I have read that crap. So has Respectful Insolence, and numerous other
bloggers who have the expertise to shred it.

Perhaps YOU would like to post some links
countering the "drivel" and "lies"?

Somehow, despite the frequent semantic NON vacuity
of your posts, we need something a bit more
than your assertions....

Get to work!!!!

Citizen Jimserac

On Jun 22, 2:26 pm, Citizen Jimserac <Jimse...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Anus!
=
Nice...did NOT read Torah again today.
Is it still right there on your desk?

MSP Robert Kennedy is no expert on vaccinations, etc. He has been
debunked, and debunked numerous times.

Debunked by whom?

MSP Do read something that challenges your mind.

You do likewise, like stop lying and reading your Torah.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7395411/deadly_immunity

Deadly Immunity
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. investigates the government cover-up of a
mercury/autism scandal
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 advisor at the World Health
Organization, declared that "perhaps this study should not have been done at
all." He added that "the research results have to be handled," 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. 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 First, 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, First 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 First 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, First 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 First.

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 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 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 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."

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 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 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.

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 misstated 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. Finally, because of an
editing error, the article misstated the contents of the rotavirus vaccine
approved by the CDC. It did not contain thimerosal. Salon and Rolling Stone
regret the errors.

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 misstated 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 First. The comment was made by Dean
Rosen, health policy adviser to the senator. Rolling Stone and Salon.com
regret the error.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7483530/kennedy_report_sparks_controversy

Kennedy Report Sparks Controversy
Intense reaction from medical establishment and leading news organizations
"Deadly Immunity," our story about the link between mercury in vaccines and
the dramatic rise in autism among children [RS 977/978], sparked intense
reaction from the medical establishment and several leading news
organizations. The story, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. -- part of an ongoing
collaboration with Salon.com -- documented the government's efforts to
conceal alarming data about the dangers of vaccines.
What is most striking is the lengths to which major media outlets have gone
to disparage the story and to calm public fears -- even in the face of the
questionable science on the subject. In a segment on World News Tonight
titled "A Closer Look," ABC pointed out that Kennedy is "not a scientist or
a doctor" and dismissed his extensive evidence as nothing more than "a few
scientific studies." The network also trotted out its medical editor, Dr.
Timothy Johnson, to praise the "impeccably impartial Institute of Medicine"
and to again state that Kennedy is not a scientist.

The New York Times, in a front-page story on the subject, devoted only one
line to Kennedy's article, which it said accused public-health officials and
drugmakers of "conspiring" to hide the data on autism -- a word that our
story neither used nor implied. (The Wall Street Journal, in an op-ed
attacking the article, was even more misleading, using the word "conspiracy"
four times.) The Times then went on, for more than a full page, to portray
concerns over vaccines as nothing more than the misguided fears of parents
who suffer from "scientific illiteracy," unable to understand the medical
studies that prove immunizations to be safe. It depicted studies reviewed by
the Institute of Medicine as definitive without even bothering to address
the host of serious questions raised about their validity: conflicting
diagnoses of autism, mixed-up data from HMOs and research skewed to exclude
many sick kids.

Rolling Stone and Salon fact-checked the article thoroughly before
publication, insisting on primary documentation for every statement in the
story, and posted links to the most significant materials online to enable
readers to judge for themselves. The final article contained six errors.
These ranged from inadvertently transposing a quote and confusing a drug
license for a patent to relying on a figure that incorrectly calculated an
infant's exposure to mercury over six months, rather than citing the even
more dangerous amount injected on a single day. (The mistakes were corrected
online as soon as they were discovered and can be viewed in detail at both
RollingStone.com and Salon.com.)

It is important to note, however, that none of the mistakes weaken the
primary point of the story. The government's own records show that it has
failed to do the science necessary to put to rest reasonable concerns about
vaccines. If the scientists had simply done their job rather than covering
their tracks, there would be no controversy today. Instead, the government
cannot even provide a definitive figure of the number of cases of autism
among American children -- a number obviously critical to any serious
scientific investigation -- and yet expects the public to believe that it
has ruled out any link between vaccines and an illness it does not even
track.

"Science," as one doctor in our story insisted, "is best left to
scientists." But when the scientists fail to do their job, resorting to
closed-door meetings and rigged studies, others in society have not only a
right but a moral obligation to question their work. In the coming years,
further research may indeed demonstrate that mercury in vaccines is not
responsible for the rise in autism. For now, though, we can only raise a
very real and legitimate alarm -- and hope that the government's
well-documented mishandling of its own research did not needlessly
jeopardize the health of hundreds of thousands of children

-----

Dr. Boyd Haley, a leading University of Kentucky Researcher on the topic
thimerosal.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/see-you-in-vaccine-cour_b_51224.html

http://www.businessweek.com/print/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jun2007/db20070604_109
406.htm