The backlash of thimerosal has been seen across the globe, but American statistics show the severity of ethylmercury's impact and how the future of the country has been critically jeopardized.
The FDA and CDC carelessly added dose after dose to the vaccine schedule without calculating the levels of mercury each child was being exposed to. In 1991, three additional TCV's were added to the schedule, tripling the exposure concentrations and injecting children with extremely dangerous amounts of thimerosal. By 1999, children were receiving twenty-two doses of ethylmercury before they entered the first grade.
The Department of Education conducted a study from 1992/1993 to 2004/2005 showing the percentage increases of children aged 6-21 with autism. Illinois entered the analysis with 5 cases, but increased 139,000% to 6,995 by the time the study was complete. Maryland started off with 28 cases and ended with 4,077, Nevada went from 5 cases to 1,118, while Oregon escalated 11,632% from having 37 autistics to 4,341 (The Autism Autoimmunity Project, 2005).
"The epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin," told by Rep. Dan Burton, of the House Government Reform Committee, as he added that public-health agencies failed to operate out of "institutional malfeasance for self protection... misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry" (Pringle, 2006).
The studies supporting a link between thimerosal and developmental disorders are endless and were available at any given time, the government made a conscious decision to abandon integrity and focus more on saving reputations rather than lives.
Thimerosal's toxicity can be seen as far back as WWII when the Department of Defense required Lilly to label the vaccines as "poison" when shipping overseas for soldiers and a 1967 study in Applied Microbiology found the chemical to be deadly when incorporated into mice's vaccines.
What's more is that in 1971, the developer who originally claimed ethylmercury to be safe, and ultimately began thimerosal's reign of terror, conducted another study that found the preservative to be "'toxic to tissue cells' in concentrations as low as one part per million- 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine" (Kennedy, 2005, The Story).
A 1977 Russian study exposed adults to weaker concentrations than normally used in American childhood vaccines and found the subjects continued to show signs of brain damage years after being exposed.
Russia, along with Japan, Austria, Denmark and Great Britain, is one of the countries smart enough to ban the drug, over 20 years ago, before it had a chance to cause serious damage.
Also in 1977, a hospital in Toronto sadly became the final resting place of ten newborn babies when their umbilical cords were cleaned with an antiseptic containing thimerosal, which Lilly had established as toxic six years before the company even began manufacturing such disinfectants leaving one to question, yet again, how this product passed FDA standards of safety.
More recently, a study was conducted by the father and son research team, Mark and David Geier, showing a constant increase in both reported autism and speech disorder cases until 2002, which coincides with years thimerosal openly thrived, and began a steady decrease thereafter (Geier & Geier, 2006).
The signs are everywhere, but the government simply will not stand defeated, leaving innocent babies to carry the cross created by spineless officials.
Although officials are adamant when professing thimerosal's safety, in the early 1980's the FDA proposed a ban on thimerosal being used in over the counter ointments as officials suspected it to be toxic and generally useless, but officials waited 16 years after recognizing the products were unsafe to actually enforce the ban.
What is even more enraging is that the in the same year, 1991, that the FDA proposed a ban on using thimerosal in animal vaccines due to possible toxicity, the same group recommended an additional three TCV's be added to the childhood vaccine schedule.
The government knew what was going on and a warning from one of Merck's founding members, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, confirmed this when he said that administering the shots to six-month-olds would expose infants to dangerous levels of mercury. He suggested terminating thimerosal "...especially when used on infants and children" (Kennedy, 2005, The Story).
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