The Great American Autism Debate

Study: No link between measles vaccine and autism
updated 11:32 p.m. EDT, Wed September 3, 2008

(CNN) -- The Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine causes neither autism nor gastrointestinal disorders, a study reported Wednesday, disputing a theory that has persisted for a decade.

The theory was created in 1998, when British researcher Andrew Wakefield published studies that suggested the measles vaccine caused gastrointestinal problems and that those GI problems led to autism.W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University in New York, who co-authored the most recent study, said Wakefield theorized that the virus used in the vaccine grew in the intestinal tract, leading to inflammation that made the bowel porous. That allowed material to seep from the bowel into the blood, Wakefield's theory surmised, affecting the nervous system and causing autism.

GMC Challenged On MMR Inquiry Chief's Vaccine Firm Links
London, England & Scotland/29 May 2007/JWock/   The Chairman of the General Medical Council's inquiry into MMR vaccine doctor Andrew Wakefield, Professor Dennis McDevitt, is being challenged over undisclosed personal interests.  On 11th July this year an unprecedented 14 week GMC hearing chaired by Professor McDevitt was due to commence into charges against Dr Andrew Wakefield of the Royal Free Hospital relating to the controversial vaccine.  However, previously secret government minutes reveal Professor McDevitt was himself a member of a 1988 government safety panel  which approved Pluserix MMR as safe for vaccine manufacturer Smith Kline & French Laboratories (see first .pdf attached).  Pluserix MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine was introduced in 1988 but the Government was forced to withdraw it in November 1992 after large numbers children suffered suspected adverse vaccine reactions.

This development follows the recent discovery that High Court Judge Sir Nigel Davis, who in a secret hearing rejected the MMR childrens' appeals against withdrawal of legal (see second .pdf attached), failed to disclose his brother was main board director of the MMR vaccine manufacturer's parent company GlaxoSmithKline (more below).

The GMC hearing against Dr Wakefield relates to events in 1998, seven years after legal investigations into the MMR childrens' ailments first started.  Dr Wakefield angered MMR vaccination proponents and created a furore in 1998, when he suggested offering single vaccines alongside MMR - albeit that is current official Conservative party policy.

Nearly 2000 children alleged to be suffering from autism, deafness, bowel disorders and other serious injuries caused by the vaccine filed legal claims against manufacturer Smith Kline & French Laboratories Ltd.  Investigations into the claims started in 1991 when applications for legal aid were first being filed.  The vaccine was given to 85% of MMR vaccinated children between 1988 and 1992.  Labour MP Jack Ashley said at the time of the 1992 withdrawal that correspondence with Minister Virginia Bottomley MP confirmed government knew of the problems in March 1991, some 18 months earlier.

Deadly Immunity
Jun 20, 2005 12:00 AM

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Georgia. 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 fifty-two 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.

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 that "perhaps this study should not have been done at all." He added that "the research results have to be handled," warning that the study "will be taken by others and will be used in other ways beyond the control of this group."

[T]he 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.

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. The measure was repealed by Congress 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.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.

Deadly Immunity: Exporting The Autism Epidemic
June 19, 2005

When it comes to thimerosal science is now totally against the medical elite and the pharmaceutical companies as well as your local friendly doctor.  But with their money and power the pharmaceutical companies have maintained a long list of medical officials who sustain a medical horror that has neurologically damaged millions of children. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., speaking on national radio this week on the Imus show,[i] expressed this graphically, indicating those medical officials, when they speak about thimerosal in vaccines, use “high sounding language, but under questioning they fall apart because the science is so clear that thimerosal is deadly. The scientific evidence is now so overwhelming (that thimerosal is toxic) that it’s almost bizarre the way medical officials defend its safety. They have no defense and they know it. It’s an institutional bureaucratic cover-up.” On the  Scarborough Country show Kennedy went on to say, "One in every 166 children has autism. Plus one in six have other kinds of learning disorders, other kinds of neurological disorders, speech delay, language disorders, ADD, hyperactivity, that all seem to be connected to autism -- to Thimerosal.  There are literally hundreds and hundreds of studies that connect Thimerosal to these disastrous neurological disorders."

“The worst thing is we are now shipping it abroad. They are giving this to kids all over the third world. In China autism was unknown five years ago. In 1999 they started giving them American vaccines containing thimerosal. Our companies are over there administering these to the Chinese children there and now there are 1.8 million cases of autism. Autism is exploding; we are exporting this stuff all over the third world. Autism is exploding in Argentina, Nigeria, in India.”

“What is going to happen when our enemies around the world, America’s enemies, realize that the United States most heralded foreign policy, which is to vaccinate the children of the world, one of the best things we do, that we are actually using that policy to poison the brains of developing world children. This is a disaster.”

Imus, who interviewed Kennedy said, “I have had the most powerful people in the media tell me that its hopeless to go up against the pharmaceutical lobby.” The major news networks are in bed with pharmaceutical money abandoning their major responsibilities to inform and protect the public. The handwriting is on the wall for doctors and government officials around the world, who continue on with what can only be described as a brutal ignorance about the thimerosal issue. Meanwhile the mainstream press, for fear of losing advertising money, would see a generation poisoned rather than do their jobs.