source: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CRECB-2005-pt10/html/CRECB-2005-pt10-Pg13935-3.htm
All of my colleagues ought to read this and realize that we have had
a collaboration between health officials in our government and the
pharmaceutical industry to protect themselves from class action
lawsuits at the expense of these young kids and families who have been
damaged by neurological disorders, including autism.
So I submit to my colleagues who may be in their offices or here
tonight, please read this article. It is extremely important. I do not want to
hurt the pharmaceutical industry. I would like to protect them from
class action lawsuits; but at the same time, we need to change that
Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund to take care of these kids that have
been damaged and help their families.
Deadly Immunity
(By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.)
June 16, 2005.–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 fifteen fold, 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 Pharmacy 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 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?”
