|
 Deadly
Immunity: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Investigates the Government
Cover-up of a Mercury/Autism Scandal
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Rolling Stone Magazine & Salon
Magazine, June 16, 2005
For more articles like this
visit
https://www.bridges4kids.org.
In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health
officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood
conference center in Norcross, Georgia. 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 fifty-two 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 adviser 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 eleven-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. The measure was repealed by Congress
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 pre-eminent 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 twenty-five 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 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?" 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 twenty 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 twenty-two
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, ten 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 twenty-four hours of birth, and two-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 six-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 twenty-two 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 six 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 advisers, told me, "I think if we really have
an influenza pandemic -- and certainly we will in the next
twenty 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 advisers 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,
Pennsylvania, 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
thirty-two 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.
back to the top ~
back to Breaking News
~ back to
What's New
|
