The Great American Autism Debate

Now Public Contributor E. Lizardo
September 4, 2008 2:25 PM EDT

OPINION:

Good news and bad news about world's autism epidemic.

First the good news.

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.

Source: cnn.com

And Now the Bad News
I have been following the autism story for some time now, since autism became an issue in the life of an acquaintance. What I learned about the autism epidemic was very suprising.

And, as background to the current news article cited above, I provide the following citation from an article which ran a few years ago in the Rolling Stone® Magazine.

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.

Source: rollingstone.com

Of course one sees here the same old story of corporate disregard of people in their blind pursuit of profits. A tired old story if ever there was one, certainly.

America Exports the Autism Epidemic ?
And from the website of Josef Hasslberger, an independent health issues researcher, we have some indications of the link between Chinese autism and American vaccines.

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."

Source: communicationagents.com

And more here, from further down the same page.

“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.  

Source: communicationagents.com

Conclusion
What began with a hopeful announcement that we have nothing to fear from measles vaccines perforating the bowels of young children and thereby causing autism has ended up as yet another indictment of corporate manhandling of its customers.

Of course, anyone familiar with my stance on the 'heartless corporate machine,' which, in my view is driven not by any regard whatever for bringing beneifit to anything but its own bottom line, it will come as no suprise to hear my opinion that news releases such as the the one today from CNN® cited above, serve only to muddy the waters by confusing the issue, adding only more and more smoke and mirrors to the already deeply obfuscated debate on autism.

And why? Why would the pharmaceutical industry go to such lengths to keep marketing vaccines to children which are almost certainly very harmful to the individual child, harmful to the child's family and community, and to the child's nation and harmful to the world at large ?

The answer is, "I have absolutely no idea! But it sure looks like that's exactly what's happening!!"

A Personal Aside
This author can relate to his gentle reader the following from his own experience - referring to the acquaintance mentioned above, someone who I have know quite a long time, and it was her young child who seemed to be developing, for lack of a better term, 'abnormally.'

This acquaintance also happens to be a special educator of handicapped children. Upon looking further into the childhood-autism-childhood-vaccination link pointed out by the citations above, this acquaintance firmly decided to immediately opt her young daughter out of all further vaccinations.

Now, about 18 months later her child is clearly doing very much better, developing quite normally in a social sense, physically very well, and has now even begun finally to talk.

I realize this is only a single case, and certainly no basis for any kind of general conclusions, but, as far as a one-out-of-one average goes, I think my acquaintance is batting a thousand ...