After the controversy over the cancellation by the Veneto Region of the obligation to vaccinate children, another storm is looming on the vaccine front. It was unleashed by Giorgio Tremante, president of the Lesi da Vaccini association, responsible (with ministerial role since 21 March 2007) for people damaged by Italian vaccines and Italian referent of the European Forum for vaccine vigilance, who yesterday, through his lawyer, Dr. Luigi Meduri, presented a complaint to the Public Prosecutor's Office at the Court of Verona to request a fact-finding investigation into the possible omission by GlaxoSmithKline, whose headquarters are in Verona, regarding the mandatory information on the effects side effects of the hepatitis B vaccine manufactured by GSK. The request stems from news released by the Reuters news agency in recent days relating to an investigation launched by the French judicial authority into some executives of Sanofi Pasteur, a partner of GSK, for not having disseminated, as stated by the indictment, the necessary information about the contraindications for the use of the hepatitis B vaccine. According to the indictment, by the management of Sanofi Pasteur and GSK, in the vaccination campaigns of 1994 until 199 8, information about the health risks linked to cases of adversity from the hepatitis B vaccine was not disseminated. "The omitted information", reads the complaint presented to the Verona Public Prosecutor's Office, "as it seems to emerge from the investigation by the French judiciary, implied that not even the health structures responsible for assessing and preventing the risks inherent in the administration of vaccines were aware of the existence, nature and dangerousness of the reported side effects, with the consequent impossibility of taking the necessary precautions. This omission appears to the writer to have also occurred in our country, and this not only having to assume that a multinational company adopts the same procedures (and omissions) wherever it operates, but because effectively, starting from 1992, the effective date of the mandatory hepatitis B vaccination in Italy, the side effects that have now been reported in France have not been highlighted anywhere". Giorgio Tremante's initiative represents another piece of his battle first against the obligation to have his children vaccinated (he lost two of them and a third remained seriously disabled due to pathologies triggered, according to his experts, by the anti-polio vaccination), and against the blatant misinformation on the risks of vaccine collateral damage attributed to the Ministry of Health. Attorney Meduri specifies: «There is no initiative, recommendation or ministerial protocol to let the parents of children to be vaccinated know in which cases the vaccination itself is not recommended, that is, in the case of immune deficiencies. The same package insert for the polio vaccine indicates these cases: vomiting, diarrhea, immunodeficiency. for the latter circumstance the vaccine is contraindicated. And a simple blood test before vaccination would be enough to find out whether or not the child falls within the cases in which the vaccine should be avoided".EC L'Arena di Verona of 05/02/2008 p. 11
