doctor. The move has polarized a nation that’s extremely split on the issue of mandatory vaccinations. The country currently has two bills involving mandatory vaccination laws that are being considered by the government. One bill completely unravels mandatory vaccine laws all-together. The other allows mandatory vaccination in areas considered to have extremely low vaccine rates, or areas that suffer from epidemics.

For further reading on the Gatti study, refer to Dr. Tenpenny’s nanotechnology article.