Would You Vaccinate Your Child?

If you were to have a newborn baby would you get them vaccinated?

  • Yes

    Votes: 15 20.0%
  • No

    Votes: 53 70.7%
  • Some (If Some, please say which vaccinations and why you would have those done)

    Votes: 7 9.3%

  • Total voters
    75

kettlebell

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This topic is close to my heart. My wife and I intend on having children relatively soon and I am concerned about whether any vaccinations are safe or all are in some way allergenic or worse.

Or have you already made that decision. Please vote and say why you made the decisions to, or not to.

With my current views I would seriously consider zero vaccinations for my child but it terrifies me as is that really the right decision in our modern overpopulated and over polluted society.
 
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kettlebell

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The pressure to vaccinate your child is very strong in the UK.

This is the current list NHS recommended, free, vaccinations. They are very serious if not deadly conditions for a baby if caught.

Could you live with yourself if you made the decision not to vaccinate and you baby then died of measles or polio or any of the others?

What are the risks in our modern over crowded and polluted environments?

Is it better to risk the vaccines than it is to risk the easily deadly diseases?



Childhood vaccines
These are the routine vaccinations that are offered free of charge on the NHS to all babies and children in the UK.
A change to the childhood vaccination schedule means that from November 2010 rather than one visit at 12 months of age to give Hib/MenC and a second visit at 13 months of age to give PCV and MMR, the boosters of Hib/MenC and PCV are now offered with MMR in a single visit between 12 and 13 months of age (that is, within a month after the child's first birthday).
DTaP/IPV/Hib or 5-in-1 vaccine

Protects against: diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), polio and Hib (haemophilus influenza type B).
Given at: 2, 3 and 4 months of age.
More about the 5-in-1 vaccine
Pneumococcal (PCV)

Protects against: some types of pneumococcal infection.
Given at: 2, 4 and 12-13 months of age.
More about the pneumococcal jab
Meningitis C (MenC)

Protects against: meningitis C (meningococcal type C).
Given at: 3 and 4 months of age.
More about the MenC jab
Hib/MenC (booster)

Protects against: haemophilus influenza type b (Hib) and meningitis C.
Given at: 12-13 months of age.
More about the Hib/MenC booster
MMR

Protects against: measles, mumps and rubella.
Given at: 12-13 months and at 3 years and 4 months of age, or sometime thereafter.
More about the MMR jab
DTaP/IPV (or dTaP/IPV) ‘pre-school’ booster

Protects against: diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough) and polio.
Given at: 3 years and 4 months of age or shortly thereafter.
More about the DTaP/IPV pre-school booster
Optional vaccinations

These vaccinations are offered, in addition to the routine programme, to special ‘at risk’ groups of babies and children.
Chickenpox (varicella) vaccination

Protects against: chickenpox.
Who needs it: siblings of children who have suppressed immune systems and are susceptible to chickenpox, for example, because they're having cancer treatment or have had an organ transplant. Given: from one year of age upwards (one dose for children from one year to 12 years. Two doses given 4-8 weeks apart for children aged 13 years or older).
More about the varicella jab

BCG (tuberculosis) vaccination

Protects against: tuberculosis (TB).
Who needs it: babies and children who have a high chance of coming into contact with tuberculosis.
Given: from birth to 16 years of age.
More about the BCG vaccine
Flu vaccination

Protects against: flu.
Who needs it: children with certain medical conditions or a weakened immune system, which may put them at risk of complications from flu.
Given: from six months and over in a single jab every year in October/November.
More about the flu jab
Hepatitis B vaccination

Protects against: hepatitis B.
Who needs it: children at high risk of exposure to hepatitis B, and babies born to infected mothers.
Given: at any age, as four doses given over 12 months. A baby born to a mother infected with hepatitis B will be offered a dose at birth, one month of age, 2 months of age and one year of age.
More on the hepatitis B vaccine
 

kiran

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kb, I gotta ask, how Peatarian is your wife? What does she think of Peat?
 
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ratcheer

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I vaccinate, and happily so. I'm just not convinced the anti folks have any real data beyond hysteria and mythology. Granted one has to be skeptical of ANY study, but there have been so MANY studies demonstrating safety. This last round was pretty compelling - 1) kids who aren't vaccinated end up in the hospital more often. Also 2) multiple vaccinations at a time haven't demonstrated a problem. I was surprised at this last one - it makes sense to me that a big variety at one time especially while very young could be stressful - but the data just don't support that.

A couple things that keep me on this side of the argument: the claim that the studies are done by the pharmaceutical companies to keep their profits flowing - that doesn't fly because if those companies had a choice they'd drop vaccines right away (they are strong-armed by the FDA to make them). Also, the original claim (that vaccines cause problems) was from a study that has been since discredited and all the authors except the primary (I forget his name) have disavowed the conclusion. He sticks with it because he makes a lot of money scaring people about vaccines.

I also don't dismiss ALL scientific and medical research out of hand (I have friends that say because scientists get grants they'll produce anything their keepers want). But I don't think it really works that way. Yes there are paradigms and prejudices and pressure and reputations and funding - all that crap - but if we dismiss *everything* then we are just making stuff up. That's nice personally but as a public health policy not so great. And as an aside, if we suspect all studies we don't agree with, then why do we bother with Dr. Peat? He's getting his info from those same studies. The point isn't to believe all of them or none of them but to see it as an imperfect process and use skepticism wisely.

One argument I hear is "My kid was vaccinated - and then he got the illness later". But that happened to us: my daughter got the chicken pox vaccine then a few months later came down with chicken pox. But *thankfully* she was vaccinated because it was a very mild case - no itching or discomfort or illness even. The alternative could have been pretty bad or with scaring otherwise.

I think Kettlebell is exactly right: vaccines protect against some pretty serious diseases. Why risk possible illness or hospitalization and even death unnecessarily? Yes if we lived in a pristine and isolated environment with excellent diets and plenty of red light it wouldn't be necessary - but that's not the world we live in no matter how much we want it that way.

This reminds me - I've been meaning to get the HPV vaccine for my daughter...

As a quick edit: I'd prefer to wait a little past the newborn stage before starting any, and to spread them out if I can. This in spite of data suggesting it isn't necessary.
 

Kelly

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I've only been doing this Peat thing for a couple months now, but I've been anti unnecessary medical intervention for awhile. I live in the US and specifically sought out midwife care and had my kids with no meds (but in the hospital). I did somewhat extended nursing, a little past a year for both. This mindset naturally made me skeptical of vaccines and to read up on them. Like ratcheer, I didn't find any compelling evidence to not give vaccines, and was not willing to risk my kids get any of those diseases. We didn't do any vaccines in the hospital, but did pretty much all the rest right on schedule. We never had any issues, our girls have been quite healthy. None of us get the flu vaccine, however. I feel uncomfortable with a yearly vaccine and don't think the risk of flu is that great, especially since that vaccine is so hit or miss depending on which strain hits.

I found the Sears vaccine book had the best info, IMO. It lists the risks of the vaccine and the risks of the disease, and he also lists an alternative vaccine schedule if you want to go slow with the shots.

http://www.amazon.com/Vaccine-Book-Deci ... 0316180521
 
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ratcheer

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Yeah except for vaccines and blood tests - and any emergencies - I avoid doctors and 'medicine' as much as possible.
 

gabriel79

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Hi Kettelebell,
. As a father, I understand your concern. And yes, I've given her the mandatory vaccines especially since they're for real serious illness. I've refused to give her vaccines like the flu. I'd rather she catches a flu and that's it. Of course, I only had 50% of the decision and my wife follows a bit more than me conventional medicine. I believe that some vaccines are worthy, you have very much to win avoiding do deadly diseases and the chance of side effects is very low, but again, for things like flu I rather skip it.
 

charlie

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Kelly

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I'll have to read this more closely at some point, but I have a hard time taking medical claims from a site called "Gaia Health" seriously. I looked for some context to Dr Lanctot's claims and found this site. It seems like a lot of conspiracy theory conjecture, but again, I didn't read all of it. Number 3 seemed especially out there. The government is using gun control and ... vaccines to rule us?

http://educate-yourself.org/cn/vaccinat ... ov05.shtml
 
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ratcheer

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Not to get into a back-and-forth - I'm fully aware that some folks are making a choice and have a right to do so. That said (I can't resist!), that above study is interesting but not conclusive at all. It's data from a self-reporting database - i.e., if a child gets sick and the doctor agrees the vaccine is related, it's counted as an event. Illness from NOT taking a vaccine is not counted - which is exactly the detail that SHOULD be studied. The factor of multiple vaccines - if they stop after one, then later get sick or even die from a vaccine-preventable disease is NOT counted as an event. So yes they show a correlation - but it's clearly going to be highly skewed toward linking vaccines to hospitalizations. I'm not even addressing the 'pedigree' of a study done, sponsored and promoted by an anti-vaccine group.

But when you study who actually goes to the hospital it's a different story - this was a typical one:

"Oregon Public Health officials note increasing cases of pertussis (whooping cough) in infants, with 146 hospitalizations noted in the 2 year period ending March 2011, and at least 4 deaths since 2003. Most cases are attributed to lack of vaccination, with 86% of those due to parents declining the vaccine."

or, the finding that mercury-based vaccines actually seems to be correlated to *reduced* autism rates (not the main point of this article btw)

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/13 ... m-20100913

And so on.
 

kiran

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ratcheer said:
It's data from a self-reporting database - i.e., if a child gets sick and the doctor agrees the vaccine is related, it's counted as an event. Illness from NOT taking a vaccine is not counted - which is exactly the detail that SHOULD be studied. The factor of multiple vaccines - if they stop after one, then later get sick or even die from a vaccine-preventable disease is NOT counted as an event.

Well, the flip side is also true. If a child gets sick and the doctor doesn't think the vaccine is related, then it's not counted as an event. So it's highly dependent on a doctor's subjective determination of whether it's related.

There have been some anecdotal reports of doctors declining to count illness as a vaccine related event.
 
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kettlebell

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kiran said:
kb, I gotta ask, how Peatarian is your wife? What does she think of Peat?

She finds it very interesting, avoids pufa and eats fruit, drinks milk etc but she doesn't follow anything strictly.
 

nwo2012

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edit: apologies for spelling and grammar, tried to do this as quick as possible.

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbo ... able-2.pdf

Ignorance is bliss I guess?
Don't make me laugh regarding the FDA forcing pharmaceutical companies to make vaccines, lol. It is common knowledge, unless your mind is firmly stuck in a box, that the FDA was captivated by Big Pharma many moons ago.
The vaccine industry insisted that they be exempt from any lawsuits against them due to vaccine injuries and that is why VAERS was set up.

Many of the diseases vaccines are said to have eradicated were already vastly on the decline prior to the inception of the respective vaccine. I have seen graphs showing this on pro-vaccine sites but they just start the graph in a later year so it looks favourable to the vaccine. When shown in its entirety you can clearly see that it was improved sanitation that was responsible for the disease's decline. Here's an example of this, please look as it is an eye opener. In fact some vaccines temporarily increased the incidence of deaths from a disease.

http://www.whale.to/vaccines/decline1.html
Table IV--reveals that in England and Wales there was a continuing decline in the annual death rate from smallpox, with a reduction in mortality of roughly 300 per million to virtually 0, taking place in the 60 year period following the middle of the last century. This table further illustrates that the progressive rate of decline was severely disrupted--with a roughly 275 percent increase in mortality from the disease--occurring immediately after smallpox vaccination laws were enforced.58


When I asked RP about vaccines he simply replied with the infamous Simpsonwood memo. Well worth reading about that one. Of course Big Pharma can debunk everything but anyone with an open mind can see what went on.

I don't even know where to start but all of this is off the top of my head, feel free to research it as I have done so thoroughly in the past.

Lets start off with some of the excipients:

Aluminium - How can injecting a known neurotoxin into children be considered safe?

Polysorbate 80 - Shown to cause infertility in animals.

MSG - Yes the neurotoxin is present in some vaccines.

Neomycin - An antibiotic approved only for oral use due to its systemic toxicity when injected, the exception being that it is somehow safe when injected in small amounts into infants.

Latex- Another allergen present in some vaccines. I, myself, have a latex allergy courtesy of the latex that was present in the Hep B vaccines that were forced on me as a healthcare worker. Within a few weeks of this vaccine I suddenly couldn't wear the sparring gloves I had done for years without issue - skin on hands started to peel.

Mercury - Need I say anything about this toxic metal that somehow becomes safe in vaccines and in dentistry? Yes mercury-free vaccines can still contain it as it need not be listed if less than 3mcg.

And then we have all of the animal material left from the cultures. Read about the SV40 virus that was present in the Salk Polio vaccine and has most likely contributed to possibly millions of cancers as it is a potent carcinogen. We can never know all animal viruses so there is always the risk of similar viruses being 'hidden' in vaccines.

Endotoxins - A topic dear to Peatarians hearts. Well there is absolutely no testing for the endotoxin count in vaccines and there are researchers that are certain endotoxinemia is responsible for many infant deaths.

http://aem.asm.org/content/36/3/445.full.pdf

wentysamplesofcommercialvaccinesintendedforadministrationtohumans were assayed for the presence of bacterial endotoxins by using the Limulus amebocyte lysate test. Sixteen of the vaccines contained more than 0.1 ng of endotoxinperml (whichcorrespondsto103bkcterialcelwallequivalentsperml intheundilutedvaccines).Theseresultssuggestthatatsomestageofpreparation, thevaccineshavecontainedvaryingamountsofgram-negativebacteriaandmay indicatethepresenceofotherbacterialproductsaswell.Itmightbeusefultolist the level of endotoxins, phage, and other contaminants on each vaccine lot to facilitate studies on any side effects of these continants. Selection of vaccine lots with the least endotoxin might reduce some of the adverse effects of vacci- nations.

Shaken Baby Syndrome or Adverse Vaccine Reaction?
http://www.laleva.cc/choice/vaccines/va ... nexus.html


I could go on for a long time on this but I do not wish to spend anymore of my valuable time on it. People need to do deep research before injecting their kids with these poisons.

Most people are not even aware that much of the research data showing safety or efficacy has been 'massaged'. Examples are studies where the placebo actually contains everything except the virus itself. i.e. All of the toxic excipients are in the placebo. So naturally not much will be found in those 'trials'.

What about all the lawsuits?
http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/2012/ ... phries-md/

Vaccinationists tell us we don’t understand science. Well maybe they are right. “Science” in the world of vaccines could mean, throwing out results that don’t fit the desired outcome, throwing out the evidence before the FDA comes to inspect, offering bonuses to scientists to deliver the necessary results … I was the head technician in a biochemistry lab for two years prior to medical school, yet I never saw science carried out like that. Maybe Temple University was just a bit behind the times in its evolution of “science.”

What about this, scary stuff! Got very little exposure by the MSM, I wonder why?
It should have been front page news in every publication!

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home ... 230882.cms?

Last December, the Austrian branch of US vaccine company Baxter sent a batch of ordinary human H3N2 flu, altered so it couldn't replicate, to Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, also in Austria. In February, a lab in the Czech Republic working for Avir alerted Baxter that, unexpectedly, ferrets inoculated with the sample had died. It turned out the sample contained live H5N1, which Baxter uses to make vaccine. The two seem to have been mixed in error.



I myself have one vaccinated (I was one of the sheeple at that time) and one unvaccinated child. I can tell you that both are now very healthy thanks to Ray Peat basically. But in the past it was the vaccinated one that was regularly sick whereas the unvaccinated child has barely had so much as a stuffy nose since birth.
 

nwo2012

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kiran said:
ratcheer said:
It's data from a self-reporting database - i.e., if a child gets sick and the doctor agrees the vaccine is related, it's counted as an event. Illness from NOT taking a vaccine is not counted - which is exactly the detail that SHOULD be studied. The factor of multiple vaccines - if they stop after one, then later get sick or even die from a vaccine-preventable disease is NOT counted as an event.

Well, the flip side is also true. If a child gets sick and the doctor doesn't think the vaccine is related, then it's not counted as an event. So it's highly dependent on a doctor's subjective determination of whether it's related.

There have been some anecdotal reports of doctors declining to count illness as a vaccine related event.


Many deaths occur months after the vaccine is given so will never be attributed to it. And same for many of the injuries.
 

Claire

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Ray Peat says that vaccinations are known to suppress immunity. So I wouldn't do it. Having your own strong immune system is imperative to good health. So many of the childhood illness are good for you and make you a stronger adult with life long immunity. Whereas, who even know how long the vaccines are actually effective for, if at all. They use horrible fear mongering to get people to vaccinate their children so excessively. Vaccinations are only on the rise as our health is on the steep decline. It is not a wise choice in my opinion. I have 4 lovely strong healthy children who have never been vaccinated.

" I reviewed the many things in our environment that are known to suppress immunity, and which have become increasingly prevalent in our environment--unsaturated vegetable oils, ferrous iron and carrageenan in our foods, lead in air, food, and water, exposure to medical, military, and industrial ionizing radiation, vaccinations, pesticides, chlorinated hydrocarbons, nitric oxide (smog and medications) and oral contraceptives and environmental estrogens, in particular. "
From Ray Peat's article - Immunodeficiency, dioxins, stress, and the hormones
 

charlie

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nwo and claire. :hattip :clap:


Claire, welcome to the forum. :welcome
 

gretchen

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Vaccinations are poison. I read about them off and on and never quite get what the reason is, but they seem unjustified and toxic.
 

nwo2012

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Charlie said:
nwo and claire. :hattip :clap:


Claire, welcome to the forum. :welcome
Thanks Charlie. Welcome Claire, good to have another free-thinker on board.

This was Ray Peat's reply to the question on should one vaccinate.

RP
Deadly Immunity

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.
 

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