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In addition, if the vaccines are no threat but the thimerosol is considered a hazard (with a mercury content many times higher than anything allowed in adult vaccines), then why not eliminate the thimerosol, merely a preservative?

The individual increase in costs for producing vaccine with shorter shelf life would greatly outweigh the problems with leaving children unvaccinated.

The pharm companies are acting very strangely on this issue. Their behavior is like a guilty party for no good reason. It's like they're delaying litigation they know will succeed.

Ban the thimerosol. We'd know in about three years. And parents would have a lot less incentive to leave their children unvaccinated.

I like it being described as geek-inbreeding :-)

I'd make a distinction between doctors seeing autism [or anything along the autism spectrum] and public health officials recording it for official notice. Doctors certainly have been noticing it for a long long time; having official notice in statistics is relatively new, as is recording the number of people killed by gunshot and people dying as a result of traffic accidents.

As for eliminating thimerosol, if the doctors could come up with a good reason for messing with the formula, then sure, okay, so long as it doesn't affect the power of the vaccine or its cost to produce. But if reliable medical studies have shown that it isn't the thimerosol, then we're wasting money and resources on altering the vaccine that ought to be spent on identifying the real cause.

I still see no evidence that the pharmaceutical companies are acting strangely, particularly since they are covered from liability by the federal government. I worry more about parents who are not vaccinating their children at all than I do about the odds of having a bad reaction. The vaccine is not permanent protection; it's only temporary protection, on the hopes that collective temporary protection will dry up the sources of contaigon. Witness the terrible problems in Colorado where one school insists on not vaccinating against Whooping Cough, and permanently reinfects the entire Denver area periodically because of it.