Earlier this week Chantale was telling me about some report she heard or read somewhere regarding a possible link between childhood vaccinations and autism. It sounded really scary especially the fact that Kyle, being over 1 year old, is due for his shots.
Today, I went searching the newswires and came across this following article by Evelyn Pringle: Government Investigation Finds Autism Vaccine Related which was posted this past Monday. Here are some excerpts from the article:
On May 21, 2003, after a three year investigation, “The Mercury in Medicine Report” was released by the House Committee on Government Reform, and stated in part:
“Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic. 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 and the sharper eyes of infant exposure to this known neurotoxin. The public health agencies’ failure to act is indicative of institutional malfeasance for self protection and misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry.”
Thimerosal is a mercury-based preservative that was developed in the 1930s by Eli Lilly, and has been used regularly in vaccines ever since basically to boost vaccine maker profits by allowing drug companies to package vaccines in large containers instead of a single dose.
However, years ago children only received a small number of vaccines that were injected with period of time in between and one dose at a time. Since 1988, the number of vaccines given to children before the age two has tripled.
An internal company memo that surfaced in a lawsuit against vaccine maker, Merck, proves the company knew infants were being injected with unsafe amounts of thimerosal back in 1991.
The memo says a 6-month-old baby receiving shots on schedule would receive mercury 87 times higher than established safety guidelines
For instance, a September 1999, press release by vaccine maker Merck declared: “Now, Merck’s infant vaccine line is free of all preservatives.”
However, On March 8, 2005, the LA Times reported that “Merck & Co continued to supply infant vaccine containing a mercury preservative for two years after declaring that it had eliminated the chemical.”
In one of their more recent studies in 2005, the Geiers assessed thimerosal exposure in about 110,000 children and found a statistically significant association between exposure to thimerosal and a host of neurodevelopmental disorders including autism, tics, attention deficit disorders, and speech and language delays.
“The current epidemic of autism may well be the greatest iatrogenic epidemic in history. The damage already done to our society is already in the trillions of dollars. The damage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that of the AIDS epidemic pale when compared to the current epidemic of autism.”
Holy hell. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Okay, I *could* believe it, but the thought of my bright, smiling, sunny, active, happy little boy suddenly becoming afflicted with autism scared the shit out of me. Tonight, I went searching a bit more and found a number of other articles by her over on Autism News & More and each new reading just makes me shake my head more and more.
Corporate America making tons of money on the backs and health of its citizens? Sound familiar? Heck, all the deniability smells and reads pretty much the same as the big tobacco companies “affirming” that cigarettes are not addictive and don’t cause cancer. And let’s not get into the CIA cover-ups as discussed in Whiteout by Alexander Cockburn.
What a world we live in…
Edited to add: As I wrote below in the replies, there is just SO much information on the web from a slew of different medical blogs/ journals/ etc etc that it’s very easy to go nuts trying to formulate an opinion. It all comes down to: who do you trust? who do you want to believe? what does your gut tell you? You start down the negative trail and you want to say no, you go through the positive trail (like this LiveScience report) and you want to say Yeah, and then you get to others like this Awares article and you waver…
Information comes with a price…