REPEAT RFK, Jr's response letter in today's WSJ

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Here's the letter from RFK, Jr. in today's WSJ:

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Thimerosal, Children's Vaccines and Autism

Fumento bases his defense of thimerosal on the assurances by

the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Institute of Medicine

(IOM), but these are the same government agencies that green-lighted

thimerosal for use in children's vaccines and that have ignored

biological, toxicological and epidemiological studies linking

thimerosal to a wide range of neurological disorders ( " Immune to

Reason, " Taste page, Weekend Journal, June 24).

In 2001, they joined the pharmaceutical industry to gin up four

European studies to exonerate thimerosal. Those studies were largely

financed by vaccine makers, written principally by vaccine industry

consultants and employees and published in compromised journals (The

Journal of Pediatrics, cited by Mr. Fumento, and its parent, the

American Academy of Pediatrics, receive substantial funding from

thimerosal producers) that violated peer-reviewed ethics and their

own bias rules by not revealing the myriad conflicts of these authors.

The European studies are all flawed. They targeted children exposed

to a tiny fraction of the thimerosal concentrations used in America.

Most glaringly, prior to banning thimerosal, Denmark registered only

autistics who were hospitalized -- one fifth of the afflicted

populations.

After outlawing thimerosal in 1995, Denmark added out-patient

autistics to its registries. The resulting spike in raw numbers made

it appear autism rates actually increased after withdrawal of

thimerosal.

By using those and similarly deceptive data from Sweden and the U.K.,

the study's authors enabled IOM to make the case that thimerosal was

not linked to autism. The author of the only U.S. study,

Verstraeten, has disavowed IOM's claim that his study exonerates

thimerosal as the culprit in the autism epidemic.

Mr. Fumento's assurance that the CDC's studies were peer reviewed by

IOM is not convincing since the leading members of IOM's peer review

panel had financial bonds to the vaccine industry.

Mr. Fumento argues that there is no conspiracy by CDC to hide the

facts from the public. But CDC's efforts to erase that impression

have been hampered by the release of transcripts of secret meetings

that are susceptible to no other interpretation, by its decision to

block federal funding for any new research on the thimerosal/autism

link and by CDC's defiance of federal laws and congressional orders

requiring it to allow independent scientists to review federal

vaccine safety data.

Mr. Fumento's suggestion that ethyl mercury is benign is

pharmaceutical industry propaganda that was discredited soon after

Eli Lilly first made that claim in the 1930s. Recent studies indicate

that ethyl mercury may be more toxic to brain tissue than methyl

mercury because of its persistence in the brain. My original estimate

that thimerosal vaccines exposed children to mercury concentrations

hundreds of times safe levels was taken from published accounts and

was pretty accurate.

Dr. Boyd Haley is hardly a " vaccine conspiracist, " as Mr. Fumento

charges. He is a biochemist, professor and chair of the Chemistry

Department at the University of Kentucky. He has 123 publications in

peer-reviewed journals on biological effects of various compounds on

the brain and other organs. He is the inventor of the mercury probe

technology now used by the National Institutes of Health and the Mayo

Clinic.

Dr. DeStefano, who Mr. Fumento praises, is an epidemiologist

who analyzes numbers, not a practitioner of the biological sciences.

Dr. DeStefano has never published a study on mercury's toxicity in

children's brains or organs. Finally, the work of the expert witness

team of Mark and Geier was published in refereed journals and

has never been formally challenged or subject to any formal

corrections.

F. Kennedy Jr.

White Plains, N.Y.