Best of Age of Autism: Paul Offit’s Message: CDC, FDA, NIH, IOM, AAP, WHO and Merck Engaged in Pseudoscience
Managing Editor's Note: Dr. Offit has been appointed to the IOM.
By Jake Crosby
Did Age of Autism move the goalposts? Paul Offit says yes, but statements from the CDC, FDA, NIH, IOM, AAP, WHO and even Merck say otherwise.
In the PBS documentary Frontline, responding to concerns about vaccine-related factors in the etiology of autism other than just thimerosal or the MMR vaccine, millionaire vaccine industrialist Paul Offit said:
“So now this is classic for pseudoscience, is you just keep moving the goalpost. So now the goalpost is, no, we didn't mean actually MMR caused autism or thimerosal caused autism”
First of all, we continue to mean that the MMR and thimerosal clearly do cause autism as actual science shows - even if routinely denied by the tobacco science Offit regularly cites.
Secondly, his dismissal of any further criticisms of vaccines beyond these two factors as “pseudoscience” conflicts with the expressed concerns of many high-ranking members of public health and the pharmaceutical industry. They voiced opinions that other factors such as aluminum and receiving too many vaccines at once may cause autism and related disorders.
At the secret Simpsonwood meeting 10 years ago, Dr. Richard Johnston - a pediatric immunologist funded by SmithKline Beecham - said (on page 20):
“Aluminum and mercury are often simultaneously administered to infants, both at the same site and at different sites.
However, we learned that 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 simultaneous exposure from these two salts in vaccines…”
Dr. Johnston would later serve as liaison to the IOM panel that cut federal funding to studies examining mercury as a possible cause of autism.
As a point of interest, Johnston also said he did not want his grandson to be given vaccines with thimerosal “until we know better what is going on.”
Dr. Bill Weil, a pediatrician representing the AAP, raised further concerns about aluminum (page 24 of the Simpsonwood memo):
“The second point I could make is that in relationship to aluminum, being a nephrologist for a long time, 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.”
On page 77, when Dr. Bill Egan, the head of FDA’s division of vaccines and related products, asked CDC Epidemic Intelligence Surveillance Officer Tom Verstraeten:
“Could you do this calculation for aluminum?”
Dr. Verstraeten, who found that thimerosal was responsible for very high rates of neurological disorders including autism, responded:
“I did it for aluminum…Actually the results were almost identical to ethylmercury because the amount of aluminum goes along almost exactly with the mercury one.”
On that same page, Dr. Harry Guess of Merck said yet another problem with vaccines contributes to such neurological disorders:
"So this essentially is a 7% risk per antigen, an antigen is like in DPT you've got three antigens."
WHO vaccine advisor Dr. John Clements said on page 206:
“Aluminum is not perceived, I believe, by the public as a dangerous metal. Therefore, we are in a much more comfortable wicket in terms of defending its presence in vaccines.”
Note that he did not say it isn’t a dangerous metal, nor that its presence in vaccines is less dangerous than that of mercury.
Eight years later, former NIH director Dr. Bernadine Healy told Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News:
"There is a completely expressed concern that they don't want to pursue a hypothesis because that hypothesis could be damaging to the public health community at large by scaring people. First of all, I think the public’s smarter than that. The public values vaccines. But more importantly, I don’t think you should ever turn your back on any scientific hypothesis because you’re afraid of what it might show."
That same year, then CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding who now works for Merck, said to CNN medical reporter Dr. Sanjay Gupta:
"If a child is immunized and has a fever or other complications from the vaccine, then if you're predisposed with a mitochondrial disorder, it could certainly set off damage. Some of the symptoms can be characteristics of autism."
These concerns about vaccines causing autism and similar conditions - which do not necessarily point to thimerosal or the MMR specifically as the prime culprits - are clearly serious concerns of leaders in the CDC, FDA, NIH, IOM, AAP, WHO and the vaccine industry. But to Paul Offit, “this is classic for pseudoscience.”
Autism science is a mere political game to the millionaire vaccine industrialist. The possibility of autism having multiple causes – if it further implicates vaccines – is “shifting goalposts” to Offit. Only that which supports his biased preconceptions gets the honorable title of “science.” Though Paul Offit does not begin to qualify as a scientist concerning the issue of vaccines causing autism, he is a dedicated lobbyist. He’s Nick Naylor from “Thank You For Smoking” with an MD.
Jake Crosby is a college student with Asperger Syndrome at Brandeis University who is double majoring in History and Health: Science, Society and Policy, and is a contributing editor to Age of Autism.
Thank you Carol for sharing this link with us.We can
provide our full support to CoMeD's president's comment:
"This type of malfeasance should not be tolerated by those
who are entrusted with our children's health and well-being."CDC needs to inform the public about this study and
Pediatrics need to pull the previous study and communicate honestly about the real findings of the Denmark study. Trust begins with honesty,fake and manipulated studies with
missing data destroys trust.It is time to stop Autism now.
Posted by: oneVoice | October 28, 2011 at 07:08 PM
From Carol's link below:-
'Dr. Poul Thorsen, one of the co-authors and "scientist in residence" at the CDC 2000-2002, subsequently was terminated by Aarhus University and indicted in Atlanta for embezzlement this year in relation to his $11 million grant from the CDC.'
Thorsen is apparently currently working for the United Nations; there has been no attempt by the US authorities to begin extradition proceedings in order that Thorsen answer these charges. I sincerely hope that Thorsen is not involved in any way with the current UN debate concerning environmental mercury, in particular the mercury preservative, (thiomersal) used in vaccines.
Posted by: Jenny Allan | October 25, 2011 at 12:10 PM
Thanks for the repeat - it can never be repeated to often!
Posted by: Theodore Van Oosbree | October 25, 2011 at 11:34 AM
"The Coalition for Mercury-free Drugs (CoMeD) exposes communications between Centers for Disease Control (CDC) personnel and vaccine researchers revealing U.S. officials apparently colluded in covering-up the decline in Denmark's autism rates following the removal of mercury from vaccines.
Documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that CDC officials were aware of Danish data indicating a connection between removing Thimerosal (49.55% mercury) and a decline in autism rates. Despite this knowledge, these officials allowed a 2003 article to be published in Pediatrics that excluded this information, misrepresented the decline as an increase, and led to the mistaken conclusion that Thimerosal in vaccines does not cause autism.
In Denmark, Thimerosal, a controversial mercury compound used as a preservative in certain vaccines, was removed from all Danish vaccines in 1992. The well-publicized Danish study published in Pediatrics 2003 claimed that autism rates actually increased after Thimerosal was phased out. This study subsequently became a cornerstone for the notion that mercury does not cause autism. However, one of the FOIA documents obtained from CDC clearly indicates that this study omitted large amounts of data showing autism rates actually dropping after mercury was removed from Danish vaccines...."
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/scandal-exposed-in-major-study-of-autism-and-mercury-132519518.html
Posted by: Carol | October 25, 2011 at 09:33 AM
I still don't understand why they can't make the same assumption or simple logic when discussing the effects of most vaccines. We have some people who cannot breath in or think of touching a Peanut, or bad things cold happen. Why is it so hard to understand that the ingredients that are given in these vaccines are more potent and possibly even more deadly to a compromised immune system than simple common Peanut Butter.
Frustration:
Posted by: Lance | October 25, 2011 at 03:03 AM
The whole vaccine industrial complex is about moving the goal posts to fit the market Pharma wishes to create. Goal posts are always being statistically shifted by psuedoscientific researchers to place the outcome of a trial wherever it needs to be to sell the product.
Posted by: michael | October 24, 2011 at 10:08 PM
The sad reality is that most of the perpetrators involved @ simpsonwood still believed that vaccines are fundamental to public health. Notice that Dr Johnston didn't say he didn't want his grandson to receive vaccines period. He just wanted to wait with mercury containing vaccines until "they knew better what was going on". They just can not imagine a world where vaccines take their place along side blood letting in the long list of bizarre foot notes in the annals of medical history. A world where the main focus of pediatrics (and public health) is nutrition starting 6 months preconception. A world like that has little use for them. When did it become normal to have to bring a healthy child to the doctor repeatedly in the first 2 years of life ?
it is unthinkable that you can inject that into a little child and in any way improve its health."
Excerpted from an address made by Dr. William Howard Hay of Pocono, Pa., on June 25, 1937, to The Medical Freedom Society
"Never in the history of medicine has there been produced so false a theory, and such fraudulent assumptions, such disastrous and damning results as have followed the practice of vaccination; it is the ultimate of learned quackery and lacks even the faintest shadow of scientific basis."
Dr. E. Ripley, Connecticut Practitioner, 'Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective', N. Miller
Posted by: Adam M | October 24, 2011 at 09:42 PM
I know I'm a broken record on this, but hey, that that method has worked amazing well for the other side of this argument.
There simply is no safe vaccine, period. And the cruelest irony of all, is that they were were never intended to prevent diseases at all. That was just the sales pitch, one which has been masterfully propagated for decades on end.
When the "experts" scoff at this notion, they will always tell you to look at the history, and never at the science. There is no science, and that's why the industry had to scramble to produce those 14 studies, well after the fact, which were designed to find nothing.
But absence of proof is NOT proof of absence, and those 14 studies are just as useless as the experts who stand behind them. If vaccines were really based on science, the scientists should have simply been able to produce that science in response to questions about vaccine safety and/or efficacy.
They have never done that, and they never will do that... because that science simply doesn't exist.
Posted by: Barry | October 24, 2011 at 05:40 PM
The hypocrisy of the vaccine policymakers mentioned is stunning, and their denial of toxicological truth is frightening. Do these people actually take the medicine they prescribe, knowing its potential for physical harm?
Posted by: nhokkanen | October 24, 2011 at 05:07 PM
and the ultimate goal post will come to this...are vaccines safe in any form, on any schedule, in susceptible unknown individuals...there is the final goal post we have come to the conclusion of...that in fact, no vaccine is efficascious, not harmful, and if slowed or one at a time, has any way of confirming lifetime immunity and health. What is health nowadays? Well, apparently it is people waiting in pharmaceutical lines because their "drugs work so good", and children, one in six to be exact, who have neurological difficulties and other life long chronic disorders caused initially by vaccines. Talk about moving the "what is health" goalposts...sheez...!! I mean, lets even look at breast cancer...do they ever talk of aluminum, exposures to IGF-1 milk consumption, pesticides, or other heavy metals? Do they talk of of amalgam fillings and the direct pathway to lymph nodes in the breast from the mouth area? Do they talk about taking out iodine in our salts to "save money"? Do we ever talk of direct pathways of unhealth these days? No, we defend industry and their regulators above people, above lives and freedoms of will and thought. We can't "go there" implicating gross national product industries because it is dangerous to bottom lines and perceptions, because the illusion and prefunctary are more important than children, infants, and our elders. We can't talk of fluoride being "bad for you". We dang well better talk of these untruths for as long as we live, or else we will condemn our futures and our perceptions to increases in such pestilences. People who defend non science and lies and propoganda like Paul Offit, deserve the final conclusion of this world, and that is, we are judged by the content of our lives, what we defended, and what we did not. It is clear, Paul Offit defends an industry full of lies, instead of innocent children, aka, human beings. Surely even he who was studed in his rotovirus vaccine, that not only could cause intessuption, but also "enterocolitis and lymphoid hyperplasia", knows what he has done. If that means you give up your career in defence of children and their health, so be it...but I guess he feels his millions are worth the blood money.
Posted by: kathy blanco | October 24, 2011 at 12:51 PM
In my humble opinion .. "pseudoscience" .. better applies to those "scientists" advising the World Health community .. inviolation of all that science has learned about the dangers of mercury .. to keep thimerosal in vaccines being distributed to the poorest, undeveloped nations .. not because science has determined it is "safer" to do so .. but .. because economics has determined it is "cheaper" to do so.
Indeed, if there ever were a "goal post" in the vaccine industry .. it surely would have been to protect vaccine "safety".
So .. yes .. the "goal post" has been moved .. but .. it has been moved by Dr. Offit himself .. who publicly encourages the vaccine industry to disregard "safety" in favor of "cost effectiveness".
Posted by: Bob Moffitt | October 24, 2011 at 06:48 AM