For years now, studies have shown that exposure to mercury in childhood vaccines, not only causes autism but can also result in immune, sensory, neurological, motor, and behavioral dysfunctions similar to traits associated with autism.
On May 21, 2003, after a three year investigation, "The Mercury in Medicine Report" was released by the House Committee on Government Reform, and stated in part:
"Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is likely related to the autism epidemic. This 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 and the sharper eyes of infant exposure to this known neurotoxin. The public health agencies' failure to act is indicative of institutional malfeasance for self protection and misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry."
"The CDC in general and the National Immunization Program are particularly conflicted in their duty to monitor the safety of vaccines, while also charged with the responsibility of purchasing vaccines for resale as well as promoting increased immunization rates."
The autism epidemic cannot be denied. On February 15, 2005, the GAO, released a Report titled, "Special Education Children With Autism," that revealed the number of children ages 6 through 21 diagnosed with autism receiving special education services has increased more than 500% over the past 10 years.
In a transcript, obtained under the FOIA, of a secret meeting attended by officials from the FDA and CDC in 2000, Pediatrician Bill Weil, acknowledged the epidemic and stated, "There are just a host of neurodevelopmental data that would suggest that we've got a serious problem.... The number of kids getting help in special education is growing nationally and state by state at a rate we have not seen before."
Thimerosal is a mercury-based preservative that was developed in the 1930s by Eli Lilly, and has been used regularly in vaccines ever since basically to boost vaccine maker profits by allowing drug companies to package vaccines in large containers instead of a single dose.
However, years ago children only received a small number of vaccines that were injected with a period of time in between and one dose at a time. Since 1988, the number of vaccines given to children before the age of two has tripled.
Lisa Blakemore-Brown, a psychologist in the UK, has been investigating the vaccine-autism link for years and says the reason the epidemic in autism did not occur sooner is because before the 1990s children "were given single vaccines with single amounts of mercury."
"But with the introduction of triple vaccines," she explains, "the amount of mercury contained within the preservative was multiplied and the cumulative effects are only just now being discovered by the public."
Once the cumulative amount of thimerosal that children were receiving through injections of 30-some odd vaccines was finally measured in 1999, the FDA discovered that infants were receiving more than 100 times the EPA's safe limit for mercury by 18 months.
Internal documents from the FDA and CDC show public health officials knew about the increased mercury they were receiving at least since 1999. A June 29, 1999, email from FDA scientist, Peter Patriarca, to the head of the CDC office on vaccine safety, warned that the FDA was going to be criticized for being "'asleep at the switch' for decades by allowing a potentially hazardous compound to remain in many childhood vaccines and not forcing manufacturers to exclude it from new products."
Mr Patriarca also pointed out that calculating the cumulative amount of mercury in vaccines was not "rocket science" and involved only ninth-grade math. He also noted the questions that agency officials would likely be asked as:
"What took the FDA so long to do the calculations? Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?"
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