[escepticos] Thimerasol

[Pedro J HernÃndez GonzÃlez <pedroj.hernandezgonzalez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Salon/Rolling Stone Article re. Thimerasol 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 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 11 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 six months were being injected with a
total of 187 micrograms of ethylmercury -- a level 40 percent 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. Under the expanded schedule of
vaccinations, multiple shots were often administered on a single day: At two
months, when the infant brain is still at a critical stage of development,
children routinely received three innoculations that delivered 99 times the
approved limit of mercury.

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 "had financial ties to the pharmaceutical
companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine."

Offit, who shares a patent on one of the vaccines, acknowledged to me that
he "would make money" if his vote 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 and parents, the Institute of Medicine convened
another panel to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety
Datalink data-sharing program. In February, the new panel, composed of
different scientists, criticized the way the VSD had been used to study
vaccine safety, 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," state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a
Republican who oversaw the investigation, told the magazine Byronchild
earlier this year. "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.

About the writer
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."