CDC Study Raises Level of Suspicion

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CDC Study Raises Level of Suspicion

Posted Dec. 8, 2003

By Kelly Patricia O Meara

Rep. Weldon points out that the autism rate began to skyrocket as the number of

required childhood vaccinations increased.

 

Canned tuna or canned poison? That was the teaser for a CBS 2 News " HealthWatch "

Report of Nov. 22 that focused on high levels of mercury found in tuna and the

possible health risks associated with them.

 

CBS 2 News reporter Paul Moniz quoted a number of physicians, who observed of

the toxic substance that, " Once it gets into our bodies, a substantial part of

it will end up in our nervous system, in our brains, and it's there that it

causes a variety of symptoms. " A pediatrician is quoted as saying, " We know that

high levels of mercury can impair the cognitive development as well as the

growth and development of a young child. " What the report appears to be

revealing is that while overweight Americans may flee to fish to lose unwanted

pounds, too much of that tasty tuna could reduce the IQ more than the waistline.

 

What the critics of mercury in vaccines find provocative about this report is

the acknowledgement by physicians that the high levels of mercury ingested from

canned tuna can cause severe health risks. One such critic, the mother of an

autistic child, wonders " why everyone gets up in arms over ingesting small

amounts of mercury from fish or from breaking a thermometer but finds it

acceptable to inject an even more toxic form of mercury directly into the

bloodstream of infants. The evidence is overwhelming that hundreds of thousands

of children were damaged by gross overexposure to mercury through vaccines

[containing thimerosal] and millions more were and continue to be put at risk,

yet network news has not addressed this in any significant way. The public needs

and deserves to know the truth - not only about the biggest medical bungling in

our history, but also about the extraordinary efforts of both the pharmaceutical

industry and government agencies to cover it up. "

 

A pharmaceutical and government cover-up? It is a familiar enough accusation,

and this time the fuse was lit by yet another study from the federal Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this one titled Safety of

Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines: A Two-Phased Study of Computerized Health

Maintenance Organization Databases. The report concluded that " no consistent

significant associations were found between TCVs [thimerosal-containing

vaccines] and neurodevelopment outcomes. " Critics scoff at such a conclusion.

" Sure, " laughs one, " they say you can't eat tuna because the level of mercury

you ingest isn't good for you, but there's no health risk associated with

injecting high levels of mercury directly into a newborn baby? "

 

The CDC study, released in the November 2003 issue of Pediatrics, seemed to

puzzle news media, with most who took note of it making at least a mention of

the fact that the lead author, Thomas Verstraeten, was an employee of

GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical giant and vaccine manufacturer, when he

submitted the study for publication.

 

The first part of the two-phase study to determine whether there is a connection

between thimerosal-containing vaccines and neurodevelopment disorders began in

1999 and involved the review of data from Seattle's Group Health Cooperative and

Northern California Kaiser, both large health-maintenance organizations (HMOs).

The data used in this first phase actually revealed a significant association

between TCVs administered to infants and later developmental abnormalities such

as speech and language delays and neurodevelopment problems in general, such as

tics and the alleged hyperactivity symptoms of attention-deficit disorder and

attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

 

However, this conclusion was not included in the final draft; it was only made

public afterward when Verstraeten's notes were revealed in another forum,

according to specialists. The notes, not published with the CDC study, showed

that the " relative risk " for autism was 2.48 times higher for children who

received 62.5 micrograms or more of mercury from TCVs by 3 months of age.

 

The second phase of the study in June 2000, however, involved the Harvard

Pilgrim HMO in Massachusetts - an unlikely choice, critics say. Among the

problems with using Harvard Pilgrim's database was that the HMO was in

bankruptcy and had been taken over by the commonwealth of Massachusetts. The

medical records not only were incomplete, but the data were stored with a

diagnostic coding system completely unlike that used in the first phase of the

study using data from the two West Coast HMOs. Furthermore, the Harvard Pilgrim

data, say the expert analysts, had incomplete data on autism and did not even

address the issue.

 

Thus medical reviewers of the CDC study charge that it is rife with data

manipulation. Since it relied on incompatible diagnostic coding to validate

whether there were adverse effects from exposure to TCVs, the effect was to

sabotage the result. So, they say, it was not surprising that the CDC study's

analysis of the Harvard Pilgrim data found no consistent association between

vaccines containing thimerosal and the mercury-related neurological disorders

found previously in the first phase based on the two West Coast HMOs.

 

One of the few physicians in Congress, Rep. Dave Weldon (R-Fla.), immediately

saw the problems associated with the CDC study and notified CDC Director Julie

Gerberding. Weldon wrote, " I have serious reservations about the four-year

evolution and conclusions of this study. A review of these documents leaves me

very concerned that rather than seeking to understand whether or not some

children were exposed to harmful levels of mercury in childhood vaccines in the

1990s, there may have been a selective use of the data to make the associations

in the earliest study disappear. "

 

Weldon's letter to Gerberding goes on to observe that " the first version of the

study, produced in February 2000, found a significant association between

exposure to thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism and neurological

developmental delays. A June 2000 version of the study applied various data

manipulations to reduce the autism association to 1.69, and the authors went

outside the VSD [Vaccine Safety Datalink] database to secure data from a

Massachusetts HMO [Harvard Pilgrim] in order to counter the association found

between TCVs and speech delays. " Clear enough.

 

The Florida lawmaker, who is a staunch supporter of immunization, tells Insight,

" I don't know what's going on. It's a pretty lame study to begin with. The way

they've done it is they got some findings and started adding more numbers to the

denominator - it's kind of a strange protocol they followed. Then there are all

these quotes from the researchers from other documents about how you can add

numbers and stratify things and get any outcome you want. Then you consider that

the lead author is working for a drug company, didn't disclose this fact and

also that it is one of the drug companies being sued over this mercury issue.

I'm just very concerned that we're not going to get answers as long as there are

careers at stake. You know there are people at the CDC who have been involved in

the vaccine program who didn't recognize the amount of mercury they were giving

kids, and now they're in the process of investigating themselves. Meanwhile a

lot of these investigators bounce to and

from the drug companies. I think it all is very, very murky and very

suspicious. "

 

Weldon summarizes: " The CDC produced an article by Dr. Verstraeten, published on

Nov. 3 in Pediatrics. Dr. Verstraeten is a former CDC employee. Since 2001 he

has worked for GlaxoSmithKline - a vaccine manufacturer. While working for the

CDC in 2000, the first version of Dr. Verstraeten's unpublished study found an

association between higher thimerosal exposures and neurodevelopment disorders,

including autism. Between 2000 and 2003, Dr. Verstraeten and coauthors

manipulated and stratified the data so much that each of these associations

magically disappeared. I don't know if it was deliberate, but that is

nonetheless what happened. This study has done nothing in my mind to put these

concerns to rest, but only serves to raise suspicions. "

 

This veteran member of Congress puts it plainly: " We're not going to get answers

to these questions until Congress or some outside group starts poring through

this information. But it's very coincidental that they added the hepatitis

vaccine, the HiB vaccine and the chicken-pox vaccine - they added all these

additional childhood vaccines around the time when the autism rate started to

skyrocket. Then when you actually sit down and do the calculations, according to

the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], they were giving these kids very

toxic levels of mercury. I mean as a 150- to 200-pound adult the EPA says you're

not supposed to take in more than one microgram per day. They were taking little

seven- and 10-pound babies and pumping 50 and 75 micrograms of mercury into them

in one shot. That's like giving an adult 1,000 micrograms. And, on top of that,

the World Health Organization says mercury is 10 times more toxic in children

than it is in adults. It's horrifying. "

 

While Weldon and others cite huge and undeniable flaws, a spokesman for the CDC,

Von Roebuck, tells Insight that " the CDC stands by the study. " As he explains

it, " We pretty much looked into that [manipulation of data] in the sense of how

the information was presented, and we do stand behind it. The CDC knew that Dr.

Verstraeten worked for GlaxoSmithKline, and the one thing that we would want to

happen differently is that would have been known before, but the work that Dr.

Verstraeten did was for the CDC at the time the work was produced - the work

that he did for the study was done when he worked for the CDC. "

 

Mark Geier, M.D., Ph.D., is president of the Genetic Centers of America. He and

his son, David Geier, president of Medcon Inc., are consultants on vaccine

cases. David Geier tells Insight, " What happened here is Dr. Verstraeten goes to

the Institute of Medicine [iOM] and says that he looked at it in one California

HMO and it was statistical and he saw the effect, and then he did it in another

California HMO and it was statistical and he saw the effect, then he went to

Harvard Pilgrim HMO and he didn't see the effect. The IOM said it's biologically

plausible, but the epidemiology is mixed and therefore we're not sure. "

 

" In my opinion, " explains Mark Geier, " if they had seen clear epidemiology they

would have recommended the immediate removal of thimerosal and hundreds of

children would have been saved. But Verstraeten went to the one state in the

country where the percentage of autism was the lowest. According to the U.S.

Department of Education the average increase in autism was 400 percent, and

every state in the union had at least a 100 percent increase. But Harvard

Pilgrim had just a 10 percent increase. "

 

" We went to Atlanta, " he continues, " to the CDC, and looked at the VSD data.

There is thimerosal-containing DTaP [diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine]

and thimerosal-free DTaP, so we asked a question: Among children that got a

minimum of either three consecutive thimerosal-containing DTaPs or three

consecutive thimerosal-free DTaPs, was there a difference in the number of

autism cases in the two groups? We found mega differences. More than 20 times

higher. The rate of autism in the children that got more than three doses of

thimerosal-containing DTaP vaccines was much, much higher. Almost all the

children that have autism in that group were the ones that got the

thimerosal-containing DTaP vaccine. The more thimerosal the greater the cases of

autism. "

 

Mark Geier says, " Believe us, there is no scientific issue here. This is fraud.

The CDC and the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] know what is happening. They

just can't admit it because it is one of the worst things ever to have happened

to this United States. If a terrorist had done this, we wouldn't attack them,

we'd nuke them. We're talking about one in eight children in the U.S. that

currently are in special education, and that number is going to change to about

one in five. What percentage of our young population can we destroy before we

realize how serious this is? "

 

Lyn Redwood, a registered nurse, mother of an autistic child and president and

cofounder of www.SafeMinds.org (Sensible Action for Ending Mercury-Induced

Neurological Disorders), a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending

devastation caused by the needless use of mercury in medicines, tells Insight

that " there are so many problems with the study, but over time you can see how

all the manipulations of the data slowly bring down the signals for neurological

disorders. I think they were trying to get lower numbers. It must be very hard

to admit that a program that was designed to eradicate infectious disease has

resulted in an epidemic of a whole new kind of disease. But to think that we

weren't given a choice when the regulators and manufacturers knew these products

contained mercury is inconceivable. "

 

Redwood says with a sigh, " On a scale of one to 10, I give the CDC study a big

fat zero. I think it started out good, but when they saw the early numbers it

scared the hell out of them. I don't have any faith in the CDC doing a decent

study of this matter. It's like having the tobacco industry monitor cigarettes

for safety. From a parent's perspective and from a health-care professional's

perspective it's maddening that we can't get products that are safe, and yet

we're forced by law to use them. They need to just get the thimerosal out. It's

barbaric. "

 

Kelly Patricia O'Meara is an investigative reporter for Insight.

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