[lou_lou]

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related documents -- including the Simpsonwood transcripts -- and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the "Eli Lilly Protection Act" into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. Congress repealed the measure in 2003 -- but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. "The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Andy Olsen, a legislative assistant to Frist. (Kennedy)

Thimerosal is used in vaccines as a preservative to allow for mass production. Instead of single dose vials, vaccines now come in multi-dose bottles, which is cheaper to manufacture.

Again, the perpetual fear of a bioterrorism outbreak gives Big Pharm a blank check to cut corners as "cost considerations." If terrorists employ a biological attack, the drug lords claim, then only multi-dose vials could vaccinate the American public in an emergency. This nebulous scenario has allowed the drug empire to pump an entire generation of American children full of mercury, and thanks to the politicians in their pockets, new laws protect them from any accountability.

Robert Kennedy Jr. gives a timeline of events for the generation some call the Thimerosal Generation.

Before 1989, American preschoolers received 11 vaccinations -- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of 22 immunizations by the time they reached first grade.

As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines. (Kennedy)

Kennedy goes on:

But by that time, the damage was done. Infants who received all their vaccines, plus boosters, by the age of six months were being injected with a total of 187 micrograms of ethylmercury -- a level 40 percent greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin. Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several studies -- including one published in April by the National Institutes of Health -- suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury. Under the expanded schedule of vaccinations, multiple shots were often administered on a single day: At two months, when the infant brain is still at a critical stage of development, children routinely received three innoculations that delivered 99 times the approved limit of mercury. (Kennedy)


Everyone knows mercury is not good for you. Remember the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland? Hatters were notorious for being crazy or having the "shakes," and this was due to their working with mercury to cure the felt for hats. Mercury was once used to treat syphillus, and when an afflicted hatter discovered his treatment helped produce superior hats, employing mercury became the norm in the hat making industry during the 19th century. (Source: Mercury: Element of the Ancients)

And this toxic metal is being injected into infants.

The good news -- as if anything good could come out of this travesty -- is that thimerosal is being downsized, at least in vaccine production meant for American children.

However, "the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as steroids and injected collagen" as well as in vaccines being sent to Third World countries (Kennedy).

In conclusion, let's take another look at the timeline and the rise in autism, and then we'll finish on an Amish note.

One study, which compares the cumulative dose of mercury received by children born between 1981 and 1985 with those born between 1990 and 1996, found a "very significant relationship" between autism and vaccines. Another study of educational performance found that kids who received higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines were nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism and more than three times as likely to suffer from speech disorders and mental retardation. Another soon-to-be-published study shows that autism rates are in decline following the recent elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines.

As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying vaccines, others have stepped in to study the link to autism. In April, reporter Dan Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more interesting studies himself. Searching for children who had not been exposed to mercury in vaccines -- the kind of population that scientists typically use as a "control" in experiments -- Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Penn., who refuse to immunize their infants. Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found only four. One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three -- including one child adopted from outside the Amish community -- had received their vaccines. (Kennedy)

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...adly_immunity/