The dangers of vaccination are becoming more and more public knowledge, so it is not surprising to see more big pharma snakes making stronger and bolder claims to entice people to poison their kids.  This is a good thing because they make their agenda much clearer for everybody to see.

Read this article to see how Dr. Mercola shatters, one by one, the incredibly shallow and fake claims Dr. Snyderman made recently.

Keep in mind that, even if Dr. Mercola does not say it openly, vaccination is a scam, it has NEVER WORKED, ever, it is only poisoning the population to increase big pharma profits.  See my other posts in ‘Vaccine madness‘.

The following video is rigged with errors and lies, it is truly shameful to see the level of disrespect to human suffering.  Do not miss Dr. Mercola’s rebuttal of all her claims, one by one.

If you believe in vaccines, ask yourself, “Why do they need to lie so much?”  Truth stands by itself, right?

Make sure you read the following.

_______________________________________________________

Why Dr. Snyderman’s Whooping Cough Vaccine Rant is a Total SHAM

Mercola.com

By Barbara Loe Fisher

This summer, inaccurate and misleading information about B. pertussis whooping cough and the pertussis vaccine is being put out there by medical doctors, who should know better.

Media campaigns designed to create fear about infectious disease are nothing new. This one appears to have three goals: first, to emphasize pertussis risks while ignoring vaccine risks; second, to place blame for whooping cough cases and deaths on the unvaccinated; and, third, to attack religious and conscientious belief exemptions, which serve as informed consent protections in U.S. vaccine laws.

Tools of the Trade: Fear, Intimidation, and ‘Soft’ Facts

In 2009, public health officials declared a pandemic H1N1 influenza emergency and played up the potential complications of the swine flu while playing down the potential risks of the untested new swine flu vaccine. ¹

When two-thirds of Americans “just said no” to swine flu shots, NBC’s chief medical editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman ridiculed them and quipped “Just get the damn vaccine.” ²

Now Snyderman has issued a similar standing order to “get vaccinated” but, this time, she is accusing parents of unvaccinated children for causing the deaths of six California infants, who have reportedly died from complications of B. pertussis whooping cough.

On July 28, 2010, Dr. Snyderman further alleged that “most people” with religious objections to vaccination are not telling the truth and that the “needs” of the “community as a whole” are “better than the individual” and “more important.” ³

Ordinarily I would not take the time to address specific comments by a prominent doctor, who is careless with the facts when voicing an opinion. But as more doctors use the bully pulpit of the national media – unchallenged – to disseminate incorrect information, promote personal ideological views and advance political agendas, it becomes more important for informed Americans to speak up.

Are Unvaccinated Children Responsible for Whooping Cough Outbreak?

Responding to recent press releases and media reports, in which California health officials say the state is experiencing the worst whooping cough outbreak in 50 years with about 1,500 reported cases and six infants dying from B. pertussis, ⁴ on July 28 Dr. Snyderman offered the following explanation:

“I think that what we are seeing here is a tipping point in unvaccinated children because the hot pockets are in families where, frankly, parents have under-vaccinated or decided not to vaccinate their children.“ 5

A quick fact check reveals that both California health officials and Snyderman have not been entirely honest with the people.

The Centers for Disease Control’s published morbidity and mortality report shows that in the past 12 months, between July 24, 2009 and July 24, 2010, there were a total of 809 “provisional” cases of whooping cough reported in California.⁶ In fact, in the entire United States of America for the week ending July 24, there were only 187 reported cases of whooping cough, with no cases occurring in California.

Even the New York Times Acknowledges Problems with Pertussis Vaccine

The New York Times also reported that:

“The rise in pertussis doesn’t seem to be related to parents’ refusing to have their children vaccinated for fear of potential side effects.

In California, pertussis rates are about the same in counties with high childhood vaccination rates and low ones. And the C.D.C. reports that pertussis immunization rates have been stable or increasing since 1992.”

When disease incidence statistics publicized by state health departments do not match those published by federal health agencies, there is something wrong.

It is time for California health officials to fully disclose complete details of the 1,500 whooping cough cases they allege have occurred in the state during the past year, including how many cases were lab confirmed as B. pertussis; how many cases were classified as “epidemiologically linked” – which means they were NOT lab confirmed; and the ages and vaccination status of all cases, including whether people with suspected or confirmed cases had been given 1,2,3,4,5,6 or more pertussis shots.

Pertussis Vaccine Does NOT Equal Lifelong Immunity

Most doctors know perfectly well that getting 3 to 6 doses of pertussis vaccine or more does not give lifelong immunity to whooping cough, and that other viruses and bacteria, such as parapertussis and RSV – which are not covered by the vaccine – can be misdiagnosed as pertussis if proper lab tests are not done. ⁷ , ⁸

In addition, public health officials know that B. pertussis bacteria have been evolving and become vaccine resistant, making the pertussis vaccine much less effective. ⁹

So Snyderman is engaging in pure speculation when she blames whooping cough-related deaths on the unvaccinated.

The truth is that infants can be as easily exposed to B. pertussis by coming into contact with a fully vaccinated infected person as with an unvaccinated person. ¹⁰

Dr. Snyderman goes on state that, “These are 6 infants who have lost their lives who, frankly, should not have died.”

I agree. It is tragic when babies die from whooping cough and it is tragic when babies get pertussis containing vaccines and suffer convulsions, collapse/shock, high pitched screaming and other signs of brain inflammation and then, die.¹¹

It is a tragedy when any baby dies, regardless of the cause.

The Polio Story

No fear campaign about infectious disease would be complete without bringing up polio. Snyderman says, “We were given our polio vaccine and the idea was that, if you get a vaccination, you will not get ill and you will not die.”

Yes, that was the “idea” but it is not a fact.

Every vaccine carries a risk of injury and death that can be greater for some than others. There is no guarantee the vaccine will prevent an infectious disease and, depending upon the vaccine, it could actually give you the vaccine strain of the disease it is supposed to prevent.

In 1999, the U.S. abandoned use of the live virus oral polio vaccine to prevent individuals in America from being paralyzed by vaccine strain polio. ¹²

A lot of people don’t know that if you swallow the live virus polio vaccine you can get paralyzed and die.

On top of that, recently vaccinated persons shed live poliovirus in their body fluids for weeks. People who come in close contact with them can get vaccine strain polio and be paralyzed or die.

Today, a killed polio vaccine is used in America because parents of vaccine injured children lobbied in the 1990′s to get the polio vaccine policy changed.

But Dr. Snyderman only tells one side of the polio story, charging that: “Now people, frankly, have amnesia from the event. They forget what it was like to see people with these communicable diseases.”

There are plenty of Americans, like me, who remember lining up for polio shots in the 1950′s and 60′s and were informed 40 years later, in the 1990′s, that a lot of those experimental polio shots were contaminated with a monkey virus, simian virus 40, that causes cancer in lab animals and has been associated with brain, bone and lung cancers in children and adults. ¹³ , ¹⁴

We do remember polio and the iron lung. But we also remember not being told the whole truth about polio vaccine risks.

Then Snyderman takes out the big club and warns:

“I worry that, if we are under-vaccinating our children you start to see things like whooping cough coming back, this is the canary in the coal mine. Last year we saw children die of measles and I worry that, if we see whooping cough and measles, that polio can’t be far away.”

Let’s take another look at official federal disease incidence statistics to see whether that “worry” is justified or is just a lot of hype.

In 2009, out of 300 million people living in the United States, there were 71 cases of measles reported. This year, there have been 32 cases of measles. That’s right: 32. There have been no cases of polio reported in America this year and only 1 case since 2006.¹⁵

Get a grip Dr. Snyderman.

“In a country like this, where vaccinations are available, these communicable and infectious and deadly diseases shouldn’t even be talked about,” says Snyderman.

Most doctors know that vaccines only give temporary immunity at best and that microbes, like B. pertussis, are constantly evolving to survive. ¹⁶ , ¹⁷ That’s why five or more doses of pertussis vaccine still can’t prevent all whooping cough diseases.

The One-Size-Fits-All Approach to Vaccines is Not in Your Child’s Best Interest

We will likely be talking about whooping cough, measles, mumps, chicken pox and lots of other infectious diseases for a long, long time in this country and in every country, whether we get vaccinated or not.

“You know I have been an unabashed, unapologetic advocate for vaccinations. They are safe. They work,” says Snyderman.

Many American doctors are “unapologetic” mandatory vaccination advocates because that is what they are told to be by public health officials and leaders in major medical organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics¹⁸ and the American Medical Association.¹⁹ In fact, about 40 percent of pediatricians in America today proudly say they flatly deny medical care to families, who refuse to follow their orders to “get vaccinated.”²⁰

As important, though, is the question: How many of these doctors refuse to speak to, associate with, and condemn other doctors, who do treat patients making selective vaccine choices?

The truth is, vaccines are not safe for everyone and they do not work for everyone.

When doctors only tell half the truth about vaccine benefits and risks, people can sense it. And when they demean and threaten patients who ask questions or disagree with them, the fragile bond of trust between doctors and patients is broken.

Like when Dr. Snyderman demeans Americans, who exercise religious exemption to vaccination, an exemption which exists in all but two states.

“A lot of people are opting out on them [vaccines] and saying, “Well, it’s against my religion” and I would say, for most people, that is just not true,” she says.

It is annoying when anyone pretends to know another person’s mind, heart and soul. But it is frightening when doctors believe they are entitled to judge the sincerity of another person’s religious or conscientiously held beliefs.

With this comment, Dr. Snyderman has assumed the position of an Inquisitor. There is some comfort in knowing that the rack is no longer in fashion and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ²¹ has not yet been repealed.

The Risks of Pertussis-Containing Vaccines

“Make sure your children are vaccinated,” says Snyderman.

This simplistic, one-size-fits-all approach to vaccination is dangerous.

Because there are children, who are at higher risk to becoming brain injured or dying after getting pertussis containing vaccines (DTaP, Tdap), including those who have suffered previous vaccine reactions like:²² ,²³

• Very high fever
• High pitched screaming or persistent crying
• Convulsions (with or without fever)
• Collapse/shock (also known as hypo-tonic/hypo-responsive episodes)
• Brain Inflammation and encephalopathy

For a full list of precautions for children, teenagers and adults, read the manufacturer product inserts and get more information about how to recognize a vaccine reaction at www.NVIC.org.

Find out whether the pertussis vaccine your doctor is recommending for your child has been studied for safety and effectiveness when given at the same time as other vaccines.

For example, many pertussis vaccines have not been studied in clinical trials when a flu shot is given at the same time.

“If you are an adult and you are around a child under the age of one, get vaccinated,” says Snyderman.

Again, it is important to know whether you, as an adult, are at high risk for suffering a pertussis vaccine reaction, such as being sick at the time of vaccination.

Pertussis Vaccine During Pregnancy

“If you are a woman of childbearing years, get vaccinated,” says Snyderman.

How many pregnant women, whose doctors urge them to get a booster shot (Tdap), know that the vaccine has not been thoroughly studied in pregnant women?

Or that manufacturer product inserts include this disclaimer: ²⁴

Animal reproduction studies have not been conducted…..It is not known whether [the vaccine] can cause fetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman, or can affect reproductive capacity. [The vaccine] has not been evaluated for carcinogenic or mutagenic potential, or for impairment of fertility.

Frightening Misinformation

But wait – Dr. Snyderman even tries to make us believe that unvaccinated people can infect immunocompromised people simply by walking past them in the grocery store!

No, really. She says:

“And if you think, well, you can opt out [of vaccination], remember that, when you go to the grocery store and you walk by someone who has cancer or MS or any other compromised immune system, you put that person in harms way, too.”

Is that the kind of immunology being taught in medical schools today? ²⁵ , ²⁶

That an unvaccinated person can transmit infectious disease without hand shaking or kissing or coughing or sneezing – just a simple walk-by will do? ²⁷

Nuremberg Code Revisited

And, finally, Dr. Snyderman gets to the heart of the matter and promotes her personal ideological belief, which requires devaluing the individual:

“There is a time, when the community as a whole, their needs are better than the individual and, I think, more important,” says Snyderman.

This kind of thinking is called utilitarianism, ²⁸ . ²⁹ a political philosophy that was judged to be a pseudo-ethic by the Nuremberg Tribunal at the Doctor’s Trial in 1946.

The judges at Nuremberg exposed what happened when doctors used the utilitarian rationale to conduct scientific research during World War II that forced individuals to risk their lives in drug, vaccine and other medical experiments. ³⁰

The Nuremberg Code, which defined the ethical principle of informed consent, has served as the foundation for the ethical practice of medicine for more than half a century.

The informed consent principle makes it clear that the rights of the individual cannot, ethically, be sacrificed to the needs or interests of society. ³¹

But Dr. Snyderman goes further and marginalizes and condemns individuals, who do not agree with her utilitarian view.

“Right now, individuals are trumping the general populace at large and I find that, frankly, offensive and amoral,” says Snyderman.

It is disturbing when prominent doctors tell half-truths and promote fear, hate and prejudice. We want to believe that the doctors we trust with our health and our children’s lives actually care about us as individuals.

Most people consider it is offensive and amoral to write off a minority of individuals as expendable in service to the rest. Because then, the question becomes: How many individuals can be sacrificed for what some in positions of authority have defined as “the greater good?”

Is it 300? 3,000? 30,000?

Or can we go as high as three million?

That is only 1 percent of 300 million Americans, after all.

How Many Vaccine-Injured Victims are There?

The truth is, nobody knows how many vaccine victims there are in America, how many of the 1 in 6 learning disabled children; or the 1 in 9 with asthma; or the 1 in 100 who develop autism; or the 1 in 450 who become diabetic, can trace their chronic inflammation, disease and disability back to vaccine reactions that have been dismissed by public health officials and doctors for the past century as just “a coincidence.” ³² , ³³

When parents of vaccine injured children held the first public demonstration in front of the CDC in Atlanta on May 12, 1986, the larger question we asked public health officials was, “Do you know how many?”

After we marched, we made presentations to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, (ACIP) and asked the Committee questions and, then,

I gave a report on my investigation into whooping cough outbreaks in 1985, which had been heavily publicized by physician officials at the American Academy of Pediatrics.

I found that many of the whooping cough cases reported in eight states in 1985 had not been lab confirmed and the majority had occurred in vaccinated children and adults. (You can read a transcript of what happened at that May 1986 CDC meeting on NVIC’s website.) ³⁴

Nothing much has changed in the last 25 years.

Whooping cough is still infecting both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.

The incidence of  pertussis increases every four to five years, no matter how high the vaccination rate.³⁵

Many children and adults survive whooping cough disease without complications but some do not. And some doctors in positions of power are still in the business of creating fear and demonizing those, who make informed health choices that do not include use of 16 government recommended vaccines. ³⁶ , ³⁷ ,³⁸

Get Educated – Make Informed Decisions

Dr. Snyderman concludes her diatribe by focusing on her own fears, while wistfully clinging to the myth that vaccines will eradicate all infectious diseases in America – if only every man, woman and child would dutifully comply with doctors’ orders to “get vaccinated.”

“I think this winter, as whooping cough upticks, measles continues to be under-vaccinated, we’re going to increasingly see pockets of communicable infections that a few decades ago we thought, frankly, we had eradicated from the United States. These illnesses should not be seen in the United States with the vaccinations that we have at hand,” says Snyderman.

And when asked if she believes pertussis will spread beyond the borders of California into other states, she compared it to the spreading outbreaks of measles, stating that, “Last year in Minnesota and in Philadelphia we know children died of measles.”

This despite the fact that there was not a single measles-related death in the US last year. According to the CDC information site on measles, there were a total of 71 reported cases of measles in 2009. No deaths.

Abe Lincoln once said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time.”

How long is it going to take for medical doctors, who have abandoned their critical thinking skills and lost themselves in orthodoxy, to stop fooling themselves so they can accurately inform their patients about the benefits and risks of vaccination ^{39 40} and respect the choices their patients make? ^{41 42}

Whatever doctors decide to do and whether they ever conduct the good scientific studies that will answer outstanding questions about vaccination, individuals should always have the freedom to exercise informed consent to medical risk-taking.

That freedom protects individuals and minorities from exploitation by those in positions of authority in society, who do not know what they do, as well as from those who do know what they are doing.

The freedom to make an informed, voluntary decision about what we are willing to risk our lives or our children’s lives for is not just an individual need, it is a human right. It is a human right and a freedom worth defending in this and every century.

References

1 National Vaccine Information Center. Pandemic H1N1 Swine Flu: What About You & Your Family?
2 MSNBC-TV. “Morning Meeting.” August 25, 2009.
3 NBC-TV. “The Today Show.” July 28, 2010. Meredith Vieira & Nancy Snydernan, M.D.
4 California Department of Public Health. Press Release: CDPH Broadens Recommendations for Vaccinating Against Pertussis: Immunization Key to Controlling Whooping Cough. July 19, 2010.
5 Transcript of Meredith Vieira interview of Nancy Snyderman, M.D. on NBC-TV “The Today Show.” July 28, 2010.
6 CDC. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). Vol. 59, No. 29. July 30, 2010.
7 He Q, Vijanen MK et al. Whooping Cough Caused by Bordetella pertussis and Bordetella parapertussis in an Immunized Population. JAMA. 1998; 280: 635-637.
8 Liese JG, Renner C. Clinical and epidemiological picture of B pertussis and B parapertussis infections after introduction of acellular pertussis vaccines. Archives of Diseases in Childhood 2003; 88: 684-687.
9 Preston A. Bordetella pertussis: the intersection of genomics and pathobiology. Canadian Medical Association Journal. July 5, 2005. 173 (1)
10 Mooi F R, van LooI HM, King A. Adaptation of Bordetella pertussis to Vaccination: A Cause for its Reemergence? Emerging Infectious Diseases. Vol. 7, No. 3 Supplement June 2001.
11 HRSA. National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). Claims Filed and Compensated or Dismissed by Vaccine. (up to May 5, 2010). and Statistics Report: Awards Paid (as of June 7, 2010).
12 Alexander LN, Seward JF et al. Vaccine Policy Changes and Epidemiology of Poliomyelitis in the United States. JAMA. 2004; 298:1696-1701.
13 Carlsen W. Rogue Virus in the Vaccine: Early Polio Vaccine Harbored Virus Now Feared to Cause Cancer in Humans. San Francisco Chronicle. July 15, 2001.
14 Fisher BL. Congressional Testimony: The SV-40 Virus: Has Tainted Polio Vaccine Caused an Increase in Cancer? U.S. House Government Reform Committee. September 10, 2003.
15 MMWR. See Reference #6.
16 Diavatopoulos DA, Cummings CA et al. Bordetella pertussis, the Causative Agent of Whooping Cough, Evolved from a Distinct Human-Associated Lineage of B. bronchiseptica. PLOS Pathogens. December 2005: Vol. 1, Issue 4.
17 McIntosh M. Bacteria Take Short Cuts to Evolve on Fast Track. UA News (University of Arizona). May 10, 2001.
18 Diekema DS. Responding to Parental Refusals of Immunization of Children. Pediatrics. Vol. 115, No. 5. May 2005; pp: 1428-1431. (Reaffirmed as AAP Policy on May 1, 2009).
19 Medical News Today. AACAP Applauds AMA’s Support for Universal Vaccinations. June 19, 2009.
20 Flanagan-Klygis EA, Sharp L, Frader JE. Dismissing the Family Who Refuses Vaccines. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2005; 159:929-934.
21 U.S. Constitution – First Amendment.
22 National Vaccine Information Center. Pertussis (Whooping Cough) and Pertussis Vaccine.
23 Sanofi-Pasteur. DAPTACEL Product Insert. March 2008.
24 GlaxoSmithKline. Boosterix Product Insert. December 2008.
25 Siegel JD, Rhinehart E et al. 2007 Guidelines for Isolation Precautions: Preventing Transmission of Infectious Agents in Healthcare Settings.  CDC.
26 Andre JB, Gupta S. Frank S, Tibayrenc M. Evolution and immunology of infectious diseases: What’s new? An E-debate. Infection, Genetics and Evolution (2004) 69-75.
27 Oklahoma Department of Public Health. Public Health Fact Sheet: Preventing Infectious Diseases Daily With Healthy Behavior. November 2007.
28 Mautner, T. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy. and Utilitarianism. The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy.
29 Ross KL. The Mummy’s Curse: Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).
30 Seidelman WE. Nuremberg lamentation: for the forgotten victims of medical science. BMJ 1996; 313:1463-7.
31 Katz J. The Consent Principle of the Nuremberg Code: It’s Significance Then and Now. The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 227-239.
32 Coulter HL, Fisher BL. DPT: A Shot in the Dark (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985).

33 Fisher BL. Vaccines, Autism & Chronic Inflammation: The New Epidemic. 2008.
34 Transcript (partial). May 12, 1986 Meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Transcribed in 1986 from audio tapes.
35 MSNBC. Health Today: Growing outbreaks of whooping cough raise health fears. July 28, 2010.
36 Cox L, Walker E. Doctors May ‘Fire” Parents Who Don’t Vaccinate Children. ABC News. October 23, 2009.
37 Nguyen P. Parents who don’t vaccinate their kids put us all at risk. UCLA Today. June 1, 2010.
38 PBS. Frontline: The Vaccine War. April 27, 2010.
39 Legido A, Tenembaum SN, Katsetos CD, Menkes JH. Autoimmune & Postinfectious Diseases (Chapter 8). Child Neurology – 7th Edition. Lippencott Williams & Wilkins, 2006. Pages 631-634 (Neurologic Complications of Immunizations).
40 Fisher BL. Whooping Cough Outbreaks & Vaccine Failures. NVIC. July 7, 2010. http://www.nvic.org/NVIC-Vaccine-News/July-2010/Whooping-Cough-Outbreaks-Vaccine-Failures.aspx
41 NBC “The Today Show.” March 1997. Matt Lauer, Barbara Loe Fisher, Neal Halsey, M.D.

42 Fisher BL. National Vaccine Advisory Committee. The Moral Right to Religious, Conscientious or Personal Belief Exemption to Mandatory Vaccination Laws. May 2, 1997.

I recently posted an article about how 52 officials from FDA, CDC, WHO and big pharma experts met in secret to hide the results of a dramatic study exposing that since 1991, the estimated number of CASES OF AUTISM HAD INCREASED FIFTEEN-FOLD, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children DUE TO MERCURY IN THE VACCINES.  They couldn’t care less about hurting your kids, and worked together to suppress the article exposing them, so I am reposting it here in full.

Please read this article, it is APPALLING, they are just a big mafia, and send it to as many people as you can.  

I gave this link towards the article on Rolling Stones, but it has ‘mysteriously disappeared’ without a trace.  They have been caught red-handed because I usually save those articles on my disk, fully aware of their tactics.  So, here is a copy of the full article, with my comments in brackets.  They can try to delete this post behind my back, I will repost it again and again, because I also back-up my posts.

Read the following article and learn how they couldn’t care less about human life, but only big pharma profits.  FDA, CDC have been working together for a century to increase big pharma profits.

PARENTS, you MUST read this to understand what they are up to! They work for big pharma, not you.  Your kids are their property. They want to turn them into their lifelong customers. You are there to raise and feed them, and pay for their drugs until they are able to do it themselves.  Go ahead, read the article, and prove me wrong.

The article starts here …

Deadly Immunity / Rolling stones

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

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. Posted Jun 20, 2005 12:00 AM

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 [that’s how those who you ‘trust’ to protect you conspire against you].

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 fifteen-fold, 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” [oh yeah, but please do not warn the other parents, they deserve to see their kid turned into a vegetable because of your actions].

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 advisor at the World Health Organization, declared that “perhaps this study should not have been done at all.” [this tells all you need to know about the criminality of the WHO, whose sole purpose is to expand big pharma profits and reduce the population by harming kids as much as they can].  He added that “the research results have to be handled,” [sir, research results are PUBLISHED, that’s how science moves forward, you are a criminal] warning that the study “will be taken by others and will be used in other ways beyond the control of this group.”

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 [that’s how big pharma does science these days, they order people to come up with the results they want, it has nothing to do with safey or healing people]. 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 Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to Frist [terrorism again, the perfect excuse to do anything they want under that banner...yeah, let’s be afraid of bearded cavemen !].

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.” [that’s good for big pharma, those will be lifelong customers]

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 eleven 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. At two months, when the infant brain is still at a critical stage of development, infants routinely received three inoculations that contained a total of 62.5 micrograms of ethylmercury — a level 99 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 Institute of Health — suggest that ethylmercury is actually MORE toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury [in other words, they chose the most toxic of the two, and still brag about its inocuity].

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 was part of a team that developed the measles vaccine and brought it to licensure in 1963. 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 “had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.”

Offit, who shares a patent on one of the vaccines, acknowledged to me that he “would make money” if his vote 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” [when you hide studies exposing the dangers of thimerosal, you are not a scientist anymore, but a freaking criminal who deserves life sentence.  Offit goes as far as saying that vaccines are ‘so safe, that you could inject 1,000 into a kid].

Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of interest [they faked to be alarmed because this has been going on for a century, and it is only getting worse]. 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.

[what about making it unlawful to have ties to big pharma when you are in a committee for a start?]

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 [why do ‘more’ studies, only ONE study is enough when it exposes a danger]. 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 [when people do things like that, it is a proof that what they are hiding is true, otherwise they wouldn’t bother - they are pure criminals].  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” [as Offit said, it’s better to leave science to scientists ... who are paid by big pharma]. 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.

[See, this is a GIGANTIC error of logic because ONE study proving something is harmful destroys a trillion studies who can’t put the evidence to light, but they do it all the time, and the gullible public doesn’t see the trick.]

For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination, the revelations about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything they had worked for [which means they had worked towards harming people, and they wanted it to keep it like that]. “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 [in science, we call that ‘bias’ and unscientific because you are not trying to find the truth, just to look away from it]. “Four current studies are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and thimerosal,” [in other words, they make studies ‘knowing’ the results in advance, which is only possible when you have decided to lie, it’s a show] 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 [you cannot ‘undo’ the fact that mercury causes autism, they are just trying to confuse people with results from studies who search where there is nothing to find], we need to conduct and publicize additional studies to assure parents of safety” [no, you don’t, the study mentioned at the beginning of this article is the ‘black swan’ of vaccination, it’s game over for vaccine defenders because the link has been exposed]. 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 [as I said, by not looking on purpose where the danger is, you won’t find it, it is utterly non scientific]. 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 [this is outright criminal ... someone bring the electric chair]. The new study included children too young to have been diagnosed with autism and overlooked others who showed signs of the disease [no respect for humanity ...]. 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?” [well, true scientists for a start ...]

Under pressure from Congress and parents, the Institute of Medicine convened another panel to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety Datalink Data Sharing program. In February, the new panel, composed of different scientists, criticized the way the VSD had been used in the Verstraeten study, 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 [another criminal organization started by Rockefeller] continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders “under review” [yeah, and in the meantime, let’s keep using African and developing nations as lab rats and also keep their depopulation agenda on track].

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, [ON PURPOSE = ELECTRIC CHAIR] 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 [who wants a protection like that]. 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.

NOTE: This story has been updated to correct several inaccuracies in the original, published version. As originally reported, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations before 1989, but the article failed to note that they were innoculated a total of eleven times with those vaccines, including boosters. The article also mis-stated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms – an amount forty percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA’s limit for daily exposure to methylmercury [oh yeah, I am feeling better for those kids now, because you know you can trust that daily exposure limit after all we have seen, you can be confident it has been developed with the kids interest in mind]. Finally, because of an editing error, the article mis-stated the contents of the rotavirus vaccine approved by the CDC. It did not contain thimerosal. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors.

[you can feel the hand here of big pharma criminal lawyers who would protect any misdemeanor and crime to make money - shame on them - they are probably responsible for the disappearance of this article from the website]

An earlier version of this story stated that the Institute of Medicine convened a second panel to review the work of the Immunization Safety Review Committee that had found no evidence of a link between thimerosal and autism. In fact, the IOM convened the second panel to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety Datalink Data Sharing program, including those raised by critics of the IOM’s earlier work. But the panel was not charged with reviewing the committee’s findings. The story also inadvertently omitted a word and transposed two sentences in a quote by Dr. John Clements, and incorrectly stated that Dr. Sam Katz held a patent with Merck on the measles vaccine. In fact, Dr. Katz was part of a team that developed the vaccine and brought it to licensure, but he never held the patent. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors.

CLARIFICATION: After publication of this story, Salon and Rolling Stone corrected an error that mis-stated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms, an amount forty percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA’s limit for daily exposure to methylmercury. At the time of the correction, we were aware that the comparison itself was flawed, but as journalists we considered it more appropriate to state the correct figure rather than replace it with another number entirely.

Since that earlier correction, however, it has become clear from responses to the article that the forty-percent number, while accurate, is misleading. It measures the total mercury load an infant received from vaccines during the first six months, calculates the daily average received based on average body weight, and then compares that number to the EPA daily limit. But infants did not receive the vaccines as a ?daily average? ? they received massive doses on a single day, through multiple shots. As the story states, these single-day doses exceeded the EPA limit by as much as 99 times. Based on the misunderstanding, and to avoid further confusion, we have amended the story to eliminate the forty-percent figure.

Correction: The story misattributed a quote to Andy Olson, former legislative counsel to Senator Bill Frist. The comment was made by Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to the senator. Rolling Stone and Salon.com regret the error.

Aspartame was discovered by mistake by researchers who were trying to develop a new pesticide and IS still used as a pesticide today, … that says it all ! To me, those chemicals look more like POISON than food … !

“Within a day or so of arriving in London, after a total of 12 or so hours in a jet airliner cabin, I had a case of Bell’s palsy, which is a partial paralysis of the facial muscles. If you’ve never experienced parts of your body just plain not working, I assure you that it’s scary. Your brain tells a muscle to move, and it doesn’t move. Uh-oh. All sorts of “what-ifs” (and “oh s#@$%s”) go through your head.

I went to the emergency room of the University College Hospital, where I experienced the British health care system — which was very good in my case.

The bottom line is that I’m back home. I have a partial paralysis of my right facial muscles. The rest of me is fine. I can see, hear, speak, feel and much more. My gross and fine motor skills are not impaired at all.

I just can’t move most of the muscles on the right side of my face. It’s a very strange sensation, but I guess I’m getting used to it. My neurologist says it should resolve, probably in a matter of weeks, or a month or so. I can’t wait.

What REALLY Happened?

Here’s what I found out, AFTER I looked into it. I think it has a lot to do with those artificial sweeteners. Hey, guess what? They’re bad for you!

Who knew? Actually, a lot of people know. Except I didn’t know. Not really. Yeah, I knew that “they’re bad for you,” in the sort of way that too much of anything is bad for you. But how bad? Real bad. I learned a lesson the hard way, and I’m passing it along.

Many airline pilots will tell you that they never drink the artificial sweetened stuff, because it leads to all sorts of medical issues that can cause them to have neurological reactions — even during flight operations. There’s an entire subculture of folklore about how old so-and-so drank too much Diet Whatever and passed out right on the flight deck.

With aspartame — the stuff in the blue packages — the chemistry is such that it begins to break down above 86 degrees Fahrenheit, and to form nasty chemicals like methanol (wood alcohol — poisonous) and formaldehyde (what they use to embalm dead bodies).

So take a cold, sweetened iced tea and ingest it into your 98.6-degree body and the chemistry goes to work. Usually, your body can handle the hit. But if you’re in an airplane? Try lowering the air pressure to airline cabin levels for hours at a time. Vapor pressures kick in, related to Boyle’s law. You’re poisoning yourself from the inside out.

Chemically, the methanol and formaldehyde start looking for something to do. They’re seeking tissues to attack. One place that these little nasties go is after the myelin sheath that surrounds your nerve fibers. If enough of the myelin sheath degrades from the methanol and formaldehyde, your nerves start to short-circuit. Hence the neurological issues, and in my case the Bell’s palsy.

Wait, it can get much worse. Indeed, on a related note, the U.S. Veterans Administration has spent millions of dollars researching Gulf War syndrome. Some of the evidence is that the sickened troops were drinking diet sodas that had baked for weeks in 120-degree temperatures. There are strong correlations, if not statistical causality, to some (not all) cases of Gulf War syndrome and overheated aspartame.

NEVER Drink That Stuff!

Here’s the takeaway for you. NEVER drink artificial-sweetened ANYTHING before going on a long airplane flight, or while you’re on the airplane. Drink water, or use real sugar in your beverage, but stay AWAY from the fake sweeteners, especially aspartame! Got it?

I’m not offering official medical advice, just my own personal views based on my recent experience. Maybe my Bell’s palsy has some other source, but if so, I’m unaware of what it is.

Diet sodas and such may be OK for you, in moderation and as long as you don’t play games with your body chemistry by changing altitudes, like in an airliner.

You can heed my advice if you like… or not. Regardless of what you want to do with artificial sweeteners, I thought this story might be of interest to you. “