 |
Main Menu |
|
|
 Home Community Members options Search Web
|
|
|
|
|
Survey |
|
|
How many children are on the spectrum in your family?
|
|
|
|
|
News- Page 2
|
Mercury : Time To Pay Up Again
|
|
|
Posted by sylvia on Saturday, March 25, 2006 (08:08:00)
OP ED News
By Evelyn Pringle
The generation of children injured by vaccines containing the mercury-based preservative thimerosal is now reaching puberty. Many of these children will require life-long care and support. The cost to their parents by today's standards, will reportedly exceed $2 million dollars for each child.
An ever-growing number of health care professionals point to thimerosal as the culprit behind the explosion in cases of autism and other neurological disorders. The only common thread connecting these damaged children to one another is their exposure to mercury through childhood immunizations.
Accountability from vaccine makers is something that parents of injured children have been seeking for years; but accountability appears more illusive with each year's passage. On October 27 2005, the Hartford Courant reported that "Congress is considering a bill that would allow the government to order that vaccines be given to every U.S. citizen in a national emergency, even if a vaccine has previously harmed some people."
The Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005 (S 1873), is being pushed through Congress without giving voters the chance to make their objections known to their elected officials.
Nicknamed "Bioshield Two," the bill's primary sponsor, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), claims the Act will give the Department of Health and Human Services "additional authority and resources to partner with the private sector to rapidly develop drugs and vaccines."
Co-sponsored by Senators Bill Frist (R-TN), Mike Enzi (R-WY), and Judd Gregg (R-NH), the Act will in truth, eliminate current regulatory and legal safeguards applied to vaccines.
What kind of profits need protecting? A good example is GlaxoSmithKline, which predicts that some of its new vaccines will become blockbusters with projected sales of more than $1 billion a year, according to Reuters on June 30, 2005. Glaxo aims to launch five major vaccines by 2010, it said.
Another example, for people who believe there’s no profit in vaccine making, “tell it to Wyeth, a big drug maker whose vaccine Prevnar ... costs more than $250 for the four-dose treatment given to infants,†says Kristine Severyn, PhD, author of the report, Profits, Not Science, Motivate Vaccine Mandates Vaccine Policy Institute.
Despite the price, "the government has recommended that all infants get the vaccine, and insurers generally pay for it - as does the federal Vaccines for Children program for low-income families. Prevnar, with sales expected to top $1 billion this year," says Severyn.
Severyn's predictions were right on. According to Wyeth's 2005 first quarter earnings report, Prevnar achieved net revenue of $391 million, more than double the first quarter earnings in 2004.
Bush’s FY2006 budget proposes to improve access to vaccines by allowing underinsured children to receive Vaccines for Children at state and local health clinics. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that cost of the proposal will be $140 million in 2006, and $700 million over the 2006-2010 period.
How much does this sort of government protection cost? For starters, according to the Center for Public Integrity, the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), is the industry's trade organization and it has topped the list of pharmaceutical lobbying spending since 1998, shelling out $74 million. Its members include 16 of the industry's 20 largest companies and their subsidiaries and its current president is Billy Tauzin, is a former Republican congressman from Louisiana.
In the 2002 election cycle, PhRMA gave $3,505,052 with 95% going to Republicans. The top recipient in the Senate was none other than Senator Richard Burr, who received $288,684, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. So far in the 2006 cycle, Gregg has received over $106,000 and Enzi has taken in $21,000 in pharma money.
Frist is a real piece of work. He has been trying to get a law passed to protect the drug companies for years. In 2002, he was behind the dead of night insertion of a provision into the Homeland Security bill that would have immunized vaccine makers from lawsuits related to thimerosal.
Frist has made millions upon millions profiting off human misery. The basis of the family fortune is the Hospital Corporation of America, the largest for-profit hospital conglomerate in the nation. However, the corporation also paid the largest health care settlement in history of more than $1.7 billion in civil and criminal penalties to settle charges of massive Medicare and Medicaid billing fraud.
Until recently, Frist and his wife owned $26 million worth of HCA stock. They are currently being investigated on charges of insider trading in the sale of HCA stock in the weeks immediately before the stock's value plummeted, and conflict of interest charges involving his ownership of HCA stock which he had previously claimed he knew nothing about because in accordance with ethics rules, it was in a "blind trust."
According to the Center for Justice and Democracy, Frist has received more than $2.3 million from doctors, health insurers, drug companies and others in the health care industry, raising more cash from health-care interests than 98% of his colleagues. In return, his legislative work in the Senate consists of almost nothing but trying to push through laws to increase profits for his number one backer.
Its worth noting that while Frist was its chairman, the pharmaceutical industry was also the largest single contributor to the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, doling out about $4 million, with Eli Lilly, the company that invented thimerosal, being the single biggest contributor, giving $1.6 million.
The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a watchdog advocacy group, is highly critical of the pending protection legislation. According to the group's President, Barbara Loe Fisher, "It is a big lie that drug companies have been driven out of business by lawsuits in the past two decades.†The NVIC calls the Act "a drug company stockholder's dream and a consumer's worst nightmare."
According to NVIC, currently there are at least ten different bills pending in Congress that will contain provisions to shield drug companies from lawsuits including S3, S975, S1437, S1828, S1873, S1880, HR650, HR3154, HR3970, and HR4245.
"This proposed legislation," Fisher told UPI, "is an unconstitutional attempt by some in Congress to give a taxpayer-funded handout to pharmaceutical companies for drugs and vaccines the government can force all citizens to use while absolving everyone connected from any responsibility for injuries and deaths which occur."
The bill establishes the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA), as the single authority for the advanced research and development of drugs and vaccines and grants the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, the sole authority to determine whether a drug maker violated drug safety laws. In addition, the Act specifically bars citizens from challenging the Secretary's rulings in court.
BARDA will be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act, to ensure that no evidence related to injuries caused by vaccines classified as "countermeasures" will become public.
"It means that, if an American is injured by an experimental flu or anthrax vaccine he or she is mandated to take," Fisher told UPI, "that citizen will be banned from exercising the Constitutional right to a jury trial even if it is revealed that the vaccine maker engaged in criminal fraud and negligence in the manufacture of the vaccine."
In a November 15, 2005, letter to Senator Burr's staff director, Fisher describes S 1873 as "arguably unconstitutional" because it (1) lacks transparency into the research, development, licensure and post-licensure surveillance of vaccines and drugs used in public health emergencies; (2) lacks accountability for either manufacturers of these products or government health officials who mandate their use without informed consent; and (3) lacks justice for those who will inevitably die or suffer chronic illnesses after being compelled to take these products.
“It is exactly this type of legislation that leads to civil disobedience and many times in the extreme form,†Dr Boyd Haley, a well-known expert on heavy metal toxicity, told this author, “I am very fearful of how certain segments of our society will respond to any mass vaccination program---especially if it does cause a problem like the thimerosal/autism situation,†he said.
As it stands today, if the Bush administration and its puppets in Congress achieve their common goal of protecting pharma profits by shielding vaccine makers from lawsuits, tax payers will have to foot the bill for the life-long costs of caring for millions of injured children.
Tax payers are already funding their special education needs. In a January 14, 2005, letter to a Congressional Subcommittee on Human Rights, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), informed committee members that the number of children diagnosed with autism served under the IDEA has increased by more than 500% in the last decade and that "about 1.5 million Americans are currently living with some form of autism."
In a recent interview with Teri Small published in the journal, Medical Veritas 2 (2005), Dr Geier said that he believes that this may be the greatest iatrogenic epidemic in history. "The damage already done to our society is already in the trillions of dollars," he warns. "The damage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that of the AIDS epidemic pale when compared to the current epidemic of autism," he told Veritas.
"All of us alive," Dr Geier says, "will have to bear its effects both in the lifetime care of the damaged children and the loss of what they otherwise might have contributed to our society."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
comments? |   |
|
|
|
|
Mercury : Startling rise in autism stirs questions about the cause
|
|
|
Posted by sylvia on Saturday, December 17, 2005 (13:08:26)
Kansas City October 2005
By Judy L. Thomas
Once considered rare, autism — a collection of neurologically based developmental disorders characterized by social withdrawal and repetitive behaviors — now afflicts 1 in 166 American children.
What’s more, the Autism Society of America estimates that the number of autistic children is growing by 10 percent to 17 percent every year.
U.S. Department of Education statistics show that in the past decade the number of children ages 6-21 who were diagnosed with autism and served under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act increased more than 500 percent.
In Kansas, the number of children served in 1993 was 147. In 2003, the number was 993, a 575 percent increase. In Missouri, 399 children were served in 1993, compared with 2,664 in 2003, a 568 percent increase.
“It is obvious from all accounts that there is a crisis in the United States regarding the dramatic rise in autism rates and the resulting strain placed on families, the education system, and state Medicaid and disability programs,†a congressional report concluded in 2003. “A further crisis will ensue in the next two decades when we see an explosion in the need for adult services and long-term housing.â€
The cause of autism has been hotly debated for years. Many experts think it involves a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
One theory is that the increase of mercury in childhood vaccines may have triggered a response in children who were genetically predisposed to being more vulnerable to neurological damage from mercury. But government health officials say that research indicates no connection between mercury in vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders.
The issue intensified in 1999, when health officials announced that thimerosal — a compound that is 49.6 percent mercury by weight — no longer would be used as a preservative in children’s vaccines. They stressed, however, that the action was merely precautionary.
But those who think there is a correlation between mercury and autism note that the alarming growth in autism cases coincided with an increase in the number of recommended childhood vaccines that contained thimerosal.
Throughout most of the 20th century, children were not required to receive many vaccines. The only vaccine routinely given to infants that contained thimerosal was the DTP vaccine. It contained 25 micrograms of ethylmercury and was administered three times in the first six months of life, with a total of four times in two years.
But in 1991, when the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began recommending the hepatitis B vaccine and increased the doses of Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccine, the amount of mercury exposure to infants increased significantly.
Many Hib vaccines contained 25 micrograms of mercury and, like the DTP vaccines, were given three times in the first six months and a total of four times in the first two years. The hepatitis B vaccine contained 12.5 micrograms of mercury and was given shortly after birth, then two more times in the first six months of life.
That means babies receiving the recommended vaccines at their checkups went from getting 25 micrograms of mercury in one day to up to 62.5 micrograms in one day.
The daily limit set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is 0.1 microgram of methylmercury for every kilogram of body weight. For an 11-pound baby — about the weight of a 2-month old — the daily limit would have been about 0.5 micrograms. So that baby would have received 125 times the EPA’s daily threshold.
How did this happen?
In 1997, Congress ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to determine the effects of mercury on the human body through foods and drugs.
But when the agency examined the amounts of ethylmercury being injected into children, it faced a problem: The effects of ethylmercury had not been studied as extensively as methylmercury — the kind found in seafood — and the government had not established safety limits for ethylmercury exposure.
As a result, the agency ended up comparing the exposure from the vaccines with the federal limits for methylmercury exposure. And what they found was that the cumulative amount of mercury in the vaccines exceeded the EPA’s threshold.
“For years, nobody sat down to do the math to figure it out,†said U.S. Rep. Dave Weldon, a Florida Republican who has introduced legislation in Congress to ban the use of mercury in childhood vaccines.
That delayed discovery led the FDA and other agencies in 1999 to recommend, but not order, the removal of thimerosal from most childhood vaccines.
A June 29, 1999, e-mail sent to colleagues by a former senior FDA official said the news would “raise questions about FDA being ‘asleep at the switch’ for decades by allowing a potentially hazardous compound to remain in many childhood vaccines, and not forcing manufacturers to exclude it from new products.â€
“We must keep in mind that the dose of ethylmercury was not generated by ‘rocket science’: conversion of the percentage of thimerosal to actual ug (micrograms) of mercury involves 9th grade algebra,†the FDA official wrote. “What took the FDA so long to do the calculations? Why didn’t CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations while rapidly expanding the childhood immunization schedule?â€
Those who have studied the issue say it could take a few more years before it is known whether thimerosal causes autism.
“Time will tell,†said David Kirby, author of Evidence of Harm, a new book about the controversy over mercury in vaccines. “One way or another, this is all going to come out.â€
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
comments? | |
|
|
|
|
Mercury : Autism: the mercury trail
|
|
|
Posted by sylvia on Friday, September 30, 2005 (11:34:55)
NewsStatesman August 2005
By Margaret Cook
Powerful evidence points to a preservative in vaccines as the likely culprit.
The classic juvenile tactic to get out of a scrape is to deny it vehemently, even if that means claiming black is white. Curiously, governments adopt the same technique, reinforcing their indignant denials with name-calling.
This has been the response from both US and British establishments to parental fears that autism is causally related to vaccines. Andrew Wakefield was sent packing after he suggested MMR vaccines were suspect. His failure to declare an interest in connection with his research was used to destroy his career, even though his lapse pales into insignificance beside the conflicting incentives present in the entire chain of vaccine-policy command from Cabinet Office to consulting room.
But it is more difficult to bully away the question of mercury in vaccines and its putative link with autism. A book published in the US this year, Evidence of Harm by David Kirby, makes a compel-ling case. Any unbiased doctor who reads it, following the golden rules of listening to the parents' stories and assessing the evidence the book quotes, cannot fail to be persuaded.
Yet the response in the British Medical Journal, in a review by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, is to rubbish it in a hectoring tirade, the theme of which is that parents are not reliable witnesses and the experts know best. How dare the parents side with "credulous journalists" and defy the "authoritative US Institute of Medicine"?
Since 1939 a preservative called thiomersal (thimerosal in the US) has been used in some vaccines, and it contains nearly 50 per cent mercury. Mercury is a nerve-cell poison, but the amounts in vaccines were said to be "traces" only. It was used in, among others, the diphtheria/tetanus/ pertussis vaccine given in three doses early in infancy. It is not present in MMR or other vaccines containing live viruses. In the US, pre-school vaccinations are compulsory and, under this blanket, jabs upon jabs were added to make a worryingly crowded programme.
It was nearly a decade before the Food and Drug Administration added up the mercury being injected into infants in the first few months of life, and then it found that it was well in excess of federal legal limits even for adults. In 1999 regulators in the US and Europe advised phasing out mercury in childhood vaccines in the shortest possible time - while continuing to deny it was harmful. Believe that if you will.
Autism and related disorders were un-known before 1939. The exponential in-crease in recent years seems to parallel the rising number of mercury-containing vaccines given at an ever earlier age. The infant blood-brain barrier is not developed until six months of age, and it is to be expected that even minuscule amounts of this cumulative toxin can do harm. A causal association between the metal and autistic disorders is wholly biologically plausible. Epidemiological studies have come up with conflicting results, depending on the mindset of the researcher.
There is evidence that autistic children have a (probably genetic) problem in excreting mercury. It now seems likely that these predisposed children, burdened and immuno-suppressed with toxic metal, then given a dose of MMR live vaccine, suffered a triple whammy causing full-blown autism. The history obtained from parents of children with autism is consistent and should not be dismissed so contemptuously as the reviewer Fitzpatrick did. The story that a child progressed normally until an adverse reaction to a vaccine seemed to tip him or her into a slide into autism is heard again and again.
The extraordinary increase in autism among children - one child in 166 now suffers from an autism spectrum disor- der - cannot be explained away by better recognition and diagnosis, as claimed by psychiatrists. If it were so, where are all the adults with covert autism?
So worried was the US government about the mercury question that a rider barring thiomersal litigation was tacked on at the 11th hour to the (unconnected) Homeland Security Bill 2002 - a sign of the US health, federal and industrial establishments ganging up to evade a mercury fallout.
Mercury was removed from UK infant vaccines in 2004. Parents of autistic children in the UK struggle to engage the support of public services, and many find that physical symptoms are ignored. Autism is compartmentalised as a mental illness and doctors tend to leave it to psychiatrists. Gastro-intestinal aspects of autism were Wakefield's speciality, and look what happened to him.
Yet this disease needs to be wrested back into mainstream medicine and that will happen only when the establishment seriously addresses the theory of mercury as a contributory cause.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
comments? | |
|
|
|
|
Mercury : Two Sides: Wrangle over autism refuses to subside
|
|
|
Posted by sylvia on Saturday, August 06, 2005 (13:17:20)
JournalNow.com 26/06/05
Wesley Sykes is in a rage. Dinner was late. His cup held water, not soda. Strangers had stolen his mother's attention all afternoon. It was too much for the 9-year-old autistic child to bear. He began to flap his arms and shriek, working himself into murderous screams that shatter his suburban home and all hope of a normal life.
His mother, the Rev. Lisa Sykes, has her own rage against the demon she blames for Wesley's condition. It is thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that she received in a shot during pregnancy and he received in childhood vaccines.
To Sykes, a pastor in Richmond, Va., this is a just crusade. To most scientists, it's a leap of faith. The levels of mercury in vaccines - now and in the past - do not cause autism, they repeatedly have declared.
But not everyone is convinced. Seven years after it began, the debate over vaccines and autism just won't die.
In fact, it appears to be finding new life. Several churches have started a grass-roots movement to rid vaccines of mercury. A new book on the issue is getting attention. A Kennedy has entered the fray.
"I think this issue has persisted despite a boatload of scientific evidence ... because there are no answers for parents of children with autism," said Dr. Sharon Humiston, a pediatrician at the University of Rochester who has a foot in both worlds. She once worked for the government's National Immunization Program, and she has a son whose autism she refuses to blame on vaccines.
Medical controversies flourish when science is lacking. In this case, both sides have limited science, and each criticizes the other's.
Vested interests make it tough to know whom to believe. Many parents have filed lawsuits. Many scientists have ties to vaccine-makers or are selling their expertise in court cases. Government officials don't want people to turn away from vaccines, which have clearly benefited public health.
Both sides also have credibility problems. Opponents at first accused the measles vaccine, which never contained the preservative, of causing autism. The government defended a troubled pertussis vaccine for more than 10 years before switching to a safer version.
"There's conflict on all sides," said David Kirby, the author of Evidence of Harm, a book urging more research.
There are two main questions:
• Did older vaccines, which contained more thimerosal than the trace amounts in modern ones, raise the risk of autism?
• Are there risks today? Flu vaccine sold in multidose vials still contains thimerosal, 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, is often 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 such compulsive behaviors as head-banging.
Parents blame vaccines, but "that doesn't make it true, no matter how strongly they believe it," said Dr. Steve Goodman, a biostatistician at Johns Hopkins University who served on an Institute of Medicine panel convened last year to take an independent look at the evidence, which it found unconvincing.
Beliefs and evidence are things that Sykes, the pastor of Richmond's Christ United Methodist Church, understands. A soft-spoken woman, she does not come off as a radical. She has a degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. The daughter of two CIA employees, she was brought up to trust the government.
"I dare them to call me hysterical," she said. "I'm the last one who should be screaming conspiracy."
Her son was a normal, active baby. A photo shows Wesley clutching an Elmo doll, his blue eyes shining and aware. But in a later photo, taken after autism had set in, Wesley stares vacantly next to his smiling brother.
Through a local autism group, Sykes heard that a doctor was advising cod-liver oil as a treatment. She gave it to Wesley for three days, then tried an experiment on her son, who had stopped responding even to screams. "Wesley," she said. He looked up at her.
Sykes was sold. She tracked down the doctor, Mary Megson, who did a test on Wesley that showed a level of mercury that flowed off the chart.
"That was my baptism into this issue," Sykes said. During pregnancy, she had been given a shot to prevent problems because she and her baby had a mismatched blood factor. Now, she learned that the drug contained thimerosal, which is half mercury. The additive was also in most childhood vaccines and had been used since the 1930s to prevent bacterial contamination, especially in multidose vials.
By November 1997, Congress was getting complaints. It ordered the Food and Drug Administration to review mercury in vaccines, drugs and food. The government and a doctors' group said that there was no evidence of harm but that vaccine-makers should move toward eliminating thimerosal to be safe. It wasn't until 1999 that vaccines with only trace amounts of thimerosal started to be introduced. By then, parents had organized. Barbara Loe Fisher, a Virginia mom who is the president of the National Vaccine Information Center, which had successfully campaigned for the safer pertussis vaccine, was disturbed that federal officials didn't order thimerosal removed.
She believes a theory, supported by many, that a subset of kids can't handle mercury because of a genetic or other kind of predisposition. Some scientists say that it might be something else in the vaccines, such as aluminum, or a hyper-reaction to the vaccine itself. There's a 3 percent to 8 percent recurrence rate of autism in families, and the disorder is four times more common in boys - more suggestion of a genetic link.
The experiences of a suburban Kansas City family suggest such a link. The afternoon after Kelly Kerns' 2-month-old daughter, Kaylee, got several vaccines was "living hell," her mother said. The child screamed and arched her back.
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 found to be autistic.
In June 2000, government officials, scientists and vaccine-makers held an invitation-only meeting at a Georgia retreat to review safety data that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had from several large HMOs.
The CDC's Dr. Tom Verstraeten presented results of a crude analysis suggesting that mercury might be linked to some problems such as language delays. As for autism, "we don't see much of a trend except for a slight, but not significant, increase for the highest exposure," he said, according to a transcript that vaccine opponents have posted on the Internet.
Fights over limits to damages that families could ask for in lawsuits followed. They drew the attention of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer and environmentalist.
Kennedy, who has promoted the issue on news shows, said that when he looked at the government's evidence, it was "laughably flawed."
"It was clear to me that the reports they're relying on are 'cigarette science,'" he said, referring to tobacco companies' past arguments that there was no proof that cigarettes caused cancer.
Meanwhile at Sykes' home, the day that melted down with her son's screams was turning into night. Wesley has drifted off to sleep. The phone's incessant ringing stops. Sykes' husband, Seth, returns home from work.
Later, Wesley wakes up and finishes his dinner. He cuddles with his dad in the recliner and watches TV before going to bed.
There will be more tantrums, more battles, more tears for the Sykes family.
But for a rare moment, everything seems normal. There is just sweet, blessed peace.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
comments? | |
|
|
|
|
Mercury : Deadly Immunity: Mercury, Autism, Children Vaccines & the Govt Cover-Up
|
|
|
Posted by sylvia on Saturday, August 06, 2005 (11:29:55)
BellaCiao.org 17/06/05
By Robert F Kennedy Jr
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.
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.
NOTE: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper and president of Waterkeeper Alliance. He is also the co-author of "The Riverkeepers."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
comments? | |
|
|
|
|
|
Latest: 
New Today: 0
New Yesterday: 0
Overall: 7437
Members: 0
Visitors: 9
Total: 9
1: