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 governments 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 nations preeminent 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 25 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 11 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 worlds authorities on mercury toxicity, then where are all the 20-year-old autistics? Other researchers point out that Americans are exposed to a greater cumulative 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. Its 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 childrens vaccines 20 years ago, and Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since followed suit.
You couldnt even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe, says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky. 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 22 patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected a fact Lilly didnt bother to report in its study declaring thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims about thimerosals 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 In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lillys 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 and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants. In 1977, 10 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 24 hours of birth, and 2-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 Mercks vaccine programs, warned the company that 6-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 Hillemans 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 22 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 didnt 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 6 months were being injected with levels of ethylmercury 187 times greater than the EPAs 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 dont require a preservative. Dr. Paul Offit, one of CDCs top vaccine advisors, told me, I think if we really have an influenza pandemic and certainly we will in the next 20 years, because we always do theres no way on Gods 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 committees 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 advisors 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 scientists 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. Its 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. Its just not the way it works.
Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances. Like Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of childrens health, proud of their with pharmaceutical companies, immune to the seductions of personal profit, besieged by irrational activists whose anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering childrens health. They are often resentful of questioning. 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. 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, Americas Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research.

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