Mother Jones 

I don't want to belabor this, but I wonder if any of Sharyl Attkisson's friends can write something trying to explain to the rest of us what happened to her? As near as I can tell, she was a pretty good, hard-nosed investigative reporter for years. She didn't have any Watergates to her name, but she dug for stories that weren't widely reported and came up with angles that often embarrassed those in power. She was worth following.

And then came the age of Obama. Was this just coincidence? It's hard to say, since her unraveling seems to have started in 2011 with some absurd reporting about the link between vaccines and autism, which has nothing to do with politics. But it was a sign of something. Writing about the vaccine/autism link might have been defensible ten years ago, but by 2011, when she took it on, it was about as well debunked as astrology. It was purely and simply crank science, but Attkisson was apparently unable to recognize this.

This is what happens when you say anything critical about vaccines.  Drum doesn't know what he's talking about and  I pointed that fact out in my comment.

My posted comment:

Kevin Drum said Sharyl Attkisson started writing about vaccines in 2011.   He accused her of bad reporting because she dared to deviate from the standard "vaccines are safe, vaccines save lives" song and dance of the news industry in America. 

Anyone who really investigated Attkisson's work on vaccines would quickly realize that it was extensive coverage over a ten year period from 2004.

And she's still talking about the controversy over vaccines and autism.  Plus, it's also a part of her upcoming book, Stonewalled.

Back in Sept, a Gallup Poll announced that only 40 percent of Americans trust what they're told from broadcast and print news.  Sharyl Attkisson is among the few reporters out there who dare to honestly and thoroughly cover the news.  Maybe if there were more people like her, the public would actually trust what they see in the news.

Anne Dachel, Media editor: Age of Autism

KVUE http://www.kvue.com/story/life/events/2014/11/02/building-a-house-for-people-with-autism/18369169/

Interviewer: "That's an issue.  A lot of parents caring for their young children with autism wonder what's going to happen down the road with these kids."

Polly Tommey: "It's every parent's nightmare. We go to bed at night thinking, 'Who's going to care for our children?'  Autism is difficult.  There's no doubt about it.  There's not really anything easy about it.  And the older they get, sometimes the worse the problems get because ...they're not little anymore. ...My son's eighteen and he's huge.  He can behave inappropriately in Walmart.  People aren't so understanding when they're big."

This is the looming disaster we'll be talking about everywhere.

Polly Tommey is someone familiar to the autism community and this is such an important effort.  There is such a eerie feeling hearing a parent say, "It's every parent's nightmare. We go to bed at night thinking, 'Who's going to care for our children?'"

And there's never anyone saying, "Don't worry, adults with autism will go where autistic adults have always gone."  No one can show us a significant population of adults with autism being well cared for and happy.  What is it telling us about the future?  This house will accommodate a small number of people.  Imagine what meeting the needs of countless thousands of disabled adults who aren't here now is going to cost. 

Newport News (VA) Daily Press

Until 2011, there was no school in the Peninsula area specifically devoted to the education of children with autism despite a large and growing number of such children here. One in 68 newborn children is diagnosed with autism - 1 in 50 for boys. The estimated Peninsula population was then between 300 and 500 children. Parents, such as my daughter, with an autistic child were often frustrated with the lack of progress and paucity of therapy services in public schools.

Stories like this are quite common from local news outlets.  Dr. Engel has an autistic grandchild and he's on the board of this school.  Every April, during "Autism Awareness Month" we're saturated with things like this.

Something is very wrong here.  Engel says there is "a large and growing number" of children with autism in the area.   WHY?  Where are they coming from?

He claims that it's diagnosed in newborns. 

Parents here had to start their own school for kids with ASD.  WHY?  What kind of community doesn't provide for seriously disabled children?

Engel says we all know someone with autism. 

He describes all the affected kids as "a largely silent but growing population of our children."   Really?  Just how bad are things going to get?   

In June 2014, Dr. Stephanie Seneff at MIT predicted that by 2025, at the present rate of increase, autism will affect ONE IN EVERY TWO KIDS.  Autism Daily Newscast covered it, blaming RoundUp  (This site also states the link to vaccines has been disproven.) This wasn't covered by any major news sites.  An MIT researcher doesn't matter.  We'll  accept any rate for autism, it seems.  I think April Awareness is simply a scheme to brainwash everyone into accepting seriously disabled children as normal.  Stories like this do the same thing.

Miami Herald

...No word from Jenny McCarthy, the celebrity who started the anti-vaccine craze which, doctors say, led to outbreaks of whooping cough, measles, mumps and bacterial meningitis.

"Still they (in the anti-vaccine faction) march on," said Paul. A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Paul Offit was in both the LA Times and Miami Herald on the same day slamming parents who question vaccine safety.

I posted five comments.  I'm not sure how long they'll stay up.  I'm always amazing the we're not allowed to consider that vaccines might possibly have side effects.

Los Angeles Times

Dr. Paul Offit, a University of Pennsylvania pediatrician and the nation's most outspoken childhood vaccine proponent, had come to the UCLA lecture hall to subject several dozen physicians to a faux parental grilling.

He wanted to give them the kind of pushback doctors have come to expect in affluent parts of Los Angeles and California, where increasing numbers of parents are refusing to inoculate their kids against contagious, even life-threatening diseases for fear of complications....

If Offit, a rock star in his field, could give these doctors more factual ammunition - and a little practice on their delivery - could they help convince resistant parents that science is simply not on their side?

So Offit is teaching doctors how to convince parents that vaccines are safe and they should vaccinate every child according to the ever-expanding schedule.  .

 Let's not forget that doctors don't have to worry about what vaccines might really be doing to children---they have no liability for vaccine injuries.  They can just dismiss anything that happens after a vaccination as coincidence.

Money Life (from India)

The autism epidemic in the United States, starting in the 1980s, and the suspected link between autism and mercury in vaccines, led to the removal of most mercury containing vaccines in the West

Leading doctors have urgently called for an end to the use of mercury in vaccines to avoid potential threat to health of children.

"Continuing to use this potentially toxic substance, when there is little justification for it, will erode the trust of the public and endanger many public health initiatives," warn Jacob Puliyel and Ritika Chhawchharia of the Department of Paediatrics at St Stephens Hospital in New Delhi. Their warning is published as a commentary in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics.  

This is the second story on this from India that I've seen recently.  I can't believe that all Indians aren't furious over this horrible double standard. 

A deadly, untested neurotoxin has been removed from vaccines in developed countries to protect THOSE CHILDREN, while the poorest kids are still injected with this poison.  This isn't  from a advocacy blog.  It's from Moneylife and this is a finance magazine.  IT TALKS ABOUT DOCTORS WHO CHALLENGE THE ETHICS MERCURY USE AND IT CITES A PIECE IN THE INDIAN JOURNAL OF MEDICAL ETHICS. (A study by names very familiar to us. (Thimerosal as discrimination: vaccine disparity in the UN Minamata Convention on mercury | Sykes | Indian Journal of Medical Ethics) 

Financial Post

The U.S. government then became more aggressive in redirecting industry along the path its health care planners preferred. To end the risk to corporations of lawsuits, the government in 1986 had passed legislation absolving corporations of liability should a vaccine prove defective. But more steps were needed. To overcome the vaccines' lack of popularity with the public, the government progressively became more pro-active, becoming the largest purchaser of vaccines, mandating their use, providing them at no cost to increasing portions of the population, funding research and advertising their merits. This intervention in what had been a relatively free pharmaceutical market radically changed the economics of pharmaceuticals, turning vaccines from risky, money-losing sidelines into often risk-free, government-guaranteed bread-and-butter products.

Comment:

Many parents feel that the pharmaceutical industry already has unlimited freedom and the results are disastrous.

"... the government in 1986 had passed legislation absolving corporations of liability should a vaccine prove defective.... turning vaccines from risky, money-losing sidelines into often risk-free, government-guaranteed bread-and-butter products." 

What this really means is that ever since 1986, pharmaceutical companies have had no real incentive to produce a truly safe vaccine.  Imagine an industry that produces a product that is required in order for children to attend school.  Then imagine that there is no liability for anyone involved in producing or administering the product. ...

Fox News 

The GlaxoSmithKline vaccine was designed using a chimpanzee adenovirus vector, a genetically engineered adenovirus that does not infect or reproduce itself in humans, Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and developer of rotavirus vaccine RotaTeq, told FoxNews.com. This gene codes for one of the proteins in Ebola that may trigger the virus, and it therefore prompts an immune response in the individual being vaccinated. This immune response is thought to protect the person from contracting the virus....

No mention of side effects, of course.  There never is.  No one cares, injuries would all be for the "greater good."  Paul Offit is the go-to-guy, of course.

WTSP Tampa FL

Tampa, Florida - A Bay area mother spends her day caring for a bedridden daughter who can no longer walk and has very little vocabulary. She blames it on the flu vaccine.

"She (used to) love school, she was running, playing signing in the church choir," said Carla Grivna.

In their home in the Town 'N Country area, Grivna says the nightmare started last November when she took her daughter to get her routine flu shot.

Four days after getting the vaccine, Marysue fell ill with a rare viral infection of the brain called Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM).

How did an otherwise healthy 9-year-old suddenly become so paralyzed that her father has to carry her?

Her family says it was because of the flu shot.

"It can be triggered by a virus it high fever or by a vaccination," said Grivna.

Comment:

The further tragedy here is the fact that neither the doctor nor the vaccine maker is liable for any vaccine side effect.  They've been protected by federal law.  Victims have to appeal to a federal compensation program whose main objective is to protect the vaccine schedule. 

We aren't told if that flu shot contacted MERCURY, a known neurotoxin present in most of the flu vaccine available.  The mercury-containing vaccine preservative thimerosal is allowed in vaccines despite never having been tested or approved by the FDA.  People need to educate themselves about possible side effects from the flu vaccine. See the National Vaccine Information Center:.

The UK Guardian 

If you've had a doctor's letter inviting your children to have a nasal-spray flu vaccine - are you going to say yes? The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation advises UK government departments on vaccination issues, and has a programme to vaccinate all children between the ages of two and 16, starting with the youngest....

I'm a big fan of vaccines and feel anxious questioning any of them. But the BMJ (where I work) has published papers questioning the quality of evidence for the benefits of the influenza vaccine, and whether industry-funded trials have reported "over-optimistic" results. I ask Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane Review on Vaccines for Preventing Influenza in Healthy Children,, which looked at findings from 75 studies, if I should give my four-and-a-half-year-old the nasal vaccine spray.

Experts don't back the flu vaccine, but the government is promoting it anyway? BBC News:

Something is very wrong here.

Science Daily

The number of autism cases has soared over the past three decades, leading some to wonder if mental health professionals might be overdiagnosing the disorder.

Two economists who used market theory to study the trend in autism growth, however, have confirmed that at least part of the increase is real....

"We focused on auxiliary providers because, unlike physicians and psychologists who can diagnose autism, these workers cannot induce their own demand," Fernandez said.

The very fact that anyone is still asking the question is proof of the abject disregard out there when it comes to autism.  There is ONLY THING THAT WILL MAKE AUTISM A NATIONAL ISSUE--THE COST. 

This is so elementary and obvious.  Notice that while health officials and doctors are still scratching their collective heads over the autism rate, ECONOMISTS are saying "at least part of the increase is real."

They don't say why, and after all, why should economists even care.|

The Dachel Media Update is sponsored by Lee Silsby Compounding Pharmacy and their OurKidsASD brand.  Lee Silsby Compounding Pharmacy is one of the largest and most respected compounding pharmacies in the country. They use only the finest quality chemicals and equipment to prepare our patients’ compounded medications and nutritional supplements. Customizing medication and nutritional supplements for our customers allows them to achieve their unique health goals.

Anne Dachel is Media Editor for Age of Autism and author of  The Big Autism Cover-Up: How and Why the Media Is Lying to the American Public, which goes on sale this Fall from Skyhorse Publishing.