NY Times article on Vaccines

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/sc...rticle_popular

Very interesting! How can people consistently refute facts? Strange.

macaroona

"Cocoa Butter" wrote in message
oups.com...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/sc...rticle_popular

Very interesting! How can people consistently refute facts? Strange.

macaroona

If you don't want to register with the NYT just to read that it looks like
it's also here...
http://gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll...0305/-1/wire03

"In a series of House hearings held from 2000 through 2004, Mr. Burton
called snip a doctor from Baton Rouge, La., who says that God spoke to
her through an 87-year-old priest and told her that vaccines caused autism."

Here is the article in full:

In Case of Autism, it's Science VS Parents

Kristen Ehresmann, a Minnesota Department of Health official, had just
told a State Senate hearing that vaccines with microscopic amounts of
mercury were safe. Libby Rupp, a mother of a 3-year-old girl with
autism, was incredulous.
"How did my daughter get so much mercury in her?" Ms. Rupp asked Ms.
Ehresmann after her testimony.
"Fish?" Ms. Ehresmann suggested.
"She never eats it," Ms. Rupp answered.
"Do you drink tap water?"
"It's all filtered."
"Well, do you breathe the air?" Ms. Ehresmann asked, with a resigned
smile. Several parents looked angrily at Ms. Ehresmann, who left.
Ms. Rupp remained, shaking with anger. That anyone could defend mercury
in vaccines, she said, "makes my blood boil."
Public health officials like Ms. Ehresmann, who herself has a son with
autism, have been trying for years to convince parents like Ms. Rupp
that there is no link between thimerosal - a mercury-containing
preservative once used routinely in vaccines - and autism.
They have failed.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug
Administration, the Institute of Medicine, the World Health
Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics have all largely
dismissed the notion that thimerosal causes or contributes to autism.
Five major studies have found no link.
Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, the number of parents who
blame thimerosal for their children's autism has only increased. And in
recent months, these parents have used their numbers, their passion and
their organizing skills to become a potent national force. The issue
has become one of the most fractious and divisive in pediatric
medicine.
"This is like nothing I've ever seen before," Dr. Melinda Wharton,
deputy director of the National Immunization Program, told a gathering
of immunization officials in Washington in March. "It's an era where it
appears that science isn't enough."
Parents have filed more than 4,800 lawsuits - 200 from February to
April alone - pushed for state and federal legislation banning
thimerosal and taken out full-page advertisements in major newspapers.
They have also gained the support of politicians, including Senator
Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, and Representatives Dan
Burton, Republican of Indiana, and Dave Weldon, Republican of Florida.
And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote an article in the June 16 issue of
Rolling Stone magazine arguing that most studies of the issue are
flawed and that public health officials are conspiring with drug makers
to cover up the damage caused by thimerosal.
"We're not looking like a fringe group anymore," said Becky Lourey, a
Minnesota state senator and a sponsor of a proposed thimerosal ban.
Such a ban passed the New York State Legislature this week.
But scientists and public health officials say they are alarmed by the
surge of attention to an idea without scientific merit. The
anti-thimerosal campaign, they say, is causing some parents to stay
away from vaccines, placing their children at risk for illnesses like
measles and polio.
"It's really terrifying, the scientific illiteracy that supports these
suspicions," said Dr. Marie McCormick, chairwoman of an Institute of
Medicine panel that examined the controversy in February 2004.
Experts say they are also concerned about a raft of unproven, costly
and potentially harmful treatments - including strict diets,
supplements and a detoxifying technique called chelation - that are
being sold for tens of thousands of dollars to desperate parents of
autistic children as a cure for "mercury poisoning."
In one case, a doctor forced children to sit in a 160-degree sauna,
swallow 60 to 70 supplements a day and have so much blood drawn that
one child passed out.
Hundreds of doctors list their names on a Web site endorsing chelation
to treat autism, even though experts say that no evidence supports its
use with that disorder. The treatment carries risks of liver and kidney
damage, skin rashes and nutritional deficiencies, they say.
In recent months, the fight over thimerosal has become even more
bitter. In response to a barrage of threatening letters and phone
calls, the centers for disease control has increased security and
instructed employees on safety issues, including how to respond if pies
are thrown in their faces. One vaccine expert at the centers wrote in
an internal e-mail message that she felt safer working at a malaria
field station in Kenya than she did at the agency's offices in Atlanta.

Thimerosal was for decades the favored preservative for use in
vaccines. By weight, it is about 50 percent ethyl mercury, a form of
mercury most scientists consider to be less toxic than methyl mercury,
the type found in fish. The amount of ethyl mercury included in each
childhood vaccine was once roughly equal to the amount of methyl
mercury found in the average tuna sandwich.
In 1999, a Food and Drug Administration scientist added up all the
mercury that American infants got with a full immunization schedule and
concluded that the amount exceeded a government guideline. Some health
authorities counseled no action, because there was no evidence that
thimerosal at the doses given was harmful and removing it might cause
alarm. Others were not so certain that thimerosal was harmless.
In July 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Public Health
Service released a joint statement urging vaccine makers to remove
thimerosal as quickly as possible. By 2001, no vaccine routinely
administered to children in the United States had more than half of a
microgram of mercury - about what is found in an infant's daily supply
of breast milk.
Despite the change, government agencies say that vaccines with
thimerosal are just as safe as those without, and adult flu vaccines
still contain the preservative.
But the 1999 advisory alarmed many parents whose children suffered from
autism, a lifelong disorder marked by repetitive, sometimes
self-destructive behaviors and an inability to form social
relationships. In 10 to 25 percent of cases, autism seems to descend on
young children seemingly overnight, sometime between their first and
second birthdays.
Diagnoses of autism have risen sharply in recent years, from roughly 1
case for every 10,000 births in the 1980's to 1 in 166 births in 2003.
Most scientists believe that the illness is influenced strongly by
genetics but that some unknown environmental factor may also play a
role.
Dr. Tom Insel, director of the National Institute for Mental Health,
said: "Is it cellphones? Ultrasound? Diet sodas? Every parent has a
theory. At this point, we just don't know."
In 2000, a group of parents joined together to found SafeMinds, one of
several organizations that argue that thimerosal is that environmental
culprit. Their cause has been championed by politicians like Mr.
Burton.
"My grandson received nine shots in one day, seven of which contained
thimerosal, which is 50 percent mercury as you know, and he became
autistic a short time later," he said in an interview.
In a series of House hearings held from 2000 through 2004, Mr. Burton
called the leading experts who assert that vaccines cause autism to
testify. They included a chemistry professor at the University of
Kentucky who says that dental fillings cause or exacerbate autism and
other diseases and a doctor from Baton Rouge, La., who says that God
spoke to her through an 87-year-old priest and told her that vaccines
caused autism.
Also testifying were Dr. Mark Geier and his son, David Geier, the
experts whose work is most frequently cited by parents.
Trying to Build a Case
Dr. Geier has called the use of thimerosal in vaccines the world's
"greatest catastrophe that's ever happened, regardless of cause."
He and his son live and work in a two-story house in suburban Maryland.
Past the kitchen and down the stairs is a room with cast-off, unplugged
laboratory equipment, wall-to-wall carpeting and faux wood paneling
that Dr. Geier calls "a world-class lab - every bit as good as anything
at N.I.H."
Dr. Geier has been examining issues of vaccine safety since at least
1971, when he was a lab assistant at the National Institutes of Health,
or N.I.H. His r=E9sum=E9 lists scores of publications, many of which
suggest that vaccines cause injury or disease.
He has also testified in more than 90 vaccine cases, he said, although
a judge in a vaccine case in 2003 ruled that Dr. Geier was "a
professional witness in areas for which he has no training, expertise
and experience."
In other cases, judges have called Dr. Geier's testimony
"intellectually dishonest," "not reliable" and "wholly unqualified."
The six published studies by Dr. Geier and David Geier on the
relationship between autism and thimerosal are largely based on
complaints sent to the disease control centers by people who suspect
that their children were harmed by vaccines.
In the first study, the Geiers compared the number of complaints
associated with a thimerosal-containing vaccine, given from 1992 to
2000, with the complaints that resulted from a thimerosal-free version
given from 1997 to 2000. The more thimerosal a child received, they
concluded, the more likely an autism complaint was filed. Four other
studies used similar methods and came to similar conclusions.
Dr. Geier said in an interview that the link between thimerosal and
autism was clear.
Public health officials, he said, are " just trying to cover it up."
Assessing the Studies
Scientists say that the Geiers' studies are tainted by faulty
methodology.
"The problem with the Geiers' research is that they start with the
answers and work backwards," said Dr. Steven Black, director of the
Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center in Oakland, Calif. "They are
doing voodoo science."
Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, the director of the disease control centers,
said the agency was not withholding information about any potentially
damaging effects of thimerosal.
"There's certainly not a conspiracy here," she said. "And we would
never consider not acknowledging information or evidence that would
have a bearing on children's health."
In 2003, spurred by parents' demands, the C.D.C. asked the Institute of
Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the nation's
most prestigious medical advisory group, to review the evidence on
thimerosal and autism.
In a report last year, a panel convened by the institute dismissed the
Geiers' work as having such serious flaws that their studies were
"uninterpretable." Some of the Geiers' mathematical formulas, the
committee found, "provided no information," and the Geiers used basic
scientific terms like "attributable risk" incorrectly.
In contrast, the committee found five studies that examined hundreds of
thousands of health records of children in the United States, Britain,
Denmark and Sweden to be persuasive.
A study by the World Health Organization, for example, examined the
health records of 109,863 children born in Britain from 1988 to 1997
and found that children who had received the most thimerosal in
vaccines had the lowest incidence of developmental problems like
autism.
Another study examined the records of 467,450 Danish children born from
1990 to 1996. It found that after 1992, when the country's only
thimerosal-containing vaccine was replaced by one free of the
preservative, autism rates rose rather than fell.
In one of the most comprehensive studies, a 2003 report by C.D.C.
scientists examined the medical records of more than 125,000 children
born in the United States from 1991 to 1999. It found no difference in
autism rates among children exposed to various amounts of thimerosal.
Parent groups, led by SafeMinds, replied that documents obtained from
the disease control centers showed that early versions of the study had
found a link between thimerosal and autism.
But C.D.C. researchers said that it was not unusual for studies to
evolve as more data and controls were added. The early versions of the
study, they said, failed to control for factors like low birth weight,
which increases the risk of developmental delays.
The Institute of Medicine said that it saw "nothing inherently
troubling" with the C.D.C.'s adjustments and concluded that thimerosal
did not cause autism. Further studies, the institute said, would not be
"useful."
Threats and Conspiracy Talk
Since the report's release, scientists and health officials have been
bombarded with hostile e-mail messages and phone calls. Dr. McCormick,
the chairwoman of the institute's panel, said she had received
threatening mail claiming that she was part of a conspiracy. Harvard
University has increased security at her office, she said.
An e-mail message to the C.D.C. on Nov. 28 stated, "Forgiveness is
between them and God. It is my job to arrange a meeting," according to
records obtained by The New York Times after the filing of an open
records request.
Another e-mail message, sent to the C.D.C. on Aug. 20, said, "I'd like
to know how you people sleep straight in bed at night knowing all the
lies you tell & the lives you know full well you destroy with the
poisons you push & protect with your lies." Lynn Redwood of SafeMinds
said that such e-mail messages did not represent her organization or
other advocacy groups.
In response to the threats, C.D.C. officials have contacted the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and heightened security at the disease control
centers. Some officials said that the threats had led them to look for
other jobs.
In "Evidence of Harm," a book published earlier this year that is
sympathetic to the notion that thimerosal causes autism, the author,
David Kirby, wrote that the thimerosal theory would stand or fall
within the next year or two.
Because autism is usually diagnosed sometime between a child's third
and fourth birthdays and thimerosal was largely removed from childhood
vaccines in 2001, the incidence of autism should fall this year, he
said.
No such decline followed thimerosal's removal from vaccines during the
1990's in Denmark, Sweden or Canada, researchers say.
But the debate over autism and vaccines is not likely to end soon.
"It doesn't seem to matter what the studies and the data show," said
Ms. Ehresmann, the Minnesota immunization official. "And that's really
scary for us because if science doesn't count, how do we make
decisions? How do we communicate with parents?"

"CWatters" wrote in message
...

"Cocoa Butter" wrote in message
oups.com...


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/sc...rticle_popular

Very interesting! How can people consistently refute facts? Strange.


"Despite the change, government agencies say that vaccines with thimerosal
are just as safe as those without, and adult flu vaccines still contain the
preservative."

They lie like dogs, they say the opposite at their meeting which they tried
to keep secret http://www.whale.to/a/blaylock.html

Very interesting! How can people consistently refute facts? Strange.


***************************

Do you know who the directors of the NYTimes are?

The board of directors at NYT;

Raul E. Cesan
he became president of Schering Laboratories, the U.S.
pharmaceutical marketing arm, and in 1994, became president of
Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals. (Im sure he still owns stock in
pharmacuticals)


Ellen R. Marram
Ms. Marram also serves on the board of directors of the Ford Motor
Company and Eli Lilly and Company. [Eli Lilly Makers of THIMEROSAL!]



William E. Kennard
Mr. Kennard joined The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, in
May
2001 as a managing director in the global telecommunications and
media group.


Henry B. Schacht
Mr. Schacht also serves on the boards of Alcoa (Aluminum Company
of
America), Johnson & Johnson and Lucent Technologies Inc.[Johnson &
Johnson is one of the compaines that makes rhogam, that was loaded with
mercury, and injected it into pregnant women]


Cathy J. Sulzberger
She was also an editor of Consumer Drug: Digest: American Society
of
Hospital Pharmacists and Medication Teaching Manual: National
Association of Retail Druggist, and a Consumer Editor of the
Journal
of the National Association of Retail Druggists.


http://www.nytco.com/company-directors.html




Executives

Corporate Officers


Neal Roberts

Vice President, Organization Development
The New York Times Company

Previously, Mr. Roberts was vice president of global organization
effectiveness with Hoechst Marion Roussel, the fifth largest global
pharmaceutical company. There, he directed organization development
consulting initiatives providing services to all commercial regions
and global functions located in France, Germany and the U.S. in
support of the execution of global strategies and the cultural
integration of three merged pharmaceutical companies.

http://www.nytco.com/company-executives-nroberts.html



Donna

The NYTimes is using all these Danish studies regarding thimerosal and
Autism, They say that autism is still rising even though thimerosal was
taken out of vaccines....One of the biggest studies done on Mercury
Poisoning was done on the Danish Faroe Islands, where pregnant women eat a
lot of whale meat high in mercury. Of course they are going to have
children with autism, they are mercury poisoned!

And as far as mothers being encouraged to get INJECTED with mercury here
in the USA, Autism will not go down!


Grandjean studied mercury poisoning on the Danish Faroe Islands,
They eat a lot of whale which is high in mercury.

Today those babies, born on the Danish Faroe Islands in the North
Atlantic, are teenagers-and living testaments to mercury poisoning.
In two recent papers published in the Journal of Pediatrics,
Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor of environmental health at the
School of Public Health, has begun u nraveling mercury's toxic
effect on their brains.


a blob of mercury
His results confirm that children appear most at risk in the womb,
where mercury seems to deform the brain's fragile architecture and
upset the maturation and migration of brain cells. But Grandjean
also found that mercury could threaten children's nervous systems
well into adolescence. "What we are finding out is that mercury is
very parallel to lead," Grandjean says. "Such pollutants are
particularly worrisome because, once they've done the damage to the
developing brain, the child will have to live with that for the rest
of his life.''

http://inversionmagazine.com/features/Merc042404.htm


Donna

"Kevysmom" wrote in message
lkaboutparenting.com...
The NYTimes is using all these Danish studies regarding thimerosal and
Autism, They say that autism is still rising even though thimerosal was
taken out of vaccines....One of the biggest studies done on Mercury
Poisoning was done on the Danish Faroe Islands,

Yes but the study on Thimerosol was done on the mainland.

"john" wrote in message
...

"CWatters" wrote in message
...

"Cocoa Butter" wrote in message
oups.com...


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/sc...rticle_popular

Very interesting! How can people consistently refute facts? Strange.


"Despite the change, government agencies say that vaccines with thimerosal
are just as safe as those without, and adult flu vaccines still contain
the
preservative."

They lie like dogs,

That's news to me. I did not know dogs could speak. Perhaps they were using
the 86 year old priest.


Jeff

"Kevysmom" wrote in message
lkaboutparenting.com...
Very interesting! How can people consistently refute facts? Strange.


***************************

Do you know who the directors of the NYTimes are?

The board of directors at NYT;

Raul E. Cesan
he became president of Schering Laboratories, the U.S.
pharmaceutical marketing arm, and in 1994, became president of
Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals. (Im sure he still owns stock in
pharmacuticals)


Ellen R. Marram
Ms. Marram also serves on the board of directors of the Ford Motor
Company and Eli Lilly and Company. [Eli Lilly Makers of THIMEROSAL!]



William E. Kennard
Mr. Kennard joined The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, in
May
2001 as a managing director in the global telecommunications and
media group.


Henry B. Schacht
Mr. Schacht also serves on the boards of Alcoa (Aluminum Company
of
America), Johnson & Johnson and Lucent Technologies Inc.[Johnson &
Johnson is one of the compaines that makes rhogam, that was loaded with
mercury, and injected it into pregnant women]


Cathy J. Sulzberger
She was also an editor of Consumer Drug: Digest: American Society
of
Hospital Pharmacists and Medication Teaching Manual: National
Association of Retail Druggist, and a Consumer Editor of the
Journal
of the National Association of Retail Druggists.


http://www.nytco.com/company-directors.html




Executives

Corporate Officers


Neal Roberts

Vice President, Organization Development
The New York Times Company

Previously, Mr. Roberts was vice president of global organization
effectiveness with Hoechst Marion Roussel, the fifth largest global
pharmaceutical company. There, he directed organization development
consulting initiatives providing services to all commercial regions
and global functions located in France, Germany and the U.S. in
support of the execution of global strategies and the cultural
integration of three merged pharmaceutical companies.

http://www.nytco.com/company-executives-nroberts.html

That is just some of the directors of the New York Times.

Perhaps you could provide evidence that disputes the article. Or is the best
you can do is identifiy 6 people who *might* have conflicts of interest,
none of which are directly responsible for editorial content of the
newspaper? (Frankly, it is better than anything you did before.)

Jeff

Donna