posted at 08:42:26 AM by Dominion

Tue, Jun 21 2005

Thimerosal and Autism Part II

I wuz right!

For those of you that have been following this blog for far longer than is perhaps healthy for you, I would like to take a trip down memory lane. You might remember back in November of 2002 I did an article on the additive Thimerosal. I was looking at the possible links between Thimerosal and Autism. Unfortunately I could not find as much information as I would like but what I did find, I found very disturbing.

The whole reason I started down this road was because of an article written by Dwight Meredith of P.L.A (which is not being updated anymore) entitled "Autism, Pure Rage and Thimerosal". The information in that article came as a complete surprise to me. As a skeptic and science booster, I (along with most of my fellow skeptics) thought that people sowing doubt about vaccines were of the same nut class as those that spoke to Mary, Mother of God and who saw UFO's cavorting in the skies over Washington DC. So I read with a great deal of interest.

If being a skeptic is to mean anything, it has to mean the ability to change one's mind when evidence comes in. Without this very important skill, you are not a skeptic you are a scoffer.

So after checking it out for myself, I wrote about it. Here and here.

At the time I wrote these articles I did not realize I was missing a very important piece of the puzzle, the CDC's Verstraeten epidemiological study. The reason that I was missing this study (indeed, I did not even know it existed) was that the CDC, the FDA, vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva, and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur, were too busy trying to prevent it's release to the public.

This startling information comes by way of an article in Salon written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. entitled "Deadly Immunity". Just a choice tibit:

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Ga. 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 52 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.

Go read the whole thing and be prepared to weep.

At the time I said that I felt in my gut that there was a link, at least the government and Eli Lilly, the company that developed Thimerosal sure did act like there was a link. Turns out they were acting even more gulity than I thought.

I also mentioned some email I got from various people asking me if I really thought that Eli Lilly would poison people. After all, the management of Eli Lilly had children and grandchildren. They got vaccines just like everyone else. Why would they use something that was a known poison in vaccines? This is what I said at the time:

...grow up and live in the real world. Ever hear of tobacco companies? Chemical companies? Asbestos? Silicate dust? Lead? Please, companies have been poisoning us for years, regardless of family and friends. We have what I like to call "The Evil of Inertia". Ely Lilly develops a mercury based preservative that they can use in vaccines. They don't really test it all that well before going ahead and using it. They invest x number of dollars in all phases of creating this preservative and getting it into vaccines. Then when other people start to test, they find that this preservative is actually dangerous to use, but that it's danger will be difficult to prove. Could take years. To take the preservative out would cost x number of dollars, it might cause lawsuits. Best just to hide what little evidence there is and deny there is a problem. This happens with depressing regularity.

I have been told, mostly by libertarians, that capitalism should be amoral. This is a stupid assertion that they never try to back. When I point out that such a stand actually causes capitalism to be immoral, using the above examples (all caused by a desire to maximize profit) I never get an answer. Pharmaceutical companies are not in the biz to better mankind. If they were, more people would be able to afford the medicine that they need. They exist to make money, the more money the better.

I am a believer in the precautionary principle. All this means is that I believe that before we put dangerous substances in something as common as vaccines, we should test, test, then test some more. Not one drop goes in till we are as sure as is scientifically possible that inclusion will not have a negative impact. The problem with this is that it cost money, it has a negative impact on profits. So far too often a company will say "We have already invested so much dough in this and that, if we don't use it we lose money. So what the hell".

Here is the real bottom line folks. For better than ten years we injected a substance known to be dangerous in and of itself, in to 30,000,000 infants. Forget everything else, this is a disaster just waiting to happen. The real question in all this is "What the fuck were they thinking?"