2000 Simpsonwood CDC Conference - Conference Details

Conference Details

In 1997, the Congress of the United States passed a resolution requiring the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to review the thiomersal content of approved drugs and biologics. The Simpsonwood conference was held to perform this review. At the conference, representatives from the CDC, the FDA, and the pharmaceutical industry held two days of discussion, focusing on adverse event data derived from the Vaccine Safety Datalink. Three vaccines of primary interest were discussed: hepatitis B vaccine, DPT vaccine, and the Hib vaccine.

The attendees included experts in the fields of autism, pediatrics, toxicology, epidemiology and vaccines. Also in attendance were approximately half a dozen public-health organisations and pharmaceutical companies, as well as eleven consultants to the CDC, a rapporteur, and a statistician. The meeting also served as a prelude to vaccine policy meetings held by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which sets U.S. vaccine policy for the CDC. The session was also to serve as the initial meeting of the ACIP work group on thimerosal and immunization.

Presentations and supporting documents from the conference were subject to a news embargo until June 21, 2000, at which point they were published by the ACIP. After the conference, researchers carried out a planned second phase to further analyze and clarify the study's preliminary findings. The results of this second analysis were published in 2003.