Deadly Immunity
I have a very good friend who has avoided getting his children vaccinated due to concerns about thimerosal, and vaccine safety in general, and I’ve always been a little skeptical: how good was the science behind these concerns? Wasn’t the dramatic recent increase in autism perhaps due to some other factor, such as better diagnosis?
Well, I stumbled upon the following article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., while looking for his recent 2004 Election-Theft article, and I have to say that, having read it, I’d want to thoroughly double-check the safety of any vaccine before blindly taking it myself, and especially before giving it to any child or infant. And as for the “better diagnosis” argument, that one is neatly demolished in just a few sentences: look for the bold text below.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
Read the Full Article in Rolling Stone
“Deadly Immunity”
by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
June 20, 2005
Bill Standley wrote:
The autism/metal link became apparent to me with the events surrounding the son of Robert Mykland, a brilliant friend/co-worker I met pre-Quest and founder of Ascenium Corporation. His son was diagnosed with severe autism as a toddler. At a later age, he underwent chelation therapy, and the boy immediately improved to the point where he was a normal student. Apparently, once the metals left his body, he started functioning normally again.
Posted 05 Jun 2006 at 11:28 am ¶
Jeff Lorenzini wrote:
It’s really the parents of these autistic kids that are responsible for bringing this to light. Robert Kennedy has an autistic child, btw.
I’m the person Tom Chappell mentioned that refuses to vaccinate my kids, but my wife Naomi really is the one that did the research. I probably would have gone ahead and done it with no knowledge of the dangers with vaccination. People see it as having no risk whatsoever, and it’s a direct result of the cover-up from the drug companies and the CDC. The CDC knows that if they said thimerosal is unsafe, people would think all vaccines are unsafe, and they didn’t want that. (Even though they banned thimerosal for cows 10 years ago).
Adding a vaccine to the list that kids get is a guaranteed $200 million a year in profit, and so in the 90’s the government added a lot of vaccines, but never looked at the cumulative amount of mercury the babies were receiving. It turned out to be a lot of mercury, autism shot up, and the cover-up began.
We had always felt that if our kids do get sick with something a vaccine could have prevented, it won’t be a big deal, they’ll get better and be none the worse for it. When Amelie was one year old, she got whooping cough, and she coughed a little bit for three weeks and that was that. We’re not that concerned with this.
One question we get a lot is people asking if they’ll be allowed in school. Yes, schools are required by-law to accept your kids whether they’ve been vaccinated or not.
Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 12:34 pm ¶
Chris Gibson wrote:
I certainly don’t mean this as an attack on the decision not to vaccinate, as my wife and I are also currently not vaccinating our 6 month old, and do not plan to until he is older.
We actually had a really good discussion with one of our doctors about this (our internist, not our pediatrician). He had three children, and we wanted to know what he thought about vaccinating (or not).
One of his observations was that today, it is fairly safe not to vaccinate your child, as some of the true scourges, like smallpox and polio, have been largely eradicated, and your (unvaccinated) children will benefit from the vaccinated children’s immunity, which prevents the disease from roaming the community. However, as has been seen with whooping cough in several states, and just recently mumps in several others, these diseases can and do come back naturally, and of course today there is also the prospect of bioterrorism bringing one of these back suddenly and in a big way. While whooping cough is, perhaps, acceptable in terms of risk, what about polio or smallpox? The more kids who do not get vaccinated, the larger the risk of these diseases getting an opportunity to come back. Or tetanus, which is very much here and with us today, lurking in the dirt where children love to play (and get cut)?
I guess one of the questions is whether one is in the anti-vaccine camp, or the anti-thimerosal camp? Certainly I am in the latter, and have no plans to inject our child with thimerosal at any age. But currently we are planning to begin vaccinating him (with non-thimerosal vaccines) when he is 2, before he starts to be around lots of other children. We haven’t decided which vaccines to have at this point. Certainly, we plan on smallpox, polio, and “D-P-T,” but I’m much more troubled by the decision on, say, hepatitis-B or chickenpox. Or meningitis, or who knows what else by the time he’s two.
If one is in the “anti-vaccination” camp, regardless of whether thimerosal is included or not, it seems a dicier situation, as eventually a large, unvaccinated population will allow one or more of the “eradicated” diseases to make a comeback.
Posted 06 Jun 2006 at 9:51 pm ¶