Mercury in vaccine poses a danger

Journal Standard.com
Opinions

Dr. Amy Johnson's comments in The Journal-Standard on the mercury-containing flu vaccine for children contain serious flaws.

Dr. Johnson may say that "there is no evidence of harm," but she's basing that on the CDC's easily flawed and manipulated population studies to "prove" mercury is safe when injected into babies. What about the government's own testing of thimerosal?

Introduced by Eli Lilly in 1930, thimerosal was tested only once, on 22 adult patients suffering from meningitis. There was no chance for follow-up to observe long-term effects, as all of the patients in this "study" died. Even if follow-up had been possible, damage to the developing brains of very young children would have remained an unknown. Thimerosal was pronounced "safe" and later grandfathered in when the FDA was created.

Starting in the late 1980s more and more vaccines with mercury were added to our children's list of required vaccines, without any regard for the total mercury exposure children were receiving. Finally in 1999, the federal health agencies and the American Academy of Pediatrics added up all the mercury children were receiving and realized it was over 100 times EPA limits for mercury exposure. They then urged vaccine makers to stop using it. In 2004, the AAP put out an "autism alarm" because of the epidemic increase in autism.

In 20 years, the rate has gone from one in 10,000 to one in every 166 children. Furthermore, one in every six schoolchildren now has a diagnosis of attention deficit or some other learning disability.

The medical community seems to focus on denying that this is in any way related to mercury in vaccines.

The first 11 cases of autism ever documented, in 1943, were in children who were among the first to be vaccinated with mercury. The federal government has never conducted specific tests on the neurotoxicity of thimerosal, although hundreds of published studies and documents attest to its extreme toxicity. Our CDC and FDA should be utterly embarrassed to make safety claims based on such a pathetic history of oversight.

Our federal health agencies are also the ones whose members have over 700 conflict-of-interest waivers for direct financial ties to the vaccine makers.

Evidence of Harm is the new book by David Kirby on the autism controversy. Mr. Kirby spent two years researching the history of thimerosal use and its relationship to thimerosal. He writes, "... many research) documents dating back to the 1930s, each raising a red flag about thimerosal." (EOH 207-209). Mr. Kirby chronologically lists over 70 years of scientific research on the damaging and deadly effects of thimerosal that was willfully ignored by Eli Lilly and the CDC. http://www.evidenceofharm.com/

We need to take a serious look at the generation of American children exposed to mercury. A person would need to weigh 275 pounds by the EPA's own standards to be able to eliminate the 12.5 mcg of mercury in the children's flu vaccine for this year.

This is hardly a "low dose" of mercury. By anyone's standards, it is unconscionable to inject a known neurotoxin into babies and toddlers.

Anne McElroy Dachel
Chippewa Falls, WI

Posted by Becca

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