Another study finds no vaccine link

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted a report on Tuesday that said evidence does not support a link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders, ahead of a two-day meeting of an advisory panel later this week.

The report was posted on the agency's website on Tuesday, along with some presentations and the final agenda of the meeting, which is scheduled for June 25 and 26.

In a series of votes today, the CDC’s new vaccine advisory committee voted to no longer recommend flu vaccines that contain thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative linked to neurodevelopmental disorders.

In conformance with the pharma-financed mainstream media’s mantric ritual of dutifully parroting the propaganda tropes spoon-fed them by vaccine makers and their captive regulators, @guardian on Friday pronounced thimerosal, the ethylmercury-based vaccine preservative, “safe.”

Opining under the headline, “CDC vaccine panel to review ingredient RFK Jr has targeted for removal,” The Guardian authoritatively assures: “The preservative has been deemed safe.”

The Guardian did not bother to cite any peer-reviewed study.

Journalists don’t seem to read those anymore. Instead, it referenced a fact check website operated by the Pharma-funded American Academy of Pediatrics. @AmerAcadPeds likewise cites no peer-reviewed study to support this claim or its equally terse assertion that “Thimerosal has been removed from all routine childhood vaccines.”

This is another treadworn lie of the vaccine industry. There are high bolus doses of mercury in flu shots, which CDC recommends to pregnant women in any trimester of pregnancy and as a routine vaccine for children at six months and in every year of life.

Between conception and age 18, a compliant American child today could get a cumulative load of as much as 500 mcg of ethylmercury from multidose flu shots—nearly double of what they were once getting from all the childhood vaccines put together.

Now let’s look at The Guardian claim that thimerosal is safe.

A quick search at the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed and PubChem websites nets thousands of studies on search terms such as: mercury neurotoxicity, mercury and development, and mercury and brain, and hundreds that identify thimerosal as a potent neurotoxin, carcinogen, mutagen, and endocrine disruptor. There has never been a study that proves thimerosal safe.

In early 2001, Director of the FDA Office of Vaccine Research and Review, the late William Egan, admitted under oath before Congress that thimerosal’s safety had never been studied in human beings. [“Mr. Burton. ‘When was that? That was done in 1929. Let’s follow up on that. In 1929, they tested this on 27 people that were dying of meningitis. All of those people died of meningitis, so they said there was no correlation between their death and the mercury in the vaccines. That is the only test that’s ever been done on thimerosal that I know of. Can you think of any other?’ Mr. Egan. ‘No, in people, no. Except for accidental exposures over time.’”]

I leave it to the reader to speculate as to why CDC has not performed such studies in the intervening 24 years as it dosed hundreds of millions of American children and pregnant moms with mercury-laden flu shots. Furthermore, CDC has no existing guidelines for safe exposure to ethylmercury.

But let’s put all that peer-reviewed science aside and just look at what the government and the vaccine industry say about thimerosal. Thimerosal’s label advises against its use during pregnancy, pointing out that thimerosal has never been shown to be safe and that it causes mutations in mammals.

Thimerosal’s material safety data sheet (MSDS) acknowledges that thimerosal is “toxic,” has “Nervous System and Reproductive Effects,” and is “mutagenic in mammalian cells,” and that exposure to mercury in thimerosal “in utero and in children can cause mild to severe mental retardation and mild to severe motor coordination impairment.”

The MSDS lists a grim inventory of dozens of other devastating injuries from thimerosal exposure.

In 2001, the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) revised its thimerosal toxicity statement, warning that thimerosal is “toxic by ingestion and inhalation.”

The California EPA recognizes thimerosal as a reproductive toxicant in the clearest possible language: “Thimerosal dissociates in the body to ethyl mercury. The evidence for its reproductive toxicity includes severe mental retardation or malformations in human offspring who were poisoned when their mothers were exposed to ethyl mercury or thimerosal while pregnant, studies in animals demonstrating developmental toxicity after exposure to either ethyl mercury or thimerosal, and data showing interconversion to other forms of mercury that also clearly cause reproductive toxicity. The US EPA, the authoritative body relied on when mercury and mercury compounds were listed under California’s Proposition 65, currently identifies mercury and mercury compounds as causing reproductive toxicity.”

The amount of ethylmercury in a flu shot is 25,000 times EPA’s safety level for drinking water. Federal and state laws provide that whenever expired thimerosal vaccines are disposed of, they constitute a hazardous waste.

In 1998, FDA banned thimerosal in all over-the-counter products, ending its use in creams, eye medicine, and disinfectants like mercurochrome. It’s ironic that CDC still recommends its injection into babies.

A 2000 study by the National Research Council found that prenatal and infant mercury exposures cause multiple impacts to basic brain development by disrupting the division and migration of neuronal cells.

According to a National Toxicology Program PowerPoint presentation entitled “Comparative Toxicity of Ethyl and Methyl Mercury”: “Ethylmercury is a neurotoxin. Infants may be more susceptible than adults. Ethylmercury exposure from vaccines (added to dietary exposures to methylmercury) probably caused neurotoxic responses (likely subtle) in some children.”

A 2005 NIH study commissioned by FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) and performed by the National Toxicity Program (NTP) obliterated the industry claim that the ethylmercury in vaccines is less toxic than the heavily regulated methylmercury in fish, finding that the ethylmercury in thimerosal crosses the blood-brain barrier, lodges in the brain, and metabolizes into the most toxic form of mercury at double the rate of methylmercury. A subsequent study found that this highly toxic mercury remains in the brain for over 27 years.

A 2000 study in Neurotoxicology by Dr. William Slikker Jr., former head of the FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research, directly foretold the results of a 2005 NIH-funded study, reporting that “Thimerosal (sodium ethylmercurithiosalicylate) crosses the blood-brain and placental barriers and results in appreciable mercury content in tissues including brain.”

A 2017 NIH/CDC study links miscarriage to flu vaccines, particularly in the first trimester. Pregnant women vaccinated in the 2010/2011 and 2011/2012 flu seasons had two times greater odds of having a miscarriage within 28 days of receiving the vaccine.

In women who had received the H1N1 vaccine in the previous flu season, the odds of having a miscarriage within 28 days were 7.7 times greater than in women who did not receive a flu shot during their pregnancy.

These results are all the more significant when considering the fact that 7 of the 13 authors on the study had potential conflicts of interest such as having received research support from GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, Pfizer, Merck, Novartis, Novavax, and other Big Pharma companies. One author, Frank DeStefano, was head of CDC’s immunization Safety Branch.

It’s noteworthy that these authors chose not to differentiate outcomes between thimerosal-containing flu shots and those that did not contain thimerosal. Around half the flu shots available at that time contained thimerosal.

On October 1, 2001, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences Immunization Safety Review Committee (ISR) issued a report concluding that the link between thimerosal and the rise of neurological injuries in children, including autism, is “biologically plausible,” and recommended the termination of all thimerosal-preserved vaccines.

An entire bibliography of pharmacokinetic studies by independent scientists, prestigious universities, and prominent research institutes published in high-gravitas journals, attest to thimerosal’s powerful neurotoxicity, and show that mercury tends to accumulate (and remain for considerable periods of time, years to decades) in the brains of primates and other animals after injection of thimerosal-containing vaccines.

It’s worth noting just one of these, a well-known Russian study from 1977 led by Dr. N.D. Mukhtarova, found that the majority of adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those currently given to American children in vaccines were still suffering neurological injury and neuropathology several years after the exposure. These symptoms included decreased vision, hearing, memory, vertigo, and pain and numbness in the hands and feet. [“A total of 25 persons exposed to multiple effects of low ethyl-mercuric-chloride concentrations were subjected to a clinical examination in dynamics 1 ½ and 3 years after exposure to the compound. In investigations, clinico-physiological (EEG, Asschner-Dagnini reflexes, etc) and biochemical (catecholamines, sugar, mercury, DDT, DDE in the urine, etc) methods were employed. The pathology of the nervous system presented certain peculiarities by comparison with early period. In evidence were changes in the simpatico-adrenal system function, vascular lesions of the brain after the type of transient derangements of the cerebral circulation in the vertebro-basilar basin and angiosperms, diffuse changes in the nervous system with predominant involvement of the hypothalamic cerebral structures and in some cases psychiatric disturbances were on record. (p. 4–7).”]

The Guardian is blind and scientifically baseless repetition of empty industry assurances about thimerosal safety is yet another proof that journalists, and particularly science journalists, have now devolved into obsequious stenographers for Big Pharma.

For years, the public has been told the vaccine-autism question is closed — case dismissed, myth debunked, science settled.

But when you peel back the headlines and actually examine the evidence, a startling truth emerges: We haven’t really studied the question at all. Not thoroughly. Not independently. Not with the urgency or integrity the issue demands.

The most commonly cited research? A handful of studies on the MMR vaccine and thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was largely removed from childhood vaccines over two decades ago. That’s it.

No comprehensive analysis of the full vaccine schedule. No robust long-term comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. No meaningful investigation into the timing, combinations, or cumulative biological impact of dozens of shots now given in infancy and early childhood.

In other words, we haven’t looked. And yet we claim to know.

As a pediatrician with formal training in epidemiology, I approached the research with trust in the system and confidence in the data. But what I encountered while investigating for my book, “Between a Shot and a Hard Place,” left me stunned.

I expected to uncover a vast body of high-quality science — long-term trials, robust safety evaluations, rigorous comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated children.

Instead, I found a shallow pool of studies — many small, some outdated, most narrowly focused on just one vaccine. There was no comprehensive scrutiny of the full schedule, no real curiosity about timing, interactions, or vulnerable populations.

It wasn’t that the science had disproven a link — it’s that the science had barely asked the question. And that silence speaks volumes.

We cannot claim certainty where inquiry has been suppressed. We cannot dismiss parent experiences as coincidences when they follow the same patterns again and again.

And we cannot afford to confuse lack of evidence with evidence of safety. The stakes are too high — and our children deserve better.

The rise in autism, and the refusal to ask why

Autism now affects 1 in 31 children in the U.S., with rates as high as 1 in 12.5 boys in California. The increase in diagnoses isn’t just about better awareness — more children today are deeply affected, with significant developmental and intellectual disabilities.

This is a public health crisis. Yet somehow, asking whether vaccines might play a role is taboo.

Parents see the change firsthand. A baby babbles, smiles, and makes eye contact — then suddenly, after a routine doctor visit, that progress stops. Words disappear. Eye contact fades. Regression sets in.

These stories follow a pattern, and while correlation is not causation, patterns are where science begins. But instead of investigation, we dismiss these parents. Instead of listening, we silence them.

The research we’re missing

I combed through decades of vaccine safety literature. The results were sobering.

There are no long-term, large-scale studies comparing fully vaccinated children to unvaccinated ones using standardized developmental assessments.
No comprehensive evaluation exists of the full CDC vaccine schedule as administered in real life.
Most studies focus narrowly on the MMR vaccine or thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative largely removed from pediatric vaccines two decades ago.
Even the Institute of Medicine acknowledged in a 2013 report that the safety of the full childhood vaccine schedule — especially its timing, spacing, and cumulative exposure— had not been rigorously studied.

If vaccines were a pharmaceutical drug administered in 70 doses before kindergarten, with a suspected link to any chronic disease, we’d demand independent oversight, transparent trials, and long-term tracking.

But because these are vaccines, we declare the science “settled” without proving that it is.

Buried data, ignored whistleblowers

In my research, I came across the 2010 study by Gallagher and Goodman that found a higher autism risk in boys who received the hepatitis B vaccine at birth. It wasn’t widely publicized or followed up.

More disturbing was the 2014 revelation by William Thompson, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who admitted that his team omitted key data in a pivotal MMR-autism study — data that showed increased risk in African American boys. The study was never corrected.

How can we claim the science is settled if major findings are buried and whistleblowers ignored?

A path forward

The vaccine-autism debate won’t be resolved by censorship or soundbites. It will be resolved by doing the science we’ve avoided for too long.

If we truly care about children’s health — and public trust — then we must stop circling the same studies and start asking better questions. That means:

Funding large, independent, open-label prospective studies comparing fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated, and unvaccinated children — evaluating real-world vaccine schedules, not just single shots in isolation.
Studying combinations, timing, and aluminum adjuvants using updated toxicology, neurodevelopmental, and immunological tools.
Taking parental reports seriously as part of observational data—treating them not as “anecdotes to dismiss” but as signals to investigate.
Removing all financial conflicts of interest from vaccine safety research and creating full transparency for both data and funding sources.
This isn’t about choosing sides. It’s about restoring balance. We can demand rigorous, independent science without being “anti-vax.” We can protect children and respect parental intuition.

But we can’t do either if we keep denying the blind spots in our current system.

To move forward, we must be honest about what we know — and courageous enough to admit what we don’t. Because when it comes to our children’s long-term neurological health, vague reassurances are not enough.

No, the science is not settled. And it’s time we stopped saying it is.