Congressional Report on a Vaccine Mercury-Autism Link Ignored for 6 Years

"I have no doubt whatever that vaccination is an unscientific abomination and should be made a criminal practice." G. Bernard Shaw

Southern reckoner!! Where are you? Don't take that shot! It's been 15 days and you haven't been around. Did they get you with the jab?

Full article
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16061


Condensed version of article below

It is a sorry state of affairs when a Congressional committee is forced to undertake a more thorough, concise review of the scientific literature related to a national health crisis, i.e., thimerosal as a causative factor behind the epidemic scourge of neurological and developmental disorders in America’s children, because our Federal health agencies prefer to not upset their clients (or masters) in the pharmaceutical industrial complex. But what is even more disturbing is that after six years since the Committee’s report, nothing has fundamentally changed. Instead, the CDC, FDA and HHS continue their rogue campaigns to spread unfounded medical propaganda and have done next to nothing, aside from issuing promises and marginalizing opposing medical views, to fund and launch the independent research necessary to determine once and for all vaccine safety in young children, developing fetuses and pregnant mothers. And as we wait for medical sanity to descend upon our government agencies, more and more children are injured from the increasing number of scheduled vaccinations, while the burden of health costs continue to mount on the shoulders of parents with neurologically and physically damaged children.

Therefore reviewing some of the Committee’s major findings is warranted to bring them up to date with recent information showing the thimerosal-autism link and to provide evidence for the CDC’s, FDA’s and HHS’s ongoing medical denialism about vaccine safety and their laxity in preserving and addressing public health.....

-Committee Finding 1: “Mercury is hazardous to humans. Its use in medicinal products is undesirable, unnecessary and should be minimized or eliminated entirely.”

-Committee Finding 2: “To date, studies conducted or funded by the CDC that purportedly dispute any correlation between autism and vaccine injury have been of poor design, under-powered, and fatally flawed. The CDC’s rush to support and promote such research is reflective of a philosophical conflict in looking fairly at emerging theories and clinical data related to adverse reactions from vaccinations.”

The Committee also reports, “Upon thorough review of the scientific literature and internal documents from government and industry, the Committee did in fact find evidence that thimerosal posed a risk. The possible risk for harm from either low dose chronic or one time high level (bolus dose) exposure to thimerosal is not ‘theoretical,’ but very real and documented in the medical literature.”

Furthermore, the report continues,

“Of additional concern has been the CDC’s bias against theories regarding vaccine-induced autism. Rather than aggressively working to replicate clinical findings with laboratory data that showed a relationship between vaccines and autism... the CDC funded researchers who also worked for vaccine manufacturers to conduct population-based epidemiological studies to look at the possible correlation between vaccine injury and a subset of the population that might be injured. The CDC to date has relied too heavily on epidemiological findings. While epidemiological studies are important, they are not a substitute for focused, clinical research.”

-Committee Finding 3: “Manufacturers of vaccines and thimerosal have never conducted adequate testing on the safety of thimerosal. The FDA has never required manufacturers to conduct adequate safety testing on thimerosal and ethylmercury compounds.”

For many decades, the FDA has known about the neurotoxic effects of thimersosal. A review of internal documents from Eli Lilly, the original inventor of ethylmercury in the 1920s, reveals that only one study has ever been performed to investigate thimerosal’s safety in humans and it was “woefully inadequate.” During the actual Committee hearings, Rep. Burton remarked, “You mean to tell me since 1929 we’ve been using thimerosal and the only test you know of is the one that was done in 1929, and every one of those people got meningitis and died?”[5]

The Committee’s report states,

“It appears that our Federal regulatory framework (the FDA and its predecessor organizations) failed to require manufacturers to prove thimerosal was safe. They failed to require industry to conduct adequate testing to determine how thimerosal is metabolized. The FDA failed to require that industry conduct studies to determine the maximum safe exposure level of thimerosal. These basic issues should have been proven prior to the introduction of thimerosal into the marketplace, but more than 70 years after its introduction, these issues have still not been adequately addressed... It is clear that the guiding principal for FDA policymakers has been to avoid shaking the public’s confidence in the safety of vaccines. For this reason, many FDA officials have stubbornly denied that thimerosal may cause adverse reactions... given the serious concerns about the safety of thimerosal, the FDA should have acted years earlier to remove this preservative from vaccines and other medications.”

-Committee Finding 4: “At the same time that the incidence of autism was growing, the number of childhood vaccines containing thimerosal was growing, increasing the amount of ethylmercury to which infants were exposed threefold... The FDA and CDC failed in their duty to be vigilant as new vaccines containing thimerosal were approved and added to the immunization schedule.”

The Commission report states, “There was tremendous reluctance on the part of some officials that a mistake had been made in allowing ethylmercury to be used in vaccines.” The FDA damns itself in a 1999 email by a former FDA official, Dr. Peter Patriarca, then Director of the FDA’s Division of Viral Products, who opines that hastening the removal of thimerosal from vaccines would “raise questions about the FDA being ‘asleep at the switch’ for decades by allowing a potentially hazardous compound to remain in many childhood vaccines, and not forcing manufacturers to exclude it from new products.”

-Committee Finding 5: “A growing number of scientists and researchers believe that a relationship between the increase in neurodevelopmental disorders of autism... and the increased use of thimerosal in vaccines is plausible and deserves more scrutiny.”

In fact, the CDC in June 2000 discovered “a statistically significant positive correlation between the cumulative exposure” of thimerosal and ASD symptoms.

-Committee Finding 6: “The CDC’s failure to state a preference for thimerosal-free vaccines in 2000 and again 2001 was an abdication of their responsibility.”

-Committee Finding 7: “Thimerosal should be removed from these vaccines. No amount of mercury is appropriate in any childhood vaccine.”

-Committee Recommendations: There were two important recommendations made by Rep. Dan Burton’s Committee that Americans should demand from our government and Federal health agencies. First is the recommendation that “studies be conducted that pool the results of independent research that has been done thus far, and a comprehensive approach should be developed to rid humans, animals and the environment from this dangerous toxin [ethyl- and methylmercury].”

The second urgent recommendation is that Congress “enact legislation that prohibits federal funds from being used to provide products or pharmaceuticals that contain mercury, methylmercury or ethylmercury unless no reasonable alternative is available.” Tweet