I first heard of this link back in 2001 on WOR 710 AM, a talk radio station that plays host to mostly conservative and financial radio hosts. But there is a really in-depth article in this month’s Rolling Stone, written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that lays out the link between a mercury-based (yes, mercury) preservative used in vaccines called thimerosal and developmental brain disorders such as autism, and the huge cover-up of CDC study data involving this link. “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.”
Why would a government agency like the CDC hide its study data from the public? Perhaps because after studying the medical records of over 100,000 children, a certain epidemiologist noticed an alarming trend in the increase of neurological disorders when the number of vaccines containing thimerosal were increased. “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.” A fifteen-fold increase in nine years due to three extra vaccines!
To be fair, the need for preservatives in vaccines is definitely present. Third world countries simply don’t have the resources to handle non-preserved vaccines, and neither do some American hospitals. But is autism in one out of 166 children really the price that we want to pay for increased availability to vaccination? And it seems that the more vaccines that a child receives with thimerosol, the more likely it is that that child will develop some sort of neurological disorder. Add to this the fact that children born after 1989 receive twice the infant vaccinations that a baby born before 1989 did, and you have some scary implications.
Sadly, these implications are a reality; 40,000 new cases of autism are diagnosed every year. I volunteered a few summers ago at a camp for autistic children run by The Eden Institute, and it’s a horrible thing to witness a child (or anyone) go through. It’s not like “Rain Man;” the children don’t have special powers. Some can be violent, some never speak, most will never be able to live on their own.
What is most disheartening about the thimerosol issue is the many cover-ups that have been done regarding it, most because of conflict of interest in CDC scientists. I’m going to quote the article at length here, because you need to read all of this:
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.”
Just sick. Fucking sick.
