Important enough to repost to include the entire article. Deadly Immunity

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Important enough to repost to include the entire article

 

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Deadly Immunity

 

Robert 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 GlaxoSmithKline, 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. Richard Johnston, 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. Robert 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. John

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 GlaxoSmithKline 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-Moore, 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? " Peter 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. Paul 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,

Paul 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.

Michael 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 Douglas, 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. " Douglas

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.

David 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,

David, 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.

(Posted Jan 01, 2001)