Posted on 02/18/2017 3:07:54 PM PST by NYer
Robert Kennedy Jr. and Robert De Niro convened a news conference on Wednesday at the National Press Club to announce a $100,000 cash reward for anyone who identifies a peer-reviewed scientific study demonstrating that the mercury in vaccines is safe. Though the challenge was perhaps something of a stunt, the significance of the appearance was underscored by Kennedys confirming that President Trump may ask him to lead a commission on autism. The consequences of such a commission could extend beyond the narrow vaccine/autism debate. More significantly, the commission could expose the incentives driving vaccination policy, which, in the current political climate, could move mainstream opinion against vaccines and also bolster doubts about the integrity of the health-care system.
Since at least 2007, Trump has suggested that the recent epidemic of autism might be related to current immunization practices. He is not categorically against immunizationin fact, he is totally in favor of vaccines, as he saysbut he suggests that the rate and quantity of injections given to infants, per the recommended immunization schedule, may contribute to incidents of autism. In Trumps words, massive combined inoculations and simultaneous vaccinations may be producing a wave of doctor-inflicted autism.
Trumps central point that diagnoses of autism have skyrocketed alongside an increase in childhood vaccination is not in dispute. The term early infantile autism was first introduced in 1943 based on clinical observations of eleven children. When Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger published a groundbreaking paper on autism a year later, it drew little attention, and, indeed, was only translated and annotated into English in 1991. Possible links between immunization and autism did not draw much comment in subsequent years because mass vaccination itself was not yet a common practice. It wasnt until 1949 that the combined diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus (DPT) vaccine was licensed in the United States for pediatric use, and it was only around this time that large-scale vaccine production for public health became feasible.
The more salient question is whether vaccines are contributing to the wave of autism diagnoses since the 1980s, when major policy changes related to immunization were enacted. By 1981, under the Childhood Immunization Initiative, all 50 states instituted laws linking school eligibility to immunizationan effective mandate far more stringent than what is instituted in Canada and most European countries. A surge of lawsuits followed and, in a series of high-profile settlements, manufacturers of the whooping cough and polio vaccines were held liable for injuries in children. In response to warnings from pharmaceutical companies that they would cease producing vaccines amid such a precarious legal environment, President Reagan, in 1986, signed into law the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. The mandatory no-fault compensation system established under the new legal regime shields vaccine makers from civil product liability, as it forces victims to file initial claims under a federal vaccine compensation program in which awarded damages are paid by taxpayers.
The law was a boon to vaccine manufacturers. The vaccine business, as the Wall Street Journal reports, was transformed from a risky, low-profit venture in the 1970s, to one of the pharmaceutical industrys most attractive product lines. From $500 million in 1990, vaccine-industry revenues have grown to $24 billion today, expanding the pharmaceutical industrys ability to enter into public-private partnerships, lobby for lower licensing standards for vaccines, and advocate against vaccine exemption laws.
Both the rate of vaccination and the rate of autism have spiked over the past three decades. From 23 doses of seven vaccines in 1983, the recommended immunization schedule has tripled to 69 doses of 16 vaccines, and Americans are now required by law to use more vaccines than any other nation in the world. What fuels vaccine hesitancy is the fact that, for several decades through the 1970s, childhood autism remained at a steady rate of about four in ten thousand children. After three decades of steady increases since the 1980s, however, the childhood autism rate, according to the CDC, has climbed to 1 in 68 or 1.5 percent.
Although the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a rebuttal to Trumps critique, Trump has said that he couldnt care less about the shills of conventional medical wisdom, the pharmaceutical companies, and their fudged up reports. In typical fashion, he declares that the doctors lied and that he is being proven right about massive vaccinations.
More influential to Trump than the medical establishment, it seems, is a dissident group of health practitioners, experts, and advocates. Trump has praised the efforts of Bob Wright, the founder and former chairman of Autism Speaks. And as a candidate, he met with a group of vaccine skeptics including:
All of these experts either have children with autism or were drawn to the field after personal encounters with parents who are certain that their children suffered from vaccine damage. This, as Kennedy remarked today, has made an impact on Trump. Asked to explain his persistence on the issue, Trump has consistently cited the testimony of parents who attribute the onset of autism in their children to vaccinesparents, he suspects, who know far better than the experts who assert instead that autism is genetic or starts in utero. If Trump ultimately establishes a commission led by Kennedy, and the commission provides a platform for vaccine skeptics, millions of Americans would be exposed for the first time to counter-narratives in the vaccine/autism debate.
They would see that the very term anti-vaxxer is misleading. The voluminous writings of the anti-vaxxers in fact reveal little in the way of unified opposition to vaccines. Their views, to the contrary, are quite diverse in terms of which vaccines they endorse, the schedules they recommend, and their assessments of vaccine risk in relation to more natural alternatives. Kennedy himself is explicitly pro vaccine, had all six of his children vaccinated, and believes that vaccines save millions of lives. But he questions the safety of neurotoxins in vaccines, particularly the mercury-based preservative thimerosal, given its causative link to brain disorders.
The American people would also learn that the activists with whom Trump has associated are not all that different from vaccine skeptics generally. Numerous investigations suggest that anti-vaxxers hardly conform to the caricature of fringe, anti-science zealots. They are, for the most part, highly-educated, wealthy, and, in the assessment of pediatric infectious disease specialist Mark Sawyer, mainstream upper class people who dont reject modern medicine. Steve Silberman observes in his award-winning NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, that they are generally better acquainted with the state of autism research than the outsiders presuming to judge them.
Why then are vaccine skeptics treated with such contempt in establishment institutions? There are, it is true, growing numbers of writers such as the science journalist Maggie Koerth-Baker, who, after advancing the conventional narrative on vaccines, decided to study media reporting on the issue. She ultimately criticized her colleagues in Aeon for their failure to acknowledge that vaccine rejection can be a rational choice. Yet standard accounts, insofar as they even mention the genuine debate among experts on vaccine safety, often ignore the science informing these objections. Nor do they grapple with personalized approaches to vaccine decisions that, as Prof. Maya Goldenberg argues, are not ignorant per se but can produce cost-benefit analyses that depart, in individual cases, from public health orthodoxy.
In addressing this question, its important to consider what vaccine skeptics, including those in Trumps orbit, do have in common. Rather than a doctrinaire view on vaccines, what unites vaccine skeptics is a suspicion that a corrupt regulatory system, driven by the seamless marriage between the health establishment and government agencies, is succumbing to the temptations of bureaucratic preservation. The consequence, they fear, is routine data manipulation and stifling of dissent. A legal paradigmupheld by the Supreme Courts 2011 decision in Breusewitz v. Wyeththat does not permit class-action lawsuits or the checks and balances that prevail in almost every other industry, they argue, only exacerbates the risk.
Herein lies the problem. In a recent paper in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics, Prof. Brian Martin found evidence not of a conspiracy, but rather of a pattern of suppression of vaccination dissentone that made Andrew Wakefield subject to a degradation ceremony, a ritualistic denunciation casting him out of the company of honest researchers. Martin argues that challenges to free inquiry, while prevalent throughout mainstream science, are particularly serious in the case of immunization. Because vaccination is a signifier for the benefits of modern medicine, questions about vaccination are treated as a potential threat to the public perception that credentialed experts unanimously endorse vaccination.
While Trump can be faulted for his simplistic rhetoric on the issue, his objections appear to stem from legitimate questions. At a moment when doubts about vaccine are growing and when the federal government, the big pharmaceutical combine, and health-care industries are the three least trusted institutions in America, a presidential commission would seem sensible.
Ping!
Robert Kennedy Jr is a lunatic. He makes Gore seem reasonable l cannot believe he’s being considered for ANYTHING.
Thanks for the ping. I hope they extend the study to the other ingredients, such as aluminum and aborted fetal tissue.
Vaccine gatekeepers will show up and start personal attacks in 10...9...8...
I’ve heard there is some difference in results using the aborted fetal tissue vs not using it.
Proving a negative?
Proving it is safe?
Proving there are no dangers?
Playing with Hg occasionally as a kid, kid minor wounds treated with Mercurochrome, and still having Hg amalgam fillings has arguably kept me alive.
He is a detestable blood sucking turd that defies biological analysis...some kind of intercosmogenic turd, not of this world.
Still, on this issue concerning vaccines, I am 100% in his corner. Homework will show the extent to which the CDC has ducked, dodged, lied, prevaricated, mislead, and just plain acted incompetently, if not suspiciously, on this matter of mercury and vaccines, as well as with MMR. They are going to get to keep the $100,000. No way, no how, under any circumstances is mercury “safe”. The body can sequester it in different ways, we have what are called metallothioneins which can facilitate excretion of some mercury compounds, but there are also ways to concentrate mercury in the body...there are no biological functions for mercury. BUT there was one paper suggesting mercury can enhance the infective activity of some viruses. Think about it.
Kennedy and DeNiro are both idiots, and dangerous idiots at that.
It’s not possible to prove a negative.
Everything carries some associated risk.
Everything.
L
I hope to see some studies produced on the long term effects of vaccines contained aborted fetal tissue and simian virus 40.
I also see the number of flu related deaths this year is elevated among those who were vaccinated, yet part of Obamacare tied hospital reimbursement rates to a hospital’s compliance with having their entire staff forcibly vaccinated. Where the outrage??
You and Lurker win the thread. If Kennedy can't follow basic principles of logic, he needs to be kept far away from anything related to science.
Hazlett and her colleagues studied two groups of infants: a high-risk group of 106 infants who had an older sibling with autism and a low-risk group of 42 infants with no immediate family history of autism.he research team used MRI technology to measure brain development for each infant at set time points between 6 months and 24 months of age.
Hazlett and her colleagues discovered an overgrowth of cortical surface area in infants later diagnosed with autism, compared with the typically developing infants.
Reading through the article, there is no mention of the type of study ... was this comparative using vaccinated vs non-vaccinated infants? Most children by six months of age have received about 18 inoculations containing 24 vaccines against nine diseases, and over the next two years they will receive another nine shots containing 14 vaccines against 12 diseases. You would have to be quite dense not to suspect that some children might be negatively impacted by some of these vaccines, which may even cause serious brain damage in some kids. Compelling research has demonstrated that aluminum is an accumulative neurotoxin, even in small concentrations. It has a tendency to concentrate in the hippocampus, an area of the brain vital to crucial functions including learning, memory, and behavior.... Of the 36 vaccines children get, 18 of them contain aluminum. Read More.
I don’t see what’s wrong with compelling big pharma and the medical community in general to do what they can to make vaccines safe and administered properly.
Beat me to it.
My parents freaked out when my grandfather treated me with Mercurochrome. They always used Methiolate. Turns out, unbeknownst to my parents, Methiolate has more Hg in it than Mercurochrome. It just doesn't have Mercury in the name.
The Clinton administration got Methiolate taken off the market. I know it was also used as a preservative in vaccines, but I thought that had ended in the 90's when it was removed from the drug stores. What Mercury is there in vaccines now?
Do you know the difference between ethyl and methyl mercury?
Thank you for sharing this terrific article. WHAT a lot of info and leads. The vaccine debate is about the only thing people on the Left and Right agree with each other on, if it’s yeah or nay. Personally I’m in the camp that thinks there is something wrong with the vaccine picture, and that act that Reagan signed into law is absolutely criminal, with an appropriately Orwellian name. I say let’s go, if DeNiro and Kennedy are the best ok. Let’s get to the bottom of this.
What good is a topical disinfectant that doesn’t leave an orange indication of its application?
Well there is always Iodine.
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