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Deadly Immunity
This is why he was not allowed to speak to a live TV audience.

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Salon.com

Thursday 16 June 2005

A Salon/Rolling Stone joint investigation.
When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have
caused autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal
the data - and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their
role in the epidemic.


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.

"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 flatly
that the study "should not have been done at all" and warned that the
results "will be taken by others and will be used in ways beyond the
control of this group. The research results have to be handled."

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 11-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. Congress repealed the measure 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 Andy Olsen, a legislative assistant 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
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 world's
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 "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 20 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 22 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, 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 Merck's 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
Hilleman's 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 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. 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 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 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 - 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
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 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, parents and a few of its own panel
members, the Institute of Medicine reluctantly convened a second panel
to review the findings of the first. In February, the new panel,
composed of different scientists, criticized the earlier panel for its
lack of transparency 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, Penn., 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 32
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.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is senior attorney for the Natural Resources
Defense Council, chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper and
president of Waterkeeper Alliance. He is the co-author of The
Riverkeepers.
-------

On Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:55:21 -0400,

Deadly Immunity
This is why he was not allowed to speak to a live TV audience.

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Salon.com

Thursday 16 June 2005

A Salon/Rolling Stone joint investigation.
When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have
caused autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal
the data - and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their
role in the epidemic.

RFK Jr. continues his run of being wrong. There have been repeated
large studies and no link has been found between autism and
thimerosol.