Government covers up mercury in vaccines

[mhd24]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/7395411?rnd=1118955368125&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1040

Bill Frist should be ashamed of himself.

Deadly Immunity

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. investigates the government cover-up of a mercury/autism scandal

By ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

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.

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. "I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.

Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. "You can play with this all you want," Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results "are statistically significant." Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's first day, was even more alarmed. "My gut feeling?" he said. "Forgive this personal comment -- I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on."

But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. 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 adviser at the World Health Organization, declared flatly that the study "should not have been done at all" and warned that the results "will be taken by others and will be used in ways beyond the control of this group. The research results have to be handled."

In fact, the 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. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.

Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of injections given to American infants -- but they continued to sell off their mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last year. The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines -- including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus boosters routinely given to eleven-year-olds.

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. "The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Andy Olsen, a legislative assistant to Frist.

Even many conservatives are shocked by the government's effort to cover up the dangers of thimerosal. Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was diagnosed with autism. "Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic," his House Government Reform Committee concluded in its final report. "This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin." The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of "institutional malfeasance for self protection" and "misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry."

The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed. I was drawn into the controversy only reluctantly. As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines. Privately, I was skeptical.

I doubted that autism could be blamed on a single source, and I certainly understood the government's need to reassure parents that vaccinations are safe; the eradication of deadly childhood diseases depends on it. I tended to agree with skeptics like Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, who criticized his colleagues on the House Government Reform Committee for leaping to conclusions about autism and vaccinations. "Why should we scare people about immunization," Waxman pointed out at one hearing, "until we know the facts?"

It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation's pre-eminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real. Five of my own children are members of the Thimerosal Generation -- those born between 1989 and 2003 -- who received heavy doses of mercury from vaccines. "The elementary grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system damage," Patti White, a school nurse, told the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. "Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in twenty-five years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our children."

More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and pediatricians diagnose more than 40,000 new cases every year. The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among eleven children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931.

Some skeptics dispute that the rise in autism is caused by thimerosal-tainted vaccinations. They argue that the increase is a result of better diagnosis -- a theory that seems questionable at best, given that most of the new cases of autism are clustered within a single generation of children. "If the epidemic is truly an artifact of poor diagnosis," scoffs Dr. Boyd Haley, one of the world's authorities on mercury toxicity, "then where are all the twenty-year-old autistics?" Other researchers point out that Americans are exposed to a greater cumulative "load" of mercury than ever before, from contaminated fish to dental fillings, and suggest that thimerosal in vaccines may be only part of a much larger problem. It's a concern that certainly deserves far more attention than it has received -- but it overlooks the fact that the mercury concentrations in vaccines dwarf other sources of exposure to our children.

What is most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading detectives have gone to ignore -- and cover up -- the evidence against thimerosal. From the very beginning, the scientific case against the mercury additive has been overwhelming. The preservative, which is used to stem fungi and bacterial growth in vaccines, contains ethylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. Truckloads of studies have shown that mercury tends to accumulate in the brains of primates and other animals after they are injected with vaccines -- and that the developing brains of infants are particularly susceptible. In 1977, a Russian study found that adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to American children still suffered brain damage years later. Russia banned thimerosal from children's vaccines twenty years ago, and Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since followed suit.

"You couldn't even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe," says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky. "It's just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage."

Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage -- and even death -- in both animals and humans. In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering it to twenty-two patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected -- a fact Lilly didn't bother to report in its study declaring thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims about thimerosal's safety "did not check with ours." Half the dogs Pittman injected with thimerosal-based vaccines became sick, leading researchers there to declare the preservative "unsatisfactory as a serum intended for use on dogs."

In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to mount. During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it "poison." In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly's own studies discerned that thimerosal was "toxic to tissue cells" in concentrations as low as one part per million -- 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as "nontoxic" and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants. In 1977, ten babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.

In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within twenty-four hours of birth, and two-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.

The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccine programs, warned the company that six-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and children," noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. "The best way to go," he added, "is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives."

For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money. Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries. The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics. Faced with this "cost consideration," Merck ignored Hilleman's warnings, and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations -- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of twenty-two immunizations by the time they reached first grade.

As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines. "What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?" Peter Patriarca, director of viral products for the agency, asked in an e-mail to the CDC in 1999. "Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?"

But by that time, the damage was done. Infants who received all their vaccines, plus boosters, by the age of six months were being injected with levels of ethylmercury 187 times greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin. Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several studies -- including one published in April by the National Institutes of Health -- suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury.

Officials responsible for childhood immunizations insist that the additional vaccines were necessary to protect infants from disease and that thimerosal is still essential in developing nations, which, they often claim, cannot afford the single-dose vials that don't require a preservative. Dr. Paul Offit, one of CDC's top vaccine advisers, told me, "I think if we really have an influenza pandemic -- and certainly we will in the next twenty years, because we always do -- there's no way on God's earth that we immunize 280 million people with single-dose vials. There has to be multidose vials."

But while public-health officials may have been well-intentioned, many of those on the CDC advisory committee who backed the additional vaccines had close ties to the industry. Dr. Sam Katz, the committee's chair, was a paid consultant for most of the major vaccine makers and shares a patent on a measles vaccine with Merck, which also manufactures the hepatitis B vaccine. Dr. Neal Halsey, another committee member, worked as a researcher for the vaccine companies and received honoraria from Abbott Labs for his research on the hepatitis B vaccine.

Indeed, in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines, such conflicts of interest are common. Rep. Burton says that the CDC "routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on intellectual advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines," even though they have "interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight." The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisers who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine laced with thimerosal "had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine."

Offit, who shares a patent on the vaccine, acknowledged to me that he "would make money" if his vote to approve it eventually leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist's direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. "It provides no conflict for me," he insists. "I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it. When I sat around that table, my sole intent was trying to make recommendations that best benefited the children in this country. It's offensive to say that physicians and public-health people are in the pocket of industry and thus are making decisions that they know are unsafe for children. It's just not the way it works."

Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances. Like Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of children's health, proud of their "partnerships" with pharmaceutical companies, immune to the seductions of personal profit, besieged by irrational activists whose anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering children's health. They are often resentful of questioning. "Science," says Offit, "is best left to scientists."

Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of interest. In his e-mail to CDC administrators in 1999, Paul Patriarca of the FDA blasted federal regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize the danger posed by the added baby vaccines. "I'm not sure there will be an easy way out of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and immunization-policy bodies may have been asleep at the switch re: thimerosal until now," Patriarca wrote. The close ties between regulatory officials and the pharmaceutical industry, he added, "will also raise questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive recommendations for use" of thimerosal in child vaccines.

If federal regulators and government scientists failed to grasp the potential risks of thimerosal over the years, no one could claim ignorance after the secret meeting at Simpsonwood. But rather than conduct more studies to test the link to autism and other forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science. The agency turned its database on childhood vaccines -- which had been developed largely at taxpayer expense -- over to a private agency, America's Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research. It also instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the link between thimerosal and brain disorders. The CDC "wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe," Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the IOM's Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. "We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect" of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee's chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was "inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation" between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result "Walt wants" -- a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.

For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination, the revelations about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything they had worked for. "We've got a dragon by the tail here," said Dr. Michael Kaback, another committee member. "The more negative that [our] presentation is, the less likely people are to use vaccination, immunization -- and we know what the results of that will be. We are kind of caught in a trap. How we work our way out of the trap, I think is the charge."

Even in public, federal officials made it clear that their primary goal in studying thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines. "Four current studies are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and thimerosal," Dr. Gordon Douglas, then-director of strategic planning for vaccine research at the National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton University gathering in May 2001. "In order to undo the harmful effects of research claiming to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated risk of autism, we need to conduct and publicize additional studies to assure parents of safety." Douglas formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where he ignored warnings about thimerosal's risks.

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.

The report may have satisfied the CDC, but it convinced no one. Rep. David Weldon, a Republican physician from Florida who serves on the House Government Reform Committee, attacked the Institute of Medicine, saying it relied on a handful of studies that were "fatally flawed" by "poor design" and failed to represent "all the available scientific and medical research." CDC officials are not interested in an honest search for the truth, Weldon told me, because "an association between vaccines and autism would force them to admit that their policies irreparably damaged thousands of children. Who would want to make that conclusion about themselves?"

Under pressure from congress, parents and a few of its own panel members, the Institute of Medicine reluctantly convened a second panel to review the findings of the first. In February, the new panel, composed of different scientists, criticized the earlier panel for its lack of transparency and urged the CDC to make its vaccine database available to the public.

So far, though, only two scientists have managed to gain access. Dr. Mark Geier, president of the Genetics Center of America, and his son, David, spent a year battling to obtain the medical records from the CDC. Since August 2002, when members of Congress pressured the agency to turn over the data, the Geiers have completed six studies that demonstrate a powerful correlation between thimerosal and neurological damage in children. One study, which compares the cumulative dose of mercury received by children born between 1981 and 1985 with those born between 1990 and 1996, found a "very significant relationship" between autism and vaccines. Another study of educational performance found that kids who received higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines were nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism and more than three times as likely to suffer from speech disorders and mental retardation. Another soon-to-be published study shows that autism rates are in decline following the recent elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines.

As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying vaccines, others have stepped in to study the link to autism. In April, reporter Dan Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more interesting studies himself. Searching for children who had not been exposed to mercury in vaccines -- the kind of population that scientists typically use as a "control" in experiments -- Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, who refuse to immunize their infants. Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found only four. One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three -- including one child adopted from outside the Amish community -- had received their vaccines.

At the state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth reviews of thimerosal. While the Institute of Medicine was busy whitewashing the risks, the Iowa legislature was carefully combing through all of the available scientific and biological data. "After three years of review, I became convinced there was sufficient credible research to show a link between mercury and the increased incidences in autism," says state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a Republican who oversaw the investigation. "The fact that Iowa's 700 percent increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more and more vaccines were added to the children's vaccine schedules, is solid evidence alone." Last year, Iowa became the first state to ban mercury in vaccines, followed by California. Similar bans are now under consideration in thirty-two other states.

But instead of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as steroids and injected collagen. Even more alarming, the government continues to ship vaccines preserved with thimerosal to developing countries -- some of which are now experiencing a sudden explosion in autism rates. In China, where the disease was virtually unknown prior to the introduction of thimerosal by U.S. drug manufacturers in 1999, news reports indicate that there are now more than 1.8 million autistics. Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, autistic disorders also appear to be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua and other developing countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines. The World Health Organization continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders "under review."

I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral crisis that must be addressed. If, as the evidence suggests, our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children, their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine. "The CDC is guilty of incompetence and gross negligence," says Mark Blaxill, vice president of Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization concerned about the role of mercury in medicines. "The damage caused by vaccine exposure is massive. It's bigger than asbestos, bigger than tobacco, bigger than anything you've ever seen."

It's hard to calculate the damage to our country -- and to the international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases -- if Third World nations come to believe that America's most heralded foreign-aid initiative is poisoning their children. It's not difficult to predict how this scenario will be interpreted by America's enemies abroad. The scientists and researchers -- many of them sincere, even idealistic -- who are participating in efforts to hide the science on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal of protecting children in developing nations from disease pandemics. They are badly misguided. Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt our country and the world's poorest populations.

[Leonard Washington]

coverup? people have known this for years.

[Larry]

I think I could understand people wanting to avoid liability with something like this. It may not be perfect, but it's an understandable motive.

Where I have a problem is when they went beyond "coverup", into "we're gonna keep doing the same thing. You. Go out and get me some fake studies so we can keep doing the same thing."

[chomerics]

Great. . . now, we have the GOVERNMENT issuing a FALSE study to undermine the fact that this causes autism. Absolutely disgusting, and I hope that this is blown wide open.

Some great paragraphs for people who didn't read the article. . .

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. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism. . .

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. "The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Andy Olsen, a legislative assistant to Frist. . . .

For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money. Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries. The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics. Faced with this "cost consideration," Merck ignored Hilleman's warnings, and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations -- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of twenty-two immunizations by the time they reached first grade. . . .

As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines. "What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?" Peter Patriarca, director of viral products for the agency, asked in an e-mail to the CDC in 1999. "Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?"

But by that time, the damage was done. Infants who received all their vaccines, plus boosters, by the age of six months were being injected with levels of ethylmercury 187 times greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin. Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several studies -- including one published in April by the National Institutes of Health -- suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury. . . .

Indeed, in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines, such conflicts of interest are common. Rep. Burton says that the CDC "routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on intellectual advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines," even though they have "interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight." The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisers who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine laced with thimerosal "had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine."

Offit, who shares a patent on the vaccine, acknowledged to me that he "would make money" if his vote to approve it eventually leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist's direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. "It provides no conflict for me," he insists. "I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it. ". . .

Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of interest. In his e-mail to CDC administrators in 1999, Paul Patriarca of the FDA blasted federal regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize the danger posed by the added baby vaccines. "I'm not sure there will be an easy way out of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and immunization-policy bodies may have been asleep at the switch re: thimerosal until now," Patriarca wrote. The close ties between regulatory officials and the pharmaceutical industry, he added, "will also raise questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive recommendations for use" of thimerosal in child vaccines. . . .

Even in public, federal officials made it clear that their primary goal in studying thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines. "Four current studies are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and thimerosal," Dr. Gordon Douglas, then-director of strategic planning for vaccine research at the National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton University gathering in May 2001. "In order to undo the harmful effects of research claiming to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated risk of autism, we need to conduct and publicize additional studies to assure parents of safety." Douglas formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where he ignored warnings about thimerosal's risks.

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.

At the state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth reviews of thimerosal. While the Institute of Medicine was busy whitewashing the risks, the Iowa legislature was carefully combing through all of the available scientific and biological data. "After three years of review, I became convinced there was sufficient credible research to show a link between mercury and the increased incidences in autism," says state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a Republican who oversaw the investigation. "The fact that Iowa's 700 percent increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more and more vaccines were added to the children's vaccine schedules, is solid evidence alone." Last year, Iowa became the first state to ban mercury in vaccines, followed by California. Similar bans are now under consideration in thirty-two other states.

But instead of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as steroids and injected collagen. Even more alarming, the government continues to ship vaccines preserved with thimerosal to developing countries -- some of which are now experiencing a sudden explosion in autism rates. In China, where the disease was virtually unknown prior to the introduction of thimerosal by U.S. drug manufacturers in 1999, news reports indicate that there are now more than 1.8 million autistics. Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, autistic disorders also appear to be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua and other developing countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines. The World Health Organization continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders "under review."

I like to think scientists and researchers are above monetary decisions, but unfortuantely, even people with advanced degrees will allow millions of children to suffer a horrible disease to fatten their pocketbooks. . . It is an absolutely horrible article, and it brings into question if our government is really looking out for the people. This article is yet more evidence they are more concerned about the dollar then people. Truly sad and horrible.

[stevenaa]

Russia banned this crap 20 years ago. This makes me more angry than you can imagine. I have 2 children that I now have to be concerned about. Atleast we're past the stage of worry about autism.

[Ghost of]

Never rely completely on the government to look out for the people.

THat's not the nature of government, especially republics where there are so many competing interests and where getting elected and voting yourself other people's money, safety or freedom is an appealing option.

No room for the benevolent king in such a picture. That's why the government was supposed to be relatively toothless.

[OrangeSkin]

That's it, I'm moving to Bhutan. :mad:

[jpillian]

I new there was a reason I didn't like shots as a kid......

"Four, four hunderd and ninety six matches...."

(sorry, a little dark, Rainman humor for the uninitiated -- no offense meant)

[MaddogCT]

From Quackwatch.com:

http://www.autism-watch.org/general/thio.shtml

It is hard to know exactly when the hypothesis that mercury could cause autism was first proposed. The idea was circulating well before 2000, the year that thimerosal—a mercury-containing preservative—was removed from children’s vaccines. In its October 2001 report, Immunization Safety Review: Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded that, while it was biologically plausible that thimerosal could cause autism, no data supported the claim that it did cause autism.

Since that time, much has happened (and not happened). The most significant thing has been, as Sherlock Holmes said in "Silver Blaze," the "dog that didn’t bark." Because manufacturers stopped using thimerosal in children’s vaccines in 2000, few children now under age four have ever received a thimerosal-containing vaccine. Even those born to Rh-negative mothers (who received at least one dose of thimerosal-containing RhoGam during pregnancy) have gotten far less thimerosal than older children. If thimerosal were a major cause of autism, we should see a drop in autism incidence, which has yet to materialize.

This non-event shouldn’t come as a surprise. Denmark mandated removal of thimerosal from vaccines in 1992. Even allowing for continued use of thimerosal-containing stocks of vaccine, Danish children were thimerosal-free by 1995. Autism prevalence in Denmark has risen in exactly the same fashion as in the United States and the United Kingdom.

A number of supporters of the thimerosal-autism connection have "corrected" the numbers of the Danish studies, manipulating the numbers in ways that would make Enron accountants blush. They can, through mathematical sleight-of-hand, turn the exponential upward curve into a downward trend, but they have yet to explain why the autism numbers in Denmark keep rising every year if the prevalence is dropping. So, no matter how many possible mechanisms are proposed, no matter how they "massage" the data, the cold, hard facts are these:

Thimerosal exposure is down.

Autism numbers have kept rising.

The conclusion should be inescapable.

For Additional Information:

Misconceptions about Immunization: Thimerosal Causes Autism: Chelation Therapy Can Cure It

Thimerosal & vaccines: Q&A. CDC Immunization Program Web site, revised May 18, 2004.

Immunization Safety Review Committee. Immunization Safety Review: Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. National Academy Press, 2001.

This page was posted on January 31, 2005.

If what the people at this "secret" meeting were true, the numbers should be going DOWN. They are not. They are going up. And what these people are doing is focusing the attention away from other, more plausible reasons for autism. If they were truly about finding a cure, then they would quit with the Thimerosal blame. It hasn't been used since 2000 and the numbers go up. No Enron style number crunching can dispute that. But they try. Too bad for us.

:logo:

[Larry]

Maddog,

Thanks for some (alleged) facts. (Not trying to cast aspersions on your quote. But am I the only one who thinks there's something wrong, somewhere, when, as the article says, someone (the CDC, in this case) can order up some studies, and specify in advance what they want the study to say?)

Is ethics out of fasion, just some fairy tale that children believe in when they're cute, but everybody else really knows better? Have we sunk to the position, as a society, where there is no statement that can be taken at face value, without at least a nagging suspicion of "I wonder who paid for this study?"

(Or have things always been dishonest, and the world hasn't changed, it's just that I have?)

[/rant]

I will point out that it's at least theoreticlly possible that the folks who made the decisions described above had good motives. (Yeah, I believe in Star Trek, too.)

Their decision wasn't strictly a desision of "do we inject mercury into kids?" or not. It was, at least partially, a tradeoff of "Do we inject mercury into kids, or do we raise the price, knowing that it will result in some kids not getting vaccinated?"

(I would have thought, however, that if the only implication of leaving the mercury out of the vaccine was that it raises the cost, then the decision might have been "Take the mercury out of the US vaccines, because Americans can afford the more expensive version, but leave it in the vaccines we ship to third-world countries, because they need their vaccines to be as cheap as possible." Unfortunately, then you get into the whole political "The US is dumping toxic chemicals into African children that they won't allow in US children. We demand that the US give us the expensive version! (For free.)"

Sometimes I think that more openness would solve a lot of these (and similar) problems. (If your position is that "I can't do what I think is the Right Thing, because my opponents will spin it into something evil." then my response is "If you're open about your position, then your opponent can't spin it, because too many people will know the facts.")

But again, I believe in Star Trek, too.

[jpillian]

It's interesting that Maddog's link was from, what I'd guess from the URL, is specifically an autisim related site.

I would tend to give that more credence (if true, and that it really is an unbiased site -- i.e., not an opinion front for the industry mentioned in the Rolling Stone article) than an investigative report from Rolling Stone.

I would THINK that an autism focused group would be singing the praises of Rolling Stone's article -- trying to put together any two possible leads to help and try and prevent the condition -- rather than try and quash is, as you see in Maddog's article.

To me, it seems a pretty effective debunking. Who is actually concerned with finding tangible new methods for preventing autism? And who is trying to put together an us vs. them investigative report?

I honestly don't have a very strong opinion about this, I guess I'm just looking at the motivations of the two articles.

[Joe Sick]

That goodness we protected Eli Lilly from prosecution for this.

You know how important that was to homeland security!

Thanks, "Dr." Frist.

[flyingtiger1013]

Originally posted by Joe Sick

That goodness we protected Eli Lilly from prosecution for this.

You know how important that was to homeland security!

Thanks, "Dr." Frist.

That's just irresponsible on your part. Autism doesn't care what your background is or politics are. Frist looks bad, given. However, we can't just sue those companies out of business either.

In case you don't recall my mentioning of it, I have an autistic son. I have been on damn near every website that even mentions autism. My ex-wife and I explored, read, and studied so much about it that we became so-called experts in our community. This is nothing new for us. We've been dealing with this for 8 years. Luckily, our son is high functioning. I've been with parents that have severely autistic twins. I truly believe that when those parents pass from this life they will have a very special place in Heaven because they have been through more than Hell can give. I hope and pray that no one will ever have to go through what parents of autistic children have to go through. Just getting them educated can be compared to pulling teeth.

I am going to stop for now before I get myself really worked up. I just beg all of you; please don't turn this into a political discussion. Autism doesn't give a sh*t.

[GoCommiesGo]

The coverup by the Govt. doesn't surpise me so much as the fact they kept producing and using the stuff. I've got a ten year old brother and the simple fact that he COULD have been hurt by this pisses me off to no end.

If the article is true and they knowingly poisned the genration of kids in the 90's someone should be hanged for this.

[Thiebear]

Originally posted by MaddogCT

From Quackwatch.com:

http://www.autism-watch.org/general/thio.shtml

It is hard to know exactly when the hypothesis that mercury could cause autism was first proposed. The idea was circulating well before 2000, the year that thimerosal—a mercury-containing preservative—was removed from children’s vaccines. In its October 2001 report, Immunization Safety Review: Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded that, while it was biologically plausible that thimerosal could cause autism, no data supported the claim that it did cause autism.

Since that time, much has happened (and not happened). The most significant thing has been, as Sherlock Holmes said in "Silver Blaze," the "dog that didn’t bark." Because manufacturers stopped using thimerosal in children’s vaccines in 2000, few children now under age four have ever received a thimerosal-containing vaccine. Even those born to Rh-negative mothers (who received at least one dose of thimerosal-containing RhoGam during pregnancy) have gotten far less thimerosal than older children. If thimerosal were a major cause of autism, we should see a drop in autism incidence, which has yet to materialize.

This non-event shouldn’t come as a surprise. Denmark mandated removal of thimerosal from vaccines in 1992. Even allowing for continued use of thimerosal-containing stocks of vaccine, Danish children were thimerosal-free by 1995. Autism prevalence in Denmark has risen in exactly the same fashion as in the United States and the United Kingdom.

A number of supporters of the thimerosal-autism connection have "corrected" the numbers of the Danish studies, manipulating the numbers in ways that would make Enron accountants blush. They can, through mathematical sleight-of-hand, turn the exponential upward curve into a downward trend, but they have yet to explain why the autism numbers in Denmark keep rising every year if the prevalence is dropping. So, no matter how many possible mechanisms are proposed, no matter how they "massage" the data, the cold, hard facts are these:

Thimerosal exposure is down.

Autism numbers have kept rising.

The conclusion should be inescapable.

For Additional Information:

Misconceptions about Immunization: Thimerosal Causes Autism: Chelation Therapy Can Cure It

Thimerosal & vaccines: Q&A. CDC Immunization Program Web site, revised May 18, 2004.

Immunization Safety Review Committee. Immunization Safety Review: Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. National Academy Press, 2001.

This page was posted on January 31, 2005.

If what the people at this "secret" meeting were true, the numbers should be going DOWN. They are not. They are going up. And what these people are doing is focusing the attention away from other, more plausible reasons for autism. If they were truly about finding a cure, then they would quit with the Thimerosal blame. It hasn't been used since 2000 and the numbers go up. No Enron style number crunching can dispute that. But they try. Too bad for us.

:logo:

good read...

[chomerics]

Originally posted by MaddogCT

From Quackwatch.com:

http://www.autism-watch.org/general/thio.shtml

It is hard to know exactly when the hypothesis that mercury could cause autism was first proposed. The idea was circulating well before 2000, the year that thimerosal—a mercury-containing preservative—was removed from children’s vaccines. In its October 2001 report, Immunization Safety Review: Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded that, while it was biologically plausible that thimerosal could cause autism, no data supported the claim that it did cause autism.

Since that time, much has happened (and not happened). The most significant thing has been, as Sherlock Holmes said in "Silver Blaze," the "dog that didn’t bark." Because manufacturers stopped using thimerosal in children’s vaccines in 2000, few children now under age four have ever received a thimerosal-containing vaccine. Even those born to Rh-negative mothers (who received at least one dose of thimerosal-containing RhoGam during pregnancy) have gotten far less thimerosal than older children. If thimerosal were a major cause of autism, we should see a drop in autism incidence, which has yet to materialize.

This non-event shouldn’t come as a surprise. Denmark mandated removal of thimerosal from vaccines in 1992. Even allowing for continued use of thimerosal-containing stocks of vaccine, Danish children were thimerosal-free by 1995. Autism prevalence in Denmark has risen in exactly the same fashion as in the United States and the United Kingdom.

A number of supporters of the thimerosal-autism connection have "corrected" the numbers of the Danish studies, manipulating the numbers in ways that would make Enron accountants blush. They can, through mathematical sleight-of-hand, turn the exponential upward curve into a downward trend, but they have yet to explain why the autism numbers in Denmark keep rising every year if the prevalence is dropping. So, no matter how many possible mechanisms are proposed, no matter how they "massage" the data, the cold, hard facts are these:

Thimerosal exposure is down.

Autism numbers have kept rising.

The conclusion should be inescapable.

For Additional Information:

Misconceptions about Immunization: Thimerosal Causes Autism: Chelation Therapy Can Cure It

Thimerosal & vaccines: Q&A. CDC Immunization Program Web site, revised May 18, 2004.

Immunization Safety Review Committee. Immunization Safety Review: Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. National Academy Press, 2001.

This page was posted on January 31, 2005.

If what the people at this "secret" meeting were true, the numbers should be going DOWN. They are not. They are going up. And what these people are doing is focusing the attention away from other, more plausible reasons for autism. If they were truly about finding a cure, then they would quit with the Thimerosal blame. It hasn't been used since 2000 and the numbers go up. No Enron style number crunching can dispute that. But they try. Too bad for us.

:logo:

If you read the entire article, you would see that Rolling Stone talked about it. :doh:

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.

It appears it is just as the magazine said, and quack-watch should really look into what is behind the study.

[tex]

http://flushot.secopinion.com/

http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/Articles/Cancer_Causing_Vaccines.html

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/O/OP/OPV_AIDS_hypothesis5.htm

http://www.hazardcards.com/card.php?id=37

Mercury is the mere tip of the iceberg.

The flu vaccine can also be downright dangerous as well. The vaccine contains formaldehyde, the embalming fluid that's a known carcinogen.

In addition to formaldehyde, the flu vaccine also contains aluminum and mercury, two heavy metals that have been linked to a whole bunch of neurological disorders, from Alzheimer's disease to autism.

How dangerous are the metals in the vaccine? Dr. Hugh Fudenburg, MD, a geneticist who has served on panels with the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization, studied flu shot data from 1970 to 1980. His conclusion:

"If an individual has had five consecutive flu shots between 1970 and 1980, his/her chances of getting Alzheimer's Disease is 10 times higher than if they two shots [or less]."

Even though the manufacturers screen the vaccine for bacteria and other pathogens, the risk of contamination is still high. After all, there are thousands of different pathogens, more than they can possibly test for.

This year, they were able to detect a bacterial contamination in 48 million batches of the vaccine. But in previous years, they haven't been so lucky.

Back in the 1960s, for example, the polio vaccine was infected with SV-40, a virus known to cause disease in apes, but with unknown effects in humans. The authorities pooh-poohed the risk at the time. Now, 40 years later, we're seeing an epidemic of strange cancers harboring this virus.

And remember the swine flu scare of the 1970s? People panicked, and President Ford went on TV and promised "to inoculate every man, woman, and child in the United States. "

But just as the program began, three people in Pittsburgh died after getting their flu shots. Cases started popping up of Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a rare disease that causes the body to attack its own nerve cells.

In December of 1976, the government halted the vaccination program. But the damage was done. No one can say for sure how many injuries and deaths resulted from the shots. But in the end, the government paid out over $90 million in damages to people who developed Guillain-Barre.

The WHO and the Man-Made Theory of AIDS

Unlike most Americans, Africans are aware of the man-made theory of AIDS, and the possibility the WHO’s extensive vaccine programs in Africa in the 1970s are connected to the severe outbreak of AIDS in the early 1980s.

On May 11, 1987, the London Times, one of the world’s most respected newspapers, published an explosive article entitled, “Smallpox vaccine triggered AIDS virus.” The story suggested the smallpox eradication vaccine program sponsored by the WHO was responsible for unleashing AIDS in Africa. Almost 100 million Africans living in central Africa were inoculated by the WHO. The vaccine was held responsible for awakening a “dormant” AIDS virus infection on the continent.

An advisor to the WHO admitted, “Now I believe the smallpox vaccine theory is the explanation for the explosion of AIDS.” Robert Gallo, M.D., the co-discoverer of HIV, told The Times, “The link between the WHO program and the epidemic is an interesting and important hypothesis. I cannot say that it actually happened, but I have been saying for some years that the use of live vaccines such as that used for smallpox can activate a dormant infection such as HIV.” Despite the tremendous importance of this story, the US media was totally silent on the report, and Gallo never spoke of it again.

In September 1987, at a conference sponsored by the National Health Federation in Monrovia, California, William Campbell Douglass, M.D., bluntly blamed the WHO for murdering Africa with the AIDS virus. In a widely circulated reprint of his talk entitled “W.H.O. Murdered Africa”, he accused the organisation of encouraging virologists and molecular biologists to work with deadly animal viruses in an attempt to make an immunosuppressive hybrid virus that would be deadly to humans.

From the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation (Volume 47, p.259, 1972), he quoted a passage that stated: “An attempt should be made to see if viruses can in fact exert selective effects on immune function. The possibility should be looked into that the immune response to the virus itself may be impaired if the infecting virus damages, more or less selectively, the cell responding to the virus.” According to Douglass, “That’s AIDS. What the WHO is saying in plain English is ‘Let’s cook up a virus that selectively destroys the T-cell system of man, an acquired immune deficiency.’” The entire article can be read on google.com (“WHO Murdered Africa”).

In his 1989 book, AIDS: The End of Civilisation, Douglass claims the WHO laced the African vaccines. He blames “the virologists of the world, the sorcerers who brought us this ghastly plague, and have formed a united front in denying that the virus was laboratory-made from known, lethal animal viruses. The scientific party line is that a monkey in Africa with AIDS bit a native on the butt. The native then went to town and gave it to a prostitute who gave it to a local banker who gave it to his wife and three girl friends, and wham – 75 million people became infected with AIDS in Africa. An entirely preposterous story.”

SV-40, the 40th discovered simian virus, was introduced into the human population in the 1950s by contaminated polio vaccines produced in Asian rhesus monkey kidney cells. It now infects 23% of the population, and is likely to be passed on to future generations. Research has shown that SV-40 induces tumours in hamsters, and has been found present in human brain tumours, mesotheliomas and bone tumours. It is accepted that SV-40 slightly increases the risk of particular varieties of cancer.

A similar case occurred in 1942, in which 50,000 US servicemen were infected with acute hepatisis B due to contaminated yellow fever vaccine.

n 1957, the Oral Polio Vaccine was still in its experimental phase and none of the Western countries allowed test vaccinations in their own countries.

The United Nations then suggested testing the vaccine in the undeveloped countries and a group of researchers went off to Western Africa, bringing with them a small amount of vaccine, which was amplified in whichever primate cells were locally available.

By the second half of the 1950s, virologists in South Africa were using African green monkey cells to amplify the vaccines, while their colleagues in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa were apparently using cells from baboons. In the town of Stanleyville in Congo, Hooper claims, they used chimpanzees.

Today, it is considered a fact that HIV comes from chimpanzee SIV, called SIVcpz. The big question is: How was it transferred to humans?

Some scientists state that it happened by means of chimp bites or other contact involving blood, but how come that HIV has not transferred earlier, since humans have killed and eaten chimpanzees for thousands of years?

According to the OPV-theory, the polio vaccine was contaminated with SIV when cultivated in the chimpanzee kidneys. Each OPV contained a bit of the poliovirus, but due to the method of cultivation, it also contained whichever ape virus or monkey virus present in the cell substrate.

Hooper points to the fact that in Poland, where another type of monkey was used, which was not carrying the SIV-virus, no cases of HIV were detected.

The scientists carrying out the OPV project in Stanleyville in the late 50’s deny that local chimpanzees were ever used, but Hooper has strong evidence that this is not true. Coincidence or not, the epidemic broke out exactly in the African town, where the oral polio vaccine, called CHAT, was given.

As the renowned biologist William Hamilton wrote in a letter to a colleague of the Royal Society, in October 1999: “the AIDS disaster, if the OPV theory is right, (...) arose out of well-meaning (though also, it must be said, egotistical and profit-seeking) medical motives. But, the potential compounding of this, through failure to find the truth, to publicise and to study what happened, is that medical science continues virtually unwarned towards other equal - or conceivably greater - disasters.”

In other words: the scientific world must act as if the OPV-theory were true in order to prevent similar or greater disasters to happen in the future. UNAIDS estimates that there are currently 36,1 million people living with HIV/AIDS, of which 34,7 million are adults and 1,4 million are children under the age of 15. Since the epidemic began, an estimated 21,8 million people have died of AIDS – 17,5 million adults and 4,3 million children under 15.

For information about the ongoing debate, please visit the link below called "Polio vaccines and the origin of AIDS, some key writings", where new articles on the subject rutinely are collected.