The Medical Racket
Disclaimer: I am a layman, and do not give medical advice. Please do not take my word, or anybody else's, regarding your health. Take responsibility for your health, and do not give it to "experts" or anybody else. Your life is your life, and giving the responsibility for your health to others is a dangerous path. Talk to your doctor, read this essay, research the areas presented here if you feel inclined, but in the end, please make your own decisions. Doctors only know what they are taught, and if they are taught incorrectly, their advice can be less than helpful, and their treatments can kill you. Please do nothing simply because an "expert" or other authority figure tells you to.
This essay is overflowing with names, dates and events, and takes an iconoclastic look at today’s medical establishment and how it came to be, while also arguing that legitimate alternative paradigms exist, and far preferable to today’s. Early readers informed me that it could be an overwhelming amount of information to digest, as well as emotionally trying. This timeline is designed to make the reading experience easier, so readers can refer to names, dates and events in the larger scheme of this essay. The early human data is controversial in many quarters, and this timeline hews more toward today’s orthodox theories. The early population estimates, until the modern age, are probably within 25% of the actual population, at least as far as orthodoxy is concerned. The timeline is broken into two pieces, to 1491, directly below, and from 1492 onward. There are far more links to this medical essay from the 1492 onward piece. This timeline is an abbreviated version of the site timeline.
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I can reproduce the whole site here, except that it would take a lot of time, but would do it someday, later. Follow the link on a week end and find for yourself how you have been ripped off. Theres more from another site which I will do now, in a moment.
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http://www.nomorefakenews.com/archives/archiveview.php?key=1681
AUGUST 10, 2005. Here is another backgrounder for my upcoming tele-workshop, DISEASE HOAXES AND HEALING EXERCISES. Click on the link below the green and blue painting on this page.
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MURDER AT THE US NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE (NCI).
Daniel Haley's brilliant book, Politics in Healing, recounts how NCI's 1991 clinical trial of the innovative and "alternative" cancer medicine, hydrazine sulfate (HS), was rigged.
Rigged to fail.
A spectacularly promising medicine, HS had shown good results in trials at Harbor/UCLA hospital and in Russia. NCI felt obligated to test the drug. But there was a catch.
The drug's discoverer, Dr. Joseph Gold, had found that HS reacted badly if patients were taking other drugs, especially tranquilizers. Several warnings were given to NCI before it began its test. The warnings were explicit. Patients could DIE if they were taking tranquilizers.
It turned out that none of the NCI patients were warned about this. It turned out that 94% of those patients were in fact on tranquilizers.
Barry Tice, an investigator for the US General Accounting Office (GAO), looked into the NCI trial of hydrazine sulfate after it was over. He called Dr. Gold and told him he had found a "smoking gun." There was an internal NCI memo which
showed that NCI was well aware of the problems involved in the drug combinations.
The GAO did not back up its own investigator. The final GAO report on the NCI clinical trials of hydrazine sulfate simply accused NCI of sloppy bookkeeping.
In the June 1995 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, a letter from the NCI was published. The letter stated that NCI had omitted mentioning, in its own published account of its cancer study, that 94% of the patients had been on tranquilizers. But, because this letter did NOT mention how dangerous that situation was, it looked like NCI was simply admitting to a technical and unimportant mistake. A clerical error.
So what did happen to the patients in the NCI hydrazine sulfate study?
They ALL DIED.
The drug, hydrazine sulfate, was judged to be totally ineffective, and thus a competitor for chemotherapy dollars was eliminated. Hydrazine sulfate is a cheap, widely available, unpatentable substance. No profit there.
Was this story splashed across the front pages of major newspapers in America? Did the "great men" of television, those holy anchors, insist on covering it with the emphasis it deserved? Of course not.
The story was originally dug out and published in Penthouse, by reporter Jeff Kamen, who should have won a Pulitzer for it, but won nothing.
And NCI has a rule that none of its patients in clinical trials can have their names revealed.
(THERE ARE OTHER SUBSTANCES AND FOODS WHICH ARE INCOMPATIBLE WITH HYDRAZINE SULFATE AND MAY CAUSE GREAT HARM AND DEATH. ONE SHOULD KNOW ALL ABOUT THIS BEFORE DECIDING TO EXPERIMENT WITH THE DRUG.)
There is more to this incredible story. Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione's wife, Kathy Keeton, who was the founder of Longevity, a magazine that was part of the Guccione empire, was diagnosed with "galloping breast cancer" in 1995. She was given 6 weeks to live.
She refused chemotherapy and became a VERY high-profile case of a person taking hydrazine sulfate instead.
She also chose radiation to reduce one of her many tumors--a growth around her bile duct. Dr. Gold said the dose of radiation should be small, because hydrazine sulfate would enhance the effect of the radiation. But the radiologist gave her the full dose instead, burned her liver and caused later scarring.
Overall, Keeton recovered. In fact, a year after her predicted death date, her cancer was in full remission. The hydrazine sulfate was a remarkable success.
Guccione ran ads in Penthouse, asking for families of the dead victims in the NCI experiment to come forward and join a class-action suit against NCI.
Guccione estimated there had been 600 victims in the NCI clinical test.
In October 1997, Kathy Keeton went into a major and well-respected NY hospital for surgery. From all accounts, this operation had nothing to do with cancer. Amazingly, complications occurred. She died.
Most of America assumed she had succumbed to cancer. Further "proof" that hydrazine sulfate did not work.
Predictably, the FDA has gotten into the act. On April 23, 1998, that criminal agency raided a distributor of hydrazine sulfate, Great Lakes Metabolics, in Rochester, Minnesota. In 2000, the FDA shut down the company that supplies hydrazine sulfate to Great Lakes, and Great Lakes went out of business.
In 1996, when hydrazine sulfate (HS) was still very much in the public spotlight, Dr. Gold states he received 20 phone calls in one day from doctors at Sloan Kettering, the world's number one center for toxic chemotherapy research and treatment. These doctors wanted to obtain HS on the sly for their patients. Gold states that roughly 2/3 of the patients were from the doctors' families. And six of these doctors had refused to give HS to other patients at Sloan Kettering. The phrase, scum of the Earth, comes to mind.
Author Haley offers a dozen patient testimonials re HS. They are anecdotes, to be sure, but they are remarkable.
Example: "Oncologist report in today. No cancer anywhere, after two and a half months on HS and vitamins/minerals and supplements. They have no idea where cancer went."
Example: "Seven weeks on hydrazine sulfate. Brain and lung lesions disappeared."
Example: "I purchased some HS for my sister a few weeks ago. Too early to tell, but she went from near death at the hospital on chemo to a campground some place, with a fishing pole."
I don't make recommendations for medicines. HS studies at Harbor/UCLA and in Russia did not cure everyone, not by a long shot. Of course, there are questions about those protocols too, because ordinary foods like raisins are incompatible with HS--and who knows what the patients were fed. And, on top of that, no well-designed studies have ever been done using HS on patients in early stages of cancer, where the results might be even better.
HS has been defamed by monsters. "First do no harm" has been turned into "destroy." Those responsible for this terrible crime should be arrested, shackled, and shown on national television on the steps at NCI. NCI should be closed and fumigated.
More notes on HS (hydrazine sulfate)...
One session of conventional chemo costs enough to pay for 10 years of treatment with HS.
In 1973, a doctor with a terminal Hodgkins patient approached Dr. Gold for help. Gold recommended a dosage level. In a few weeks, the patient was up and around, not dead. By October of 1973, 1000 patients in the US were on HS.
Dean Burke, head of cell chemistry at NCI, said in 1974 that HS was "the most remarkable anticancer agent I have come across in my 45 years experience in cancer...this material is so cheap because it is made by the trainload for industrial purposes."
In September 1973, Sloan Kettering (SK), the most prestigious cancer center in the world, started an HS study on terminal patients. The lead physician, Dr. Manuel Ochoa, had agreed to give each patient 60 mg a day for 3 days and then 60 mg 3 times a day after that---but Dr. Gold learned Ochoa was changing the protocol drastically---he was giving 1 mg the first day, then 2 mg the next day, and so on, building up to a top of 30 mg----except in some cases he actually gave patients 120-190 mg a day---brutal overdoses.
In 1975 SK announced HS was worthless.
Dr. Gold then did a study for Calbiochem, a drug company. 70% of 84 patients gained weight and had less pain. HS was, in fact, designed to alleviate wasting away in the first place. 17% of the patients showed tumor regression or a stabilization of their condition for one year.
In 1975, Russian researchers published two positive study findings on HS.
In 1976, the American Cancer Society (ACS) put HS on its dreaded blacklist of "unapproved" cancer treatments. ACS neglected to mention it owned 50% of a competing and highly toxic cancer drug, 5FU.
By 1978, the FDA was cracking down on HS. 5000 patients in the US were on the medicine. The FDA falsely stated that HS caused bone marrow toxicity. In fact, conventional chemo---approved by the FDA---destroys bone marrow.
Jeff Kamen, the reporter who got the HS story out in Penthouse? Here is how he became interested in the first place. His mother Erna came back from cancer with HS. She gained 23 pounds and was doing much better. Then her doctor convinced her to stop HS and go on an experimental chemo drug. In five days, she was dead.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
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http://www.nomorefakenews.com/archives/archiveview.php?key=2780
AUGUST 15, 2005. Here is another backgrounder for my upcoming telephone workshop, DISEASE HOAXES AND HEALING EXERCISES, on August 29th and 30th. Just click on the red link under the green and blue painting on this page, and get all the details. In answer to queries I've received, there will be ample time during both sessions for questions.
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When people consider healing exercises that tap into the mind-body connection, they tend to think of standardized visualizations or meditations that apply to everyone across the board.
After all, the pattern of conventional medical research is about claiming that one medicine fits all. You have X condition, you take drug Y.
This concept is thoroughly ingrained.
However, early in my research into mind-body healing exercises, I saw that uniform application was not the answer.
People are different. An exercise that may work for one person may be a dud for another person.
An exercise that may work for a person for three weeks may have no effect beyond that point.
I also noticed that some people who were given a specific exercise to do didn't, from the get-go, like the exercise. They were doing it because someone told them to do it.
Which is like telling someone he has to use his imagination in a prescribed way. It creates resistance. And the resistance shipwrecks the situation.
So what to do?
I came up with a simple answer. Present a whole range of exercises, and TELL THE PERSON TO START OUT BY CHOOSING ONE HE IS ATTRACTED TO.
Design the full range of exercises to tap into DIFFERENT ways of accessing healing energy.
Not everyone visualizes or meditates along the same channel. People have their own inclinations and abilities, when it comes to accessing energy.
Some people can visualize things clearly, from the outset. Others rely on feelings. Others use more abstract ideas. There are all sorts of styles.
So I constructed a set of exercises that approach healing energy from various directions.
Sometimes, you will see this: a person begins by doing an exercise that relies on feelings; then, after a while, he finds that he can visualize clearly and he wants to do THAT; or a person begins with visualizations, and later on he moves into feeling.
All sorts of crossovers occur.
Put ten people in front of an abstract painting and ask them what they get from it. One person will describe images he sees inside the shapes of the painting. Another person will tell you what he feels. Another person will relate ideas that occur to him.
Try to force everyone to experience the painting along the same channel and you'll arrive nowhere.
If healing is "the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow," it would be foolish to demand that everyone travel the rainbow in the same fashion. One person wants to ride in a car. Another wants to swim. Another feels like running.
At the heart of all healing exercises that tap into the mind-body connection, there is one quality: imagination.
But imagination does not work the same way for everyone.
Ideas, physical sensations, emotions, images, messages, sounds---there are many, many ways in which imagination manifests.
A person will tend to want to do a healing exercise that works the way HIS IMAGINATION WORKS.
When a person says, "I can't imagine anything," he usually means he can't imagine in THE PARTICULAR WAY HE'S BEEN TOLD TO. So he concludes he has no imagination.
But if that person is given access to an exercise that connects with THE WAY HE DOES, IN FACT, IMAGINE, everything changes.
And that's when he accesses healing energies. That's when mind-body healing occurs.
This is very important.
I have known people who imagine based on sound only. They listen to music, and all sorts of images and feelings and sensations arise from the sound. I have known people who come at imagination purely from a visual perspective. They see images, and then, from those images, feelings and sensations proceed. I have worked with people who imagine in terms of ideas. They chew on an idea for a while, and then they obtain very interesting sensations that have no easy labels.
So I have put under one roof a range of healing exercises that will allow people to come at healing energy from their own preferred ways. This works.
Another point: once a person has chosen a healing exercise to do, he may do it for a minute or six hours (over a period of weeks), and then everything dries up. He experiences no more energy. He gets nothing.
At that moment, the person usually thinks, "I'm blocked. I can't go further."
What to do?
It isn't really a block. If that person can find another exercise he wants to do from the list, he can get his engine operating well again. He can come at healing energy from a slightly different angle, and he's in business again. It's just a matter of shifting gears.
Everything I'm bringing up in this backgrounder is usually overlooked or minimized by people who hand out healing exercises to others. But these are key, key factors. They make all the difference.
I hope you'll be with me at the workshop. The mind-body connection is a vital part of healing, and it increases the value of everything else you're doing for your health.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
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http://www.nomorefakenews.com/archives/archiveview.php?key=2805
AUGUST 20, 2005. This is another backgrounder for my upcoming telephone workshop, DISEASE HOAXES AND HEALING EXERCISES. The workshop will take place on August 29 and 30. You do it from your home. Click on the red link under the green and blue painting on this page, and get the details. This one is going to be explosive.
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In the spring of 1984, Dr. Robert Gallo and representatives of the US government announced that the cause of AIDS had been found. During this televised press conference, a virus was named. It would later be called HIV.
What very few people realized at the time was, Gallo, the purported hero, hadn't published a single paper that made a serious effort at PROVING that HIV was the cause of AIDS.
Until that moment, researchers at least paid lip service to the idea that you had to publish evidence, and that evidence had to be tested and retested by other scientists, before any conclusions about disease causation could be publicly advanced.
After all, this was what separated science from speculation.
But on that day in 1984, everything changed.
Even when many researchers realized that Gallo's claim of discovery was unsupported by the facts, all but a few of them remained silent. They gave up without a struggle.
The day after Gallo made his preemptive 1984 announcement, all government funding for AIDS research took a sharp right turn. Suddenly, there was no money for investigation into the cause of AIDS. Now, the $$ were slated for people who could establish the mechanism by which HIV attacked and destroyed the immune system.
So any potential rebellion in the ranks was squashed by the re-assignment of dollars.
While I was writing my first book, AIDS INC., in 1987, I discovered the above facts. I also learned that researchers don't simply cast a net into the water when they are searching for the cause of a disease. They are, from the outset, narrowing their field of inquiry.
Gallo had been researching the possible role of so-called retroviruses in cancer. Despite Gallo's optimistic assertions, this effort had yielded nothing of significance. But when the word AIDS appeared on the horizon, he decided to gather his forces and find money to keep researching this type of virus as a potential cause of AIDS. That was his territory, so he went with it.
But it was a strange starting point for him. If he thought that retroviruses caused cancer---which is all about out-of-control proliferation of cells---why would he think that retroviruses would be involved in the destruction of immune-system cells---the hallmark of AIDS?
As I wrote my book, I saw more and more holes in the HIV hypothesis. If HIV was not the cause of AIDS, then what was AIDS? The CDC had just issued a new definition of the disease, in which more and more so-called opportunistic illnesses were listed as markers for AIDS. It was asserted that these marker illnesses were ushered in by the initial immune-system collapse caused by HIV.
But if HIV was a fraudulent cause, then what we were left with? A whole host of diseases that were connected by nothing more than a word: AIDS.
And that word was being used to connect people in Haiti, starving people in Africa, heroin addicts in New York, gay men in San Francisco and New York, and hemophiliacs.
We were also assured that HIV would cause widespread deaths beyond those populations. AIDS, for example, would soon kill large numbers of heterosexual men in the US.
It never happened.
Why not? Was this the first germ that had such esoteric preferences for certain "risk groups?"
During the years since 1987, I met many people who had been diagnosed as HIV positive. They remained healthy, and the common denominator was, they hadn't taken the AIDS drugs.
I also met many people who told me stories about their healthy friends and family who had, on the strength of an HIV positive diagnosis, taken AZT, rapidly declined, and died.
AZT, a failed chemotherapy drug, attacks all cells of the body and destroys the ability of cells to reproduce. In other words, it kills.
The HIV blood test itself was riddled with flaws. A falsely positive result could ensue because of 60 or more factors that had nothing to do with HIV.
I deconstructed and reconstructed the AIDS legend. If you boldly and arbitrarily and falsely announced that a certain group---say, people who inhabited a certain park in a major city---had been exposed to a deadly germ; and if you then undertook a major propaganda campaign to convince these people to get tested for the germ; and if the test yielded false-positive results like crazy; and if you made a major push to have people who tested positive take a deadly drug; you would essentially be consigning these people to destruction.
Name a group. Any group. Put them through this step-by-step process, and many of them end up dead.
That was the assembly line. It still is.
In writing AIDS INC., I examined every so-called high-risk group for AIDS, and I found factors---non-viral factors---in each group that could easily account for the immune-system collapse that was being called AIDS. The factors tended to be different for each group. Some factors were recent. Some were age-old.
When I wrote AIDS INC., there were only a handful of recognized scientists who were speaking out against the fraudulent and death-dealing "research" behind AIDS. Among them, Peter Duesberg and Harvey Bialy. I had learned much from Peter and Harvey. Since those days, a number of other scientists have stepped up to the plate. They are largely ignored by the press.
Now we see stories in the press about a vaccine that will possibly work to prevent HIV from causing immune-system failure. Such a vaccine will, they say, produce antibodies against HIV in the body. This is taken to be a sign that the person is immune to HIV.
However, the standard HIV blood tests look for these same antibodies. If they are found, the person is said to be on the road to AIDS.
To say there is a confusion here is a vast understatement.
You see, traditionally, the production of antibodies, by the human body, was taken to be an indication that the body had warded off a disease. The germ entered the body, antibodies were produced against it, and the body knocked out the germ.
But with the advent of the AIDS legend, another rule was thrown out the window. Suddenly, antibodies to HIV were taken to be a gravely negative indicator.
Yet, even as the traditional rule was trashed, researchers were saying that a vaccine that induced those same antibodies was protective, was good, was a breakthrough.
In 1988, I spoke with a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. He told me that, when a vaccine was found, every person who took it would be given a letter. The letter would say that he was immune to HIV, and if he ever tested positive for HIV on a blood test, that result should ignored, because he was immune, not on the road to AIDS.
Antibodies naturally produced by the body against HIV=infected with the killer virus. The same antibodies produced by taking a vaccine=protective immunity.
There are researchers who understand this ridiculous and dangerous contradiction. But most of them will not speak out. As a well-known virologist at UCLA once said to me, "HIV is not an issue I'll comment on. It's political. That's all I'll say. There are other people in the research community you could approach, but they won't talk to you, either."
There is more to the AIDS story, and I'll be sharing some of that with you in the workshop.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
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The last one is perhaps the biggest hoax of it all. Have you seen an autopsy report which says, cause of death = AIDS? No. It usually will be TB, pneumonia or multiple organ failure etc etc.
Ever wondered why?
posted by maverick @ 6:14 AM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
This one is about thimerosal. Read on.
SEPTEMBER 2, 2005, REPRINTED FROM JUNE 20, 2005. The article below, written by Robert F Kennedy, Jr., was published in Salon.com and then re-printed in Common Dreams. It concerns the toxic effects of mercury in vaccines and the cover-up of that crime.
Several comments:
This article assumes that vaccines are a good thing. I have disputed that assumption for the last 15 years, and have written much on the subject.
In general, the long-term decline in various so-called infectious diseases is attributable to factors like improved nutrition and sanitation and cleaner water supplies and less overcrowding of populations---not the introduction of vaccines.
There are still vaccines on the market that contain mercury, and there are also drugs that contain mercury.
While it may be polite to say that health authorities overlooked the mercury problem, and while it may be less polite to say they coverered it up, in reality we are talking about a crime. A crime of poisoning. It is one of the most basic and traditional of crimes. It is actually a form of warfare, no matter what rationalizations are offered.
The most often-used rationalization goes this way: "We know that vaccines are miracles of disease prevention. If we scare the public by admitting we have been using a poison in vaccines, they will stay away from all vaccines, they won't trust us, and millions of unvaccinated children will die. Therefore, we must lie."
In fact, vaccines are not miracles. They are multi-faceted poisons. They may induce the formation of antibodies, which are said to be the best protection against future disease, but human immunity from disease is a much more complex situation. Immunity really comes from basic overall health, not from a shot of attenuated and/or live germs plus mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, and other chemicals.
Medical authorities have no problem saying the public should be the last to know. "We will protect you, but you must leave the method to us. You shouldn't enter into the process, which is really science, about which you know nothing. We're the pros. Trust us. Don't impede us."
Treating the public as a mass of uncomprehending idiots, time and time again, establishes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Walled off from vital information, the public does become more ignorant and less able to think matters through to essential conclusions.
Although it is true that admitting the mercury-autism link would greatly injure the profit picture of pharmaceutical companies and bring down hundreds of class-action suits on their heads, it is more true that a crime is in progress. In other words, if we focus too tightly on the concept that these companies are wrongly trying to protect their money, we don't emphasize strongly enough that they and the government agencies that aid them are engaged in a death-injection program.
Published on Thursday, June 16, 2005 by Salon.com
Deadly Immunity
When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have caused autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal the data -- and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their role in the epidemic.
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Ga. 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 52 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 flatly that the study "should not have been done at all" and warned that the results "will be taken by others and will be used in ways beyond the control of this group. The research results have to be handled."
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 11-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.
Congress repealed the measure 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 Andy Olsen, a legislative assistant 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 preeminent 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 25 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 11 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 20-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 20 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 22 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, 10 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 24 hours of birth, and 2-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 6-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 only three vaccinations -- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of 22 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. Infants who received all their vaccines, plus boosters, by the age of 6 months were being injected with levels of ethylmercury 187 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 advisors, told me, "I think if we really have an influenza pandemic -- and certainly we will in the next 20 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 shares a patent on a measles vaccine with Merck, which also manufactures the hepatitis B vaccine. 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 advisors who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine laced with thimerosal "had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine." Offit, who shares a patent on the vaccine, acknowledged to me that he "would make money" if his vote to approve it 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, parents and a few of its own panel members, the Institute of Medicine reluctantly convened a second panel to review the findings of the first. In February, the new panel, composed of different scientists, criticized the earlier panel for its lack of transparency 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, Penn., 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 32 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.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper and president of Waterkeeper Alliance. He is the co-author of "The Riverkeepers."
end Salon.com article
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