Thimerosal-containing Vaccine Cover-up Uncovered!

[Guest guest]

Vaccinations: Deadly Immunity, by Robert F. Kennedy, jr

_http://www.pandemicfluonline.com/?p=510#more-510_

(http://www.pandemicfluonline.com/?p=510#more-510)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Global Research

July 25, 2009

 

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.â€

 

 

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.â€

 

 

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.â€

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.â€

 

 

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?â€

 

 

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.â€

 

 

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.â€

 

 

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?â€

 

 

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.â€

 

 

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?â€

 

 

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.

 

 

Global Research comments: 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 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. At the time of the correction, we were aware that

the comparison itself was flawed, but as journalists we considered it more

appropriate to state the correct figure rather than replace it with another

number entirely.

 

 

Since that earlier correction, however, it has become clear from responses

to the article that the forty-percent number, while accurate, is

misleading. It measures the total mercury load an infant received from vaccines

du

ring the first six months, calculates the daily average received based on

average body weight, and then compares that number to the EPA daily limit. But

infants did not receive the vaccines as a **daily average** they received

massive doses on a single day, through multiple shots. As the story states,

these single-day doses exceeded the EPA limit by as much as 99 times.

Based on the misunderstanding, and to avoid further confusion, we have amended

the story to eliminate the forty-percent figure.

 

 

Correction:

The story misattributed a quote to Andy Olson, former legislative counsel

to Senator Bill Frist. The comment was made by Dean Rosen, health policy

adviser to the senator. Rolling Stone and Salon.com regret the error.

 

 

Kennedy Report Sparks Controversy

 

 

**Deadly Immunity,** our story about the link between mercury in vaccines

and the dramatic rise in autism among children [RS 977/978], sparked

intense reaction from the medical establishment and several leading news

organizations. The story, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — part of an ongoing

collaboration with Salon.com — documented the government*s efforts to conceal

alarming

data about the dangers of vaccines.

 

 

What is most striking is the lengths to which major media outlets have

gone to disparage the story and to calm public fears — even in the face of

the

questionable science on the subject. In a segment on World News Tonight

titled **A Closer Look,** ABC pointed out that Kennedy is **not a scientist

or a doctor** and dismissed his extensive evidence as nothing more than

**a few scientific studies.** The network also trotted out its medical

editor, Dr. Timothy Johnson, to praise the **impeccably impartial Institute of

Medicine** and to again state that Kennedy is not a scientist.

 

 

The New York Times, in a front-page story on the subject, devoted only one

line to Kennedy*s article, which it said accused public-health officials

and drugmakers of **conspiring** to hide the data on autism — a word that

our story neither used nor implied. (The Wall Street Journal, in an op-ed

attacking the article, was even more misleading, using the word *conspiracy*

four times.) The Times then went on, for more than a full page, to portray

concerns over vaccines as nothing more than the misguided fears of parents

who suffer from “scientific illiteracy,†unable to understand the medical

studies that prove immunizations to be safe. It depicted studies reviewed by

the Institute of Medicine as definitive without even bothering to address

the host of serious questions raised about their validity: conflicting

diagnoses of autism, mixed-up data from HMOs and research skewed to exclude

many

sick kids.

 

 

Rolling Stone and Salon fact-checked the article thoroughly before

publication, insisting on primary documentation for every statement in the

story,

and posted links to the most significant materials online to enable readers

to judge for themselves. The final article contained six errors. These

ranged from inadvertently transposing a quote and confusing a drug license for

a patent to relying on a figure that incorrectly calculated an infant’s

exposure to mercury over six months, rather than citing the even more

dangerous amount injected on a single day. (The mistakes were corrected online

as

soon as they were discovered and can be viewed in detail at both

RollingStone.com and Salon.com.)

 

 

It is important to note, however, that none of the mistakes weaken the

primary point of the story. The government’s own records show that it has

failed to do the science necessary to put to rest reasonable concerns about

vaccines. If the scientists had simply done their job rather than covering

their tracks, there would be no controversy today. Instead, the government

cannot even provide a definitive figure of the number of cases of autism among

American children — a number obviously critical to any serious scientific

investigation — and yet expects the public to believe that it has ruled out

any link between vaccines and an illness it does not even track.

 

 

“Science,†as one doctor in our story insisted, “is best left to

scientists.†But when the scientists fail to do their job, resorting to

closed-door

meetings and rigged studies, others in society have not only a right but a

moral obligation to question their work. In the coming years, further

research may indeed demonstrate that mercury in vaccines is not responsible for

the rise in autism. For now, though, we can only raise a very real and

legitimate alarm — and hope that the government’s well-documented

mishandling

of its own research did not needlessly jeopardize the health of hundreds of

thousands of children.

 

 

 

 

(http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm)