F. Kennedy Jr. investigates the government cover-up of a mercury/autism scandal

[Guest guest]

Hello, Here is RFK’s piece in Rolling Stone. – DK

www.evidenceofharm.com

Deadly Immunity

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.

RFK Jr and thimerosal

Dear Nate,

My good friend France suggested I contact you.

On Wednesday, Kennedy Jr. will publish an article in Rolling

Stone (and, for the first time, simultaneously on Salon.com),

supporting the theory that thimerosal in vaccines can cause autism and

other neurological disorders in children. Mr. Kennedy will also appear

on ABC World News Tonight and Good Morning America on Thursday. I

believe this will be much talked about in the coming days.

If you are planning to do any coverage of this controversy, I do hope

you might consider an interview with me, perhaps in addition to Mr.

Kennedy, as someone who has followed and researched this topic

thoroughly for nearly three years.

My book, “Evidence of Harm, Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism

Epidemic,” from St. ’s Press, is selling well in bookstores now,

and has received very favorable reviews from The New York Times,

Washington Post, Newsday, Bloomberg News, Publishers Weekly and others.

More information on the book is at www.evidenceofharm.com

Many thanks,

Kirby