Vaccination-Autism Link Unproven (Junk Science)

Radio shock jock Don Imus (search) is on a rampage about the vaccine preservative thimerosal (search) allegedly causing autism (search).

A closer look at the facts, however, reveals that while thimerosal is safe, Imus unfortunately appears to be suffering from a case of Charlie McCarthy Syndrome, with his eco-crusader wife as the ventriloquist.

Since the beginning of March, Imus has been ranting about thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used to prevent contamination from fungi and bacteria in countless vaccines administered to adults and children since the 1930s.

But in 1999, frenzied and junk science-fueled activists goaded wobbly-kneed pharmaceutical companies, federal public health agencies and the American Academy of Pediatrics to agree to reduce or eliminate thimerosal from vaccines as a precautionary measure.

An email sent to Steven Molloy that has so far not been answered:

THE CDC and IOM HAVE THEMSELVES CALLED VACCINE SAFETY INTO QUESTION BY THEIR IRRESPONSIBLE HANDLING OF DATA

In his followup article on the Thimerosal controversy, " Vaccine Disease Protections Outweigh Side Effects", Steve Milloy of the Cato Institute continues his ideologically driven attack on parents who believe their children are vaccine injured. Simply because a parent believes his or her child is vaccine injured does not mean that a
parent fails vaccinate his or her children or is opposed to vaccination. It does suggest that such a parent may rightly be concerned about vaccine safety and the devastating side effects sometimes caused by vaccines.

Mr. Milloy misses the point. The point is not that parents are irrationally afraid to vaccinate their kids. The point most certainly is that parents want safe vaccines and open and adequate testing and research process to insure safety. Only an open scientific process will inspire parents' trust for our vaccine program.

That 95% of the responses to Mr. Milloy's piece were parents critical of his views and 5% medical people who supports his views means little. It is no surprise that medical doctors who subscribe to the established
medical views would be motivated to support Mr. Milloy. Medical professionals feel threatened by any challenge to the safety of the current mandatory vaccine regime. But Mr. Milloy insinuates that those parents who would challenge vaccine safety are emotionally driven
parents while more rational medical people support vaccination. This is simply not true--parents are rational in their desire to protect their kids. Perhaps a little honesty by our government's vaccine safety
officials would serve to quell the controversy.

Many parents who question the safety of vaccination are
professionals--many are medical professionals-- who have a reasonable basis to question vaccine safety. Many medical professionals who support the vaccine regime do so without even acknowledging the many studies that call vaccines into question. The medical establishment ignores the science, and that makes parents worry about the integrity
of our nation's vaccine program. If one believes in science than one has to deal with the fact that many sound studies call vaccine safety into question and show a connection between Thimerosal in vaccines and a high rate of neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism.

Mr. Milloy displays the same type of uncritical thinking that characterizes the thinking of medical professionals: he accepts the conclusions of the IOM review panel without looking behind its conclusions to examine the IOM's methods and the soundness of the studies on which the IOM relies. Those who defend the IOM's conclusions and the studies on which they rely repeat the mantra: "well
designed studies of thousands of children." Yet these IOM supporters fail to acknowledge that the Danish epidemiological studies on which the IOM relied was performed in a nation that has a rate of autism that
is a fraction of the current U.S. rate, not to mention that the Danish studies had serious methodological flaws and their researchers were plagued by conflicts of interst. The IOM and CDC defenders fail to
acknowledge that the U.K. vaccine schedule differed from the U.S. schedule, calling into question the applicability of that study to the U.S. population. And the IOM defenders fail to acknowledge that there exist serious questions about data manipulation utilized by CDC
researchers in the U.S. "Verstraeten" study. How do the IOM defenders explain that even the lead author of the only U.S. population study, Dr. Thomas Verstraten, stated in a letter published in Pediatrics that his study was "neutral" and could not be used to rule out a link
between Thimerosal and autism. Yet that is precisely how the IOM used the study.

Most importantly, those medical professionals who adopt the view of established medicine never explain why, in a February 2005 report, a second IOM panel severely criticized the data manipulation and lack of
transparency used in the CDC's handling of the Vaccine Safety Datalink database which they utlized for the Verstraeten study. Thus, the very foundation of the principal study of the U.S. population on which the
IOM relied has been called into question by the IOM itself. Yet the medical establishment never discusses this glaring and fatal defect inherent in the supposedly "high quality" studiy upon which the IOM vaccine safety committee relied.

Mr. Milloy can call the IOM the "gold standard" of review. If that is so he needs to deal with the IOM panel that criticized the CDC handling of data that formed the very basis of the IOM study whose virtues he extolls. But Mr. Milloy fails to deal with these serious questions.
Rather he is satisfied to rely on unsound IOM vaccine safety panel conclusions. He even praises the IOM recommendation to end research on the link between Thimerosal and autism. Again, even Verstraeten has
said, in commenting on his own study, that the only conclusion one can draw from a "neutral" study is that more research is necessary. Thus, not even Verstraeten supports the IOM vaccine safety conclusions.

This issue is not vaccination but vaccine safety. The best way for the CDC to reassure parents about vaccine safety is to be honest and to come clean about its research and the data. The CDC might start by giving access to the VSD data so independent researchers can fairly test the CDC's conclusions upon which the IOM relies. The CDC might
also explain why the IOM vaccine safety committee it paid to conduct its review of vaccine safety was charged by its authors that the CDC did not want to find any link, according to secret transcripts of closed IOM sessions that the IOM did not want the public to see, but
which were disclosed by a whistleblower. The CDC might also explain the emails between its researchers and those in Europe showing that their study subjects in Europe were selected based on a search for the desired result--no association between Thimerosal and autism--rather
than on a dispassionate search for the scientific truth.

Far from being a pure process resulting in self-described "high quality" studies the process of CDC/IOM vaccine safety research suggests manipulation designed to achieve the CDC's desired and predetermined result. Such a process does not inspire the confidence of parents. It is the CDC's own conduct that has called the U.S. vaccine
program into question, not the rational and prudent concerns of parents who are only trying to protect our most valuable resource, our children.

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