Olmsted on Autism: Tell It To Bernadine Healy
Today, we're adding a new permanent post to our home page -- a link to Bernadine Healy's comments in a CBS interview with Sharyl Attkisson. You'll find it on the left sidebar under "Papers, Reports, Info."
We're doing this for a couple of reasons. Reason One: It is the most important single statement by the most important person ever to lend credence to a plausible link between autism and vaccinations. It's a game-changer, and it's all the "cover" any of us need to keep raising questions until they are answered to our satisfaction.
Secondly, this is a moment when we need all the help we can get. The recent MMR study, which was wrongly interpreted (with the help of the researchers themselves) as more proof against a link between autism and vaccines, was outrageous. And so is Paul Offit's new book, False Prophets, in which he tears down everybody who has ever raised the issue, ever believed their child might have improved after any sort of biomedical intervention -- ever dared to disagree with medical orthodoxy. My God, you cut out dairy and wheat, you see your kid get better, and you're practically accused of child abuse.
So let's remind ourselves briefly of what Healy, the former director of the NIH -- not a vaccinologist, not a pediatrician, not a CDC flack, not a blogger, not the head of a mere division of the NIH but the whole edifice -- had to say.
"The question has not been answered." It doesn't get much clearer than that. The question of whether vaccines can trigger autism in a susceptible subgroup has not been answered. Let's repeat for emphasis: The question has not been answered.
"One should never shy away from science. One should never shy away from getting causality information." Yet that is what is happening, she says.
"I think the government or certain public health officials within the government have been too quick to dismiss the concerns of these families without studying the population that got sick." Healy says we need to take 300 children whose parents say they regressed right after a vaccine and figure out what happened. This is the opposite of the nonsense that because autism and vaccination both occur in the first two years of life, it's just a coincidence. It's the opposite of slipshod epidemiology that "proves" there's no problem at the population level. We are not talking about populations, we're talking about people. We're not talking about a herd, we're talking about a child.
"I think public health officials have been too quick to dismiss the hypothesis (vaccines can trigger autism) as irrational without sufficient studies of causation." We need more science, in other words.
Studies in primates and mice of the total vaccine load, including vaccine mercury, are sending ominous signals about the overall health outcomes of children vaccinated under the CDC's childhood immunization schedule. Yet the agency won't budge -- not on Hep B at birth, not on the MMR and chickenpox on the same day at 12 months, not on mercury in flu shots given to pregnant women and to infants starting at 6 months -- years AFTER they called for mercury to be removed from ALL childhood immunizations. And we're helping saturate the world's children in organic mercury, otherwise known as thimerosal.
Many are concerned -- and rightly so -- that public health officials and vaccine advocates don't want "to pursue a hypothesis because that hypothesis could be damaging to the public" by scaring people away from vaccinations, Healy says. "I don't believe the truth ever scares people."
Dr. Healy is treating Americans like the adults and citizens they are, and public health officials like the servants of the people they should be. She is the one Paul Offit and the wackosphere and the CDC and Big Pharma need to be disparaging, not desperate parents and the relatively few people who are standing with them while more and more researchers and writers take their grant money and their 15 seconds of prime-time newscast fame and run.
As I mentioned in my post on Offit's book (HERE), it's sure interesting he doesn't mention Healy's comments, or the Poling case that undoubtedly was part of Healy's awakening to the issue. Or the primate study that found so many sick monkeys. Or anything else that gets in the way of denigrating anybody who simply happens to agree with the former head of the NIH that the fundamental question has not been answered and the people we trusted to answer it are shying away from facing the truth. That's quite some dereliction of duty, when you think about it.
We need more independent and relevant research, urgently. We need to listen to real parents about what happened to their kids. We need to have enough respect for Americans to trust they can handle the truth.
And we must remind ourselves we're not alone, not when someone of Bernadine Healy's stature is saying the same thing. Do yourself a favor and listen to her interview -- as needed, to use the phrase beloved of pharmaceutical firms.
--
Dan Olmsted is editor of Age of Autism.
Thank you Dan for posting this. It is sanity with truth.... much needed and appreciated. The "as needed" sounds very right about now....and JB's announcement regarding Jenny on Oprah is spectacular!
Posted by: Teresa | September 23, 2008 at 12:33 AM
Thankyou Dan, You never fail to inspire us. Perhaps someone could make a simple Age of Autism pledge that we will never rest until the health profession takes the mercury/vaccines /neurological disorders question honestly and scientifically. That would truly be change we can believe in.We could keep a list of those who take the pledge and stick it to CDC and AAP now, then.
Everything that our opposition does can be summed up in a single word: DELAY
One fine day, certain things may not be delayed any longer and then THEY will proceed to distract our attention to mercury in fish, air, water, dental work.Therefore- MORE DELAY
One of their most prominent delaying tactics is to NEVER mention any research that implicates vaccines or mercury. (Or mention it very briefly, laughingly and disparagingly. ) If they are so afraid of that, lets get news of that research into some peoples faces. We could start with pediatricians.
Posted by: Cherry Sperlin Misra | September 22, 2008 at 01:56 PM
Dan:
I couldn't agree more with you on the importance of remembering what Bernadine Healy said.
The pace of reports of parents watching their children disappear after "well baby visits" are not abating, and its unliekly they will simply because health authorities declare there isn't a problem.
While we might all feel a bit annoyed with the news in this moment, I predict that one week from today we all feel a lot differently.
Jenny will be on Oprah Wednesday.
http://www.oprah.com/tows
JB
Posted by: JB Handley | September 22, 2008 at 11:15 AM
What is it about this interview that makes me so angry? This interview makes me more angry than an interview with Paul Offit. I am so tired of hearing about some kids being "susceptible." My son got injected with mercury on the day he was born, two weeks later another HBV, more shots at 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 15 months. For God's sake, they injected him full of mercury. Susceptible to mercury poisoning - that's some logic. Put a poison in a baby and they get poisoned. WOW!!!
BTW Just because most children injected full of mercury did not develop autism, does not mean they were not harmed. Autism is not the only result of mercury poisoning. We have yet to see what will happen and quite frankly, I'm scared for all these kids. Mercury is BAD stuff!!!
Posted by: Maggie | September 22, 2008 at 10:09 AM
Yesterday I just had a crappy crappy day.
Tho' my son who has chelated for 5 years is making remarkable progress, the violent surge in toxic vaccines and those who advocate they are totally safe still abound.
As do the phone calls that I get as a "parent to parent" volunteer.
While I relished a church staffer saying my son has recovered so well she wouldn't peg him as Autistic I come home to this:
A request from a relative to call a parent from out of state, whose Autistic child is once again in the hospital with a raging fever of unknown origin.
A call from a parent with an 17 year old, tearful after she found she must apply for, pay for an attorney, and file for guardianship...for a non-verbal child she has spent her entire life carrying for!
Her child by the way, had an immediate reaction to vaccines, went to sleep and woke up with Autism. She spent 200K at the Cleveland clinic to get her final diagnosis and was told she had no legal recourse for vaccine failure.
Now she must "apply" to care for him.
A call from a parent who came to an "Autism Yesterday" screening and immediately got on the stick treating his toddler, who recently found his second child was also loaded with Mercury and symptomatic.
You know, IT IS JUST NOT ENOUGH TO HAVE MY KID RECOVER.
The senseless damage of a poorly regulated vaccine industry run a muck must be challenged.
The collateral damage is just too great.
Families are being destroyed, their finances sacked, their kid's destines hijacked.
Thank God for Bernadine Healy and her steel spine. For years we have been praying an insider would have the courage to speak out.
I think that this woman - who almost became a nun, was reserved for a higher calling.
Her wisdom breathes life into my soul.
Posted by: karenatlanta | September 22, 2008 at 09:49 AM
Thank you Dan. CBS's stunning interview should have been picked up everywhere, but it wasn't. If Dr. Healy had agreed with the CDC studies denying a link, I'm sure ABC and NBC would have led the newscast with her.
It's hard to understand this selective reporting on the most heated debate in medicine. Pleasing corporate interests seems to trump ethical journalism when it comes to autism's cause.
Offit conveniently ignores the experts who challenge him. He refused to participate with Dr. Boyd Haley who had agreed to debate him on thimerosal.
The reporters writing the glowing reviews of Offit's new book fail completely to address the concerns and claims of parents. They merely dismiss us as dangerous and ignorant.
Even the most uninvolved observer can see the one-sided coverage this book is receiving.
Offit's book will do nothing to settle the issue. It can't explain why so many children are disabled. These are desperate times for those who have no answers except to say, it can't be vaccines.
Anne Dachel
Media editor
Posted by: Anne Dachel | September 22, 2008 at 09:00 AM
The only thing that scares me away is the cover-up. How can I trust a governing agency who is unwilling to do the needed studies to prove or disprove (yeah right) this aassociation? It is the cover-up that causes concern over being able to believe ANYTHING that is said or done by the CDC. My goodness, it baffles me that there is no understanding of the basic concept of transparency. The distrust bleeds over into everything that happens within my pediatrician's office. I was never the mom that had to read the insert on ALL medicines prescribed to my children. NOW, I question absolutley eveything my doc prescribes. And LOL, I turn down half of it. There were nose sprays that I refused to give my son when he was 14 months old because the indert stated that it had never been tested on a child under the age of 6 years. Certainly, there is probably a good reason that I would be able to trust that spray...but knowing that they are already willing to pretend there is no relationship without proof to vaccines causing damage, I now have no trust in anything else they say. What a horrible feeling. They are suppose to be our security blanket. THEY are suppose to be the people that you may not like what is said, but you can have faith that you will be told the truth.
LOL, what a joke. I miss the world I grew up in.
I miss being able to trust my doctor.
Sorry about the rambling....
Kathleen
Posted by: kat23 | September 22, 2008 at 08:24 AM
Sorry - error in my previous post. I intended to say that Brian Deer had posted the Hornig study on his website, not "the Wakefield".
Posted by: John Stone | September 22, 2008 at 07:26 AM
Dear Dan,
I would just like to take the opportunity to re-post the link to Ed Yazbak's review of the Hornig study 'CDC-sponsored MMR study supports Wakefield's findings' recently published by JABS. It is the most comprehensive commentary on it to date.
http://www.jabs.org.uk/pages/yazbak%20on%20cdc%20study.pdf
It is important to understand that the present hearing against the three doctors by the UK General Medical Council is one of shabbiest events in scientific history. Wakefield's chief accuser, the journalist Brian Deer, has posted the Wakefield study on his website, failing to note that it undermines his position in two vital respects. It gives the lie to the prosecution's claim that the doctors were in some way fabricating the GI symptoms of their patients, and undermines the case that O'Leary got his lab results wrong - which seems to be the basis on which the UK MMR litigation was collapsed.
The allegation (the other main one) that Lancet editor, Richard Horton, had not been told of Wakefield's involvement in the litigation at the time the controversial 1998 paper has already been disproved:
http://www.theoneclickgroup.co.uk/documents/vaccines/JABS%20Briefing%20Note,%209%20April%202008.pdf
None of this, of course, is reported in the British media. Indeed, it is all too significant that while our Department of Health and Health Protection Agency (not to mention industry lobby organisations like Science Media Centre and Sense About Science) are usually keen to publicise the latest study refuting Wakefield, they seem to have run a mile from this one. Because, of course, it supports him.
John
Posted by: John Stone | September 22, 2008 at 06:07 AM