Note: When Dr. Dave Weldon's CDC appointment was pulled last week, many of us wanted to jump out a basement window. I did too, for a short moment, then I had a Ted Lasso thought. Remember Bobby. When the Democratic Party and media machine stopped Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s Presidential bid, excommunicated him from their not-so-good graces and even his family turned on him, they did us the biggest favor ever. He's the head of HHS! It's almost too sublime to be true. Like finding out the guy who you cut off and flashed the bird at you on your way to work is your 9:00am interviewee. That's 100,000,000,000 times better for us than his being President because he can focus OUR areas of dire need. Dr. Weldon's removal as our next CDC Chief might just lead us to another huge win. 

By Anne Dachel

In a surprising move, Dr. Dave Weldon’s nomination to head the Centers for Disease Control was withdrawn. 

CBS published the story, White House pulls Dave Weldon's nomination to run CDC which explained what happened. 

They didn’t have the votes

In a statement obtained by CBS News, Weldon said that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was "very upset" at his nomination being pulled. Weldon said he had received a call from the White House 12 hours before the scheduled hearing, informing him that the nomination would be withdrawn.

"Bobby Kennedy is a good man who really is passionate about improving the health of the American people," Weldon said. "President Trump did a good thing in making him secretary of HHS. Hopefully they can find someone for CDC who can survive the confirmation process and get past pharma and find some answers." 

Weldon said that Maine Sen. Susan Collins had told Kennedy she had reservations about his nomination, and said the Republican senator's staff had been "very hostile" in a meeting with him. 

Collins' staff repeatedly accused him of being against vaccines, Weldon said, "even though I reminded them that I actually give hundreds of vaccines every year in my medical practice." . . .

He said that over 20 years ago, while in Congress, he raised concerns about childhood vaccine safety, and "for some reason Collins staff suddenly couldn't get over that."

Weldon also said that another senator, Louisiana Republican Dr. Bill Cassidy, had also said he was anti-vaccine and had once asked for his nomination to be withdrawn. . . .

After a meeting with Sen. Patty Murray last month, the Washington Democrat said she was "deeply disturbed to hear Dr. Weldon repeat debunked claims about vaccines."

What was in Weldon’s past that could make him a threat to the vaccine industry and the claim of no link between vaccines and autism?

Hannah Poling

Seventeen years ago. . . 

In 2008, we learned about Hannah Poling, the beautiful red-haired daughter of Jon and Terry Poling. Hannah did something no other child up until that time had been able to do.  When her story broke in 2008, she put a face on the autism-vaccine controversy.  

Hannah’s history included normal development until an immediate and dramatic regression at 18 months following vaccination. Hannah was typical of so many children in the autism community, but the difference in her case was that the government recognized it, and in March, 2008 her story was in the news.

(It should be noted that the government conceded Hannah’s case in November, 2007, but the public didn’t learn about it until four months later.)

March 7, 2008, ABC reported on Hannah Poling on Good Morning America.

In the introduction ABC said, “In an unprecedented settlement, the government says there may be a possible link” between vaccines and autism—in the case of Hannah Poling.”

The news anchor on GMA, Chris Cuomo, said, 

Some doctors say the vaccinations may have aggravated a pre-existing disease in Hannah’s brain called mitochondrial disease.  Once that happened, Hannah’s father, a neurologist, believes it triggered her autism.”

Hannah’s the first case of its kind in which the federal government allowed that, in Hannah’s case, because of the pre-existing condition, there’s likely a connection between her vaccinations and her autism symptoms.  

Hannah and both of Hannah’s parents, Jon and Terry Poling, along with their attorney were featured in the interview. 

The discussion then focused on the question of how many other children have been affected just like Hannah.   

Jon Poling said, 

As other parents hear her story, I think her case is echoed among thousands of other similar cases. 

And I know a lot of other medical experts are going to get out there and say this is a very unusual, odd-ball case, and we don’t really think it is at all.  

We just very thoroughly investigated the biomedical issues going on with our daughter. We followed every single medical lead. We didn’t just take autism as a diagnosis and stop there. We did every type of medical testing you can imagine and eventually came up with this mitochondrial issue. How it’s related to her autism is a huge question because mitochondrial disorders are seen in relatively high frequency in children who have autism.  I

In fact, one study shows that maybe it’s up to seven percent. In our study with Dr. Zimmerman, we showed 38 percent had certain markers of abnormality which means this really needs a lot of further study and a lot of research dollars poured into it because mitochondrial disease is potentially treatable. There are certain things we can do.

U.S. Rep Dave Weldon on Hannah Poling

Also covering the Hannah Poling story was CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson.  Attkisson interviewed then Congressman Dave Weldon, MD, about the concession

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHtuILnzYZ4

March 6, 2008, CBS News: CBS Evening News Vaccine Case: An Exception Or A Precedent?

Attkisson:  

When you learned about the Poling case, the concession the government made, the government didn’t even have to be ordered to pay. The government conceded that the child’s resulting illnesses were because of vaccines, and part of the resulting illnesses include autism or autistic symptoms. 

What goes through your mind when you hear about that case?

Weldon: “

Well, as a physician and a biomedical professional, I looked at the pathophysiology of what this child had.

Is there a vulnerable subset of children?

One of the things I’ve wondered about for years is why do most kids have absolutely no problem with their vaccinations, and why are all these parents of autistic kids saying, my kid got the shot, and then my kid deteriorated. 

Is there a correlation there, and specifically, do these children have some sort of underlying problem or feature of their metabolism that causes them to be predisposed to having his kind of bad reaction? And that case really caught my attention because it could be kind of a missing piece of information to explain why at least some of these children who appear to have autism develop after their shots. Why it may be happening.

Attkisson:

What does it say to you that the government has now affirmatively conceded a case in which autism was the result—even though they’re not saying vaccines caused autism, they’re saying vaccines caused an illness in which one result was autism.

The government has been telling the public for over a decade that there’s absolutely no reason to be concerned about any link.

Weldon:

Well, I have a lot of concerns about that. Obviously the biggest one is just public health, the welfare of our children.  . . .

But we had Secretary Levett of HHS in front of the committee, and I said to him and the chairman of the committee, Mr. Obey, that there are some huge issues associated with this.

Obviously one of them is we need to maintain public confidence in our vaccine program. . . .

If it is ever shown scientifically that these kids were getting this terrible condition because of these shots, that the federal government would be liable in court to provide for the health care and in some cases, if they’re really badly disabled, the support of these children for their lifetimes. So this is a very huge issue, not just on a humanitarian level, but as well on a financial level.

Sharyl Attkisson asked Weldon if the government should continue to say there is no link between vaccines and autism. 

Weldon: 

I wouldn’t recommend they say something like that in light of the Poling case and the admission on the part of the government.

Rep. Weldon called for more research. He said NIH was putting more money into autism research, but they’re not getting any answers. 

Weldon:

We haven’t had the good, rigorous independent research that we need, and until we have that, the federal government is going to engender erosion of confidence on the part of the American people.

Attkisson then asked the pivotal question.

Attkisson:

Is there any way to figure out which children might suffer a side effect from vaccines and help make it safer for them?”

Weldon:

That has always been my hope, that there would be some kind of test to determine if a child is prone to a vaccine side effect.

The Poling case is a very interesting one in that regard. There are measurable abnormalities in her metabolism that have been decided in a court of law that played a role in her developing autism in response to the vaccine. 

So we may have a simple test that we can do on all newborns and make a determination as to whether they can be safely vaccinated.

Weldon speculated on possibly inventing new vaccines that children prone to vaccine side effects could safely take. 

On Jun 19, 2008, Sharyl Attkisson reported on the real significance of the Hannah Poling story in this astonishing article.  

After a decade of denying any possible association between vaccines and autism, the government quietly settled a vaccine-autism case last fall. When news of the case leaked out to the public months later, government officials labeled the case of Hannah Poling an ‘anomaly.’  

The truth is, nobody is in a position to know whether Hannah's case is an exception. Government officials have told CBS News that they have not tracked vaccine-autism claims to see how many of them might involve children with the same undetected mitochondrial disorder Hannah had... one that may have made her susceptible to side effects from vaccines, triggering her autism.

So what should have happened following the news about Hannah Poling? Certainly this story would shake parents’ confidence in the vaccine program. It should follow that money and effort would be put into robust studies to determine if Hannah’s situation were truly rare, after all, this affects the health outcomes of millions of children receiving routine vaccines.

At the time of Hannah’s concession, it seemed like the medical community and health officials were going to look into the issue of mitochondrial disease. This was the topic at a meeting held on Sunday, June 29, 2008 in Indianapolis.

ABC News reported on what happened in the piece, Gov't Examines Link between Autism and Vaccines.

Attendees included scientists from the FDA, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders, the National Institute of Mental Health, the CDC and HHS.

The article said, 

At the heart of the issue for many specialists and concerned parents is whether vaccines -- suspected by some people as being a cause of autism -- might trigger mitochondrial disorders, which lead to autism.

That was a riveting question. What if vaccines themselves caused the mitochondrial disorder?  This should have been a major concern for anyone working in the vaccine program.   

Dr. Jon Poling was quoted in the story saying, 

I guess I kind of feel like it's Christmas Eve. Tomorrow is Christmas morning and, hopefully, those presents will be grants in the form of serious federal monies to look into autism and its relationship to mitochondrial disorders.

The tone of the rest of the ABC story was much different from the sentiments expressed by Dr. Poling. It seemed that a number of people went to the meeting intending to deny that mitochondrial disorder/autism was linked to vaccination.  

Experts lined up against the possibility that vaccines played a role here.

Dr. Douglas Wallace, director of the Center for Molecular and Mitochondrial Medicine and Genetics at the University of California-Irvine, was quoted in the piece. 

Parents have observed a time association between when their child got vaccinated and when they had a worsening of their clinical state, but just because two things occur at the same time, it doesn't mean that one caused the other.

Dr. Bruce Cohen, a neurologist at the Cleveland Clinic, sounded worried about the fallout from even talking about a link between vaccines and autism. 

I think there is some potential of causing undue concern when one hears about situations such as the Hannah Poling case.   

Cohen made it sound that even if there is a link, the greater good is served by vaccines. 

But when we look at all the benefits of the vaccine program in preventing horrible diseases and horrible deaths, I think you have to take it all into consideration.

Timely coincidence

Incredibly, on June 28^th, the New York Times put out yet a stunning report by Gardiner Harris with the title, Experts to Discuss One Puzzling Autism Case, as a Second Case Has Arisen.  

At the same time experts were meeting to talk about the Hannah Poling case, evidence was mounting that she wasn’t an isolated case. What Harris revealed showed, once again, the government was also concerned with damage control.

Federal health officials on Sunday will call together some of the world’s leading experts on an obscure disease to discuss the controversial case of a 9-year-old girl from Athens, Ga., who became autistic after receiving numerous vaccinations.  

A second case

But the government has so far kept quiet a second case that some say is more disturbing and more relevant to the meeting.  

On Jan. 11, a 6-year-old girl from Colorado received FluMist, a flu vaccine, and about a week later “became weak with multiple episodes of falling to ground” and ‘difficulty walking,’ according to a case report filed with federal health officials and obtained by The New York Times. 

The girl grew increasingly weak and feverish and ‘became more limp, appears sleepy, acts as if drunk,’ the report said. She was hospitalized and underwent surgery and was finally withdrawn from life support. She died on April 5, according to the report. 

Both the 9- and 6-year-olds had mitochondrial disorders, a spectrum of genetic diseases that have received almost no attention from federal health officials. The 9-year-old, Hannah Poling, was 19 months old and developing normally in 2000 when she received five shots against nine infectious diseases. Two days later, she developed a fever, cried inconsolably and refused to walk. In the next seven months, she spiraled downward, and in 2001 doctors diagnosed autism. 

No one knows whether vaccinations had anything to do with the girls’ health problems, and the scientific significance of individual cases is always difficult to assess. But suggestions that mitochondrial disorders could be set off or worsened by vaccinations, and that the disorders might be linked to autism, prompted the meeting on Sunday and has brought the disorders sudden national attention.

Immediately there was a massive effort to make this all go away. 

CNN head Dr. Julie Gerberding was interviewed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s medical expert, about the Poling case. 

Gerberding clearly indicated she wasn’t interested in investigating the Poling case. She talked about “autism-like symptoms,” and she admitted that she hadn’t had time to review the case, although the concession was made in November, 2007 and it was now March 2008.

Gerberding was definite: 

What we can say, absolutely for sure, is that we don’t really understand the causes of autism. We’ve got a long way to go before we get to the bottom of this, but there have been a least 15 very good scientific studies and the Institutes of Medicine who have searched this out, and they have concluded that there is really no association between vaccines and autism.

So Hannah Poling’s vaccinations caused her autism, but no one else’s. 

Gerberding:

I think we have to have an open mind about this.  We know that there’s very little chance something related to a vaccine is going to cause a serious problem for a child.

The message to the public was clear: No one wants to look at vaccines.

She went on to criticize all the focus on vaccines and autism and not other potential causes, referring to autism as “a huge challenge.” Once again, no one at the CDC has ever used the world “crisis” when speaking about autism. 

(Two years later Dr. Gerberding moved on to be the head of the vaccine division at Merck.)

In the end, no one would do anything about the link between vaccines and mitochondrial disorders. The story died quickly never to be heard about again in the mainstream press.

It needs to be noted that at the time of the Hannah Poling case in 2008, the official autism rate in the U.S. was one in every 150children, one in 92 boys. In the following years that statistic would keep making huge leaps upward until we’re at today’s rate of one in 36 children, one in 22 boys. 

And over the past 17 years, with each increase, officials at the CDC still have no idea what’s causing autism OR if there has ever been a true increase in the number of children affected.

Dr. Weldon’s nomination hearing would have been a perfect opportunity to bring up the Hannah Poling case and the fact that the government conceded her autism was vaccine-induced. Now however, we’ll never get to hear about it.

Anne Dachel is Media Editor for Age of Autism.