Deadly Immunity - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. investigates the government cover-up of

[Guest guest]

There was not enough room for it all; read the rest at the url.

Deadly Immunity

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

mercury/autism scandal

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7395411/deadly_immunity/

 

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 advisor at the World

Health Organization, declared that " perhaps this study should not have been done

at all. " He added that " the research results have to be handled, " warning that

the study " will be taken by others and will be used in other ways beyond the

control of this group. "

 

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 Dean Rosen,

health

policy adviser 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 eleven 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. At two months, when the infant brain

is still at a critical stage of development, infants routinely received three

inoculations that contained a total of 62.5 micrograms of ethylmercury -- a

level 99 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 was part of a team that

developed

the measles vaccine and brought it to licensure in 1963. 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 " had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing

different versions of the vaccine. "

 

Offit, who shares a patent on one of the vaccines, acknowledged to me that he

" would make money " if his vote 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 and parents, the Institute of Medicine convened

another panel to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety Datalink

Data Sharing program. In February, the new panel, composed of different

scientists, criticized the way the VSD had been used in the Verstraeten study,

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.

 

NOTE: This story has been updated to correct several inaccuracies in the

original, published version. As originally reported, American preschoolers

received only three vaccinations before 1989, but the article failed to note

that

they were innoculated a total of eleven times with those vaccines, including

boosters. The article also misstated the level of ethylmercury received by

infants

injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms

- an amount forty percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA's limit for

daily exposure to methylmercury. Finally, because of an editing error, the

article misstated the contents of the rotavirus vaccine approved by the CDC. It

did

not contain thimerosal. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors.

 

An earlier version of this story stated that the Institute of Medicine

convened a second panel to review the work of the Immunization Safety Review

Committee that had found no evidence of a link between thimerosal and autism. In

fact, the IOM convened the second panel to address continuing concerns about the

Vaccine Safety Datalink Data Sharing program, including those raised by critics

of the IOM's earlier work. But the panel was not charged with reviewing the

committee's findings. The story also inadvertently omitted a word and

transposed two sentences in a quote by Dr. John Clements, and incorrectly stated

that

Dr. Sam Katz held a patent with Merck on the measles vaccine. In fact, Dr. Katz

was part of a team that developed the vaccine and brought it to licensure,

but he never held the patent. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors.

 

CLARIFICATION: After publication of this story, Salon and Rolling Stone

corrected an error that misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants

injected with all their shots by the

 

 

 

Non-text portions of this message have been removed]