Deadly Immunity -- by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

[Guest guest]

This is outside normal posting parameters, here, but -- of Sufficient

Importance (i believe) to *all* parents & grandparents (of young

children receiving vaccines) that it needs to be as widely

disseminated as possible.

 

~~wynn

 

^^^^^^

 

DEADLY IMMUNITY

 

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.

 

- - - - - - - - - - - -

 

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 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, 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.

 

- - - - - - - - - - - -

 

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."

[Guest guest]

Scary...

 

Here is a follow up reading material on FDA website.

 

Gives a couple of tables regarding which vaccines contain the toxic

chemical (Thimerosal). Might be of some use for the parents.

 

http://www.fda.gov/cber/vaccine/thimerosal.htm

[Guest guest]

This information has been out there for five years. My daughter who is 6 year

old now had some of her vaccines delayed when she was less than a year old

because of concerns over thimerosal. This is definitely not new news and was

definitely known to doctors in 2000.

 

-------------- Original message --------------

This is outside normal posting parameters, here, but -- of Sufficient

Importance (i believe) to *all* parents & grandparents (of young

children receiving vaccines) that it needs to be as widely

disseminated as possible.