In These Times Side Effects can run in families
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What’s the Point?
Recent Prescription Drug TV Ads
Have you noticed the ever-increasing number of prescription drug television ads recently? They are heavy on emotion, and light on facts. The side effects are trivialized.
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Here is a summary list of DTC (Direct-To-Consumer) prescription drug TV ads, along with their published adverse side effects. Your doctor does NOT know everything. Your doctor simply repeats what the pharmaceutical companies’ literature says. MOST doctors ARE PAID to push pharmaceutical drugs. Kiddie Prozac Docs Took Millions From Drug Makers
EVERY SINGLE DRUG LISTED ABOVE HAS SIDE EFFECTS THAT CAN BE FAR WORSE THAN THE CONDITION BEING TREATED!
Unacceptable
Side Effects
Many of these drugs have unacceptable side effects – half the commercial time is used to tell you what the problems are, so you can’t complain later. After all, they warned you, right? WRONG! You may need to seek a personal injury lawyer, if you have suffered a personal medical injury, resulting from a prescription drug, such as vioxx.
One of Karel’s favorite Books
In These Times
Causecast
The FDA, CDC, Drug
Companies Deliberately
Poison & Cause
Brain Damage
The FDA, CDC, US Govt.,
Drug Companies &
World Health Organization
as
well as
thousands upon thousands
of doctors and nurses and
many others are
deliberately
poisoning and harming
our children and the
worlds children, causing
brain damage,
mental retardation,
learning disabilities,
autism and much more!!!!
This is no a hoax or
alarmist ravings, this is sadly
all too real!
Hello everyone -
I apologize, I know
the following is very long
and might be hard to
read.
But this is information
you MUST take the time
to read if you care at
all about your
children and grandchildren
or as yet to be unborn children.
This a very
, very, serious issue
and may affect ten’s of
millions of children around
the world and many
more millions as yet
unborn children.
This must be stopped
and no longer allowed!
This is so terrible,
so vicious, and one of
the greatest abuses and
examples of greed
overshadowing
the welfare of people
and especially children
I have ever seen or heard
of. This is not really
news to me,
I have long been involved
in campaigns to expose
and deal with this
issue, but the magnitude
and extent
of this has me in shock
to discover what has long
been suspected is not
only true but far exceeds
anything
in scope that we could
have even imagined!
I have been in, shock,
tears and anger over
this all day, I can’t even
describe it.
Angrier over this than
virtually anything else
I have ever been angry
about, ever. But even
more than angry, my
heart is breaking
with the thought of just
how many lives, millions
upon millions of
lives and possibly millions
of more to come, that
have been
destroyed, ruined,
devastated and affected
by this incredibly
unbelievable conspiracy
and deliberate poisoning
of our
and the worlds children!
This must be stopped NOW!
So, I beg you with
all my heart to please
read this, for the sake of
your children
and the children of the world.
I have spent the better part
of today verifying and
confirming with my
own sources the validity
of this article
and material within this
article. I am saddened
beyond all description
to say it is all unfortunately
true, all too sadly true.
It also saddens me to have
to share this information,
but it is
essential that I do,
our children’s welfare
and future
depends on it,… if you
care at all about the
future of either your
own children, or the
future children in this
world, for
their futures and rights
to a productive and
healthy life, you will
take the time to read
this. My youngest child is
one of these poor victimized
children, I pray with all
my heart, that
your’s is not and never
will be, but it’s up to you.
Thank you.
RJ
Deadly Immunity
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.
_____________________________________________________________
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
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originator of this article nor is Nvision Arts Media endorsed or
sponsored by the originator.)
Editors note: If you are as alarmed, heart broken, angry and as
concerned about what you just read as I am, and as you should be,…
You know what to do.
SPEAK OUT! HELP STOP THIS NOW! DO NOT ALLOW EVEN ONE MORE CHILD OR
FAMILY TO SUFFER THE TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES OF THIS
REPREHENSIBLE POLICY OF DECEIT & GREED! Write & contact your elected
representatives and let them know your concern, your outrage, and
demand this be
investigated, stopped and those responsible be brought to account!
Millions of lives are depending on you, the lives of your children and
grandchildren and the world’s
children are depending on you. Act now! Please!
RJ Hughes – Owner & Publisher
Nvision Arts Media & Publishing Group.
