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By Herb Newborg

Former CDC Chief Who Admitted Vaccines Cause Autism To Head Merck Vaccines Unit
Julie Gerberding was asked to resign and obliged when Obama took office.

Julie Gerberding, who until this year was the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was named president of Merck’s vaccine division. Gerberding, who led the CDC from 2002 to 2009, stepped down after being asked to resign by the administration when President Barack Obama took office this year. The Merck announcement can be read here.

The move comes a few months after Margie McGlynn, a former sales and marketing exec, retired as Merck’s vaccines chief. The big drug maker markets vaccines for various childhood ailments, as well as a shingles vaccine and the controversial Gardasil vaccine.

Last year, vaccine sales fell 2 percent amid manufacturing woes and controversy over Gardasil safety and marketing.

Some of the criticisms of Gerberding’s tenure as CDC director include:

-- She instituted a large, morale-damaging reorganization of the agency that triggered an exodus of admired agency scientists. Gerberding said the changes made the CDC stronger. But in 2005, five previous CDC directors wrote Gerberding a joint letter expressing their concern about what was happening to the agency.

-- A 2004 medical journal article co-authored by Gerberding said obesity was about to overtake smoking as the No. 1 cause of death in the United States, but CDC officials later reported they had overstated the increase in obesity-related deaths by about 35,000. The mistake was blamed on a computer software error.

-- After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the agency was criticized for being slow to respond to survivors' complaints about formaldehyde fumes in trailers that had been provided by the government.

-- In 2007, she was criticized for going along with the White House's editing of her Senate testimony on the impact of climate change on health, which involved deletion of key portions citing diseases that could flourish in a warmer climate. had led the agency during a series of crises - the investigation into anthrax attacks that killed five people in 2001, the H5N1 avian influenza, the global outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and various outbreaks of food poisoning.

Perhaps the most important event of Gerberding’s directorship of the CDC was this March, 2008 admission that vaccines can trigger Autism: