R. F. Kennedy Jr.: Deadly Immunity (mercury/autism)

[Guest guest]

Emma and all - here is the story in rollingstone by RFK earlier this year

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/7395411

ROLLING STONE

F. Kennedy Jr. investigates the government cover-up of a

mercury/autism scandal

By ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials

gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in

Norcross, Georgia. 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 fifty-two 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

GlaxoKline, 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.

ston, 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.

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. Clements, vaccines adviser 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

GlaxoKline 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 eleven-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. The measure was repealed

by Congress 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 pre-eminent

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 twenty-five 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 eleven 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 twenty-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 twenty 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 twenty-two 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-, 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, ten 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 twenty-four hours of birth, and

two-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

six-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

twenty-two 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? "

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 six 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. Offit, one of CDC's top vaccine advisers, told me,

" I think if we really have an influenza pandemic -- and certainly we will

in the next twenty 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 advisers

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, 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. 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 , 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. " 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.

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, ,

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,

Pennsylvania, 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 thirty-two 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.

--------------------------------------------------------

Sheri Nakken, R.N., MA, Classical Homeopath

Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Nevada City CA & Wales UK

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