August 24 DC Protest – Vaccine-Autism Activists Join In

Activist attending the 3 day protest in Washington DC this month have one thing in common. They want to raise awareness of the fact that the pharmaceutical industry has knowingly injured Americans with dangerous products to increase profits and the nation's regulatory agencies have aided and abetted them.

Since the discovery in recent years of cover-ups by the FDA and drug makers, involving injuries caused by drugs such as Prozac and Vioxx, the similar pattern of cover-ups of injuries caused by the nation's vaccine program should come as no surprise.

During the 1990s, as the number of vaccines on the Federal Immunization Schedule nearly tripled, and vaccination rates soared to nearly 95% for five year olds, the number of kids diagnosed with autism and other neurological disorders skyrocketed.

And, there is only one commonality in all the injured children - they received vaccines that contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal.

Vaccines are the only product whose use is mandated in all 50 states, requiring children to be vaccinated before entering day care facilities and schools. According to a 1999 report by the General Accounting Office, an estimated 12 million vaccinations are given to children each year in the US.
During the 1990s, some 40 million children were vaccinated. Since the government literally forced children to be vaccinated with thimerosal for decades, it now has an obligation to find a cure for the epidemic of autism and other related disorders and to hold the vaccine-makers financially responsible for the damage caused by their products.

The country is in the midst of the worst man-made epidemic in history. Twenty years ago, autism only affected one in 10,000 children. However, the Autism Autoimmunity Project reports that the disorder strikes 1 in 150 (or 1 in 68 families) today.

In dealing with this epidemic, the first order of business has to be to find a way to force the government to ban thimerosal in all vaccines. Most unsuspecting people do not realize that thimerosal is still contained in some products, such as flu vaccines.

In addition, even though thimerosal has been removed from most vaccines in the US, drug companies are still knowingly injecting thimerosal into millions of children all over the world each year. The global market for vaccines is still a gold mine. For instance, UNICEF, the World Health Organization's parent body, buys 40% of all vaccines used in developing countries, and Merck is its sole supplier. Merck makes Recombivax HB, a Hepatitis B vaccine that contains thimerosal. Eli Lilly invented thimerosal, and it has licensing agreements with drug companies in 40 countries that make the product.

The EPA recommends ingesting no more than 0.1 micrograms of mercury, and the FDA recommends no more than 0.4 micrograms per day for pregnant women, nursing mothers, and small children, which amounts to a recommendation that they eat no more than 12 ounces of tuna per week, because the EPA says, "mercury consumed by a pregnant or nursing woman or by a young child can harm the developing brain and nervous system."

Yet the government still recommends that children aged 6 to 23 months and pregnant women get the flu vaccine with its 25 micrograms of mercury which amounts to 250 times the safety limit for mercury intake set by the EPA for fish-eaters.

During the late 1980s and 1990s, while approving new vaccines and adding them to the childhood immunization schedule, the government agencies responsible for drug safety, failed to add up the cumulative amounts of mercury that a child would receive in shots during one doctor visit, or over the course of the full vaccine schedule.

In 1999, while conducting a review of all mercury containing products, the regulatory agencies finally got around to looking at vaccines and discovered that the mercury being injected into children through vaccines vastly exceeded the guidelines set by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Professor Lynn Adams, of Radford University, a speech-language pathologist who specializes in autism, said that in 1999, a study determined that the average child received 33 doses of 10 different vaccines by the age 5.

By 1999, the FDA definitely knew about the accumulative dangers of thimerosal to our children. We know this because the staff for Rep Dan Burton (R-Ill) obtained an internal FDA e-mail written on June 29, 1999, by former FDA scientist Peter Patriarca, that specifically discussed the dangers when offering a"pros and cons" assessment of a statement on thimerosal about to be released by the FDA, and listed the questions and accusations that would inevitably be lodged against the FDA after its release. He said people are bound to question:

(1) 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. (2) various advisory bodies aggressive recommendations for use. (3) the dose of ethyl mercury was not generated by `rocket science': conversion of the % of thimerosal to actual ug [micrograms] of mercury involves 9th grade algebra. (4) What took the FDA so long to do the calculations? (5) Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations while rapidly expanding the childhood immunization schedule?

The fact is that the FDA and CDC knew children were being poisoned and they kept the information hidden and allowed it to continue. "Because the FDA chose not to recall thimerosal-containing vaccines in 1999," the April 2003, House Committee on Government Reform report concludes, "in addition to all of those already injured, 8,000 children a day continued to be placed at risk for overdose for at least an additional two years."

There's also no doubt that the drug companies knew of the dangers more than 30 years ago. In 1972, Lilly received an article that confirmed that thimerosal had caused 6 deaths when too much of it had been used, which said: "The symptoms and clinical course of the 6 patients suggests subacute mercury poisoning."

In an October 12, 1979 memo, Merck scientists discussed the "potential problem" of having mercury in its flu and meningococcal vaccines, as well as the Hepatitis B vaccine that was under development and asked: "Should a program of replacement be initiated now to guard against any spontaneous rally to avoid its (thimerosal) use in injectables?"

Last fall, the LA Times released a 1991 internal memo from Merck, that proves the company knew back then that the overuse of mercury in vaccines posed a dangerous health threat to children. The memo noted that 6-month-old children who received their shots on schedule would get a mercury dose up to 87 times higher than guidelines for the maximum daily consumption of mercury from fish.

Using state by state statistics produced by the Department of Education, to compare the increase in cases of autism over a 12-year period between 1992-93 and 2003-04, reveals horrendous results. In Ohio, in 1992-93 there were only 22 cases of autism, in 2003-04 there were 5146 cases. In Illinois, there were only 5 cases twelve years ago, while there were 6005 in 2003-04. Mississippi had no cases of autism 12 years ago, but had 622 in 2003-04. Wisconsin had 18 cases in 1992-93 and 3259 in 2003-04.

We are on the verge of the biggest welfare disaster that his country has ever seen. Eighty percent of the autistic children in the US are under the age of 17. In a few short years, the states will be forced to provide support for an overwhelming number of disabled adults. "The costs will be in the trillions,"according to Ann Dachel, a special education teacher and the mother of a boy with autism and a daughter who developed epilepsy after receiving a Hepatitis B vaccine.

On February 15, 2005, the GAO, released a report titled, "Special Education Children With Autism," that revealed that the number of children ages 6 through 21 diagnosed with autism who receiving special ed services has increased by more than 500% over the past 10 years, from under 20,000 in 1993 to almost 120,000 in 2002.

The cost of educating this number of autistic kids will be enormous. The Department of Education spends about $53 billion a year on K-12 education. If it provides $60,000 per year to educate each of the currently identified school-age autistic children nationwide, the price tag will be over $7 billion ayear, or about 13% of the Department's entire budget. And by the end of each year, the cost will be even higher due to the increased number of autistic kids entering the system each year.

In the absence of a cure and drug company accountability, local tax payers will be forced to carry the life-long load of educating and caring for a generation of injured people and state and local taxes will go through the roof.

The CDC and FDA policy decisions regarding vaccine approval and safety recommendations are made through physician advisory panels whose members often have financial relationships with the very same drug companies that they are supposed to regulate.

For example, during a congressional hearing on potential conflicts of interests at the FDA, it was revealed that 60% of the advisory board members who voted to approve the poisonous rotavirus vaccine had financial ties to the drug companies manufacturing the vaccine. The committee also discovered that half of the CDC members had ties to the rotavirus makers.

If parents are expected to trust the government'sapproval process, they have a right to know that thevaccines they are forced to inject into their childrenhave been approved based on the best scientific adviceavailable, without the undue influence of pharma moneybeing funneled to scientists, politicians, andofficials within the regulatory agencies.

Evelyn Pringle
mailto:Pringleepringle05@yahoo.com

(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Independent MediaTV and an investigative journalist focused on exposingcorruption in government)

For more information and resources on autism, please visit:
http://www.autismconcepts.com/.