Mercury in Vaccines
I know this story broke over a year ago, but I never heard much of it before today, so here it is in case you’re in the same boat.
In June of last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr published an article in Rolling Stone, titled Deadly Immunity, describing the widespread use of thimerosal in vaccines and its possible link to recent increases in autism and other neurological problems. It mentions that the autism rate in children has increased from 1 in 2,500 to 1 in 166, or in other words, we are making over fifteen times as many austistic children as we were in 1991.
Thimerosal contains significant amounts of ethylmercury, while different from methylmercury neurotoxin, is argued (via reference to a National Institutes of Health study) to be more dangerous and more lasting in developing brains. (Remember the Mad Hatter?) And it was a significant amount - the three inoculations routinely given to two-month-olds contained an amount of ethylmercury equal to 99 times the EPA’s daily limit of methylmercury. Even if ethyl- isn’t 100% as bad as methylmercury, I doubt it’s less than 1% as risky. Thimerosal is currently banned from children’s vaccines in Russia, Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain, and Scandinavia.
How the hell is this not a concern of our government? Short answer - our lawmakers care about money and not your children (see war in Iraq, Congressional Page Scandal, Abramoff bribery scandal, destruction of healthcare system, destruction of education system, etc). Long answer - it is a concern of our lawmakers. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and friends were concerned enough to put into law the “Eli Lilly Protection Act” which basically gave the vaccine makers immunity from any penalty related to brain disorders they caused. In what I am sure was an unrelated show of patriotism, the pharmaceutical industry bought 5,000 copies of Billy’s bioterrorism book and gave him over $800,000. The ELPA was part of a Homeland Security bill, using the excuse that if the pharmaceutical companies could be sued, it’d prevent them from being as capable to defend America from bioterrorism.
“You couldn’t even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe.” “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.”
- Dr. Boyd Haley, Chemistry department head at the University of Kentucky
So it seems fairly obvious to me at least that thimerosal isn’t a good thing and really doesn’t need to be in vaccines. Food can be distributed and safely consumed without preservatives, so it seems thimerasol is similarly unnecessary except as a method cost reduction. But if it comes with the risk of destroying the livelihood of the patient, why bother?
The article continues: “In 1977, ten babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.” And it mentions that the vaccines we send to developing countries are the autism-inducing variety, noting that there has been a recent spike of autistic disorders in India, Nicaragua, and Argentina.
After a quick Google search, I found an article (part 1 here and part 2 here) that argues against the Kennedy article. It’s very nit-picky, but the discussion in the comments is worth looking over to better understand the talking points.
A few weeks after Kennedy’s article, Rolling Stone’s editors published this article defending the original.
From the ‘put my money where your mouth is’ department, I found this related challenge. Jock Doubleday, directory of a non-profit health group, will pay $75,000 to any of the pediatricians or corresponding pharm CEOs if they consume a mess containing a weight-proportioned amount of the thimerosal, antifreeze, disinfectant, formaldehyde, and aluminum that can be found in what we routinely inject into six-year olds. Nobody has accepted, probably because consuming that garbage is a bad idea.