Front and Center Folks!

It's critical we keep this sort of thing in front of the legislators.

These Congressional actions give our community a great deal of legitimacy. These repremanding reports make it more and more difficult for anyone to call us, "on the fringe, angry and looking for someone to blame." They build the case we have been making for the culture of corruption we have been complainng about.

Don't assume everyone in Congress and Senate know what's coming out of any given committee and certainly don't assume they will make the correlation Dan has so beautifully defined here.

Here is the email I sent this morning:
(Note: I included an excerpt in the middle with a closing paragraph at the end.)

Good Morning ______,

This article is a must read. Aside from attending the recent autism briefing, this is probably the most important thing I have asked of you. Most of what I have sent you is for the sake of your office's general education. I would like to be assured that Senator _____ reads this personally, as he implied to me he believes the federal agencies are above the criticisms we, the autism community, have placed on them.

It discusses a Congressional report that will be released tomorrow. http://www.ageofautism.com/2008/11/feckless-ion-do.html#more


These Excerpts provide a good overview but the details are critical:

A harsh new report is blasting the relationship between a federal agency and the Institute of Medicine -- saying costly reports the IOM produced were worthless and failed to connect a widespread but baffling epidemic with its true causes.

No, it's not about autism. This criticism relates to the Veterans Administration and studies it commissioned from the Institute of Medicine to look into Gulf War Illness. The Congressionally mandated independent review of Gulf War Studies, in a report to be officially released Tuesday, calls the VA-IOM effort a diversion from the search for the truth.

It says that Saddam Hussein didn't cause Gulf War Syndrome -- we did. The most likely suspects, it concludes, are a nerve gas antidote used protectively (there was never an attack) and widespread exposure to pesticides. And it says multiple vaccinations given to the troops cannot be ruled out.

...........This set-up, of course, will be familiar to Age of Autism readers knowledgeable about the CDC-mandated-and-manipulated IOM study of autism and vaccines, which pulled every kind of punch -- from hurrying up the report to avoid looking at new studies, to ignoring or denigrating studies like the hair-mercury analysis and the violent reaction to thimerosal in mice bred to have autoimmune problems, to overweighting slipshod epidemiological studies that even the IOM acknowledged could fail to identify a susceptible subset of children.

Bottom line: The VA-IOM debacle is an analogous case study to the IOM-CDC cover-up, with similar consequences -- lack of understanding of what really caused Gulf War Syndrome; lack of understanding of what really caused the autism epidemic. At a deeper level, the study suggests a culture in which "science" is just another political tool to silence criticism and prevent the truth from emerging. In Patrick Fitzgerald's memorable phrase in the Scooter Libby trial, the IOM appears to have become a mechanism for "kicking sand in the umpire's face."

This connection was not lost on Steve Robinson, one of America's leading veterans advocates, who was instrumental in exposing the Bush Administration's shabby treatment of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

"It's the three-card monte game they use to have a pre-determined outcome," Robinson told me. And it's no mere game -- at stake are treatment and compensation for, in this case, hundreds of thousands of Gulf War vets whose lives have been damaged by their decision to serve their country.

"How do we break the code of how corrupt it is to manipulate science this way, not just for vets but for autism and other issues?" asked Robinson, who has been informally working with the Obama transition team on veterans' issues. He said Obama "is not going to get the ground truth from these people" in any of the areas where the science has been corrupted.

"What does he inherit? A politicized federal government [science program] that is defunct and corrupt." The problem is most acute four or five levels down from the top, where the actual manipulation occurs, he said. Those are the people who need to come clean.

The Gulf War review panel basically called for a mulligan on the shoddy VA/IOM collaboration -- recommending that the VA ask the IOM to redo all its studies and that the VA office involved in the previous studies, the Office of Public Health and Environmental Hazards, be removed from all participation in the new effort.

This angers me as much for our soldiers as for our children. It's high time that Congress and Senate stop issuing reports and reprimands. It's time to clean house and get these questions answered through independent scientists. It's also high time parents who report that their children became chronically ill after receiving vaccines be taken seriously rather than being told we are just angry, on the fringe and looking for someone to blame. The same goes for our military personel.

Regards,
Pamela Felice