The CancerCoverUp.com Monthly Newsletter | JUNE 2005 | Volume 4, Issue 6

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The CancerCoverUp.com Monthly Newsletter | JUNE 2005 | Volume

4, Issue 6

Tue, 31 May 2005 22:00:16 -0700

 

http://www.cancercoverup.com/newsletter/06-2005/default.asp

 

The epidemic of so-called " autism spectrum disorders " among our

children has reached stunning proportions. Once a rare condition,

autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders now affect one in 167

children! Many parents of autistic children suspect that the disorder

is somehow linked to the early childhood vaccines that are routinely

administered to children between the ages of six months and two years.

Specifically they believe that Thimerosal, a preservative that was

used in all childhood vaccines until recently is the culprit. Their

suspicions are not without scientific basis - Thimerosal is 49.6%

mercury by weight, and mercury exposure has long been known to cause

neurological damage.

 

Indeed, by the time a child is just six months old, they will have

received 187.5 micrograms of mercury through vaccination - an amount

from 20 to 30 times the EPA allowable limit based on weight.

 

Still, vaccine manufacturers and their supporters at the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention insist that no problem exists. More

important, they point to a study released by the prestigious Institute

of Medicine in February of 2004 to prove their claim.

 

So it would appear that the parent's suspicions are groundless - or

are they?

 

Florida Representative Dave Weldon thinks that they parents may be

right, and worse, that the CDC and the Institute of Medicine are

cooperating in a cover-up of the facts concerning this vital issue.

 

Now, it is important to understand that Dave Weldon is not just some

elected busybody looking to grab a headline. The five-term Congressman

from Florida's 15th District is a practicing physician who worked his

way through college at the State University of New York as a

respiratory technician earning membership in the prestigious Phi Beta

Kappa scholastic honorary society to boot. Completing medical school

under an accelerated honors program, Weldon went on to serve in the

U.S. Army and remained in the Reserves until 1992.

 

In short, he has the knowledge to cut through the nonsense put out by

the CDC's spin machine and the integrity to seek the truth.

 

He also makes a point of noting that he is not an opponent of

vaccination per se. Indeed, he has vaccinated thousands of individuals

in his medical practice.

 

He just wants to make sure that vaccines are safe, and that seems to

be where he and the CDC part company.

 

Last June he made this point emphatically on the floor of the U.S.

Congress stating:

 

" For too long, those who run our national vaccination program have

viewed those who have adverse reactions, including those with severe

reactions, as the cost of doing business. "

 

But what provoked this harsh assessment.

 

The story actually began almost four years earlier when the CDC, under

pressure from Congress, initiated a study at the Institute of Medicine

(IOM) to determine if there was a link between the vaccine

preservative Thimerosal and autism spectrum disorders.

 

When the IOM issued its initial report in 2001, it appeared that the

parent's worse suspicions had been confirmed. The report stated:

 

" Exposure to Thimerosal-containing vaccines could be associated

with neurodevelopmental disorders. "

 

As a result of this conclusion, the IOM recommended that children not

be given mercury-containing vaccines.

 

And that was the end of the problem.

 

Hardly - Big Pharma had too much to lose.

 

The CDC had to find a way out, but it had a problem: the facts didn't

support the conclusion it wanted to reach. The answer, in their view,

however, was simple. All they had to do was change the facts. After

all, the public and the media lacked the specialized knowledge that

would allow them to see through the sham.

 

What they didn't count on was that there would be someone like Dave

Weldon around, who did have the knowledge and could see through their

smokescreen.

 

But what exactly did they do?

 

Congressman Weldon outlined their deception in his floor statement:

 

" Unlike 2001, this time the IOM was directed by the CDC to only

consider the possible relationship between Thimerosal and autism

rather than neurodevelopmental disorders as a whole. Anyone familiar

with the Verstraeten study, a study published poking at thimerosal and

autism, knows exactly why the IOM scope was narrow, because the 2003

Verstraeten study found associations between Thimerosal and

neurodevelopmental disorders in some children with autism may have

been misdiagnosed as having speech or language delay. By narrowing the

scope, which largely went unnoticed by the media, the CDC has avoided

acknowledging that Thimerosal very well may have caused

neurodevelopmental disorders in some children. "

 

In other words just narrow the scope and the problem disappears!

 

Weldon was outraged.

 

Speaking to his colleagues he charged:

 

" In my ten years in the U.S. Congress, I have never seen a report

so badly miss the mark. I have heard some weak arguments here in

Washington, D.C., and I can tell my colleagues that the arguments put

forward in this IOM report are indeed very weak. "

 

He continued:

 

" It appears to me, not only as a Member of Congress but also as a

physician, that some officials within the CDC's National Immunization

Program, the NIP, may be more interested in a public relations

campaign than getting to the truth about Thimerosal. "

 

Weldon was fighting mad, and he had good cause to be. The Florida

Congressman had been trying to get the CDC to do what was right for

months. He had been particularly adamant about the need to delay the

February 9, 2004 meeting at which the IOM planned to release its report.

 

A month before the meeting he had written Dr. Julie Geberding of the

IOM charging that a rush to release a report clearing mercury was:

 

" being driven by a desire to shortcircuit important research and

draw premature conclusions. "

 

He further argued that:

 

" Pressing forward with this meeting at this time I believe will

further undermine the credibility of the Centers for Disease Control

on matters of vaccine safety and do damage to the reputation of the

Institute of Medicine. I believe that the proposed date of the

meeting, which you have the ability to change, is in the best interest

of no one who is seeking the truth about a possible association

between vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism. "

 

But his arguments fell on deaf ears. The IOM went ahead with its

release, and its claims that Thimerosal was vindicated. Weldon could

only conclude that:

 

" A public relations campaign rather than sound science seems to be

the modus operandi of the officials at the CDC's National Immunization

Program. "

 

What Weldon found particularly disturbing was the total reliance of

the IOM on what are called epidemiological studies. Epidemiology is

the analysis of disease incidence within a population. While it has

its uses, it is also subject to limitations. One of those is the

inability to identify subpopulations that might suffer from a genetic

predisposition to a particular condition. The reason why this is an

important consideration in examining the possible link between autism

and related diseases and Thimerosal or mercury exposure is that the

leading theory about the connection is that it is in fact genetic.

Researchers believe that some children are born with a diminished

ability to excrete heavy metals such as mercury, and therefore the

toxic substance can build up in their bodies.

 

But it was not just the reliance on epidemiological studies that

concerned Weldon. Of equal concern were the specific epidemiological

studies that the IOM used as a basis for its conclusions.

 

The IOM drew upon five studies for its data. Only one of them,

however, looked at children in the United States. Three looked at

children in Denmark, with one of those also examining Swedish

children, and a fourth looked at children in the United Kingdom. The

trouble was that in the case of all five studies, researchers involved

with them had serious conflicts of interest.

 

But that's not all.

 

All five also suffered from serious methodological flaws that called

into question their validity.

 

Perhaps the most widely criticized study was that of U.S. children,

the so-called Verstraeten study.

 

It had concluded that:

 

" …the results of the study show no statistical association between

Thimerosal and harmful health outcomes in children, particular autism

and attention deficit disorder. "

 

Published in the November 2003 edition of the journal Pediatrics, the

study did not compare children who had received vaccines with

Thimerosal with those who had not been given mercury-containing

vaccines. Rather, it used what is termed a " dose response gradient "

approach. Under this method the theory was that those who got less

Thimerosal later in life would have less autism than those who got

larger doses earlier. The trouble is that such a study would not

identify populations that were genetically predisposed to mercury

sensitivity.

 

But that wasn't the only flaw.

 

Rather than looking at the broad spectrum of neurodevelopmental

disorders that could be caused by mercury, the study was specifically

limited to autism. But at the same time, many of the children included

in the study were too young to be diagnosed with autism. Moreover, the

data were manipulated in other ways that would minimize or entirely

eliminate the potential to identify an autism link.

 

What the IOM press release also failed to mention was that the lead

researcher was employed by a pharmaceutical company - and worse

falsely identified him as a CDC employee.

 

Ironically, five months after the press conference was held and the

damage done, the study's author essentially retracted his conclusions.

He was quoted in the journal Pediatrics, the same one that had

published his original results as saying:

 

" The bottom line is and always has been the same, an association

between Thimerosal and neurological outcomes could neither be

confirmed nor refuted and therefore more study is required. "

 

That hardly sounds like " case closed. "

 

But it wasn't just the best-known study that had methodological

problems or conflicts of interest. One of the worst examples was the

so-called " Hviid " study from Denmark.

 

Conducted in 2003, the study's principal author was Dr. Anders Hviid

of the Danish Epidemiology Science Center. What the IOM failed to make

clear about Dr. Hviid was the enormous potential conflict of interest

he had.

 

The Danish Epidemiology Science Center is housed in Staten Serum

Institute, the Danish government-owned pharmaceutical company, whose

primary product is vaccines and vaccine components!

 

SSI has about $120 million in annual revenue, and two of its biggest

customers are the United States and the United Kingdom!

 

But that's not all.

 

Vaccines and vaccine components are the Institute's fastest growing

business segment accounting for fully 80% of its profits!

 

So clearly, Hviid would not want to bite the hand that feeds him.

 

Still, that might not have been his only concern.

 

Finding a link between Thimerosal in vaccines and autism and related

disorders would open a Pandora's Box of lawsuits against SSI, his

affiliate.

 

Yet, even if no potential conflict existed, the notion of comparing

the homogeneous Danish population with the heterogeneous U.S.

population has been equated to comparing " apples and cows " by one

noted scientist.

Another important flaw was in the relative levels of exposure. The

Danish children received approximately 75 micrograms of mercury in the

first nine weeks of life and then another 50 micrograms at 10 months.

By comparison, a child in the U.S. received 187.5 micrograms by six

months: 2 ½ times as much mercury as the Danish population.

 

What makes the Hviid study even more suspect is its conclusion that

the autism rate went up after 1992 when Thimerosal was removed from

the vaccines.

 

How could this be?

 

Well, one answer is that once again (surprise, surprise) the data were

manipulated. In the case of the statistics that were examined for the

period prior to 1992, outpatient diagnoses of autism were not

included. This is important, because it could well be the majority of

such diagnoses. For the period after 1992, when the mercury

preservative was removed, however, outpatient diagnoses were included.

Yet no attempt was made to adjust the figures to take into account

this possibly confounding factor!

 

The difference in the make-up of the populations, too, is a factor

that cannot be discounted. If, as researchers postulate, there is a

genetic " trigger " that makes some children more susceptible to mercury

toxicity and this factor is the cause of the autism epidemic, it is

possible that Danish children are less likely to have this genetic

defect. Indeed, the fact that the incidence of autism is only one in

10,000 in Denmark as compared to one in 167 in the United States is

powerful evidence that this might be the case.

 

But the Hviid study was not the only one that suffered from these flaws.

 

Another study IOM used was the so-called " Madsen " study. As with the

Hviid study, its principal researcher also had ties to SSI and it was

also limited to Danish children. Also, as with the Hviid, study,

outpatient cases were excluded from the period when Thimerosal was

used and included for the period after 1995, by which time Thimerosal

had been removed.

 

The so-called " Sterh-Green " study added statistics on Swedish children

to the statistics on Danish children used by Madsen and Hviid, but

since Sweden also has a relatively homogenous population that is

closely related to the Danish population it suffers from the same

sampling deficiencies. Also, as with the other two studies, the

researchers have conflicts due to ties to SSI.

 

The fourth foreign study IOM used is even more questionable, but for

different reasons. This was the " Miller " study examining British

children. The trouble is that Dr. Miller is a well-known activist who

has testified on behalf of vaccine manufacturers in lawsuits and who

has long debunked vaccine safety concerns. His conclusions would be

suspect to say the least.

 

So, what is the bottom line?

 

Representative Weldon summarized on the floor of the Congress:

 

" The IOM based its conclusions on five studies, only one of which

was on U.S. children. Three examined a genetically homogenous

population of children in Denmark and at least one employee of SSI was

a co-author of three. The study that did look at U.S. children did not

compare children who had received mercury with those who did not. Four

of the studies are of children who received less than half the amount

of mercury U.S. children do. None of the studies looked at prenatal

mercury exposure. None of them were capable of identifying a subgroup

that might be genetically susceptible to mercury toxicity. Three of

them failed to address how adding outpatient diagnoses after

Thimerosal had been removed from vaccines might have skewed their

results. Four of them studied populations with autism rates

significantly lower than the United States. "

 

" Most important, all were statistical studies. There have been

numerous biological studies suggesting the Thimerosal is linked, that

mercury is linked to autism - specifically mercury studies that show

after chelation therapy, children with autism excrete a tremendous

amount of mercury in their urine, whereas normal children do not. "

 

In short, the IOM under instruction from the CDC, the agency charged

with ensuring vaccine safety did everything it could to hide the truth

from the public. Worse, the press accepted their unfounded assertions

uncritically. Were it not for the efforts of one Congressman and many

outraged parents, the truth would have remained hidden.

 

But mercury is not the only vaccine-related scandal that the IOM tried

to sweep under the carpet. The link between the explosive growth of

Chron's disease in the U.S. and abroad may also have a vaccine link.

But, as with Thimerosal, Big Pharma and its allies are determined to

keep the truth from the public. Next month learn how a British

researcher who dared to tell the truth saw his career and reputation

ruined.