''When I started reading about thimerosal, I was dumbstruck by the contrast between the scientific reality and the media consensus. All the network news anchors and television doctors were assuring the public that there was not a single study that suggested thimerosal was unsafe or that it could cause autism. After a short time on PubMed, I'd identified many dozens of studies suggesting that thimerosal causes autism and a rich library of peer-reviewed literature—more than 400 published studies—attesting to its deadly toxicity and its causal connection to a long inventory of neurological injuries and organ damage.'' [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
''Vaccines are not subject to the safety rigors undergone by other pharmaceuticals in the FDA approval process. There are no large scale, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. And, in the one 1930 human study of thimerosal that predated its use in vaccines, all the subjects injected with thimerosal died. In 2004, an FDA official acknowledged in testimony before a Congressional committee, that no government or privately funded study has ever demonstrated thimerosal's safety. On the other hand, there is plenty of science suggesting that thimerosal is NOT safe. Several hundred studies available on PubMed link thimerosal exposure to the neurodevelopmental and immune system diseases that are now epidemic in the generation of American children born after the CDC dramatically increased childhood thimerosal exposure starting in 1988.'' Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quotes
The vaccine branch called an emergency meeting of regulators from WHO, FDA, vaccine industry stakeholders and the American Academy of Pediatrics at the Simpsonwood Conferences and Retreat Center in Norcross, Georgia. They reportedly held the meeting off the CDC campus to shield the deliberations from freedom of information requests. During a frantic two-day debate, that group decided to embargo Verstraeten's study. The CDC then pushed Verstraeten aside and assembled a team of industry and CDC scientists to rework the study using dodgy statistical devices to make the autism signal disappear. After four increasingly deceptive iterations, that team succeeded in eliminating the signal linking thimerosal with autism and a half dozen other neurodevelopmental disorders. The CDC published that version and told the public that thimerosal was safe. When parents asked to see the raw data, the CDC claimed that it had somehow "lost" all the raw data so that no independent group could check this result. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quotes
CDC and IOM officials left behind a very troubling email trail that makes it clear that those studies were deliberately manufactured to exonerate thimerosal. By the time I came across them, I was accustomed to dissecting research papers and spotting junk science. In my line, we call it "tobacco science" and the hired guns who generate it "biostitutes". The CDC's primary data manager on its widely touted Danish studies was a notorious con man and professional biostitute named Poul Thorsen (Thorsen), who actually pocketed the million dollars the CDC paid him to do the research. He is currently under indictment on 22 counts of wire fraud and money laundering by the U.S. Justice Department and is the star of the OIG's Most Wanted List. Thorsen is on the run from the FBI in Europe. Nevertheless, the CDC still uses Thorsen's studies as proof of thimerosal safety Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quotes
''I had no clue about the pivotal role they both had played in deceiving the
public about thimerosal safety. Both of them spoke to me willingly.
Offit expressed admiration for my father, which is an effective way to butter me up. I
asked them both the obvious question: "Why do we advise pregnant women to steer
clear of fish because of neurotoxic mercury and yet inject much larger doses of
mercury into pregnant women and babies?" They both repeated to me the thread
worn industry canard that the "Ethyl
mercury in vaccines is not as dangerous as the methyl mercury in fish" which
everyone admits is highly neurotoxic. Offit explained to me that ethyl mercury
wasn't toxic because it leaves the human body so quickly.
By then, I'd read Burbacher's monkey studies which confirmed
Offit's assertion that the ethyl mercury from vaccines rapidly left the blood.
But, Burbacher had shown the ethyl mercury was not being excreted from the body
as Offit implied during our telephone conversation. Instead, it was going
directly into the brain, where it rapidly metabolized into highly toxic
inorganic mercury, and then lodged there, creating inflammation and brain
damage. Burbacher had shown that inorganic mercury remains in the brain for
years. Instead of being evidence of its safety, as Offit represented, ethyl
mercury's penchant for disappearing quickly from the blood was testimony to its
extreme peril; it was disappearing due to the ease with which it crossed the
blood-brain barrier! Ethyl mercury used in vaccines was both far more persistent
and far more toxic than the methyl mercury found in fish. The Guzzi study, in
2012, showed the ethyl mercury was 50 times as toxic to cells. When I mentioned
the Burbacher study to Stratton and Offit, they both went silent. It was obvious
that they were aware of the study. THEY BOTH KNEW that science had
refuted what they were telling me. They were accustomed to talking to
journalists who seem to have an allergy to reading science and were content to
parrot their reassurances.''
[2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and
the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
''In a single day, I had spoken to the two top advocates
for the use of thimerosal in vaccines and I caught them both lying. A few days
later, I heard Offit repeat his "good mercury/bad mercury" (Ethyl vs. Methyl) fib during an
interview on NPR. I thought to myself, "This man is a thorough charlatan, a
snake oil salesman and he has everyone flimflammed." That made me angry. After
that, I learned that he was also venal. Well, my original assumption was
that he was lying in service to the vaccine program. I later learned that
vaccines were a lavishly profitable enterprise for Dr. Offit.
He is on permanent retainer to Merck to "right vaccine
wrongs". And, both Merck and the CDC have rewarded his service with
extraordinarily lucrative opportunities. In 1999, the CDC allowed him to sit on
the committee that voted the rotavirus vaccine onto the schedule, even though he
was working on his own rotavirus patent. Electing not to recuse himself, he cast
his vote to add rotavirus to the schedule. That version of the rotavirus vaccine
caused so many agonizing childhood deaths from intussusception that the CDC had
to withdraw it a year later, making room for Offit's version, a turn of events
that made him a vaccine tycoon. His rotavirus vaccine patent sold for $182
million; his cut was at least $29 million. When I learned about this caper and
his other money schemes, I just thought, "Well, he's a hoodlum."
It's disturbing because the media treats him like a deity.
And, like all bullies, he's a coward. He dismisses women who question him as
superstitious hysterics. He lobs vicious bombs at the mothers of vaccine-injured
children from the editorial pages and national TV shows which give him a
platform for his poison. But, he refuses to debate me or anyone else who knows
what they are talking about.
I don't feel competent to psychoanalyze Offit. It's hard to look
into another person's mind. And Offit's brain has got to be a really dark and
scary zip code where I don't really want to spend time. In his defense, we all
have some capacity for self-deception and it's possible that Offit is as gifted
at deceiving himself as he is at deceiving the public. Upton Sinclair observed
that, "It's difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it." But I do think it's more likely that he
knows that what he's saying is dishonest. For years, he claimed Bill Thompson's
2004 study was "the definitive proof" of thimerosal safety. He's been silent
about that since Thompson disavowed his own study. That suggests a purposeful
mendacity. Like a lot of other people, Offit seems to have made the self-serving
calculation that all of the dead and damaged children are just collateral
damage—unfortunate sacrifices in a program that serves the greater good.
.....Offit's moral Donnybrook is his absolutist defense of the industry position
that all vaccines are always safe for all people and that the safety of
thimerosal is unassailable. That approach has unnecessarily damaged vulnerable
subgroups that could easily have been protected and sacrificed millions of kids,
not for the greater good but for the bottom line. As the vaccine industry's lead
pitchman for thimerosal, Offit's been extraordinarily successful at crafting a
persuasive alternative to fact-based reality and selling it like a carnival
barker. He has made himself the high priest of the weird dogma that it's somehow
safe to inject mercury into babies.''
[2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and
the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
In Denmark, ASD rates dropped 30% when the Danish government ordered removal of mercury in 1992. So that's a bellwether. The drop would likely be more dramatic in this country because the Danes had a very small amount of thimerosal-containing vaccines. We use much more thimerosal than the Danes ever allowed. Katie Wright suggests that the Danes never had the severe brand of autism that is now common in America. [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
''The former president of Merck's vaccine division acknowledged to me recently that vaccines are a likely culprit in the food Allergy epidemic, but he told me that no one is studying it. How can that possibly be?'' [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
The CDC has gone to monumental lengths to make sure no one performs studies that might even inadvertently expose the link between thimerosal and autism. In 2004, the CDC arm-twisted the IOM into making the extraordinary declaration that any questions on the links between vaccines and these diseases had been settled and ought never to be studied again. When does a scientist ever say anything like that? In science, nothing is ever settled. Everything is a hypothesis subject to revision when contrary evidence emerges. Science says you always keep investigating and questioning assumptions. That IOM declaration was the opposite of science. It was like the Catholic Church silencing Copernicus because of its fear that scientific knowledge might endanger the institution. The CDC then effectively closed access to the Vaccine Safety Data link—America's largest repository for vaccine safety information—and forced FDA and the IOM to abandon their own scheduled studies of thimerosal toxicity. The CDC has effectively stopped everyone from studying the links. Scientists who try to do the research get blackballed and the journals are too intimidated to publish research that raises questions about vaccine or thimerosal safety. [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
there are many pediatricians who have grave doubts about thimerosal safety and would like better science. I meet many pediatricians who are reticent about the schedule and have seen vaccine damage in their patients, but they are terrified to speak out. They know they will face intimidation by their peers. There's a name for this phenomenon. It's called the "Semmelweis reflex". Ignaz Semmelweis was the obstetrician who first proposed antiseptic procedures. His work implied that physicians using the current protocols were actually making people sick. The medical community ridiculed and marginalized him, and took away his medical practice. I show in my thimerosal book how the medical community destroyed the career of British physician and epidemiologist, Alice Stewart, when she demonstrated that the routine practice of giving x-rays to pregnant women was causing cancer in their children. Herbert Needleman and Rachel Carson got the same treatment. In the same way, today's doctors who are brave enough to talk about vaccine safety concerns often get punished. Look what happened to Andy Wakefield, Mark Geier, Bob Sears, and Anju Usman. These were all courageous physicians, the kind that I would want caring for my children. They each made the career mistake of standing up for their patients, acting as healers, questioning authority and speaking truth to power. The medical establishment made examples of them. [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
The CDC is a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry. The
agency owns more than 20 vaccine patents and purchases and sells $4.1 billion in
vaccines annually. Congressman Dave Weldon has pointed out that the primary
metric for success across the CDC is how many vaccines the agency sells and how
successfully the agency expands its vaccine program—regardless of any negative
effects on human health. Weldon exposed how the Immunization Safety Office,
which is supposed to ensure vaccine efficacy and safety, has become subsumed in
that metric. The scientists in that part of the agency should no longer be
considered part of the public safety sector. Their function is to promote
vaccines. As Dr. Thompson has attested, they are routinely ordered to destroy,
manipulate and conceal evidence of adverse vaccine reactions in order to protect
that ultimate metric. The CDC should not be the agency that we are relying on
for oversight of the vaccine program. It's the hen guarding the wolf house. It's
not just the CDC. Virtually all the institutions that are supposed to stand
between a rapacious industry and vulnerable children have been compromised.
Congress, the regulatory agencies, FDA and CDC, the IOM, the NIH, the AAP, the
science journals, the university science departments and the press. Pharma
has a broad reach.
Pharma is the largest lobbyist in Washington. It now has more
lobbyists on Capitol Hill than there are Congress people. The industry spends
twice as much on lobbying as oil and gas and almost four times as much as the
defense and aerospace industries. Imagine that! Congress was already drowning in
Pharma money in 1986 when it gave those companies immunity from lawsuits arising
from vaccine injury. In that way, vaccine makers rid themselves of the courts
and the lawyers. With Congress and the regulatory agencies already captured,
Pharma succeeded in thereby eliminating the final check and balance against bad
corporate behavior in a free market. Once they were liberated from liability,
vaccines became a major industry profit center. It was that legislation that
launched the vaccine bonanza that began in 1988.
The media is complicit in the cataclysm. At least part of the
reason is financial. America is one of only two nations in the world that allows
pharmaceutical ads on television. Drug companies are the largest advertisers on
TV and radio. They spend $3-$5.4 billion annually to saturate the airwaves with
80 advertisements every hour. Anyone who watches network news quickly
understands that it has devolved into a vehicle for selling pharmaceuticals.
That lucre seems to have neutralized the news divisions at CNN, ABC, NBC and
CBS. Fox News alone is uncorrupted, but only because its shameless purpose, from
its inception, has been to promote the ascendancy of corporate power. Fox's
former CEO, Roger Ailes, was sympathetic with the cause but he told me that he
would have to fire any of his hosts who allowed me on his network to discuss
mercury in vaccines or autism if I cost them an advertiser. He said, "Bobby, if
I let you on to talk about vaccines, Rupert would be on the phone with me in ten
minutes."......Newspapers and electronic media outlets have suppressed
legitimate debate over vaccine safety or the ongoing corruption scandals at the
CDC. They allow Paul Offit and other pharma shills almost unlimited use of the
airwaves to spout Pharma propaganda—always unquestioned and unanswered.
Newspapers won't publish Op Eds or letters or comments from vaccine safety
advocates. Even alternative press—like Huffington Post, Drudge Report, Salon,
Slate and Mother Jones won't allow discussion—and these are
supposedly the antidote to a corporate controlled media. Astonishingly, many
journalists openly advocate the censoring of any discussion about vaccine
safety......The biggest disappointment has been The New York Times. I
love that paper; it's such a critical institution for our country and our
democracy! They made the dreadful mistake, cheerleading the run up to the Iraq
War. They were manipulated by undeserving public officials. They had to
apologize for leading our country into that costly quagmire. Their mistake on
the thimerosal issue has been even more costly. I've met and corresponded
repeatedly with the reporters, columnists, the science editors, editorial board
and the public editor. I've written letter after letter. I brought a squadron of
scientists and dragged a pile of scientific studies into a meeting with the
paper's editorial board. They gave me the meeting, but all of them were sullen
and impervious. They refused to even look at the studies. It's tragic because
their evangelical message discipline on thimerosal's supposed safety has
anointed the CDC narrative with moral authority among less rigorous news
outlets......[2016 Dec] Mercury,
Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
The media's silence on this issue is not simply a quid pro quo for billions of dollars of annual pharmaceutical advertising. Most reporters and media outlets accept the muzzle because they think they are safeguarding public health. They believe that allowing debate about vaccine safety and CDC corruption may cause the public to stop vaccinating. [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
The pharmaceutical companies know that nothing they do will be questioned when it comes to vaccines. Look, just use common sense. Every year, we see million, or even billion-dollar litigation settlements against Merck, Pfizer, Novartis, Glaxo, Abbott, and Lilly for false marketing, off label uses, adulterated products, falsifying science, kickbacks and fraudulent safety data in their pharmaceutical products. Just a couple months ago, vaccine maker Glaxo Smith Kline paid $20 million to the SEC to settle charges of funneling $489 million in bribes to physicians in China. We see shenanigans like that all the time in the United States and there's this whole industry of trial lawyers making very good livelihoods telling those stories to juries. How do you imagine those same companies would behave if they suddenly got rid of the lawyers, the courts, the depositions, the class action lawsuits, and the multi-district litigations? What would happen if they then got rid of the press? Why in the world do we think that these same companies have somehow made their vaccine programs off limits to these crooked strategies? It's a comical fiction. You have to be almost purposefully naive to believe it. And yet, America's most prestigious media outlets have all been gulled into swallowing it. [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
The science journals are also corrupted. It's common for these journals to receive half or more of their income from pharma ads and reprint orders. Many of them are owned by drug companies. Dr. Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of The Lancet, the world's two preeminent science journals, have both recently declared that half of their articles are untrue—concocted by authors compromised by "flagrant conflicts of interest." Pharma's stranglehold on the journals keeps independent vaccine safety science from ever getting published. Just this month, the Swiss journal, Frontiers in Public Health, cancelled publication of the first vaccinated/unvaccinated study. The study showed that vaccinated children had less measles and rubella, but four times as many neurological disorders—including autism –and 30 times the incidence of allergies. Frontiers panicked after it put up the abstract and got 78,000 views in a day and, presumably, a lot of heat from pharma. I could give you a parade of other examples of great studies that either can't find a publisher, or get published and then taken down as soon as the journals feel the heat. As it turns out, the people who run those journals are no Bravehearts. Self-preservation is the overriding motivation. [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
there is an overt conspiracy by a small group within the CDC vaccine division. It's explicit. You can watch it unfold if you read the Simpsonwood transcripts and the related emails which you can find on the World Mercury Project website. It's chilling. You have all these bureaucrats and industry officials sitting there staring at the CDC's internal study that proves that thimerosal caused the autism epidemic. Their focus quickly moves away from a public health concern to a cover-up—how to hide what they've done from the public. One of the Simpsonwood attendees, University of Colorado immunologist, Dr. Robert Johnson, declares to the group that he is not going to allow his newborn grandson to receive thimerosal containing vaccines. Yet none of the meeting participants ever came forward to warn the public of the risks to THEIR children's health! Instead, they all agree to keep the study secret. We know the names of the conspirators. These particular guys all ought to be playing Rock Hockey in Spandau with three hots and a cot in the Albert Speer suite. I don't know how they live with it. I guess they just pray that there is no God and no such thing as a divine justice. We know what Jesus said about people who harm little children. It was the single sin he considered unforgiveable.
there were a lot of power centers—the industry, the media, the political leaders, the medical community—that found it in their own self-interest to not scrutinize or question the CDC narrative too closely. In that way, a tiny explicit conspiracy made the evolutionary leap to widespread orthodoxy. Pharma's unlimited reach and wealth helped cement the consensus. That proliferation of the gospel swept up the other regulators, the press, the environmental groups, the science journals, the AAP, the AMA and other medical associations, and the pediatricians in a kind of consensus dogma much larger than the explicit conspiracy. It's akin to what happened to the Catholic Church during the pedophile scandal. The institution suddenly became more important than the children it was supposed to protect. Only a few individuals were actively involved in raping children and shuffling known pedophile priests to unsuspecting dioceses. But everyone became complicit—from the bishops and priests, the doctors, to the press and police. You can judge the power of the orthodoxy by the way it often swept up the parents of abused children and even the victims. It was in everyone's self-interest to keep their mouths shut. Orthodoxies don't require overt collusion. The same thing happened with the NFL in the concussion scandal. [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
It's exactly like religion. It's certainly not science. It's blind faith in the CDC's word about what the science says. It's like the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church kept the scriptures in Latin, a language Jesus never spoke, so that no one could read them except the priests and everyone just had to take their word for what God says. Among American journalists, this cult-like parroting of the CDC's safety assurances has become a kind of lazy man's science. There's never any fact checking. There's this pervasive insistence that we not talk about vaccine safety and never question the government. Instead of scientific argument, the debate has deteriorated into "argument by credential". Reporters cite government safety assurances as if the CDC was a divine authority. Also, it's corollary "argument by insult." Scientists and celebrities and bereaved mothers who question vaccine safety are shamed, marginalized and black-balled. It's like the way the Inquisition burned religious heretics. Like other theologies, this one comes with its own set of taboos and superstitions and mythologies. You hear these repeated over and over like a Gregorian chant. "There is no mercury in vaccines." "The mercury came out and autism rates continued climbing." "Multiple studies have proven it safe." "Ethyl mercury is non-toxic." "The hysteria all began with Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his retracted study in The Lancet." Of course, all of these articles of faith are patently and demonstrably false. They had to make a religion out of it because the facts wouldn't countenance their assertions. And as with all orthodoxies, it's cruel and occasionally lethal.
Rather than strengthening public support for vaccines, the laws that shield the vaccine industry from lawsuits combined with the absence of political and press scrutiny, have emboldened the CDC to sanction increasingly reckless conduct by vaccine makers. Because the press won't cover CDC corruption, we now have a rogue agency that's completely unaccountable. Its senior vaccine safety scientist has just come forward to admit that the CDC routinely destroys data. Its key studies are fraudulent. If what Dr. Thompson is saying is true, the implications are monumental. It means that CDC officials knowingly sanctioned the unnecessary injection of brain killing poison into an entire generation of American children, and children all over the world. [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
By stacking fraud upon fraud upon fraud, the CDC has created an edifice so high, so wobbly and so fragile that a light breeze of scrutiny will bring the whole thing tumbling down. You can accomplish the same thing—forcing debate—with a lawsuit or you can do it with a single courageous news outlet. If the Atlanta Journal-Constitution did a series on CDC corruption or if 60 Minutes did a segment investigating the science? Game over! CDC has no science to support its position that isn't blatantly fraudulent. These fabricated epidemiological studies are comical. All we need to do is force the debate. [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
Ask any school nurse who has been around for a few decades. In addition to autism, we now have epidemics of other neurological disorders like ADD, ADHD, tics and narcolepsy, SIDS, and seizure disorder. The CDC says that one in every six US children now suffers from a developmental disorder. This is not normal. Asthma and food allergies are also suddenly exploding in the same thimerosal-exposed generation. School infirmaries have whole cupboards for the Epi pens and inhalers. All of these conditions are associated in the scientific literature with vaccines, mercury, and with thimerosal specifically. Think about when you were in school. How many people did you know with peanut allergies and autism? EPA scientists found that the greatest increase in ASD prevalence occurred in cohorts born between 1987 and 1992. The so called "changepoint year" was 1988. That's the timeframe that the CDC began expanding the vaccine schedule, increasing mercury exposures from 75mcg to 237.5 mcg before the second birthday. [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
Mercury disproportionately affects boys because testosterone amplifies the neurotoxic effects of mercury. Conversely, estrogen wraps the mercury molecule and protects the female brain. That's why these disorders tend to selectively affect males and girls with unusually high testosterone. Any scientist genuinely searching for the cause of this epidemic must begin by identifying a toxin that suddenly increased across every demographic in 1988 and affects boys at a 4 to 1 ratio. [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
Our Client, Yates Hazelhurst, regressed into autism after receiving vaccines that included thimerosal. Yates' case survived the dismissal of the other 5,000 cases in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding. His is the only case in 30 years that has been allowed to allege that vaccines can cause autism. His case survived because Yates' parents sued not just the pharmaceutical company but also Yates' pediatrician for breaching his standard of care. The biggest impediments against Yates' prevailing are the 2004 IOM declaration that vaccines are not linked to autism and the Supreme Court's Bruesewitz holding which relied on the IOM. These decisions both rested heavily on Dr. Thompson's Pediatrics study published in 2004. Dr. Thompson now says that the study was the product of fraud, data manipulation, and data destruction. That study has been cited in at least 110 subsequent studies published in PubMed and is the principle foundation of the orthodoxy that vaccines are not causing autism. We've asked to subpoena Dr. Thompson because his testimony will show that the central foundation stone for the orthodoxy is fraudulent. Under federal law, you can't subpoena a federal agency employee unless you can show that his testimony couldn't be obtained from any other source. Of course, that's true in this case because there were only 4 people who witnessed the CDC data dump and nobody else is talking. However, the federal law requires that the first step in that process is to petition the head of the agency and ask for permission to subpoena the employee. CDC Director Dr. Thomas Friedan denied our request, which was not a surprise. The CDC has much to lose from Thompson's truthful testimony. We are now appealing that decision in federal court. [2016 Dec] Mercury, Vaccines and the CDC's Worst Nightmare By Rita Shreffler
