NBC report - 'Vaccines Cause Autism?'

Run time: 04:36 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN20SkRgGz0   Posted on YouTube: May 12, 2007 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: May 13, 2007 By DU Member: reprehensor Views on DU: 1853

 
Broadcast 5/9/2007.

But there has been a lot of good research on this, in lots of countries, including Scandinavia where science is reasonably untainted by the medical industrial complex. There is not a single study that has found even a whiff of link. There is no link.

On the other hand, average life expectancy in the US in 1900 was 45 years. Today it's 76 years or so. A large part of this increase is due to vaccines.

While autism is not related to vaccines, I'm sure that other reactions occasionaly crop up. Some of these reactions might even be fatal - and that's tragic. However, on average, far, far more lives will be saved by vaccines than taken by them.

Either people are genetically predisposed to vulnerability to this environmental trigger, or the environmental triggers are actually causing genetic mutations. Are vaccines that trigger? Probably not exclusively.

Given the increased rate of occurrence of late onset autism (like my son who displayed no symptoms until age four) it seems that the first scenario is more likely.

It's pretty clear that vaccines have nothing to do with autism.

As to the possibility that there are other environmental triggers, the evidence is quite unclear - we actually don't even know if there's been an increase in autism at all, or whether it's a label that's thrown around more.

That vast bulk of "autism" that is diagnosed today is actually not true autism - which is an awful, awful diseas. Rather, it is "spectrum autism", which is a hypothetical condition where the victim is said to have some degree of autism, but not the full-blown condition. "Spectrum autism" was not a label until the last decade or so, and to this day, there is zero scientific evidence that kids labeled as having "specrum autism" have any link to kids with true autism. In fact, the best scientific evidence tends to indicate that they are NOT linked at all.

There are certainly a lot of kids being labeled as having "spectrum autism". These kids would not have been labeled with this 20 years ago, because it was not recognized. So, the question is: do we actually have more kids with "spectrum autism" then before? Or were kids simply not diagnosed with it before, because the label is recent.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=69427

"This new study leaves little doubt there is a direct causal link between mercury exposure from Thimerosal-preserved biological products (vaccines and Rho(D) products) and mercury poisoning diagnosed as an autism spectrum disorder (ASD)."

He had an article a few years ago about this in the Rolling Stone mag. There is a governmental and industry cover-up about this according to Bobby.

But he's quite wrong on this.

Here's a link to his Rolling Stone article: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7395411/deadly_immunity/

"What is most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading detectives have gone to ignore -- and cover up -- the evidence against thimerosal."

Corrupt, GREEDY Bushbots have compromised the integrity of the military, the GAO, the media, the scientific community re global warming, etc. It's not unreasonable to believe the CDC and the IOM have also been infiltrated.

"If federal regulators and government scientists failed to grasp the potential risks of thimerosal over the years, no one could claim ignorance after the secret meeting at Simpsonwood. But rather than conduct more studies to test the link to autism and other forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science. The agency turned its database on childhood vaccines -- which had been developed largely at taxpayer expense -- over to a private agency, America's Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research. It also instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the link between thimerosal and brain disorders. The CDC "wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe," Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the IOM's Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. "We are not ever going to come down that is a true side effect" of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee's chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was "inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation" between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result "Walt wants" -- a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC."

Endangering the healthful lives of our children was ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS.

"The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccine programs, warned the company that six-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and children," noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. "The best way to go," he added, "is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives."

For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money. Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries. The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics. Faced with this "cost consideration," Merck ignored Hilleman's warnings, and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received eleven vaccinations -- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of twenty-two immunizations by the time they reached first grade."

Bill "Cat Killer" Frist has helped with the cover-up, too.

"The drug companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers in Washington. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related documents -- including the Simpsonwood transcripts -- and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the "Eli Lilly Protection Act" into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. The measure was repealed by Congress in 2003 -- but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. "The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to Frist."

Thanks for finding this.

The study indicates that there were a number of children diagnosed with "Autism Spectrum" Disorder ASD who had mercury in them, and as far as they could tell, the mercury came from thimerosal.

It doesn't show that these kids had more mercury than other kids; it doesn't show that they would not have received the same diagnosis if they did not have mercury in them; it doesn't show that removing the mercury relieves the symptoms, and so forth. Unless I'm missing something, it doesn't show causality, or even corrolation. They claim a dose-response relationship, but this could never be meaningful in such a small study, particularly when the diagnosis of ASD is incredibly subjective.

Personally, I'd love to see a study that shows that thimerosal or some other substance causes a disease - it would mean that we could eliminate a cause of disease, and have less disease, which is a great thing. But, given the really good and big studies to date, it's very, very unlikely that thimerosal causes "spectrum autism".

If you want to work on a consipiricy theory, look at fish oil. Taking fish oil daily has been well proven, in lots of studies, to reduce death more than anything else people can do. More than drugs, medical procedures, and lifestyle changes. But when was the last time your doctor told you to take fish oil pills? In the US alone, hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved each year by this simple act. Incredible, no? (P.S. - I am not in the fish oil industry!)

Do what she or he says!

...to support their claims that there is no link.

Injecting mercury into 2-week-old children is WRONG.:crazy:

Doesnt understand the scientific process and really how to analyze things like correlation vs. causation properly. When groups even claim that autism is an 'epidemic' it is incorrect. YES there are huge numbers of cases being diagnosed now and it is a gigantic problem that is significant to me and I will surely dedicate part of my future career in medicine and research to this. HOWEVER we do not know if there is a) a huge number of new cases being dagnosed due to improved diagnostic techniques alone b) a huge increase in the incidence of cases due to an environmental (or possibly other) trigger or c)a combination of both (what I suspect). And there is absolutely NO NO NO conclusive or even kind of conclusive evidence I have founding saying that vaccines cause autism!! This is a completely irresponsible claim.

In the late 70s/early 80s, when soft contact lenses first came out, many of the associated solutions had thimerosal in them. I quickly discovered that I was allergic. When I put the solutions in my eyes, they would swell up and turn as red as cherry tomatoes. The tracks of my tears left welts on my face.

Without the thimerosal, I have no bad reaction to saline. Once I identified the allergy, I wore extended wear contacts for 25 years without incident.

I later discovered that I was allergic to other preservatives, especially the nitrates that are used a lot in cured meats.
I can eat all the nitrate free corned beef, hot dogs, and bacon I want. But if I accidentally get a dose, I become enraged :mad:, and then very emotional before collapsing into deep exhaustion. I awaken in a few hours, but I am not the same for days.

So, maybe the problem isn't vaccinations. Maybe it's preservatives.

I think people should stop accepting the idea that everything should have preservatives. It's like we agree to a little dose of poison, so that the people who sell us the stuff can enjoy the increased profits of extended shelf life. I think that many people are affected by these chemicals, and don't know it. Perhaps a lot of the diseases on the rise began to escalate when we introduced the additives, dyes and preservatives into our diets.

After seeing what it did to my cherry tomatoe eyeballs, I shudder to think of the damage thimerosal could do if I allowed it to be injected into my body. This stuff is serious. I am sure it is massively harmful to some of the children who receive it. And adults. And animals.

"Hypothetical" my ass.

The autism spectrum is real. There isn't "true autism" and like, autism wannabees. Everyone on the spectrum (Pervasive Development Disorders) is afflicted with very closely related illnesses, only differing as a matter of degree of expression of the various symptoms.

Autism (which I am using as shorthand for all PDD's) is not just a behavioral disorder - it is a whole body illness that manifests itself in myriad ways including digestive problems like leaky gut syndrome. These problems occur in people everywhere on the spectrum.

The rate of autism occurrence has gone from one in 10,000 in 1943 to one in 150 today. My son is described as high-functioning, but even so, there is no possible way that his behavior would not have been recognized as a disorder - even in 1943.

Are we categorizing something today as autism that was described as some other kind of disorder 50 years ago? The data strongly indicates that the answer is no. The Dx rate of other disorders has remained flat while the rate of diagnosis of Autism has skyrocketed.

I stand by what I say because:
a) I'm right
b) it is the medical consensus.

I am reacting indignantly to your "it's all due to changes in diagnostic procedures" speculation because it is wrong and incredibly damaging to the cause of finding a cure.

Have diagnostic procedures improved? Undoubtedly. When faced with an epidemic of this magnitude, the medical establishment had to develop expertise in a hurry.

Improved diagnostic tools are a result of an increased prevalence, not the reverse.

There's simply no way to know, because the diagnosis is new.

And we don't even know what the diagnosis is. It may well be that all of the kids being diagnosed with ASD actually have an issue in common - however, it's not likely that the issue is actually related to true autism. For example, people with true autism are typically mentally retarded (80%-90% are). On the other hand, people with ASD seem to typically have above-average IQs (to the degree it's been studied). Because the IQs of people with Autism/ASD seem to cluster at the two ends of the scale (bottom and top), rather than falling into something more like a bell curve, epidemiology 101 tells us that these are unlikely to be related diseases.

The reason that people with classical autism display cognitive deficits is because that's the nature of the symptoms that accompany the category. A person with withdrawal that is mild enough to enable them to test successfully is categorized as high functioning autistic. A person whos perserveration on topics enables them to excel in often arcane subjects is considered to have aspbergers.

Yet, they all have many of the same behavioral characteristics and physical expressions of the same disorder. It's as misleading to say that there are people with "true autism" and those who are just kind of wierd, as it is to describe a kind of cancer which has a better prognosis as not a "true cancer". And it is just as counterproductive.

It's all ASD (or PDD) - the categories are arbitrary.

http://www.autism-society.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_whatis_characteristics

Suppose that we couldn't biopsy tissue and diagnose cancer with a microscope. We might say that lung cancer and emphysema were all part of "chronic couging disorder", because they both have coughing - some folks just cough occasionally, while some have it so bad that they diw. But, in reality, that would be a misleading diagnosis as these are different conditions with different treatments.

The current state in "ASD" is analogous. Some aspects of Autism and "ASD" smell similar to some psychologists, thus the pronouncement is made that they are a spectrum. But, in reality, (at least as of three years ago, the last time I looked) there is no scientific analysis that has ever demonstrated a spectrum. The only data, and it's not much, seem to indicate the opposite - that there are two different conditions at work. Sadly, actual science is not particularly encouraged in psychology, so we may not know the reality of the situation for many, many years.

The title of the article is "Bush Puppets Push for New Law to Protect Drug Co.'s."

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0502/S00076.htm

"Research conducted since the CDC meeting shows a definite link between Thimerosal and disorders such as autism. One of the larger studies came from an independent review of the exact same data that was analyzed by Verstraeten, contained in the CDC's Vaccine Safety Datalink.

Dr Mark Geier, a medical doctor with a PhD in genetics, and fellow researcher, David Geier, were the lead investigators in the discovery of the link. The Geiers were able to use the CDC database to compare autism rates among more than 85,000 children who received a TCV for diphtheria/tetanus/acellular pertussis, against rates of nearly 70,000 children who received the Thimerosal-free version of the vaccine. In the TCV group, the risk of autism was 27 times higher.

Which means autism developed due to TCVs has a higher connecting risk factor than the correlation between lung cancer and smoking, which according to the American Cancer Society is only 22 for men and 11 for women. "This absolutely confirms what parents have been saying for years," says Jo Pike, President of the National Autism Association."

Later, they compared the dosage amounts of those receiving thimerosal-containing vaccines and those who had thimerosal-free vaccines.

"The results of the comparison were amazing. The group of children who received no Thimerosal had no autism, while the rate of autism escalated in the other groups as the children received higher-doses of the preservative.

The kids who received 100 micrograms of Thimerosal were over 10 times more likely to have autism than the kids who received none. “At first I didn’t think it was right,” David Geier said. “I ran the program several times, and each time it turned out the same—the kids in group five were over ten times more likely to have autism than the kids in group one,” he explained."

1. There is evidence that autism is linked to various vaccines according to international scientists.

2. The CDC claims that vaccines have had little impact on mortality in the US, and point to other advances in medicine as contributing factors. We also have much better nutrition, 911 service, and more people covered by heatlh insurance.

As for your last point about more lives being saved via vaccination vs. taken by them, unfortunately no one is keeping track.

several major centers. She has a second child...she is not giving her baby the vaccines. Are all of you so sure that vaccines are so safe that you would give them to this little baby?

Run time: 04:36 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN20SkRgGz0   Posted on YouTube: May 12, 2007 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: May 13, 2007 By DU Member: MannyGoldstein Views on DU: 1853

 
My head says take the vaccine, my heart says don't.

do it either.

and the symptoms of vaccines and mercury doesn't cause autism. However, the symptoms from mercury are very similar to autism.

Mercury poisoning symptoms are in many ways similar to autism, but the CDC concedes that more research is merited on environmental triggers (potentially including vaccines) for Autism.

So kids go in and are misdiagnosed as having Autism, when they really have Mercury poisioning. I am not sure how studies are done, but ones trying to answer the question if mercury causes autism are wrong from the start because these kids don't have autism. This is why Chelation works for some kids. It helps the kids that have mercury poisioning and doesn't help the kids with autism.

I am a teacher and don't have a background in medicene, so I am probably oversimplifying this. I would love to hear from someone with more a medical background. As a teacher, however, I have worked with many students with autism and the drastic rise is frightening.

Thanks for sharing, one more recommendation for ya. :hi:

I feel so badly for these parents/children. :(