Written by Vera Sharav
Note from the World Mercury Project Team: Following
is Part One in a seven-part series of Vera Sharav’s in-depth exposé of
the complex and widespread corruption that exists in the vaccination
program. Her investigation has uncovered decades-long fraudulent
activity that has permeated the vaccine industry. Sharav’s research is a
must-read by those in our community because it explains the intricate
groundwork that has led us to the debacle we are now living with – an
epidemic of sick children.
The exponential increase in the autism /
autism spectrum prevalence rate since 1985 (1 in 2,500) to 2016 (1 in
45) is evidence of an epidemic, not, as the deniers will have it, “an optical illusion” or “a statistical mirage”
“today a million and more Americans, almost all under thirty, have been formally diagnosed with autism…Most with an autism diagnosis will never [lead normal lives] or be responsible for their health and welfare. Both the increase and the burden it imposes are widely recognized by thousands of parents and frontline professionals such as nurses and teachers. Yet some of the most prominent and powerful people in medicine, the media, and government deny it.” [DENIAL: How Refusing to Face the Facts about Our Autism Epidemic Hurts Children, Families, and Our Future, Mark Blaxil and Dan Olmsted (2017)]
Are children’s rights to a normal life being sacrificed as collateral damage to protect high utilization of vaccines?
The focus of this appendix is how the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the vaccine
industry control vaccine safety assessments, control the science of
vaccines and control the scientific and mass channels of information
about vaccines. These primary stakeholders gained control by
establishing an elaborate web of collaborating institutional
partnerships which they fund. The collaborating institutional
stakeholders include:
- The American Academy of Pediatrics,
- The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI, UK),
- The World Health Organization,
- WHO-Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (GACVS),
- The European Medicines Agency (EMA),
- The European Centre for Disease Prevention & Control (ECDPC),
- The Brighton Collaboration and the Brighton Collaboration Foundation,
- The Cochrane Collaboration,
- The Institute of Medicine,
- The Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS),
- The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) which is bankrolled by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
- World Bank and others.
Numerous additional industry front groups are popping up on social media to spread vaccine propaganda, such as the European Health Parliament (EHP,
situated in Brussels, created in 2017). EHP is bankrolled by Johnson
and Johnson and is affiliated with Google, Politico and others.
[Appendix 10 is being updated. It will publish shortly.]
All of these institutions became de facto stakeholders in promoting vaccination policies while presenting themselves as independent authoritative sources of information about vaccine safety.
All of these institutions became de facto stakeholders in promoting vaccination policies while presenting themselves as independent authoritative sources of information about vaccine safety.
Through this elaborate network of
collaborative partnerships, industry gained global control of vaccine
safety assessments – which are applied as the single standard, used mostly to rule out a causal relationshipbetween
vaccination and serious adverse events following vaccination. These
centrally controlled assessments are applied indiscriminately in all
cases, disregarding individual human susceptibility factors.
One of the intended features of these
collaborating partnerships is to camouflage the identity of the funding
source for vaccine research and professed independent reviews of vaccine
research. Medical journals, as the editor-in-chief of The Lancet, Dr. Richard Horton acknowledged, “devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.” Indeed, the BMJ (British Medical Journal)
entered into undisclosed partnership agreements with both major vaccine
manufacturers. In 2008, BMJ and Merck entered into partnership and in
2016, BMJ and GlaxoSmithKline formed a partnership as well.
Additionally, vaccine stakeholders control the vast channels of
propaganda – including Google, which has formed a partnership with GlaxoSmithKline.
The financial interest of these
collaborating partnerships conflicts with the tenets of medical ethics
and scientific integrity – such as transparency and independent
assessment of the data. The consequences of these ill-suited
partnerships are demonstrated by evidence of corrupt vaccine safety
assessments; evidence of harm following vaccination is either concealed
or defined as non-related; journal publications are corrupted by
fraudulent reports, and honest scientific findings are suppressed. The
entire web of vaccine stakeholder- collaborations is geared toward
issuing uniform vaccine safety pronouncements that promote vaccination
policies crafted to ensure high vaccination rates, translating to ever
higher profit margins.
Much of the evidence is documented in thousands of internal CDC documents (some were obtained in 2011);[1] additional CDC internal documents were obtained in July 2017.[2] The evidence is also documented in transcripts of closed-door meetings, such as the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) at Simpsonwood (2000); the Institute of Medicine Committee on Immunization Safety Review (2001); and the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI,
1990). These documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA). Evidence was also gathered in the course of a criminal investigation of Dr. Poul Thorsen by the U.S. Inspector General, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Background:
What Did CDC Officials Know About Thimerosal; When Did They Know It, & What Did They Do About It?
In 1974, the FDA convened a panel of
experts to conduct a comprehensive review of the safety and
effectiveness of over-the-counter medicines. One facet of the review was
OTC drugs that contained mercury whose function was to kill bacteria to
prevent infection. In 1980, the Advisory Review Panel submitted its
report to the FDA, having reviewed 18 products containing mercury. It
found the products either unsafe or ineffective. The report cited
several studies demonstrating human hypersensitivity to thimerosal:
“mercury compounds as a class are of dubious value for anti-microbial use. Mercury inhibits the growth of bacteria, but does not act swiftly to kill them.”
“The Panel concludes that thimerosal is not safe for OTC topical use because of its potential for cell damage if applied to broken skin, and its allergy potential. It is not effective as a topical antimicrobial because its bacteriostatic action can be reversed.”[4]
After the determination by the FDA
advisory committee, Eli Lilly chose to cease production of
Thimerosal-containing products. Despite the evidence, Thimerosal
continued to be added to vaccines. In 1990, Professor Hans Wigzell,
Rector of the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, and member Nobel Committee
for Physiology or Medicine, wrote “Difficult to Substitute Mercury as a
Preservative in Bacterial Vaccines”, in which he recommended that:
“a study [be conducted] to show if there is a difference in general toxicity when uptake of mercury is from the stomach-intestines or after injections…This should be studied in relation to the tremendous large number of subjects vaccinated with preparations containing thimerosal sodium; Our goal is to develop, as soon as possible, vaccines completely free of mercury.”[5]
In 1991, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, an
internationally renowned Merck vaccinologist, wrote a memo to the
president of Merck’s vaccine division stating:
“6-month-old children who received their shots on schedule would get a mercury dose up to 87 times higher than guidelines for the maximum daily consumption of mercury from fish. When viewed in this way, the mercury load appears rather large. The key issue is whether thimerosal, in the amount given with the vaccine, does or does not constitute a safety hazard. However, perception of hazard may be equally important.” [6]
The FDA delayed issuing its final rule on thimerosal until 1998, stating: “safety
and effectiveness have not been established for the ingredients
(mercury based preservatives)… manufacturers have not submitted the
necessary data in response to earlier opportunities.”[7]The rule, however, applied only to OTC products.
In 1991, Dr. Peter Aaby, Director of the
Bandim Health Project, a demographic surveillance system (in
Guinea-Bissau, West Africa), which is affiliated with the Statens Serum Institute,
identified non-specific adverse vaccine effects which go beyond the
specific protective effects of the targeted disease. He noted that these
non-specific effects can be beneficial or harmful. Dr. Aaby has
conducted a series of comparative “natural studies” of vaccinated and
unvaccinated children in high-mortality regions in rural Africa, that
consistently confirmed that:
“Though a vaccine protects
children against the target disease it may simultaneously increase
susceptibility to unrelated infections.”[8]
The First Large-Scale Scientifically Sound CDC Epidemiological Study
The 1999 CDC study sought to determine
the relative risk for infants following exposure to
thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines was conducted by Dr. Thomas
Verstraeten and three CDC colleagues who examined the evidence
documented in CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD).
They analyzed the medical records of 400,000 infants born between 1991
and 1997 that were maintained by four HMOs and assessed the risk of
autism for the children at different ages.
This was a scientifically solid study; it provided scientific documentation that: exposure to thimerosal during the first month of life increased the relative risk of autism by 7.6 i.e., 760%.
The VSD data revealed additional risks
as well: 1.8 increased relative risk for a neurodevelopmental disorder;
2.1 relative risk for speech disorder; and 5-fold increased relative
risk for a nonorganic sleep disorder. The evidence documents that
infants exposed to vaccines laced with thimerosal during the first month
of life are at an alarmingly high increased risk of serious harm.
In
December 1999, Dr. Verstraeten sent an email to his co-authors and CDC
colleagues, Dr. Robert Davis and Dr. Frank DeStefano; the subject line
was “it just won’t go away”. The email attachments included four tables
with relative risk data and the Abstract of
their study findings, that he was submitting for a presentation, at the
high level (by invitation only) meeting, convened by CDC’s Epidemic
Intelligence Service, at Simpsonwood Retreat Center in Georgia (2000).[9]
The title of their study: “Increased
Risk Of Developmental Neurologic Impairment After High Exposure To
Thimerosal-Containing Vaccine In First Month Of Life.”
The meeting was chaired by Richard Johnston, M.D., an immunologist and pediatrician (University of Colorado) who stated:
“
The data on its toxicity (shows) it can cause neurologic and renal toxicity, including death. We learned [sic] a number of important things about aluminum, and I think they also are important in our considerations today.”“Aluminum salts are important in the formulating process of vaccines, both in antigen stabilization and absorption of endotoxin. Aluminum and mercury are often simultaneously administered to infants, both at the same site and at different sites.”“However [sic] there is absolutely no data, including animal data, about the potential for synergy, additively or antagonism, all of which can occur in binary metal mixtures that relate and allow us to draw any conclusions from the simultaneous exposure to these two salts in vaccines…” [p. 19-20]
Dr. Verstraeten began his presentation by stating: “what I will present to you is the study that nobody thought we should do.”
The study categorized the cumulative effect of thimerosal-containing
vaccines administered to infants after one month of life and assessed
the subsequent risk of degenerative and developmental neurologic
disorders, and renal disorders before the age of six. Dr. Verstraeten
stated that ALL of these relative risks were statistically significant.
And he noted that: “mercury at one
month of age is not the same as mercury at three months, at 12 months,
prenatal mercury, later mercury. There is a whole range of plausible
outcomes from mercury.” When asked about the risk of aluminum, he
stated: “the results were almost identical to ethylmercury because the
amount of aluminum goes along almost exactly with the mercury one.”
Following the presentation, Dr. Roger Bernier (Associate Director for Science NIP) stated: “We have asked you to keep this information confidential….Consider this embargoed information.”[p. 113]
It is clear from the EIS transcript that
the response to Dr. Verstraeten’s research findings differed between
pediatricians, who were genuinely concerned about the hazards of both
Thimerosal and aluminum, whereas officials of government and
non-government organizations (NGOs, that are dependent on government and
industry support, such as the World Health Organization), focused on
the threat to vaccination policy and the risk of litigation were intent
on burying the data and maintaining secrecy about the findings.
Pediatricians focused on the risks, public health: Dr. William Weil, represented the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) stated:
“
moving from one month or one day of birth to six months of birth changes enormously the potential for toxicity. There are just a host of neurodevelopmental data that would suggest that we’ve got a serious problem. the potential for aluminum and central nervous system toxicity was established by dialysis data. To think there isn’t some possible problem here is unreal.”[p.24]
“Although the data presents a number of uncertainties, there is adequate consistency, biological plausibility, a lack of relationship with phenomenon not expected to be related, and a potential causal role that is as good as any other hypothesized etiology of explanation of the noted associations.
In addition, the possibility that the associations could be causal has major significance for public and professional acceptance of Thimerosal containing vaccines. I think that is a critical issue. Finally, lack of further study would be horrendous grist for the anti-vaccination bill. That’s why we need to go on, and urgently I would add.” [pg. 187 & 188]
“The number of dose related relationships are linear and statistically significant. You can play with this all you want. They are linear. They are statistically significant.” [p.207]
[Dr. Weil may well have been informed by the following research report: Aluminum Neurotoxicity in Preterm Infants Receiving Intravenous-Feeding Solutions in the NEJM(1997) whose authors concluded: “In
preterm infants, prolonged intravenous feeding with solutions
containing aluminum is associated with impaired neurologic development.” More on aluminum vaccine adjuvants below.]
Dr. Robert Brent [a Scientific Adviser to an industry front-group] focused entirely on protecting corporations from lawsuits:Dr. Johnson: “This association leads me to favor a recommendation that infants up to two years old not be immunized with Thimerosal-containing vaccines if suitable alternative preparations are available… I do not want [my] grandson to get a Thimerosal containing vaccine until we know better what is going on.” [p. 198]
“The medical/legal findings in this study, causal or not, are horrendous and therefore, it is important that the suggested epidemiological, pharmacokinetic, and animal studies be performed. If an allegation was made that a child’s neurobehavioral findings were caused by Thimerosal containing vaccines, you could readily find junk scientist who would support the claim with “a reasonable degree of certainty”.But you will not find a scientist with any integrity who would say the reverse with the data that is available. And that is true. So we are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits if they were initiated and I am concerned.” [pg. 229, emphasis added]
*[Dr. Brent was a member of the Board of
Trustees of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) a food
and chemical industry front group which the Center for Science in the
Public Interest described as, “Voodoo Science, Twisted Consumerism”[10]]
Dr. John Clements, who
represented the WHO at the EIS conference, expressed alarm about the
direction of the research, which he viewed as posing a threat to
vaccination uptake if the information reaches the public:
“
I am really concerned that we have taken off like a boat going down one arm of the mangrove swamp at high speed, when in fact there was not enough discussion really early on about which way the boat should go at all. And I really [don’t] want to risk offending everyone in the room by saying that perhaps this study should not have been done at all, because the outcome of it could have, to some extent, been predicted…, and we have all reached this point now where we are left hanging, even though I hear the majority of consultants say to the Board that they are not convinced there is a causality direct link between thimerosal and various neurological outcomes. I know how we handle it from here is extremely problematic.” [Emphasis added]
“…even if this committee decides that there is no association and that information gets out, the work that has been done and through the freedom of information that will be taken by others and will be used in ways beyond the control of this group. And I am very concerned about that as I suspect it already too late to do anything regardless of any professional body and what they say.”
“My mandate as I sit here in this group is to make sure at the end of the day that 100,000,000 are immunized with DTP, Hepatitis B and if possible Hib, this year, next year and for many years to come, and that will have to be with Thimerosal containing vaccines unless a miracle occurs and an alternative is found quickly and is tried and found to be safe. “ [emphasis added]
“I am very concerned that this has gotten this far, and that having got this far, how you present in a concerted voice the information to the ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] in a way they will be able to handle it and not get exposed to the traps which are out there in public relations.
My message would be that any other study, and I like the study that has just been described here very much. I think it makes a lot of sense, but it has to be thought through. What are the potential outcomes and how will you handle it? How will it be presented to a public and a media… I wonder how on earth you are going to handle it from here.“ [p. 247—249]
Other comments from those present include:
The concerns expressed at this Epidemic Intelligence Service meeting, by Dr. Clements and other public officials and industry representatives who asserted their determination to conceal the thimerosal evidence from the public, has been the policy of CDC and an international network. However, concealing the evidence does not eradicate the evidence. A compendium of 80 peer-reviewed, published studies found evidence of a link between thimerosal and neurological disorders, including autism. A recent Review paper (April 2017) documents that the continued use of thimerosal in underdeveloped countries provides evidence of its harmful impact.[11]“We could exclude the lowest exposure children from the database”; “We could remove children that got the highest exposure levels since they represented an unusually high percentage of the [adverse] outcomes”; “We can push and pull this data any way we want to get the results we want;” “We could have predicted the outcomes.”CDC’s Dr. Bernier reminded everyone: “consider this embargoed information…and very highly protected information.”
WMP NOTE: This concludes Part One. Part Two of the Seven-Part series will be entitled: Public Trust of Government Pronouncements Regarding Vaccine Safety is Validated By Evidence of Deception and Corrupt Practices. Sharov’s Introduction outlines
her well-researched and documented belief that, “Public health
officials and the medical profession have abrogated their professional,
public, and human responsibility, by failing to honestly examine the
iatrogenic harm caused by expansive, indiscriminate, and increasingly
aggressive vaccination policies.”
