Dear friends,
Has mercury
in vaccines played a part in the rapid rise of autism? The below article
by Senior Attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., discusses government documents
obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which clearly show
that government agencies like the FDA and CDC (Centers for Disease Control)
have consciously concealed solid evidence of a link between mercury in vaccines
and the rise in autism. Just reading the few sections highlighted in bold
below will show you how profit and greed may have created much unnecessary
suffering in our children.
Vaccines
in the US are regulated by
the FDA, the same body that fired
whistleblowers who exposed critical dangers of genetically engineered
food and hired a former
biotech lawyer as a chief monitor and regulator of biotech industries.
You can help on this topic which is so critical to the health of our children
by forwarding this information to your friends and colleagues. For more reliable,
verifiable information on health cover-ups, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthinformation Together,
we can and will build a brighter future for ourselves, and for our future
generations.
With best
wishes,
Fred Burks for the WantToKnow.info
Team
Note:
Short summaries of related media articles with links to originals are given
at the end of this article, including one with possible autism treatment.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0616-31.htm
Deadly Immunity
When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have caused
autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal the data --
and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their role in the epidemic.
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials
gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross,
Ga. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting
was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next
to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had
issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to
52 attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and
Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization
in Geneva, and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including
GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data
under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was
strictly "embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of documents,
no taking papers with them when they left.
The federal
officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing
new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common
childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to
a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's
massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based
preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for
a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among
children. "I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten
told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier
studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit
disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had
recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be
given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth --
the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one
in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.
Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life
and death, the findings were frightening. "You can play with this all
you want," Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics,
told the group. The results "are statistically significant." Dr.
Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of
Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's
first day, was even more alarmed. "My gut feeling?" he said. "Forgive
this personal comment -- I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing
vaccine until we know better what is going on."
But instead
of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of
thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the
next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts
obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned
about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine
industry's bottom line.
"We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits,"
said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for
Children in Delaware. "This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff
attorneys in this country." Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for
the CDC, expressed relief that "given the sensitivity of the information,
we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible
hands." Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization,
declared flatly that the study "should not have been done at all"
and warned that the results "will be taken by others and will be used
in ways beyond the control of this group. The research results have to be
handled."
In fact,
the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than
at protecting children's health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to
conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers
to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten's
findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and
told other scientists that his original data had been "lost" and
could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it
handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring
it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his
study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data
to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.
Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of injections
given to American infants -- but they continued to sell off their mercury-based
supplies of vaccines until last year. The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying
up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug
companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines --
including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus boosters routinely
given to 11-year-olds.
The drug
companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers in Washington. Senate
Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from
the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from
liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured
children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the
government's vaccine-related documents -- including the Simpsonwood transcripts
-- and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002,
the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the "Eli Lilly Protection
Act" into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to
his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. Congress
repealed the measure in 2003 -- but earlier this year, Frist slipped another
provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children
suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. "The lawsuits are of
such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit
our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Andy
Olsen, a legislative assistant to Frist.
Even many conservatives are shocked by the government's effort to cover up
the dangers of thimerosal. Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, oversaw
a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was diagnosed
with autism. "Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly
related to the autism epidemic," his House Government Reform Committee
concluded in its final report. "This epidemic in all probability may
have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch
regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin."
The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added,
out of "institutional malfeasance for self protection" and "misplaced
protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry."
The story
of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks
of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance,
power and greed. I was drawn into the controversy only reluctantly. As
an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of
mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely
convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines. Privately, I was skeptical.
I doubted that autism could be blamed on a single source, and I certainly
understood the government's need to reassure parents that vaccinations are
safe; the eradication of deadly childhood diseases depends on it. I tended
to agree with skeptics like Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California,
who criticized his colleagues on the House Government Reform Committee for
leaping to conclusions about autism and vaccinations. "Why should we
scare people about immunization," Waxman pointed out at one hearing,
"until we know the facts?"
It was
only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the leading scientific
research and talking with many of the nation's preeminent authorities on mercury
that I became convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic
of childhood neurological disorders is real. Five of my own children are
members of the Thimerosal Generation -- those born between 1989 and 2003 --
who received heavy doses of mercury from vaccines. "The elementary grades
are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system
damage," Patti White, a school nurse, told the House Government Reform
Committee in 1999. "Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier;
however, in 25 years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids.
Something very, very wrong is happening to our children." More than
500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and pediatricians diagnose more
than 40,000 new cases every year. The disease was unknown until 1943, when
it was identified and diagnosed among 11 children born in the months after
thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931.
Some skeptics dispute that the rise in autism is caused by thimerosal-tainted
vaccinations. They argue that the increase is a result of better diagnosis
-- a theory that seems questionable at best, given that most of the new cases
of autism are clustered within a single generation of children. "If the
epidemic is truly an artifact of poor diagnosis," scoffs Dr. Boyd Haley,
one of the world's authorities on mercury toxicity, "then where are all
the 20-year-old autistics?" Other researchers point out that Americans
are exposed to a greater cumulative "load" of mercury than ever
before, from contaminated fish to dental fillings, and suggest that thimerosal
in vaccines may be only part of a much larger problem. It's a concern that
certainly deserves far more attention than it has received -- but it overlooks
the fact that the mercury concentrations in vaccines dwarf other sources of
exposure to our children.
What is
most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading detectives have
gone to ignore -- and cover up -- the evidence against thimerosal. From
the very beginning, the scientific case against the mercury additive has been
overwhelming. The preservative, which is used to stem fungi and bacterial
growth in vaccines, contains ethylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. Truckloads
of studies have shown that mercury tends to accumulate in the brains of primates
and other animals after they are injected with vaccines -- and that the developing
brains of infants are particularly susceptible. In 1977, a Russian study found
that adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those
given to American children still suffered brain damage years later. Russia
banned thimerosal from children's vaccines 20 years ago, and Denmark, Austria,
Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since followed
suit.
"You couldn't even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe,"
says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky.
"It's just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its
brain will sicken. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you
put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be
shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage."
Internal
documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from
the start that its product could cause damage -- and even death -- in both
animals and humans. In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering
it to 22 patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks
of being injected -- a fact Lilly didn't bother to report in its study declaring
thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore,
warned Lilly that its claims about thimerosal's safety "did not check
with ours." Half the dogs Pittman injected with thimerosal-based vaccines
became sick, leading researchers there to declare the preservative "unsatisfactory
as a serum intended for use on dogs."
In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to
mount. During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the
preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it "poison."
In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice
when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly's own studies discerned
that thimerosal was "toxic to tissue cells" in concentrations as
low as one part per million -- 100 times weaker than the concentration in
a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as
"nontoxic" and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants.
In 1977, 10 babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved
with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.
In 1982,
the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal,
and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines. But tragically,
that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series
of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis
B within 24 hours of birth, and 2-month-old infants would be immunized for
haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.
The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year
that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers
of Merck's vaccine programs, warned the company that 6-month-olds who were
administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended
that thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and
children," noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. "The
best way to go," he added, "is to switch to dispensing the actual
vaccines without adding preservatives."
For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money. Thimerosal
enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain
multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more
easily contaminated by multiple needle entries. The larger vials cost half
as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international
agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics.
Faced with this "cost consideration," Merck ignored Hilleman's warnings,
and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based
vaccines for children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received only three
vaccinations -- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella.
A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving
a total of 22 immunizations by the time they reached first grade.
As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded.
During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based
vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical
for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal,
it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that
children would receive from the mandated vaccines. "What took the FDA
so long to do the calculations?" Peter Patriarca, director of viral products
for the agency, asked in an e-mail to the CDC in 1999. "Why didn't CDC
and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the
childhood immunization schedule?"
But by that time, the damage was done. Infants who received all their vaccines,
plus boosters, by the age of 6 months were being injected with levels of ethylmercury
187 times greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury,
a related neurotoxin. Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury
poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body,
several studies -- including one published in April by the National Institutes
of Health -- suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic to developing
brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury.
Officials responsible for childhood immunizations insist that the additional
vaccines were necessary to protect infants from disease and that thimerosal
is still essential in developing nations, which, they often claim, cannot
afford the single-dose vials that don't require a preservative. Dr. Paul Offit,
one of CDC's top vaccine advisors, told me, "I think if we really have
an influenza pandemic -- and certainly we will in the next 20 years, because
we always do -- there's no way on God's earth that we immunize 280 million
people with single-dose vials. There has to be multidose vials."
But while
public-health officials may have been well-intentioned, many of those on the
CDC advisory committee who backed the additional vaccines had close ties to
the industry. Dr. Sam Katz, the committee's chair, was a paid consultant
for most of the major vaccine makers and shares a patent on a measles vaccine
with Merck, which also manufactures the hepatitis B vaccine. Dr. Neal Halsey,
another committee member, worked as a researcher for the vaccine companies
and received honoraria from Abbott Labs for his research on the hepatitis
B vaccine.
Indeed,
in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines, such conflicts of
interest are common. Rep. Burton says that the CDC "routinely allows
scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on intellectual advisory
committees that make recommendations on new vaccines," even though they
have "interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed
to be providing unbiased oversight." The House Government Reform Committee
discovered that four of the eight CDC advisors who approved guidelines for
a rotavirus vaccine laced with thimerosal "had financial ties to the
pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine."
Offit, who shares a patent on the vaccine, acknowledged to me that he "would
make money" if his vote to approve it eventually leads to a marketable
product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist's direct financial
stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. "It provides no conflict
for me," he insists. "I have simply been informed by the process,
not corrupted by it. When I sat around that table, my sole intent was trying
to make recommendations that best benefited the children in this country.
It's offensive to say that physicians and public-health people are in the
pocket of industry and thus are making decisions that they know are unsafe
for children. It's just not the way it works."
Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances. Like
Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of children's health,
proud of their "partnerships" with pharmaceutical companies, immune
to the seductions of personal profit, besieged by irrational activists whose
anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering children's health. They are often resentful
of questioning. "Science," says Offit, "is best left to scientists."
Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of
interest. In his e-mail to CDC administrators in 1999, Paul Patriarca of the
FDA blasted federal regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize the danger
posed by the added baby vaccines. "I'm not sure there will be an easy
way out of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and immunization-policy
bodies may have been asleep at the switch re: thimerosal until now,"
Patriarca wrote. The close ties between regulatory officials and the pharmaceutical
industry, he added, "will also raise questions about various advisory
bodies regarding aggressive recommendations for use" of thimerosal in
child vaccines.
If federal
regulators and government scientists failed to grasp the potential risks of
thimerosal over the years, no one could claim ignorance after the secret meeting
at Simpsonwood. But rather than conduct more studies to test the link to autism
and other forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science. The
agency turned its database on childhood vaccines -- which had been developed
largely at taxpayer expense -- over to a private agency, America's Health
Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research.
It also instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that
is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking
the link between thimerosal and brain disorders. The CDC "wants us
to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe," Dr. Marie McCormick,
who chaired the IOM's Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow
researchers when they first met in January 2001. "We are not ever going
to come down that [autism] is a true side effect" of thimerosal exposure.
According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee's chief staffer, Kathleen
Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was "inadequate
to accept or reject a causal relation" between thimerosal and autism.
That, she added, was the result "Walt wants" -- a reference to Dr.
Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.
For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination, the revelations
about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything they had worked for. "We've
got a dragon by the tail here," said Dr. Michael Kaback, another committee
member. "The more negative that [our] presentation is, the less likely
people are to use vaccination, immunization -- and we know what the results
of that will be. We are kind of caught in a trap. How we work our way out
of the trap, I think is the charge."
Even in
public, federal officials made it clear that their primary goal in studying
thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines. "Four current studies
are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and thimerosal,"
Dr. Gordon Douglas, then-director of strategic planning for vaccine research
at the National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton University gathering
in May 2001. "In order to undo the harmful effects of research claiming
to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated risk of autism, we need to conduct
and publicize additional studies to assure parents of safety." Douglas
formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where he ignored warnings
about thimerosal's risks.
In May
of last year, the Institute of Medicine issued its final report. Its conclusion:
There is no proven link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines. Rather
than reviewing the large body of literature describing the toxicity of thimerosal,
the report relied on four disastrously flawed epidemiological studies examining
European countries, where children received much smaller doses of thimerosal
than American kids. It also cited a new version of the Verstraeten study,
published in the journal Pediatrics, that had been reworked to reduce the
link between thimerosal and autism. The new study included children too young
to have been diagnosed with autism and overlooked others who showed signs
of the disease. The IOM declared the case closed and -- in a startling position
for a scientific body -- recommended that no further research be conducted.
The report may have satisfied the CDC, but it convinced no one. Rep. David
Weldon, a Republican physician from Florida who serves on the House Government
Reform Committee, attacked the Institute of Medicine, saying it relied on
a handful of studies that were "fatally flawed" by "poor design"
and failed to represent "all the available scientific and medical research."
CDC officials are not interested in an honest search for the truth, Weldon
told me, because "an association between vaccines and autism would force
them to admit that their policies irreparably damaged thousands of children.
Who would want to make that conclusion about themselves?"
Under pressure from Congress, parents and a few of its own panel members,
the Institute of Medicine reluctantly convened a second panel to review the
findings of the first. In February, the new panel, composed of different scientists,
criticized the earlier panel for its lack of transparency and urged the CDC
to make its vaccine database available to the public.
So far, though, only two scientists have managed to gain access. Dr. Mark
Geier, president of the Genetics Center of America, and his son, David, spent
a year battling to obtain the medical records from the CDC. Since August 2002,
when members of Congress pressured the agency to turn over the data, the Geiers
have completed six studies that demonstrate a powerful correlation between
thimerosal and neurological damage in children. One study, which compares
the cumulative dose of mercury received by children born between 1981 and
1985 with those born between 1990 and 1996, found a "very significant
relationship" between autism and vaccines. Another study of educational
performance found that kids who received higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines
were nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism and more than
three times as likely to suffer from speech disorders and mental retardation.
Another soon-to-be-published study shows that autism rates are in decline
following the recent elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines.
As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying vaccines,
others have stepped in to study the link to autism. In April, reporter Dan
Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more interesting studies himself. Searching
for children who had not been exposed to mercury in vaccines -- the kind of
population that scientists typically use as a "control" in experiments
-- Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Penn., who refuse to immunize
their infants. Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that
there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found only four. One had
been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three
-- including one child adopted from outside the Amish community -- had received
their vaccines.
At the
state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth reviews of thimerosal.
While the Institute of Medicine was busy whitewashing the risks, the Iowa
Legislature was carefully combing through all of the available scientific
and biological data. "After three years of review, I became convinced
there was sufficient credible research to show a link between mercury and
the increased incidences in autism," says state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a
Republican who oversaw the investigation. "The fact that Iowa's 700 percent
increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more and more vaccines
were added to the children's vaccine schedules, is solid evidence alone."
Last year, Iowa became the first state to ban mercury in vaccines, followed
by California. Similar bans are now under consideration in 32 other states.
But instead
of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to include thimerosal
in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as steroids and injected
collagen. Even more alarming, the government continues to ship vaccines
preserved with thimerosal to developing countries -- some of which are now
experiencing a sudden explosion in autism rates. In China, where the
disease was virtually unknown prior to the introduction of thimerosal by U.S.
drug manufacturers in 1999, news reports indicate that there are now more
than 1.8 million autistics. Although reliable numbers are hard to come
by, autistic disorders also appear to be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua
and other developing countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines.
The World Health Organization continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but
it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders
"under review."
I devoted
time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral crisis that
must be addressed. If, as the evidence suggests, our public-health authorities
knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation
of American children, their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest
scandals in the annals of American medicine. "The CDC is guilty of
incompetence and gross negligence," says Mark Blaxill, vice president
of Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization concerned about the role of mercury
in medicines. "The damage caused by vaccine exposure is massive. It's
bigger than asbestos, bigger than tobacco, bigger than anything you've ever
seen." It's hard to calculate the damage to our country -- and to the
international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases -- if Third World nations
come to believe that America's most heralded foreign-aid initiative is poisoning
their children. It's not difficult to predict how this scenario will be interpreted
by America's enemies abroad. The scientists and researchers -- many of them
sincere, even idealistic -- who are participating in efforts to hide the science
on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal of protecting
children in developing nations from disease pandemics. They are badly misguided.
Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt
our country and the world's poorest populations.
Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council,
chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper and president of Waterkeeper Alliance.
He is the co-author of "The Riverkeepers."
Note: Below are excerpts from and links to other revealing articles on
this topic:
Merck's
infant vaccine stirs new controversy
Los Angeles Times/Newsday,
March 8, 2005
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/health/ny-usglan084168623mar08,0,3713664.story
http://www.mercuryexposure.org/index.php?article_id=344
Merck
& Co. continued to supply infant vaccine containing a mercury preservative
for two years after declaring that it had eliminated the chemical. Thimerosal,
which is nearly 50 percent ethyl mercury, has largely been eliminated from
most routine childhood vaccines, although it is present in most flu shots.
More than 4,200 parents have filed claims in the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation
Program, alleging that their children suffered autism or other neurological
disorders from mercury in their shots.
Possible Mercury, Autism Connection
Found in Study
Los Angeles Times, March
17, 2005
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-autism17mar17,1,1770760.story?coll=la-news-science
http://www.yourlawyer.com/practice/panews.htm?parea=Toxic%20Substances&&story_id=9495
Studying
individual school districts in Texas, the epidemiologists found that those
districts with the highest levels of mercury in the environment also had the
highest rates of special education students and autism diagnoses. There was a strong, direct relationship between mercury and autism levels.
The incidence of autism has grown dramatically over the last two decades,
from about one in every 2,000 children to as high as one in every 166. The
purported link between autism and mercury has been a subject of intense debate.
In the past it has centered primarily on the mercury-containing preservative
thimerosal, which was once widely used in vaccines. Many parents have
argued that thimerosal causes autism because their children seemed to develop
the neurological disorder shortly after they received childhood vaccinations.
The Age of Autism: The Amish
anomaly
April 18-19, 2005, Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20050321-115921-9566r.htm - Part 1
http://washingtontimes.com/UPI-breaking/20050417-052541-5549r.htm -
Part 2
Where
are the autistic Amish? Here in Lancaster County, heart of Pennsylvania Dutch
country, there should be well over 100 with some form of the disorder. I have
come here to find them, but so far my mission has failed, and the very few
I have identified raise some very interesting questions about some widely held
views on autism. The Amish have a religious exemption from vaccination.
So far, there is evidence of only three, all of them children, the oldest age
9 or 10. Julia is one of them. She...is adopted from China. She had most of
her vaccines given to her in the United States before we got her. [Of the other
one definitely had a vaccine, and the other's vaccine status is unknown.]
The mainstream scientific consensus says autism is a complex genetic disorder,
one that has been around for millennia at roughly the same prevalence. That
prevalence is now considered to be 1 in every 166 children born in the United
States.
Debate
over vaccines, autism won't die
June 26, 2005, MSNBC
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8336821
- Page 1
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8336821/page/2
- Page 2
The
afternoon after Kelly Kerns’ 2-month-old daughter Kaylee got several vaccines
was “living hell,” with the child screaming and arching her back, her mother
said. 'I kept telling myself everybody gets vaccinated — this is OK,' she
said. When Kaylee was 18 months old, her white-blonde hair began falling out
and she stopped talking. Meanwhile, Kerns had twin boys — Andrew and Daniel.
When they were 15 months old, they received three vaccines. A week later,
they stopped talking. All three children have since been diagnosed as autistic.
Flu vaccine sold in multidose vials still contains the preservative,
and the government urges flu shots for pregnant women and young children even
though not enough thimerosal-free ones are available, critics say. Finding
answers is tough because autism, a little-understood developmental disorder,
often is diagnosed at the very ages when children get vaccines. The stories
are remarkably similar: A seemingly normal child gets a shot and days, weeks
or months later, withdraws from the world, stops speaking, becomes upset at
random stimulation such as a doorbell, and adopts compulsive behaviors like
head-banging.
A child's return from autism
May 25, 2005, San Francisco Chronicle
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/25/BAGU0CU2K71.DTL
A Lafayette couple,
certain that chelation therapy has helped their autistic son, stepped squarely
into the controversy surrounding the causes of autism and its treatment Tuesday
as they joined 150 other parents in launching an international support group
that will aggressively promote the treatment. The Handleys are now among
a small minority of parents -- who, believing that the autism was caused by
the mercury in thimerosal, a preservative that was routinely used in vaccines
until recently -- are treating their children with chelation therapy, a lotion
or pill that strips the body of heavy metals. It has been used for decades
to detoxify people contaminated in industrial accidents, but no studies have
proved whether it is an effective treatment for autism. For Jamie's parents,
the proof they need is in front of them: Jamie, now 3 years old and several
months into treatment, is plump and playing baseball. His smile has returned.
The Handleys said the new support group, Generation Rescue, and its Web site,
www.generationrescue.com, will
offer information on chelation therapy and connect parents with those who can
help.
