Vaccines Debate
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dogman6126
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[MENTION=1871]muir[/MENTION] you are getting seriously ridiculous. All your doing is throwing out videos and articles. Do you even understand what they are saying? If you do, then instead of video spamming, why don't you try to explain in your own words how these vaccines are toxic. Otherwise your just spamming, and I'll be done debating this with you. I could video spam too, but I am offering you the professional courtesy to speak in my own words. Why don't you do the same.
cvp12gh5
What a lovely way to burn...
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I'm trying to figure out how I even got involved in this mess. By posting something you disagree with? Stop linking me.
dogman6126
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Ok [MENTION=1871]muir[/MENTION]. Now no one is talking with you in this thread. You literally spammed your debaters away. congratulations.
Erlian
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I just want to express my admiration for those fighting against muir.
He and others against vaccines are hurting public health.
Edit: Or maybe muir is actually on our side, but employing this tactic:
"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
He and others against vaccines are hurting public health.
Edit: Or maybe muir is actually on our side, but employing this tactic:
"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
muir
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These are all scientists and doctors telling you the truth...don't be afraid of the truth just because it contrasts with what the government and their paid servile wormlike minion dissinfo agents tell you because if you haven't figured this out by now....the government lie.....ALL THE TIME
So take adult responsibility, think for yourself and listen to info outside the government propaganda it might just save your life or the life of a loved one
Also be wary of any people who try to smother the truth...you have to question their motivations when faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary
So take adult responsibility, think for yourself and listen to info outside the government propaganda it might just save your life or the life of a loved one
Also be wary of any people who try to smother the truth...you have to question their motivations when faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary
dogman6126
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muir
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These are all insiders folks giving you the facts and the facts are that the government (the state through its regulators like the FDA and bodies like the CDC), the big pharmaceutical companies and even health care workers like doctors and research scientists are part of a multi-billion dollar industry that profits from selling harmful products to the public
To do this they of course need to invest large amounts of money on missleading the public through various advert campaigns and missinfo websites as well as bribing doctors
Their business model does not revolve around curing people as that would destroy their market; what they seek to do is damage peoples immune systems and create a range of chronic health conditions which will range from minor things like allergies to more serious conditions like brain damage
Once they have a person chronically (long term) sick that person then become a customer for big pharma for life as they then become dependent on new drugs to treat the symptoms of the problem that big pharma created in the first place
Its very sick indeed but it's all being revealed by whistleblowers and you can be sure there will be more revelations to come and they will be documented right here on this thread to help folks make good decisions over their health
I know what an agonising decision it can be over whether to vaccinate or not and i would not be posting this info if i was not convinced of the dangers involved with vaccines
So how does big pharma corrupt the government?
Well money is one aspect...lots of it. The big pharma lobby group spends more than any other
[video=youtube;eHuFW1YzFRY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHuFW1YzFRY[/video]
To do this they of course need to invest large amounts of money on missleading the public through various advert campaigns and missinfo websites as well as bribing doctors
Their business model does not revolve around curing people as that would destroy their market; what they seek to do is damage peoples immune systems and create a range of chronic health conditions which will range from minor things like allergies to more serious conditions like brain damage
Once they have a person chronically (long term) sick that person then become a customer for big pharma for life as they then become dependent on new drugs to treat the symptoms of the problem that big pharma created in the first place
Its very sick indeed but it's all being revealed by whistleblowers and you can be sure there will be more revelations to come and they will be documented right here on this thread to help folks make good decisions over their health
I know what an agonising decision it can be over whether to vaccinate or not and i would not be posting this info if i was not convinced of the dangers involved with vaccines
So how does big pharma corrupt the government?
Well money is one aspect...lots of it. The big pharma lobby group spends more than any other
[video=youtube;eHuFW1YzFRY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHuFW1YzFRY[/video]
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muir
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http://www.aapsonline.org/vaccines/cdcfdaexperts.htm
[h=3]Selected vaccine authorities from CDC, FDA, and manufacturers discuss, in a closed meeting, the possibility of neurodevelopment disorders resulting from vaccine components.[/h] Emphasis and comments in square brackets added by K.P. Stoller, M.D.
[The CDC published a study in late 2003, repudiating any possible link between thimerosal and developmental problems such as autism, but the CDC did have data supporting such a link which it secretively kept from the public.
Documents released through the Freedom of Information Act detail the transcript of a meeting held in June of 2000 between members of the CDC, the FDA, and representatives from the vaccine industry.
This top secret meeting was held to discuss a study done by Dr. Thomas Verstraeten and his co-workers using Vaccine Safety Datalink data as a project collaboration between the CDC's National Immunization Program (NIP) and four HMOs. The study examined the records of 110,000 children.
The transcript is titled “Scientific Review of Vaccine Safety Datalink Information,” June 7-8, 2000, Simpsonwood Retreat Center, Norcross, Georgia, but it was also the first official meeting of the ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices which sets CDC policy) work group on thimerosal and immunization. In attendance were Walter Orenstein, Director of the National Immunization Program (NIP) at the CDC; John Modlin, Chair of the ACIP and on the faculty at Dartmouth Medical School; and 50 other distinguished members of the government (11 consultants from the CDC), academia and the pharmaceutical industry. Vaccine industry representatives were: Harry Guess, M.D., Merck, Chief of Epidemiology; Jo White, M.D., North American Vaccine, Clinical Dev. & Research; Barbara Howe, M.D., Smith, Kline-Beecham, Clinical Research Group; Mike Blum, M.D., Wyeth, Safety and Surveillance for Vaccine Development.
Although this conference is apparently concerned with the effects of mercury in the form of thimerosal on infant brain development, participants seemed to have limited knowledge about mercury. None of the well known experts were invited, such as Dr. Ascher from Bowman Grey School of Medicine or Dr. Boyd Haley, who has done extensive work on the toxic effects of low concentrations on the CNS.
The conference followed a study that showed that mercury in vaccines may have caused neurodevelopment problems.
The following are in context excerpts of this 260 page transcript:]
Dr. Orenstein pg 1-2 “(For) those who don’t know, initial concerns were raised last summer that mercury, as methylmercury (thimerosal) in vaccines, might exceed safe levels. As a result of these concerns, CDC undertook, in collaboration with investigators in the Vaccine safety Datalink, an effort to evaluate whether there were any health risks from mercury on any of these vaccines. Analysis to date raise some concerns of possible dose-response effect of increasing levels of mehylmercury in vaccines and certain neurologic diagnosis. Therefore, the purpose of this meeting is to have a careful scientific review of the data.”
Dr. Bernier pg 8 : (Associate Director for Science in the NIP) “There was a Congressional Action in 1997 requiring the FDA to review Mercury in drugs and biologics…in October of 1999 the ACIP looked this situation over again and… said the vaccines could be continued to be used.”
Dr. Johnston, pg. 14-15 & 19-20: (Chair of the meeting and a pediatrician-immunologist at the University of Colorado): “Thimerosal is cleaved (in the body) into ethylmercury and thiosalicylate which is inactive… The data on its toxicity (shows) it can cause neurologic and renal toxicity, including death.”
“It is particularly a concern in multi-dose vials because of the issue of re-entry multiple times in the vials, and it is also important in the manufacturing process for a number of vaccine including inactivated influenza and some of the earlier DPT vaccine, and is a constituent of all DPT vaccines, but not all DTAP vaccines.”
“There are three licensed preservative in the United States, Thimerosal, ethyl and phenol. We won't talk about the other two today, but I thought I should mention them. Thimerosal is the most active and it has been utilized in vaccines since the 1930's.”
“Acutely, it can cause neurologic and renal toxicity, including death, from overdose…”
“Dr. Halsey made a very impassioned plea that we do carefully controlled studies to in fact address the issues specifically, and that such studies be conducted by neurodevelopmentalists and environmental scientists employing specific endpoints of their study…”
“We just recently had another meeting that some of you were able to attend dealing with aluminum in vaccines. I would like to just say one or two words about that before I conclude.”
“We learned at that meeting a number of important things about aluminum, and I think they also are important in our considerations today. “Aluminum salts are important in the formulating process of vaccines, both in antigen stabilization and absorption of endotoxin.”
“Aluminum and mercury are often simultaneously administered to infants, both at the same site and at different sites.”
“However, we also learned that there is absolutely no data, including animal data, about the potential for synergy, additively or antagonism, all of which can occur in binary metal mixtures that relate and allow us to draw any conclusions from the simultaneous exposure to these two salts in vaccines…”
Dr. Weil, pg. 24: “I think it’s clear to me anyway that we are talking about a problem that is probably more related to bolus acute exposures, and we also need to know that the migration problems and some of the other developmental problems in the central nervous system go on for quite a period after birth. But from all of the other studies of toxic substances, the earlier you work with the central nervous system, the more likely you are to run into a sensitive period for one of these effects, so that moving from one month or one day of birth to six months of birth changes enormously the potential for toxicity. There are just a host of neurodevelopmental data that would suggest that we’ve got a serious problem. The earlier we go, the more serious the problem.”
“The second point I could make is that in relationship to aluminum, being a nephrologist for a long time, the potential for aluminum and central nervous system toxicity was established by dialysis data. To think there isn’t some possible problem here is unreal.”
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 31: “It is sort of interesting that when I first came to the CDC as a NIS officer a year ago only, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but one of the things I knew I didn’t want to do was studies that had to do with toxicology or environmental health. Now it turns out that other people also thought that this study was not the right thing to do, so what I will present to you is the study that nobody thought we should do.”
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 40: “…we have found statistically significant relationships between the exposure and outcomes for these different exposures and outcomes. First, for two months of age, an unspecified developmental delay, which has its own specific ICD9 code. Exposure at three months of age, Tics. Exposure at six months of age, an attention deficit disorder. Exposure at one, three and six months of age, language and speech delays which are two separate ICD9 codes. Exposures at one, three and six months of age, the entire category of neurodevelopmental delays, which includes all of these plus a number of other disorders.”
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 42: “But for one thing that is for sure, there is certainly an under-ascertainment of all of these because some of the children are just not old enough to be diagnosed. So the crude incidence rates are probably much lower that what you would expect because the cohort is still very young.”
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 44: “Now for speech delays, which is the largest single disorder in this category of neurologic delays. The results are a suggestion of a trend with a small dip. The overall test for trend is highly statistically significant above one.”
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 45: "What this represents is the overall category of developmental delays, of which I have excluded speech delays because of the impression we had was some of the calculations were driven by this speech group, which was making up about half of this category. After excluding this speech group, the trend is also apparent in this group and the test for trend is also significant for this category excluding speech.”
Dr. Weil, pg. 75: “I think that what you are saying is in term of chronic exposure. I think that the alternative scenario is that this repeated acute exposures, and like many repeated acute exposures, if you consider a dose of 25 micrograms on one day, then you are above threshold. At least we think you are, and then you do that over and over to a series of neurons where the toxic effect may be the same set of neurons or the same set of neurologic processes; it is conceivable that the more mercury you get, the more effect you are going to get.”
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 76: “What I have done here, I am putting into the model instead of mercury, a number of antigens that the children received, and what do we get? Not surprisingly, we get very similar estimates as what we got for Thimerosal because every vaccine put in the equation has Thimerosal. So for speech and the other ones maybe it’s not so significant, but for the overall group it is also significant….Here we have the same thing, but instead of number of antigens, number of shots. Just the number of vaccinations given to a child, which is also for nearly all of them significantly related.”
Dr. Guess, pg. 77: "So this essentially is a 7% risk per antigen, an antigen is like in DPT you've got three antigens."
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 77: "Correct."
Dr. Egan, pg. 77: "Could you do this calculation for aluminum?"
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 77: "I did it for aluminum…Actually the results were almost identical to ethylmercury because the amount of aluminum goes along almost exactly with the mercury one."
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 78-79: "Then the last slide I wanted to show, there was a question of it there was any way from this data that we could estimate what would happen in the future if there is Thimerosal-free Hep B and Thimerosal-free haemophilus influenza vaccine and only DTP has Thimerosal"
"The second column would be the same scenario but now at six months. Assuming they have received two additional DPTs, so between three and six months of age they have increased their ethylmercury amounts by 50 micrograms. If I do in this current cohort with all its limitations, because there is also the Hep B that exists in the cohort*, I can't really take it out. It is significant for this one disorder which is language delay and is a combination of these two disorders, also becomes significant."
* Dr. Verstraeten could not determine which children got Hep B at birth in some cases so it was difficult to back the birth dose of Hep B out of the data.
Dr. Bernier, pg. 113: "We have asked you to keep this information confidential. We do have a plan for discussing these data at the upcoming meeting of the Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices on June 21 and June 22. At that time CDC plans to make a public release of this information*, so I think it would serve all of our interests best if we could continue to consider these data. The ACIP work group will be considering also. If we could consider these data in a certain protected environment. So we are asking people who have a great job protecting this information up until now, to continue to do that until the time of the ACIP meeting. So to basically consider this embargoed information. That would help all of us to use the machinery that we have in place for considering these data and for arriving at policy recommendations."
[*This never happened. SafeMind.org obtained this transcript via the Freedom of Information Act. Data published later were diluted into insignificance by including additional data from an HMO that had very uncharacteristic results.]
Dr. Keller, pgs. 116 & 118: "…we know the developing neurologic system is more sensitive than one that is fully developed…"
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 142: "But if I can have the next slide, here instead of the proportional hazard model, we did a logistic regression model. I didn't use person time here and it's a bit tough to define exactly the control group. However, if I do it for all ages and not looking at different years, and this is for speech, the outcome is almost identical to the proportional hazard model, which suggests to me that it is not a question of bringing the diagnosis forward, but it is really the overall number that drives this estimate."
Dr. Rapin, pg. 143: "I would like to make a comment. We have been focusing on all these acquired causes including mercury and prematurity, and you had a list of confounding variables that should be considered in future studies. What we know today about all of the developmental disorders is that environmental factors are in fact rather unimportant in the case of these deficits and the major cause is genetic…I find it a little difficult knowing this and putting in autism. The major cause is not environmental, it is genetic and that we are focusing just on these environment events or adventitious events when we haven't considered, and you told us that you don't have data for example on siblings, your study does not lend itself to considering the major variable."
Dr. Johnson, pg 144: "Well, I think the assumption is that those genetic predispositions would be randomly distributed."
Dr. Rapin, pg. 144: "But you don't know that."
Dr. Johnson, pg. 144: "No, that's an interesting assumption."
Dr. Rapin, pg. 144: "I understand that, but you don't know that."
Dr. Johnson, pg. 144: "just on principle, Dr. Rapin, it seems to me that the more we learn about genetics or the more we learn about let's say autism, the more we shift towards focusing on genetic causes, but would you rule out the possibility, and let's move away from autism, that some of these are genetic predisposition and then the second hit?"
Dr. Rapin, pg. 144: "Not at all. I think that it is in fact an attractive hypothesis."
Dr. Johnson, pg. 145: "Right, thank you."
Dr. Chen, pg. 151: "One of the reasons that led me personally to not be so quick to dismiss the findings was that on his own Tom independently picked three different outcomes that he did not think could be associated with mercury and three out of three had a different pattern across different exposure levels as compared to the ones that again on a priority basis we picked as biologically plausible to be due to mercury exposure."
Dr. Brent, pg. 161: "Wasn't it true that if you looked at the population that had 25 micrograms you had a certain risk and when you got to 75 micrograms you had a higher risk."
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 161: "Yes, absolutely, but these are all at the same time. Measured at the same age at least."
Dr. Brent, pg. 161: I understand that, but they are different exposures."
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 161: "Yes."
Dr. Brent, pg. 161: "What is your explanation? What explanations would you give for that?"
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 161: "Personally, I have three hypotheses. My first hypothesis is it is parental bias. The children that are more likely to be vaccinated are more likely to be picked and diagnosed. Second hypothesis, I don't know. There is a bias that I have not recognized, and nobody has yet told me about it. Third hypothesis. It's true, it's Thimerosal. Those are my hypotheses."
Dr. Brent, pg. 161: "If it's true, which or what mechanisms would you explain the finding with?"
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 162: "You are asking for biological plausibility?"
Dr. Brent, pg. 162: "Well, yes."
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 162: "When I saw this, and I went back through the literature, I was actually stunned by what I saw because I thought it is plausible. First of all there is the Faeroe study, which I think people have dismissed too easily, and there is a new article in the same Journal that was presented here, the Journal of Pediatrics, where they have looked at PCB. They have looked at other contaminants in seafood and they have adjusted for that, and still mercury comes out. That is one point. Another point is that in many of the studies with animals, it turned out that there is quite a different result depending on the dose of mercury. Depending on the route of exposure and depending on the age at which the animals, it turned out that there is quite a different result depending on the dose of mercury. Depending on the route of exposure and depending on the age at which the animals were exposed. Now, I don't know how much you can extrapolate that from animals to humans, but that tells me mercury at one month of age is not the same as mercury at three months, at 12 months, prenatal mercury, later mercury. There is a whole range of plausible outcomes from mercury. On top of that, I think that we cannot so easily compare the U.S. population to Faeroe or Seychelles populations. We have different mean levels of exposure. We are comparing high to high in the Seychelles, high to high in the Faeroe and low to low in the U.S., so I am not sure how easily you can transpose one finding to another one. So basically to me that leaves all the options open, and that means I can not exclude such a possible effect."
Dr. Orenstein, pg. 184: "Well, the second issue is we don't know causality. We don't know about causality, but is this something that really warrants some urgent attention?"
Dr. Clover, pg. 187: "…no one around here is going to say that mercury per say is not a concern."
Dr. Weil, pg. 187 & 188: "Although the data presents a number of uncertainties, there is adequate consistency, biological plausibility, a lack of relationship with phenomenon not expected to be related, and a potential causal role that is as good as any other hypothesized etiology of explanation of the noted associations. In addition, the possibility that the associations could be causal has major significance for public and professional acceptance of Thimerosal containing vaccines. I think that is a critical issue. Finally, lack of further study would be horrendous grist for the anti-vaccination bill. That's why we need to go on, and urgently I would add.*
Dr. Brent, pg. 188-191: "I am impressed with the fact that some people here have information and believe that like the incidence of learning difficulties, behavior disorders and attention deficit is increasing in our population. I don't know whether it is or it isn't, but that kind of information you just can't throw around and say it's true or isn't true without data. And it is such an important area in our society. I mean it is the thing that makes a human being different from the other species, so it is such an important area of research…"
"…(thimerosal) Causing learning disabilities and behavioral disorders. ADD is a tremendous problem in our society and I think it is one that we should be very concerned about."
"Finally, the thing that concerns me the most, those who know me, I have been a pin stick in the litigation community because of the nonsense of our litigious society. This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country when this information becomes available. They want business and this could potentially be a lot of business."
Dr. Koller, pg. 192: "…As you increase the vaccination, you increase effects, but you don't know. You have modified live viruses. You have different antigens. There is a lot of things in those vaccinations other than mercury, and we don't know whether this is a vaccination effect or a mercury effect. But I am almost sure it is not a mercury effect. Positive as a matter of fact, and there are several experts particularly that have reviewed this, the methylmercury aspect who would agree with that due to dose response."
Dr. Johnson, pg. 193: "Are you really comfortable with the way the neurologic function was tested in the Seychelles?"
Dr. Koller, pg. 193: "I have to admit that there were many other tests that could have been conducted…We are talking about very subjective, very sensitive assays and yes, there could have been others done and there should be more done…"
Dr. Johnson, pg. 198: "This association leads me to favor a recommendation that infants up to two years old not be immunized with Thimerosal containing vaccines if suitable alternative preparations are available.”
“My gut feeling? It worries me enough. Forgive this personal comment, but I got called out at eight o'clock for an emergency call and my daughter-in-law delivered a son by C-section. Our first male in the line of the next generation, and I do not want that grandson to get a Thimerosal containing vaccine until we know better what is going on. It will probably take a long time. In the meantime, and I know there are probably implications for this internationally, but in the meantime I think I want that grandson to only be given Thimerosal-free vaccines."
Dr. Bernier, pg 198: "the negative findings need to be pinned down and published."
Dr. Weil, pg. 207: "The number of dose related relationships are linear and statistically significant. You can play with this all you want. They are linear. They are statistically significant. The positive relationships are those that one might expect from the Faroe Islands studies. They are also related to those data we do have on experimental animal data and similar to the neurodevelopmental tox data on other substances, so that I think you can't accept that this is out of the ordinary. It isn't out of the ordinary."
Dr. Weil, pg. 208: "The rise in the frequency of neurobehavioral disorders whether it is ascertainment or real, is not too bad. It is much too graphic. We don't see that kind of genetic change in 30 years."
Dr. Brent, pg. 229: "The medical/legal findings in this study, causal or not, are horrendous and therefore, it is important that the suggested epidemiological, pharmacokinetic, and animal studies be performed. If an allegation was made that a child's neurobehavioral findings were caused by Thimerosal containing vaccines, you could readily find junk scientist who would support the claim with "a reasonable degree of certainty". But you will not find a scientist with any integrity who would say the reverse with the data that is available. And that is true. So we are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits if they were initiated and I am concerned."
Dr. Meyers, pg. 231: "Can I go back to the core issue about the research? My own concern, and a couple of you said it, there is an association between vaccines and outcome that worries both parents and pediatricians. We don’t really know what that outcome is, but it is one that worries us and there is an association with vaccines. We keep jumping back to Thimerosal, but a number of us are concerned that Thimerosal may be less likely than some of the potential associations that have been made. Some of the potential associations are number of injections, number of antigens, other additives. We mentioned aluminum and I mentioned yesterday aluminum and mercury. Antipyretics and analgesics are better utilized when vaccines are given. And then every body mentioned all of the ones that we can't think about in this quick time period that are a part of this association, and yet all of the questions I hear we are asking have to do with Thimerosal. My concern is we need to ask the questions about the other potential associations, because we are going to the Thimerosal-free vaccine. I f many of us don't think that this is a plausible association because of the levels and so on, then we are missing looking for the association that may be the important one."
Dr. Caserta, pg. 234: "One of the things I learned at the Aluminum Conference in Puerto Rico that was tied into the metal lines in biology and medicine that I never really understood before, is the interactive effect of different metals when they are together in the same organism. It is not the same as when they are alone, and I think it would be foolish for us not to include aluminum as part of our thinking with this."
Dr. Clements, pg 247- 249: "I am really concerned that we have taken off like a boat going down one arm of the mangrove swamp at high speed, when in fact there was not enough discussion really early on about which was the boat should go at all. And I really want to risk offending everyone in the room by saying that perhaps this study should not have been done at all, because the outcome of it could have, to some extent, been predicted, and we have all reached this point now where we are left hanging, even though I hear the majority of consultants say to the Board that they are not convinced there is a causality direct link between Thimerosal and various neurological outcomes."
“I know how we handle it from here is extremely problematic. The ACIP is going to depend on comments from this group in order to move forward into policy, and I have been advised that whatever I say should not move into the policy area because that is not the point of this meeting. But nonetheless, we know from many experiences in history that the pure scientist has done research because of pure science. But that pure science has resulted in splitting the atom or some other process which is completely beyond the power of the scientists who did the research to control it. And what we have here is people who have, for every best reason in the world, pursued a direction of research. But there is not the point at which the research results have to be handled, and even if this committee decides that there is no association and that information gets out, the work that has been done and through the freedom of information that will be taken by others and will be used in ways beyond the control of this group. And I am very concerned about that as I suspect it already too late to do anything regardless of any professional body and what they say."
"My mandate as I sit here in this group is to make sure at the end of the day the 100,000,000 are immunized with DTP, Hepatitis B and if possible Hib, this year, next year and for many years to come, and that will have to be with Thimerosal containing vaccines unless a miracle occurs and an alternative is found quickly and is tried and found to be safe."
"So I leave you with the challenge that I am very concerned that this has gotten this far, and that having got this far, how you present in a concerted voice the information to the ACIP in a way they will be able to handle it and not get exposed to the traps which are out there in public relations. My message would be that any other study, and I like the study that has just been described here very much. I think it makes a lot of sense, but it has to be thought through. What are the potential outcomes and how will you handle it? How will it be presented to a public and media that is hungry for selecting the information they want to use for whatever means they in store for them?"
"…but I wonder how on earth you are going to handle it from here."
Dr. Bernier, pg. 256: "…As difficult as science is, there are two other equally tricky, complex challenges. The policy crafting has to take into consideration some very diverse and complex issues. There is another group that will deal with that, and then we have the communication and how we handle this, which I think I am no expert at, but seems equally daunting to me as the scientific and the policy issue."
"I don’t think we can set a rule here because some people have gotten these documents. For example, some of the manufacturers were privileged to receive this information. It has been important for them to share it within the company with the experts there, so they can review it. Some of you may have questions. You may have given a copy, but I think if we will all just consider this embargoed information, if I can use that term, and very highly protected information, I think that was the best I can offer.
Excerpts from:
Bob Chen, M.D., CDC’s chief of Vaccine Safety and Development, National Immunization Program
Tom Clarkson, M.D., University of Rochester, New York, Mercury program
John Clements, World Health Organization (WHO) representing expanded program on immunization
Bob Davis, M.D., University of Washington, associate professor of pediatrics and epidemiology
Bill Egan, Ph.D., FDA’s Center for Biologics, Evaluation & Research
David Johnson, M.D., Michigan state public health officer, Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)
Dick Johnston, M.D., University of Colorado School of Medicine and National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine, immunologist and pediatrician
Loren Koller, D.V.M., Oregon State University College of Veterinary Medicine, pathologist, immunotoxicologist
Martin Meyers, M.D., CDC’s acting director, National Immunization Program
Walter Orenstein, M.D. CDC’s director, National Immunization Program
Isabelle Rapin, M.D., Albert Einstein College of Medicine, neurologist for children
Tom Verstraeten, M.D., CDC’s National Immunization Program presently employed by Glaxo-Welcome, vaccine company
Bill Weil, M.D., retired pediatrician, representing American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP)
[h=3]Selected vaccine authorities from CDC, FDA, and manufacturers discuss, in a closed meeting, the possibility of neurodevelopment disorders resulting from vaccine components.[/h] Emphasis and comments in square brackets added by K.P. Stoller, M.D.
[The CDC published a study in late 2003, repudiating any possible link between thimerosal and developmental problems such as autism, but the CDC did have data supporting such a link which it secretively kept from the public.
Documents released through the Freedom of Information Act detail the transcript of a meeting held in June of 2000 between members of the CDC, the FDA, and representatives from the vaccine industry.
This top secret meeting was held to discuss a study done by Dr. Thomas Verstraeten and his co-workers using Vaccine Safety Datalink data as a project collaboration between the CDC's National Immunization Program (NIP) and four HMOs. The study examined the records of 110,000 children.
The transcript is titled “Scientific Review of Vaccine Safety Datalink Information,” June 7-8, 2000, Simpsonwood Retreat Center, Norcross, Georgia, but it was also the first official meeting of the ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices which sets CDC policy) work group on thimerosal and immunization. In attendance were Walter Orenstein, Director of the National Immunization Program (NIP) at the CDC; John Modlin, Chair of the ACIP and on the faculty at Dartmouth Medical School; and 50 other distinguished members of the government (11 consultants from the CDC), academia and the pharmaceutical industry. Vaccine industry representatives were: Harry Guess, M.D., Merck, Chief of Epidemiology; Jo White, M.D., North American Vaccine, Clinical Dev. & Research; Barbara Howe, M.D., Smith, Kline-Beecham, Clinical Research Group; Mike Blum, M.D., Wyeth, Safety and Surveillance for Vaccine Development.
Although this conference is apparently concerned with the effects of mercury in the form of thimerosal on infant brain development, participants seemed to have limited knowledge about mercury. None of the well known experts were invited, such as Dr. Ascher from Bowman Grey School of Medicine or Dr. Boyd Haley, who has done extensive work on the toxic effects of low concentrations on the CNS.
The conference followed a study that showed that mercury in vaccines may have caused neurodevelopment problems.
The following are in context excerpts of this 260 page transcript:]
Dr. Orenstein pg 1-2 “(For) those who don’t know, initial concerns were raised last summer that mercury, as methylmercury (thimerosal) in vaccines, might exceed safe levels. As a result of these concerns, CDC undertook, in collaboration with investigators in the Vaccine safety Datalink, an effort to evaluate whether there were any health risks from mercury on any of these vaccines. Analysis to date raise some concerns of possible dose-response effect of increasing levels of mehylmercury in vaccines and certain neurologic diagnosis. Therefore, the purpose of this meeting is to have a careful scientific review of the data.”
Dr. Bernier pg 8 : (Associate Director for Science in the NIP) “There was a Congressional Action in 1997 requiring the FDA to review Mercury in drugs and biologics…in October of 1999 the ACIP looked this situation over again and… said the vaccines could be continued to be used.”
Dr. Johnston, pg. 14-15 & 19-20: (Chair of the meeting and a pediatrician-immunologist at the University of Colorado): “Thimerosal is cleaved (in the body) into ethylmercury and thiosalicylate which is inactive… The data on its toxicity (shows) it can cause neurologic and renal toxicity, including death.”
“It is particularly a concern in multi-dose vials because of the issue of re-entry multiple times in the vials, and it is also important in the manufacturing process for a number of vaccine including inactivated influenza and some of the earlier DPT vaccine, and is a constituent of all DPT vaccines, but not all DTAP vaccines.”
“There are three licensed preservative in the United States, Thimerosal, ethyl and phenol. We won't talk about the other two today, but I thought I should mention them. Thimerosal is the most active and it has been utilized in vaccines since the 1930's.”
“Acutely, it can cause neurologic and renal toxicity, including death, from overdose…”
“Dr. Halsey made a very impassioned plea that we do carefully controlled studies to in fact address the issues specifically, and that such studies be conducted by neurodevelopmentalists and environmental scientists employing specific endpoints of their study…”
“We just recently had another meeting that some of you were able to attend dealing with aluminum in vaccines. I would like to just say one or two words about that before I conclude.”
“We learned at that meeting a number of important things about aluminum, and I think they also are important in our considerations today. “Aluminum salts are important in the formulating process of vaccines, both in antigen stabilization and absorption of endotoxin.”
“Aluminum and mercury are often simultaneously administered to infants, both at the same site and at different sites.”
“However, we also learned that there is absolutely no data, including animal data, about the potential for synergy, additively or antagonism, all of which can occur in binary metal mixtures that relate and allow us to draw any conclusions from the simultaneous exposure to these two salts in vaccines…”
Dr. Weil, pg. 24: “I think it’s clear to me anyway that we are talking about a problem that is probably more related to bolus acute exposures, and we also need to know that the migration problems and some of the other developmental problems in the central nervous system go on for quite a period after birth. But from all of the other studies of toxic substances, the earlier you work with the central nervous system, the more likely you are to run into a sensitive period for one of these effects, so that moving from one month or one day of birth to six months of birth changes enormously the potential for toxicity. There are just a host of neurodevelopmental data that would suggest that we’ve got a serious problem. The earlier we go, the more serious the problem.”
“The second point I could make is that in relationship to aluminum, being a nephrologist for a long time, the potential for aluminum and central nervous system toxicity was established by dialysis data. To think there isn’t some possible problem here is unreal.”
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 31: “It is sort of interesting that when I first came to the CDC as a NIS officer a year ago only, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but one of the things I knew I didn’t want to do was studies that had to do with toxicology or environmental health. Now it turns out that other people also thought that this study was not the right thing to do, so what I will present to you is the study that nobody thought we should do.”
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 40: “…we have found statistically significant relationships between the exposure and outcomes for these different exposures and outcomes. First, for two months of age, an unspecified developmental delay, which has its own specific ICD9 code. Exposure at three months of age, Tics. Exposure at six months of age, an attention deficit disorder. Exposure at one, three and six months of age, language and speech delays which are two separate ICD9 codes. Exposures at one, three and six months of age, the entire category of neurodevelopmental delays, which includes all of these plus a number of other disorders.”
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 42: “But for one thing that is for sure, there is certainly an under-ascertainment of all of these because some of the children are just not old enough to be diagnosed. So the crude incidence rates are probably much lower that what you would expect because the cohort is still very young.”
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 44: “Now for speech delays, which is the largest single disorder in this category of neurologic delays. The results are a suggestion of a trend with a small dip. The overall test for trend is highly statistically significant above one.”
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 45: "What this represents is the overall category of developmental delays, of which I have excluded speech delays because of the impression we had was some of the calculations were driven by this speech group, which was making up about half of this category. After excluding this speech group, the trend is also apparent in this group and the test for trend is also significant for this category excluding speech.”
Dr. Weil, pg. 75: “I think that what you are saying is in term of chronic exposure. I think that the alternative scenario is that this repeated acute exposures, and like many repeated acute exposures, if you consider a dose of 25 micrograms on one day, then you are above threshold. At least we think you are, and then you do that over and over to a series of neurons where the toxic effect may be the same set of neurons or the same set of neurologic processes; it is conceivable that the more mercury you get, the more effect you are going to get.”
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 76: “What I have done here, I am putting into the model instead of mercury, a number of antigens that the children received, and what do we get? Not surprisingly, we get very similar estimates as what we got for Thimerosal because every vaccine put in the equation has Thimerosal. So for speech and the other ones maybe it’s not so significant, but for the overall group it is also significant….Here we have the same thing, but instead of number of antigens, number of shots. Just the number of vaccinations given to a child, which is also for nearly all of them significantly related.”
Dr. Guess, pg. 77: "So this essentially is a 7% risk per antigen, an antigen is like in DPT you've got three antigens."
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 77: "Correct."
Dr. Egan, pg. 77: "Could you do this calculation for aluminum?"
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 77: "I did it for aluminum…Actually the results were almost identical to ethylmercury because the amount of aluminum goes along almost exactly with the mercury one."
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 78-79: "Then the last slide I wanted to show, there was a question of it there was any way from this data that we could estimate what would happen in the future if there is Thimerosal-free Hep B and Thimerosal-free haemophilus influenza vaccine and only DTP has Thimerosal"
"The second column would be the same scenario but now at six months. Assuming they have received two additional DPTs, so between three and six months of age they have increased their ethylmercury amounts by 50 micrograms. If I do in this current cohort with all its limitations, because there is also the Hep B that exists in the cohort*, I can't really take it out. It is significant for this one disorder which is language delay and is a combination of these two disorders, also becomes significant."
* Dr. Verstraeten could not determine which children got Hep B at birth in some cases so it was difficult to back the birth dose of Hep B out of the data.
Dr. Bernier, pg. 113: "We have asked you to keep this information confidential. We do have a plan for discussing these data at the upcoming meeting of the Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices on June 21 and June 22. At that time CDC plans to make a public release of this information*, so I think it would serve all of our interests best if we could continue to consider these data. The ACIP work group will be considering also. If we could consider these data in a certain protected environment. So we are asking people who have a great job protecting this information up until now, to continue to do that until the time of the ACIP meeting. So to basically consider this embargoed information. That would help all of us to use the machinery that we have in place for considering these data and for arriving at policy recommendations."
[*This never happened. SafeMind.org obtained this transcript via the Freedom of Information Act. Data published later were diluted into insignificance by including additional data from an HMO that had very uncharacteristic results.]
Dr. Keller, pgs. 116 & 118: "…we know the developing neurologic system is more sensitive than one that is fully developed…"
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 142: "But if I can have the next slide, here instead of the proportional hazard model, we did a logistic regression model. I didn't use person time here and it's a bit tough to define exactly the control group. However, if I do it for all ages and not looking at different years, and this is for speech, the outcome is almost identical to the proportional hazard model, which suggests to me that it is not a question of bringing the diagnosis forward, but it is really the overall number that drives this estimate."
Dr. Rapin, pg. 143: "I would like to make a comment. We have been focusing on all these acquired causes including mercury and prematurity, and you had a list of confounding variables that should be considered in future studies. What we know today about all of the developmental disorders is that environmental factors are in fact rather unimportant in the case of these deficits and the major cause is genetic…I find it a little difficult knowing this and putting in autism. The major cause is not environmental, it is genetic and that we are focusing just on these environment events or adventitious events when we haven't considered, and you told us that you don't have data for example on siblings, your study does not lend itself to considering the major variable."
Dr. Johnson, pg 144: "Well, I think the assumption is that those genetic predispositions would be randomly distributed."
Dr. Rapin, pg. 144: "But you don't know that."
Dr. Johnson, pg. 144: "No, that's an interesting assumption."
Dr. Rapin, pg. 144: "I understand that, but you don't know that."
Dr. Johnson, pg. 144: "just on principle, Dr. Rapin, it seems to me that the more we learn about genetics or the more we learn about let's say autism, the more we shift towards focusing on genetic causes, but would you rule out the possibility, and let's move away from autism, that some of these are genetic predisposition and then the second hit?"
Dr. Rapin, pg. 144: "Not at all. I think that it is in fact an attractive hypothesis."
Dr. Johnson, pg. 145: "Right, thank you."
Dr. Chen, pg. 151: "One of the reasons that led me personally to not be so quick to dismiss the findings was that on his own Tom independently picked three different outcomes that he did not think could be associated with mercury and three out of three had a different pattern across different exposure levels as compared to the ones that again on a priority basis we picked as biologically plausible to be due to mercury exposure."
Dr. Brent, pg. 161: "Wasn't it true that if you looked at the population that had 25 micrograms you had a certain risk and when you got to 75 micrograms you had a higher risk."
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 161: "Yes, absolutely, but these are all at the same time. Measured at the same age at least."
Dr. Brent, pg. 161: I understand that, but they are different exposures."
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 161: "Yes."
Dr. Brent, pg. 161: "What is your explanation? What explanations would you give for that?"
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 161: "Personally, I have three hypotheses. My first hypothesis is it is parental bias. The children that are more likely to be vaccinated are more likely to be picked and diagnosed. Second hypothesis, I don't know. There is a bias that I have not recognized, and nobody has yet told me about it. Third hypothesis. It's true, it's Thimerosal. Those are my hypotheses."
Dr. Brent, pg. 161: "If it's true, which or what mechanisms would you explain the finding with?"
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 162: "You are asking for biological plausibility?"
Dr. Brent, pg. 162: "Well, yes."
Dr. Verstraeten, pg. 162: "When I saw this, and I went back through the literature, I was actually stunned by what I saw because I thought it is plausible. First of all there is the Faeroe study, which I think people have dismissed too easily, and there is a new article in the same Journal that was presented here, the Journal of Pediatrics, where they have looked at PCB. They have looked at other contaminants in seafood and they have adjusted for that, and still mercury comes out. That is one point. Another point is that in many of the studies with animals, it turned out that there is quite a different result depending on the dose of mercury. Depending on the route of exposure and depending on the age at which the animals, it turned out that there is quite a different result depending on the dose of mercury. Depending on the route of exposure and depending on the age at which the animals were exposed. Now, I don't know how much you can extrapolate that from animals to humans, but that tells me mercury at one month of age is not the same as mercury at three months, at 12 months, prenatal mercury, later mercury. There is a whole range of plausible outcomes from mercury. On top of that, I think that we cannot so easily compare the U.S. population to Faeroe or Seychelles populations. We have different mean levels of exposure. We are comparing high to high in the Seychelles, high to high in the Faeroe and low to low in the U.S., so I am not sure how easily you can transpose one finding to another one. So basically to me that leaves all the options open, and that means I can not exclude such a possible effect."
Dr. Orenstein, pg. 184: "Well, the second issue is we don't know causality. We don't know about causality, but is this something that really warrants some urgent attention?"
Dr. Clover, pg. 187: "…no one around here is going to say that mercury per say is not a concern."
Dr. Weil, pg. 187 & 188: "Although the data presents a number of uncertainties, there is adequate consistency, biological plausibility, a lack of relationship with phenomenon not expected to be related, and a potential causal role that is as good as any other hypothesized etiology of explanation of the noted associations. In addition, the possibility that the associations could be causal has major significance for public and professional acceptance of Thimerosal containing vaccines. I think that is a critical issue. Finally, lack of further study would be horrendous grist for the anti-vaccination bill. That's why we need to go on, and urgently I would add.*
Dr. Brent, pg. 188-191: "I am impressed with the fact that some people here have information and believe that like the incidence of learning difficulties, behavior disorders and attention deficit is increasing in our population. I don't know whether it is or it isn't, but that kind of information you just can't throw around and say it's true or isn't true without data. And it is such an important area in our society. I mean it is the thing that makes a human being different from the other species, so it is such an important area of research…"
"…(thimerosal) Causing learning disabilities and behavioral disorders. ADD is a tremendous problem in our society and I think it is one that we should be very concerned about."
"Finally, the thing that concerns me the most, those who know me, I have been a pin stick in the litigation community because of the nonsense of our litigious society. This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country when this information becomes available. They want business and this could potentially be a lot of business."
Dr. Koller, pg. 192: "…As you increase the vaccination, you increase effects, but you don't know. You have modified live viruses. You have different antigens. There is a lot of things in those vaccinations other than mercury, and we don't know whether this is a vaccination effect or a mercury effect. But I am almost sure it is not a mercury effect. Positive as a matter of fact, and there are several experts particularly that have reviewed this, the methylmercury aspect who would agree with that due to dose response."
Dr. Johnson, pg. 193: "Are you really comfortable with the way the neurologic function was tested in the Seychelles?"
Dr. Koller, pg. 193: "I have to admit that there were many other tests that could have been conducted…We are talking about very subjective, very sensitive assays and yes, there could have been others done and there should be more done…"
Dr. Johnson, pg. 198: "This association leads me to favor a recommendation that infants up to two years old not be immunized with Thimerosal containing vaccines if suitable alternative preparations are available.”
“My gut feeling? It worries me enough. Forgive this personal comment, but I got called out at eight o'clock for an emergency call and my daughter-in-law delivered a son by C-section. Our first male in the line of the next generation, and I do not want that grandson to get a Thimerosal containing vaccine until we know better what is going on. It will probably take a long time. In the meantime, and I know there are probably implications for this internationally, but in the meantime I think I want that grandson to only be given Thimerosal-free vaccines."
Dr. Bernier, pg 198: "the negative findings need to be pinned down and published."
Dr. Weil, pg. 207: "The number of dose related relationships are linear and statistically significant. You can play with this all you want. They are linear. They are statistically significant. The positive relationships are those that one might expect from the Faroe Islands studies. They are also related to those data we do have on experimental animal data and similar to the neurodevelopmental tox data on other substances, so that I think you can't accept that this is out of the ordinary. It isn't out of the ordinary."
Dr. Weil, pg. 208: "The rise in the frequency of neurobehavioral disorders whether it is ascertainment or real, is not too bad. It is much too graphic. We don't see that kind of genetic change in 30 years."
Dr. Brent, pg. 229: "The medical/legal findings in this study, causal or not, are horrendous and therefore, it is important that the suggested epidemiological, pharmacokinetic, and animal studies be performed. If an allegation was made that a child's neurobehavioral findings were caused by Thimerosal containing vaccines, you could readily find junk scientist who would support the claim with "a reasonable degree of certainty". But you will not find a scientist with any integrity who would say the reverse with the data that is available. And that is true. So we are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits if they were initiated and I am concerned."
Dr. Meyers, pg. 231: "Can I go back to the core issue about the research? My own concern, and a couple of you said it, there is an association between vaccines and outcome that worries both parents and pediatricians. We don’t really know what that outcome is, but it is one that worries us and there is an association with vaccines. We keep jumping back to Thimerosal, but a number of us are concerned that Thimerosal may be less likely than some of the potential associations that have been made. Some of the potential associations are number of injections, number of antigens, other additives. We mentioned aluminum and I mentioned yesterday aluminum and mercury. Antipyretics and analgesics are better utilized when vaccines are given. And then every body mentioned all of the ones that we can't think about in this quick time period that are a part of this association, and yet all of the questions I hear we are asking have to do with Thimerosal. My concern is we need to ask the questions about the other potential associations, because we are going to the Thimerosal-free vaccine. I f many of us don't think that this is a plausible association because of the levels and so on, then we are missing looking for the association that may be the important one."
Dr. Caserta, pg. 234: "One of the things I learned at the Aluminum Conference in Puerto Rico that was tied into the metal lines in biology and medicine that I never really understood before, is the interactive effect of different metals when they are together in the same organism. It is not the same as when they are alone, and I think it would be foolish for us not to include aluminum as part of our thinking with this."
Dr. Clements, pg 247- 249: "I am really concerned that we have taken off like a boat going down one arm of the mangrove swamp at high speed, when in fact there was not enough discussion really early on about which was the boat should go at all. And I really want to risk offending everyone in the room by saying that perhaps this study should not have been done at all, because the outcome of it could have, to some extent, been predicted, and we have all reached this point now where we are left hanging, even though I hear the majority of consultants say to the Board that they are not convinced there is a causality direct link between Thimerosal and various neurological outcomes."
“I know how we handle it from here is extremely problematic. The ACIP is going to depend on comments from this group in order to move forward into policy, and I have been advised that whatever I say should not move into the policy area because that is not the point of this meeting. But nonetheless, we know from many experiences in history that the pure scientist has done research because of pure science. But that pure science has resulted in splitting the atom or some other process which is completely beyond the power of the scientists who did the research to control it. And what we have here is people who have, for every best reason in the world, pursued a direction of research. But there is not the point at which the research results have to be handled, and even if this committee decides that there is no association and that information gets out, the work that has been done and through the freedom of information that will be taken by others and will be used in ways beyond the control of this group. And I am very concerned about that as I suspect it already too late to do anything regardless of any professional body and what they say."
"My mandate as I sit here in this group is to make sure at the end of the day the 100,000,000 are immunized with DTP, Hepatitis B and if possible Hib, this year, next year and for many years to come, and that will have to be with Thimerosal containing vaccines unless a miracle occurs and an alternative is found quickly and is tried and found to be safe."
"So I leave you with the challenge that I am very concerned that this has gotten this far, and that having got this far, how you present in a concerted voice the information to the ACIP in a way they will be able to handle it and not get exposed to the traps which are out there in public relations. My message would be that any other study, and I like the study that has just been described here very much. I think it makes a lot of sense, but it has to be thought through. What are the potential outcomes and how will you handle it? How will it be presented to a public and media that is hungry for selecting the information they want to use for whatever means they in store for them?"
"…but I wonder how on earth you are going to handle it from here."
Dr. Bernier, pg. 256: "…As difficult as science is, there are two other equally tricky, complex challenges. The policy crafting has to take into consideration some very diverse and complex issues. There is another group that will deal with that, and then we have the communication and how we handle this, which I think I am no expert at, but seems equally daunting to me as the scientific and the policy issue."
"I don’t think we can set a rule here because some people have gotten these documents. For example, some of the manufacturers were privileged to receive this information. It has been important for them to share it within the company with the experts there, so they can review it. Some of you may have questions. You may have given a copy, but I think if we will all just consider this embargoed information, if I can use that term, and very highly protected information, I think that was the best I can offer.
Excerpts from:
Bob Chen, M.D., CDC’s chief of Vaccine Safety and Development, National Immunization Program
Tom Clarkson, M.D., University of Rochester, New York, Mercury program
John Clements, World Health Organization (WHO) representing expanded program on immunization
Bob Davis, M.D., University of Washington, associate professor of pediatrics and epidemiology
Bill Egan, Ph.D., FDA’s Center for Biologics, Evaluation & Research
David Johnson, M.D., Michigan state public health officer, Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)
Dick Johnston, M.D., University of Colorado School of Medicine and National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine, immunologist and pediatrician
Loren Koller, D.V.M., Oregon State University College of Veterinary Medicine, pathologist, immunotoxicologist
Martin Meyers, M.D., CDC’s acting director, National Immunization Program
Walter Orenstein, M.D. CDC’s director, National Immunization Program
Isabelle Rapin, M.D., Albert Einstein College of Medicine, neurologist for children
Tom Verstraeten, M.D., CDC’s National Immunization Program presently employed by Glaxo-Welcome, vaccine company
Bill Weil, M.D., retired pediatrician, representing American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP)
muir
Banned
- MBTI
- INFJ
http://galacticconnection.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-s-article-on-childhood-vaccines/
Many of us know that vaccines are laden with nasty toxins such as mercury, formaldehyde etc. but few probably know that Robert F. Kennedy Jr took a strong stance against this. Check out an article written by him below:
http://www.commondreams.org
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[TD]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.”
© 2005 Salon.com
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Many of us know that vaccines are laden with nasty toxins such as mercury, formaldehyde etc. but few probably know that Robert F. Kennedy Jr took a strong stance against this. Check out an article written by him below:
http://www.commondreams.org
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Published on Thursday, June 16, 2005 by Salon.com
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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.
[/TD]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.
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by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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[TD]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.”
© 2005 Salon.com
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