Pharmaceutical Companies and Vaccine Controversies

to sue the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured that.

Dan Burton was, of course, furious, and he tried to stop it on the House

side, but it wa- it was too late at that point. It did pass.

And when it came time to vote in the Senate side, they could

either vote down the Homeland Security bill or vote it in

with this rider from the House, and that's what they did. They,

they voted it in.

Had I been notified, I would've been down here on the floor

debating it very

stringently because we've been studying this issue for three

years.

Initially, uh, a lot of people thought that

Bill Frist had inserted this rider.

He was the Senate majority leader, Republican at the time.

Bill Frist had major ties to Eli Lilly and had previously attempted to

protect them from these lawsuits.

Frist said, "No, it didn't come from me.

Um, you might wanna check with the White

House."

Before becoming vice president under Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr.

was a director on the board of Eli Lilly.

His vice president's family owned controlling interest in Eli Lilly, who

was a

major contributor to the Bush-Quayle campaign for the presidency.

It was this administration that would over double the amount of

thimerosal children

were being exposed to in their vaccines. His son, George W.

Bush's current budget director was Mitch Daniels, who

was a vice president of Eli

Lilly. Sidney Taurel, Eli Lilly's current CEO at the time of the

Lilly

rider,

just so happened to be a member of George W.

Bush's Homeland Security Advisory Council.

And the White House said, "No, it wasn't us.

We, we think it may have come from Senator

Frist."

The parent community just erupted in a unified sense of

outrage.

Those of us who, who understood what that meant organized

a letter writing campaign, uh, a faxing campaign,

emails, phone calls into Congress,

and as one s- one one person described it, brought the

Senate to its knees.

In January, in a technical amendments bill, it

was taken out.

So it was, uh, it, it is still remembered on the Hill as one of

the, uh, the

few times when a public outcry has forced an

abrupt reversal on such a sleazy rider.

Congressman Dick Armey finally admitted that he did it.

He was quoted as saying, "I did it, and I'm proud of it."

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful,

and so are we.

They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people,

and neither do we.

The CDC would perform one final generation of the Verstraten study, this

time without Verstraten.

And then they got the brilliant idea.

Don't have a reference group that has no mercury.

Make a reference group that has some mercury, and don't

take the ones who got the maximum mercury as your exposed group to compare

against. Take ones who have a little less.

In other words, take the extremes and drive them towards the middle,

and the closer you get to the middle, the smaller the relative risks.

That's what they published?

And that's what they ultimately published.

You weren't involved in Verstraten in 2003 at all, were you?

No.

He laughs. Yes, yes.

That was a circus. That was a total circus.

How would it be possible for this to go through, you know, from 7.62

to the next analysis, 2.48, to the next analysis, 1.69,

to the next analysis, 1.52, and then down to one?

I, I ha- I don't know how this happened.

Um, it's

startling. It does suggest to me that, uh, I probably wouldn't

wanna take too seriously any of the numbers.

The CDC coincidentally lost all of Verstraten's original raw data, so

this study can never be replicated by an outside source.

When you have a protocol and you get data,

you know, and then you don't like the data you got,

so then you go back and change

the rules, that's just not cricket.

That's fraud in anybody's book.

Desperate to exonerate thimerosal, the CDC would orchestrate four more

studies in collaboration with researchers from other countries.

Their primary focus was on Denmark, where they would conclude and widely

report that autism rates continued to rise even after thimerosal was removed from

their vaccines by 1992.

But the CDC knew exactly why the rates had risen.

Confounding factors made it completely impossible

to look at thimerosal removal and autism incidents in

Denmark.

Shortly after thimerosal was removed, Denmark changed their autism diagnosing

criteria, increasing the rates. Then they began adding to

the rates all children who had been diagnosed outside of a hospital,

which account

for the majority of cases nationwide, easily explaining why the autism rates

went

up after thimerosal was removed.

But once these changes stabilized, the rates started going down,

and the CDC knew this.

Yet somehow, y- you know, through a wave of a magic wand,

thimerosal was absolved at the very, very end of the article.

Their conclusions put many countries at ease by reassuring them thimerosal was not

to blame. The principal investigator and coauthor on one of the studies is now

living in Denmark as a wanted fugitive for stealing over a million dollars from the

CDC.

So all of a sudden, you had five published epidemiological

studies

showing no link between mercury and autism.

What does the CDC do in December of '03?

It calls on the IOM to suddenly, quickly, without warning,

hold a special meeting of the IOM Vaccine Safety

Committee meeting on February 9th, 2004.

The CDC had completely ignored the 2001 IOM panel's recommendation for

biological and clinical science.

I always said the cells and molecules don't lie, but,

but you know,

numbers can lie. Epidemiological studies can be designed

to, to come out with an answer that you want.

On January 15th of this year, I wrote Dr.

Julie Gerberding, the director of CDC, and I asked

her to postpone the February 9th Institute of Medicine

meeting.

There was work being done on the other side, on the biomedical side, on the,

on the

biological side, but none of that had yet been published.

I said, "Pressing forward with this meeting at

this time, I believe, will further

undermine the credibility of the Center for Disease Control on

matters of vaccine safety and do damage to the reputation of the

Institute of Medicine."

So it's not even possible to do an epidemiology study

of any sort that could rule thimerosal out?

Absolutely, for all time, you can't do a study that,

an epidemiologic study, that would rule out

almost anything.

Yet the prestigious Institute of Medicine came to the conclusion that these studies

definitively rule out thimerosal as the cause of autism,

studies that all have fatal flaws and are in no way even designed to rule

thimerosal out.

What is perhaps the greatest outrage, it goes further to

call for the halt of, of further research.

We never say, like the IOM, "No further study should ever be done."

If you ever

read that in science, by the way, you know there's a problem.

The only reason you'd wanna close research is that you might fear what you would

find.

And that's how we ended up with the famous May 2004 IOM

report, which has, uh, affected this debate ever since.