alt.conspiracy,sci.med,fr.bio.medecine
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 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.

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

Kennedy Report Sparks Controversy
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7483530

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.