Thimerosal Vindicated in Another Study, Yet ... the Show Must Go On

A New England Journal of Medicine study has added another brick to the wall of evidence closing out a link between vaccines and autism and other brain disorders. Unfortunately, the public relations effect of the study will be muted because the anti-mercury activists who helped plan it withdrew their support when the results displeased them.

The study, released today, did not specifically address a link between vaccines and autism.
Rather, the scientists, led by the Centers for Disease Control, carried out a battery of neuropsychological tests on 1,047 7- to 10-year-old children who as infants had received various dosages of thimerosal. In 1999, the government asked drug companies to remove thimerosal from three pediatric vaccines that contained it. The active ingredient of thimerosal, a preservative, is ethyl mercury, a neurotoxin at high doses.

The study conducted a total of 378 different statistical tests with the data, based on 42 measurements of things like attention span, fine motor skills, tics and IQ. The authors found no impact of thimerosal in 359 of these data points, but found statistically significant results for 19 measures. About half of the latter showed that thimerosal exerted a positive effect, the other half potential harm. For example, males babies seemed to be more likely to have tics the more thimerosal they ingested. They also seemed to have better verbal skills.

The usual scientific explanation for such results is that they are artifacts of chance. Indeed, in any study with this many variables, scientists are certain to find some statistically significant results, just as a person flipping 378 different coins repeatedly would be certain to have a "significant" excess of either heads or tails for a few of the coins.

One potential concern in the study was the finding of tics, although the rate wasn't drastically higher in the high-thimerosal group. As the paper's lead author, William Thompson, explained to journalists, children of this age frequently experience "tics" that are transient and of no significance--repetitive clearing of the throat, say, or drumming of fingers. The neurologists who conducted the tests registered behaviors and mental capacities according to protocol, and irrespective of the clinical significance in a given child.

Naturally, the so-called Mercury Militia are having none of it. For them, this is yet another incidence of bad faith by the CDC.

SafeMinds and other activist groups have long accused the CDC of hiding vaccine safety problems. In response to those claims, which are backed by members of Congress who apparently share SafeMinds' belief, the CDC and other government agencies have invited activists to participate in research, in order to clarify that government scientists are not evil conmen but rather in most cases are endeavoring to find the truth.

Sallie Bernard, a New Jersey businesswoman and leader of SafeMinds (a group that alleges vaccines are responsible for an epidemic of autism) was on the external board that helped design the Journal study. But Bernard, in a statement released by SafeMinds, charged that the study "draws a misleading conclusion," a comment she backs with various complaints about the study's methodology, size and the wording of its abstract. Bernard, according to Thompson, withdrew her support for the study around the time its final draft was circulating.

Earlier in September, Bernard's group released a statement urging parents to make sure their children were not vaccinated with thimerosal-containing flu shots--the last remaining pediatric vaccines that sometimes contain the preservative.

This statement came at a particularly bad time for public health officials who are trying to increase flu vaccination levels among children this fall. A study in this week's Lancet Infectious Diseases showed, as has previous work, that campaigns to vaccinate the elderly against the flu are not very effective, because the old have immune systems that frequently don't respond to the killed flu virus vaccine. For this reason, the CDC has been trying to boost flu vaccination of the young to reduce the number of human vectors carrying the virus to the elderly. Flu can be an innocuous disease, but in the sick and old it can kill, alone or in combination with bacterial infections.

Despite the wealth of data showing that vaccines do not cause autism, many parents continue to believe the theory. Jenny McCarthy, an ex-Playboy Bunny and TV personage, has been making the rounds of the media this week (Oprah, ABC, People magazine) to promote her book, in which she claims that her child was made autistic by vaccines but was "recovered" through alternative therapies.

A large CDC study comparing thimerosal exposure rates in autistic and non-autistic kids is due out around this time next year, as is an Italian study of the question. The data will probably duplicate the many previous studies that have shown no effect. The dogs may bark but the caravan moves on. Or is it the other way around?

Comments

[usna73]

Anyone who has a serious interest in finding the truth may be reading and returning here.

For those I offer that the CDC themselves have indicated that this study was not designed to measure a causal conection between autism and thimerosal.

It takes serious questioning by people like David Kirby to flush this out. Mr. Kirby is not a headline writer, but rather a serious journalist.

If you are a scientist or just a person who seeks truth, I implore you to read the actual transcripts imbedded in the link below:

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/09/thimerosal-ques.html

[joseph449008]

David Kirby is simply unable to comprehend statistics, which is probably fine since he's a journalist, not a scientist. Same goes for whoever wrote the Wired piece. As I noted below:

"For 378 measures, you'd expect that 18.9 of the actual RRs would fall outside the 95% confidence interval, if the null hypothesis is true. They found that 19 measures had this issue. Plus they found more protective factors than risk factors. Pretty impressive results and methodology. But it's not going to shut anyone up."

In other words, the study found exactly what you would expect to find if the null hypothesis is true. None of the risk factors or protective factors can be taken at face value, but should be taken as what they probably are: random noise.

David Kirby either can't quite grasp this, or is pretending not to be able to. He's cherry picking the random noise found and calling them real risk factors. At the same time he's mocking the protective factors which are also probably random noise.

[MidwestDad]

Oh, Joseph, don't confuse us with your knowledge of statistics. Everybody knows facts have an anti-Kirby bias. This debate isn't about science, or evidence, or probability. It's about what some parents "feel" is true. Your 18th century Enlightenment values are so yesterday.

[sheila]

i have been watching this from the sidelines, but can anyone tell me why on earth we would want to inject our kids with mercury, no matter what?

is it a CRUCIAL ingredient to these vaccines? if not, then why don't they just STOP USING IT already? if so, then how are they vaccinating so many kids without it?

this seems like a ridiculous argument to have, but perhaps i am missing something?

[Pyrum]

I agree. The pharmaceutical company apologists are like the members of a cult religion. They can't even see they are defending the practice of injecting a known neurotoxin directly into a newborn infant's bloodstream. For them, it's like a holy sacrement. It goes against all logic!

Even without the thimerosal, vaccines are chalk full of plenty of other toxins: lead, ethylene glycol (car antifreeze) and my favorite: formaldehyde, a known carcinogen. Increasing cancer rates in children are usually blamed on them living near electrical fields, such as power lines. That may be part of the problem, but could it also be they're being shot up with formaldehyde? No one can possibly know for certain, because there's no such thing as a vaccination that's been tested for carcinogenity. The study has never, ever been done.

If there was a medicine, let's say a cough syrup, that contained the ingredients of a typical vaccination, it would have a snowball's chance in hell of being approved by the FDA and put on the market. Even if it was, it would be pulled off again so fast it would make our heads swim. Why is it we're so careful about what we ingest but so caverlier about what we inject directly into own children's bloodstream?

I hope this comment makes it past the Huffpo censors...

[Pyrum]

I meant aluminum, not lead. My apologies.

[joseph449008]

For me at least, the debate is not mostly about this. I'm fine if thimerosal is completely removed for the few remaining vaccines where it's still used. (Although there are some questions as to how you would preserve vaccines in the 3rd world, for example.) The larger issue in my view is the promotion and hype surrounding unlikely autism hypothesis; people claiming that they know what autism is, what causes it, and proclaiming it's curable without a shred of evidence other than testimonials and anecdotes. This kind of thing hurts autistic people, and unfortunately has been going on for many decades. It's one thing after another.

[RaisingAwareness]

WHAT MERCURY LEVELS ARE CONSIDERED TOXIC:

Water contamination = 2 ppb (parts per billion)
Toxic Waste = 200 ppb
Fish = 1000 ppb


So how much in a infants vaccines?

50,000 ppb



http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6890106663412840646&q=vaccine&hl=en

[joseph449008]

Those guidelines are for drinking water. Basically, considering that you drink about 2 liters of water per day for your entire lifetime, the guidelines are designed to tell you what kind of water would be safe to drink that entire time.

They don't say that if you drink one cubic inch of 50,000 ppb mercury you'll be in trouble. You won't.

You can put the mercury from a vaccine in a bucket of water and all of the sudden the ppb drops to the safe levels you mention.

[Pyrum]

Your arithmetic is off. The amount of mercury from one typical vaccination would have to be dissolved into about 23 gallons of water before the EPA would consider that water to be safe to drink. Who drinks 23 gallons of water a day?

[MikeWag]

Another study by the perpetrators, for the perpetrators and paid for by the perpetrators (using taxpayer money of course). And the verdict, the perpetrators are not guilty!

[ohiyo]

How about the external advisors? Were all of them bribed as well?

How long before we see the entire CDC study team retiring to Maui? Why hadn't they already done so when they were presumably already bribed to say thimerosal didn't cause autism the first time they looked at this?

Maybe somebody has naked incriminating pictures of the entire study team. Yes, that seems much more probable than the possibility that vaccines just don't cause autistic symptoms.

[joseph449008]

This time the CDC went out of its way to make the process as trasparent as possible, hiring outside consultants, including Sallie Bernard from SafeMinds.

[AurigaRa]

Can you imagine if it WAS found to be the culprit? Can you imagine the lawsuits? It would make 9/11 lawsuits look like chump change. Can you imagine the truth will ever emerge on this disaster?

Me neither.

[joseph449008]

And of course, as anyone can see, the potential for lawsuits proves there's a causal association.

[NCGigi]

I think there will be a link found between mercury(including thimerosol)and autism. I think there is a link between the number of dental fillings one's gestational mother has (dental amalgam contains mercury)and the preservatives in the vaccines and also free floating mercury. We get so much conflicting information about mercury. It is in fish. We are encouraged to eat fish.

Mercury in the environment comes from burning fossil fuels. The mercury laden smoke settles over the land and water and gets concentrated in animals that are eaten.

Pregnant women with dental fillings eating fish and then having their offspring vaccinated with mercury preserved vaccines, sounds like it could be a tipping point. The link between fish and mercury in the environment could help explain why the autism rate is increasing all over the world.

[ohiyo]

Go look up the difference between methylmercury (in pollution) and ethylmercury (in thimerosal). Despite the fact that they have several syllables in common, they are not.the.same.

[Pyrum]

The ethylmercury form is considered to be more toxic.

[NCGigi]

Great idea. This is what I found: they are both organic mercury compounds that transit the blood brain barrier and cause neurological problems.
http://www.immunizationinfo.org/immunization_science_detail.cfv?id=110
So, it looks like the two acting together could be a double whammy for the vaccinated infant.

[Pyrum]

Did anyone read the disclaimer on this article?:

"Dr. Thompson reports being a former employee of Merck; Dr. Marcy, receiving consulting fees from Merck, Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, and MedImmune; Dr. Jackson, receiving grant support from Wyeth, Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, and Novartis, lecture fees from Sanofi Pasteur, and consulting fees from Wyeth and Abbott and serving as a consultant to the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee; Dr. Lieu, serving as a consultant to the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; Dr. Black, receiving consulting fees from MedImmune, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, and Merck and grant support from MedImmune, GlaxoSmithKline, Aventis, Merck, and Novartis; and Dr. Davis receiving consulting fees from Merck and grant support from Merck and GlaxoSmithKline. No other potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.

The findings and conclusions in this study are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the CDC."

I'd trust the conclusions this article draws a lot more if the authors weren't being funded by a bunch of pharmaceutical companies!

[kathleenseidel]

I don't see any statement here that the study was funded by the named pharmaceutical companies, or any evidence that their conclusions were predestined by virtue of their openly-acknowledged affiliations. What I see here is a list of authors with extensive experience in the field of vaccine development and public health. Merge it with the affiliation statement at the beginning at the article to get a more complete picture of each author's career path. Dig up each author's CV if you really want to get a sense of what they've focused on over the decades.

Do you expect people with no relevant professional experience to conduct a study of this significance? Who would you have preferred to conduct this study?

[Pyrum]

Apologize for them as much as you want. I've got a better idea: get an independent source of funding to do a scientific double-blind study. Select three groups of subjects: one group gets thimerosal vaccines, one gets group thimerosal free vaccines (or plain water) and the last group gets nothing. Neither the subjects nor the technicians administering the vaccines know beforehand who's getting what. If there are ethical concerns about doing such a study on children, perhaps lab animals could be used as subjects.

After a few years, compare the groups to each other and see if there's any evidence or not for a thimerosal-autism link. Any group of scientists or doctors could carry out such a study. They wouldn't need pharmaceutical company connections.

[MidwestDad]

Dr. Mark Geier, MD could have conducted the study. He told a judge four three years ago that he could name a single study that conclusively showed a connection between mercury and autism. So I'm sure that after that humiliation, Dr Geier could be motivated to do his own study. Did anybody bother to ask him? Hah! I don't think insurance fraud would necessarily preclude him from delivering an honest opinion.

[AutismVox]

I would say, some of the dogs are chasing their own tails, and have yet to notice that the caravan has advanced.

[joseph449008]

For 378 measures, you'd expect that 18.9 of the actual RRs would fall outside the 95% confidence interval, if the null hypothesis is true. They found that 19 measures had this issue. Plus they found more protective factors than risk factors. Pretty impressive results and methodology. But it's not going to shut anyone up.

[Orac]

Yes, that was rather amazing. It's as though statistics actually works. In fact, I should have mentioned that in my commentary on this study. It's amazing how perfectly the almost certainly spurious associations found in this study look like random noise to be expected in any trial in which multiple measures are examined.

Sadly, this will not shut up the antivaccination fanatics, though. No amount of evidence will.

[blooddoc]

People who continue to cling to the thimerosal theory as an explanation for their child's problems - whatever they might be - fit into one of two camps: it's either "I've been hurt and it's not my fault", or "I've been hurt and someone has to pay." Those in the first camp deserve genuine sympathy, while those in the second warrant only disgust. Every parent wants, and expects, a child who is perfect. Nature doesn't care what a parent wants; developmental abnormalities, mild to severe, are uncommon but not rare, and almost always have a genetic origin. When well-conducted studies by respected scientists fail to document a relationship between an environmental agent and a child's problems, it's time to look to the genes. Then it becomes not a matter of fault, but a search for ways to best help the child.

[usna73]

What a self-righteous misguided platitude.

There is mostly a group of parents who want to find justice, who can prove that their children are inconsequential compared to the profits of the pharmaceutical industry run amok.

[Heraldblog]

But the issue is whether the parents can prove causality between vaccines and autism. Industry profits might sound like a motive, but you still need to prove a "crime". This study, like many others before it, do not support what thousands of parents think happened.

[Orac]

No, it's a good observation.

Barring good evidence showing causality (or, heck, even good evidence showing a strong association between thimerosal­-containin­g vaccines or MMR and autism), there is no "justice" to be had, because there is no evidence that there was ever any harm caused.

There comes a point when the preponderance of evidence has to be accepted. Science would have done it a while ago regarding the thimerosal/autism issue if it weren't for the CDC bending over backwards to cater to antivaccination activists. And, yes, the CDC did bend over backwards to cater to those of you who think vaccines cause autism. They included some of you as consultants to help design the study, and they bolted when the results didn't go the way they'd hoped.

[MidwestDad]

At a deeper level, it comes down to "It's my fault, but I'd rather blame someone else", and "I don't know why this happened, so I'll make something up."

[johnfryer]

Sir,
Mercury is a known brain destroying chemical which apart from destroying brains has the ability to split or sever DNA.
The consequences of this will be usually death before birth if the mother gets a mercury product.
The effect on past infants that survived can be imagined. More problems in the future?
Small, underweight and sick infants will suffer disproportionately from toxic chemicals.
Harry Clark whose brother died from vaccine harm survived his first vaccine by 6 hours.
But the vaccine was 100 per cent in the clear.
Mrs Clark got double life in prison.
How many underweight infants in this study?
How many sick children in this study?
How many dead children counted in this study?
I believe there is one answer to all three; NONE.
We have today I believe much higher amounts of not only neurological problems but all problems and with so many confounding factors, it is imperative to eliminate those that are known to be harmful.
The current practice of putting vitamins on the prescribed list of products for which a doctors approval is needed and the forced vaccinations of for example soldiers against illnesses that no longer exist ie smallpox is something a simple chemist finds difficult to understand?
Can someone enlighten me as to what the rationale for all this is?

John Fryer MSc BSc Advanced Analytical Chemist

[jvarga]

Thimerosal has been removed from all pediatric vaccines besides the flu for a while now. Why are disease rates increasing instead of decreasing?

As to why soldiers are still given smallpox vaccines:

Small pox (Variola virus) still exists. There aren't infections in the wild, but the virus itself is still in existence. Added bonus, the complete genome sequence is available, it took me about 30 seconds to locate it. As it is only 185 kb, you could probably reconstitute the virus "from scratch" if you were so inclined, even if the last remaining stocks were destroyed.

I'm guessing the line of thinking for keeping the army vaccinated is that if some nefarious individual were to use the virus in a biological warfare or terrorism scenario, at least the military would be retain some functional capabilities.

Out of curiosity, are you suggesting that the DNA changes seen in autism cases are caused by the vaccine? It is pretty impressive if a vaccine given at x months of age is able to cause specific genetic changes in a person with most of their cells already present. I'd be more likely to think that such an outcome would result from an insult very early in development.

If the consequences of a vaccine containing thimerosal given to a pregnant woman are usually death of the fetus, wouldn't epidemiologists picked up on that by now? Do they even give thimerosal­-containin­g flu shots to pregnant women at this point?

John Varga, Bsc PhD biological sciences

[usna73]

Broader scale "diagnosis" of ASD is increasing at large. You can find controlled specific population data bases where the rate of autism has decreased along the curve. Nobody wants to see the truth publicized.

[Pyrum]

Anyone who believes thimerosol has been removed from vaccines is naive. The vaccine manufacturers claimed they would voluntarily remove it, but sinced it's never been outlawed (although it should be), so the only way to be certain your child is getting thimerosol free vaccines is to check the list of ingredients on each and every package. You'll find it's still in many of them!

[NCGigi]

What about the consequences of methylmercury from pollution, dental fillings and eating fish for a gestating mother and her fetus combined with a vaccine containing ethylmercury? Has anyone dealt with this?
If mercury, in all its compounds, has neurological and DNA effects, shouldn't we look at all sources?
Could the vaccines be a tipping point? Not causality in isolation, but the final straw?

[NavyMom]

Disclaimer-I have an Autistic person in my family.
It's sad that so many families devote time, money, and energy to screaming about mercury instead of fighting for better education and better job opportunities for atypical young people, or studying how to create a better life for Autistic people. Minds that work differently are part of the diversity of humanity-I want people with those minds to have the fulfilling life they deserve, not to be labelled as some kind of "tragedy."

[usna73]

Those that caused the events want to pay for neither ma'am.

I have devoted my entire life in my community to making ife better for those like my son and those similarly situated.

Our general culture knows nothing other than self-indulgence. This is not the "Navy" community.

I have committed myself to forcing the pharmaceutical industry to pay for these transgressions and punish them financially. It is the only way to get them to change their behavior.

For the record, we will donate any damages we would receive towards providing services to all in our community who have been made to suffer for so long.