|
|
DISCLAIMER – The Autism Resource Foundation provides general information to the autism community. The information comes from a variety of sources, and the Autism Resource Foundation does not independently verify any of it, nor does it necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of the Autism Resource Foundation. Nothing on this website should be construed as medical advice. Always consult your doctor regarding the needs of your family.
Excerpt from Autism Facts.com
2002
A research study, "A Pilot Scale of Evaluation of Removal of Mercury From Pharmaceutical Wastewater Using Granular Activated Carbon" states:
Walter S. Schumm recommended in "psychological Reports":
The last of Merck's Hep B vaccines that contain Thimerosal expire during this year. However, other Thimerosal-containing vaccines are still sitting on the shelves of doctor offices and are being used that do not expire until 2003.
The National Institutes of Health estimated the rate of autism as 1 in 250 children in the United States and recognized it as the fastest growing disability in the United States. They invested just $56 million toward autism research compared to $688 Million on diabetes research and over $2.2 Billion on HIV/AIDS research.
The CDC invested $11.3 Million on autism, while spending $62 Million on diabetes, and $932 Million on HIV/AIDS.
Dr. Vijendra Singh found that autistic children had antibodies believed to be involved in autoimmune diseases.
Dr. Andrew Wakefield and coworkers published a second paper examining the relationship between the measles virus and autism. They tested intestinal biopsy samples for the presence of the measles virus from children with and without autism. Measles was present in 75 of 90 children with autism but only 5 of the 70 control patients who did not have autism.
Criticisms included that children should be matched for a length of time since inoculation, that it should be determined if the measles virus is natural or vaccine strain, and that the methods used were highly sensitive to detecting the virus and are, therefore, at risk of a false positive result. However, the clear differences in autistic children compared to non-autistic children with this measles detection in the intestines were not addressed.
Dr. Brent Taylor published another paper examining the MMR and "new variant autism" as described by Wakefield's claim that autism is associated with inflammation of the small intestine. Children diagnosed with autism between 1979 and 1988 were examined and they compared the number of children with autism and intestinal symptoms before 1988 and after 1988 and found no difference. They did not examine the children for the measles in the intestines but only for intestinal symptoms that were reported. Still, they concluded this was evidence that the MMR vaccine was not associated with autism.
Dr. Ferret states in a study that inorganic mercury is known to induce membrane and DNA damage.
The CDC recommended that at risk pregnant women receive the Prevnar, Hepatitis B and Hepatitis A vaccines.
The Hepatitis A vaccine is added to the schedule for all children aged 2 to 18 years.
Prevnar is added to the schedule for all children aged 2 through 18 years.
For the first time ever, the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommends that pregnant women in their second or third trimester and infants between 6 months and 24 months to get a flu vaccine. All flu shots still contain full dose Thimerosal with only one manufacturer, Evans, producing a flu vaccine with reduced Thimerosal.
The CDC states no preference for infants, children or pregnant women to receive mercury free vaccines. The vaccines are not added to the schedules but there is a major push across the United States to vaccinate these groups. The flu shot contains more Thimerosal in one shot being given to pregnant women, 25 mcgs., than Rho-GAM contained in 2 shots combined, at 10.5 mcgs. each, that was given to Rh-Negative women during the 1990's.
Infants are to receive the vaccine twice with the first shot, 4 weeks apart from each other. It is also to be given to all children every year with the first dose to be given twice at 4 weeks apart if the child is less than 8 years old.
The CDC's Thimerosal study to determine if Thimerosal-containing vaccines caused autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders was not completed and published for another two years, yet they made this recommendation anyway.
Children in the United States continue to receive Thimerosal-containing vaccines that are stockiled in physician's offices.
Thimerosal-containing vaccines continue to be distributed by the United States through the World Health Organization to other countries. These vaccines have never been required or requested to have mercury removed and all still contain full dose Thimerosal.
February 2002
Dr. Thomas Clarkson with the Department of Environmental Medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine in New York published a paper called, "The Three Modern Faces of Mercury" in "Environmental Health Perspectives." The paper stated that the EPA's reference dose of 0.1 microgram of methylmercury per day would mean that:
Dr. Clarkson's statement referring to the amount of mercury contained in a can of tuna fish, as being equal to or exceeding the safe limit of mercury exposure, was being compared to an adult's bodyweight.
February 13, 2002
Republican Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana introduced Bill H.R. 3741, the"National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program Improvement Act of 2002." He had 32 co-sponsors to this Bill. The bill extended the Statute of Limitations to 6 years after the date of injury and increased the level of compensation from $250,000 to $300,000. It allowed for family counseling to be reimbursed and expenses of establishing guardianships such as attorney fees, a trust fund and other costs. It also eliminated mandatory meeting schedules and allowed for attorney fees if the claim had a reasonable basis.
This bill never made it to the floor for a vote.
February 14, 2002
President Bush announces that mercury emissions from power plants would be reduced by 69% under his Clear Skies Initiative.
March, 2002
A whistle blower comes forward to lawyers handing them documents from Eli Lilly & Company with the study never disclosed to the FDA of Dr. Smithburn's, which injected 22 patients dying of meningitis with Thimerosal. The patients all died of the disease, and the doctor reported that he saw no ill effects from the Thimerosal before their deaths. The deaths from the patients ranged from the day after injection to 2 weeks later. Lilly had reported these findings as proof that Thimerosal was safe. This study had not been turned over to the lawyers during the discovery as required by law.
March 21, 2002
Senator Bill Frist, R of Tennessee, introduced S. 2053 "The Improved Vaccine Affordability Act". This Bill seriously altered the way the National Vaccine Compensation Program would have worked. It would take away public comment and input about the Vaccine Injury Table, attempted to stop litigation by families of children with autism, put caps on compensation allowed, eliminated the legal theory that Thimerosal is a contaminant, gave manufacturers rights to remove claims that don't go through the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program first, and created new causes to dismiss such cases by any contributing factor such as genetics which would thereby dismiss all autism cases. It did not provide for attorney fees unless the child wins, which further limits a parent's ability to fight the unlimited government and vaccine manufacturer lawyers and their resources. The Bill was shot down in the senate.
April 18, 2002
The Autism Society of America President, Lee Grossman, testified to Congress about the strongly held belief of many parents that vaccines caused their child's autism and urged everyone to stand together to get this question answered immediately.
Melinda Wharton, Director of the Epidemiology and Surveillance Division of the CDC's National Immunization Program testified as well. Her response to a question about mercury in vaccines:
(The FDA established "trace amounts" to be less than 1 microgram of Thimerosal. This is far lower than the amount of Thimerosal that was contained in vaccines.)
The CDC planned to cut autism research spending by $1.1 Million to $10.2 Million.
May 2002
Dr. Jane Seigel of the CDC's Vaccine Advisory Committee gave an interview to a reporter. She stated there was no link between autism and vaccines containing Thimerosal. The reporter showed the 1999 Lilly package insert to Seigel:
Dr. Seigel said she could not comment without further clarification of it. She found the insert to be "uninterpretable".
The Congressional Autism Caucus now had 174 members from 43 states in a bipartisan effort to call attention to autism and to improve research, education and support services.
June, 2002
Chairman Burton expressed some of his concerns during a Congressional hearing:
June 24, 2002
Republican Dick Armey of Texas, then majority leader in the Senate, introduced the "Homeland Security Bill." Provisions for this bill were, literally, slipped in at the last minute by Republican Bill Frist. The Rider is known as the "Eli Lilly Protection Act". The day after Bill Frist slipped the provisions into the Bill, Eli Lilly contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism.
Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine, and Lincoln Chaffe of Rhode Island stopped the vote as it was happening. They threatened to side with Democrats who were refusing to vote for the Bill as long as the provisions were in there. They said they would vote the other way unless they received promises from Republican Senator Trent Lott and Congressmen Republicans Tom Delay and Dennis Hastert that the provisions would be removed in Congress. The three men only had 15 minutes to decide and all 3 promised.
Later, Senator Lott said that he had made a promise to remove the provisions but Congressman Tom Delay denied making any promise.
The Bill was, indeed, shot down in Congress by both sides and Congress repealed the provisions in 2003.
Dick Armey came forth and said he was behind the provisions in the Homeland Security Bill protecting Eli Lilly. He said, "They asked me to do it at the White House."
The White House has close ties to Eli Lilly. The first President Bush sat on the Eli Lilly Board in the late 1970's. The current President Bush's White House Budget Director at the time, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., was a former Vice President at Eli Lilly. Sidney Taurel, who was appointed by President Bush to serve on a presidential council that will advise the president on domestic security, is also Eli Lilly's CEO. President Bush received $891,208 in political contributions from the drug industry.
Bill Frist said that the provisions came from a Bill he was sponsoring that was aimed at making more companies make vaccines.
July 2002
Julie Gerberding replaces Jeffery Koplan and becomes the CDC Director and the Administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
July 26, 2002
Republican Congressman James Greenwood introduced Bill H.R. 5282, "Improved Vaccine Affordability Act", co-sponsored by Democrat Edolphus Towns of New York. The Bill extends grants to states for flu shots, requiring the Secretary of Health and Human Services to provide a program to insure immunizations are routinely offered to adults and children and to collect data on adverse impacts with vaccines. It also directed the Secretary to give out information about meningitis, and Hepatitis A & B. It also seriously altered the way in which the Vaccine Compensation Program would now work.
Republican Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee had introduced a companion Bill, S. 2053, to the "Improved Vaccine Affordability Act", further limiting the Vaccine Compensation Act. It amended the program by cutting the time in half from 180 days to 90, allowing public comment when the the Vaccine Injury Table is proposed. It eliminated the Secretary of Health and Human Services' obligation to hold a public meeting on the issue, thereby limiting the amount of potential petitioners. He then rewrote the Bill again to cut the time allowed for public input even further to 60 days.
The Bill removed the possibility of civil suits seeking medical monitoring or other non-monetary rewards. This would ensure that anyone with an injury must go through the Compensation Program rather than privately sue. He further amended the Bill to make sure that whether an injury was past or present, a person must go through the program, in an attempt to stop all lawsuits filed against the vaccine manufacturers.
It eliminated petitions by parents, guardians and spouses for compensation claiming a loss of consortium, society, companionships or services, loss of earnings, medical and other expenses and emotional distress. This would eliminate almost all autism lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.
It also did not provide for attorney fees unless the child wins, further limiting the parents' ability to fight the unlimited government and vaccine manufacturer lawyers and their resources.
The Bill forced parents to wait until after the child went through the program, then had 60 days after judgment to make a claim. However, if a child won and accepts the reward, parents are blocked from filing suit. The cap on winnings was $250,000 and it also capped the amount the program could pay ut per year in total. It eliminated the legal theory that Thimerosal is a contaminant.
Further, it created a new cause for injury "unrelated" to the vaccine so that if a child has a genetic abnormality, toxin, infection, trauma or anything else unrelated, the claim denies compensation in the program. This would dismiss all autism lawsuits.
This Bill was shot down in the Senate.
October 2002
By this time, more than 875 families had filed petitions for compensation under the Federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), alleging that a vaccine or a series of vaccines caused their child's autism. The Chief Special Master laid out a special two-part procedure for resolving these claims. A general causation inquiry known as the "Omnibus Autism Proceedings" would be conducted to determine if vaccines can cause autism disorders, and if so under what circumstances. It would be conducted over 2 years with a ruling on general causation issued by July of 2004. The determination of the ruling would then be applied to individual cases.
November 2002
A study on autism cases in California determined that the number of autistic individuals in that state has nearly tripled, increasing by 273%. The study stated that the increase was real, and could not be explained by changes in diagnostic criteria or better diagnosis. The main author of the study, Dr. Robert Byrd, said:
The 2002 report confirmed a 210 percent increase in the number of new children professionally diagnosed with the most severe cases of autism entering the developmental services system between 2001 and 2002. The system added 3,577 new cases in 2002.
The figures reported in California do not include persons with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), PDD-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS), Asperger's Syndrome, or any of the other milder autism spectrum disorders. The California data reflect only those children who have received a professional diagnosis of level one, DSM IV autism - the most severe form of autism.
Dr. Pichichero from the University of Rochester published a study in the "Lancet", Great Britain's premiere medical journal, called, "Mercury Concentrations and Metabolism in Infants Receiving Vaccines Containing Thimerosal: A Descriptive Study." The authors studied 40 children who were given vaccines containing Thimerosal, and 21 children who were given a vaccine without Thimerosal. Samples of blood, stools and urine were obtained from 3 to 28 days after vaccination to determine how much mercury remained in the blood and how much was expelled in the urine and in stools.
The authors found low levels of mercury in the blood of infants exposed to Thimerosal, and high levels of mercury in their stools, indicating to them that ethylmercury has a shorter half life than methylmercury, and that most of the mercury was excreted through the gastrointestinal tract. The study stated that administration of vaccines containing Thimerosal did not seem to raise blood concentrations of mercury above assumed safe values in infants.
Dr. Pichichero is a pediatric immunologist and is not a toxicologist by training. He had written several studies involving vaccines and was funded by the pharmaceutical companies, but he had never conducted a previous study into safety of heavy metals or other toxic substances. The University of Rochester also helped develop the Hib vaccine, one of the Thimerosal-containing vaccines added to the Recommended Childhood Vaccine Schedule in 1991 for all children.
Internal CDC documents indicate they contracted with Dr. Pichichero at the University of Rochester to undertake a study similar to Dr. Stajich who published a study in the "Journal of Pediatrics" in May of 2000. The study showed that post-vaccination mercury levels were significantly higher in preterm infants compared to term infants who received their Hep B vaccine at birth.
The funding was channeled through the National Institutes of Health. The CDC, FDA, IOM, AAP and others have since continually referred to this study to prove that Thimerosal is not toxic in amounts found in childhood vaccines.
Skeptics of a vaccine-autism connection hailed this study. However, its value is limited by a number of criticisms that have been raised since its publication. Some of the most commonly cited shortcomings were discussed at the Committee's December 10, 2002, hearing by Baylor University's Dr. Baskin. The actual toxicity of Thimerosal was not studied and safety to the exposure was not established.
Chairman Burton called upon the President to announce a White House Conference on autism to:
Chairman Burton suggested this would be a valuable opportunity to:
The Bush Administration asked a federal court to seal documents on cases of autism allegedly caused by vaccines in order for them to be kept from the public.
The approximately 1000 cases of autism at the time were unusual for the court so much of the fact finding and evidence was going on for all cases as a block. The Bush Administration's request would prevent plaintiffs who go to court against vaccine manufacturers from using some of the evidence gathered.
Administration lawyers said that they requested the seal to protect the right of the Secretary of Health and Human Services to decide when vaccine evidence is released to the public. After increasing pressure, the Bush Administration eventually withdrew the request.
November 6, 2002
Dr. Westphal from the Department of Occupational Health in Gottingen, Germany did a study that was published online for/and in the "Archives of Toxicology" titled, "Thimerosal induces micronuclei in the cytochalasin B block micronucleus test with human lymphocytes." The study was to determine whether or not the known DNA damaging (Genotoxic) effects of Thimerosal were dependent upon any protective effect of individuals with higher levels of glutathione S-transferase (GST) which is one of the body's defenses against Thimerosal. Because some individuals with genetic changes (polymorphisms) do not make as much GST, they might be more susceptible to DNA damage from Thimerosal. However, this study concluded that:
Vaccines with Thimerosal have been known to contain up to 50 micrograms/ml. Genotoxic effects could be seen at the injection sites. Westphal found toxicity to DNA occurs at 0.6 micrograms/ml.
November 10, 2002
Dr. Neal Halsey, Director of the Institute of Vaccine Safety at John Hopkins University was an influential member of Federal Advisory Committees that oversaw the expansion of the Federally Recommended Schedule of Childhood Vaccines in the 1990s. Dr. Halsey was instrumental in the decision to seek the removal of Thimerosal from childhood vaccines in 1999. He gave an interview to the New York Times and the article appeared on this date.
Halsey later wrote that the article was misleading on his thoughts about whether or not Thimerosal causes autism and stated that this was not his belief.
(The FDA defines "trace amounts" of Thimerosal as less than 1 microgram.)
November 12, 2002
In an interview with the Congressional committee staff, Dr. Leslie Ball from the FDA, who wrote the e-mail in 1998 stating her preference for the removal of Thimerosal from vaccines, confirmed that it was her opinion that, if there was any question, the safest course of action should be taken, and Thimerosal should be removed.
November 27, 2002
Congressman John Conyers, Jr., D-MI, wrote a letter to General John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the U.S., and Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services, criticizing the Bush Administration for trying to seal Thimerosal records.
December 3, 2002
Dr. Pichichero from the University of Rochester, who was contracted by the CDC to conduct a study on Thimerosal containing vaccines and concluded that Thimerosal in vaccines posed very little risk to full term infants, admitted during an interview with Medscape:
December 9, 2002
Patrick Leahy, D of Vermont, Herb Kohl, D of Wisconsin, and Debbie Stabenow, D of Michigan wrote a signed letter to Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services expressing their concern about his attempt to seal all documents produced by the department of HHS concerning Thimerosal and its link to autism.
December 10, 2002
Dr. David Baskin, M.D., Professor of Neurosurgery and Anesthesiology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston Texas testifies to Congress. He has been involved in extensive research on the central nervous system and serves on scientific advisory boards of the National Institutes of Health.
Concerning the study published in the "Lancet" by Dr. Pichichero in which 40 children were administered Thimerosal-containing vaccines and then had their blood and stool samples checked:
It was also noted that the study did not attempt to measure the effects of mercury on the infants' bodies, making it difficult to understand how the authors can come to the broad conclusion that, "the thimerosal in routine vaccines poses very little risk to full-term infants"." In other testimony by Dr. Baskin:
Mr. Burton:
Dr. Baskin:
Mr. Burton:
Dr. Baskin:
In other testimony he gave:
Dr. Baskin explained that according to scientific research in humans and animals, brain tissue absorbs five times more mercury than other tissues in the body.
?
Dr. Karen Midthun, Director of the FDA's Office of Vaccines Research and Review, testified: