Autism: The Legacy of Our War on Germs

In my last article, I discussed the fact that vaccines are loaded with toxic heavy metals and other chemicals as well as the fact that they’re not studied for long-term side effects or safety and that they are not the public health miracle many people believe them to be. That is, they’re not safe, not particularly effective and therefore not needed. I mentioned in that article that vaccines have been linked with autism. Now, I’d like to discuss that theory a little further.

In the early days of allopathic medicine, which is marked by the use of drugs or chemicals to combat illness, mercury was a common cure-all. Because of its ability to kill virtually any living thing, mercury was used to kill germs like the one that causes syphilis. Their frequent use of “quicksilver” led to these early allopathic physicians being labeled “quacks.” Because these quacks’ treatments were also dangerous to the point of often being deadly (George Washington was killed by his allopathic physician’s heroic efforts) the terms quack and charlatan became synonymous. And yet, mercury continued to be a common treatment for bacterial infections until penicillin became available around the end of World War II.

The vaccine for pertussis (whooping cough) was developed around 1929. Pertussis is a bacterial infection, so the vaccine makers decided to use a mercury “preservative” that had just been patented called “thimerosal” to kill the pertussis germs or anything else that may have survived the manufacturing process. Thimerosal was a brand new drug at the time and had only been used on humans once in a case of sheer desperation. Here, a doctor tried using large doses of thimerosal to save several of his patients who were suffering from meningitis. All of those patients died—many of them shortly after receiving their thimerosal treatments. Still, this was the “safety study” that Eli Lilly used when applying for its patent on the pertussis vaccine. Apparently, this slipped by the people at the FDA. Many years later, the FDA asked Eli Lilly to produce some safety studies on the drug, but Ely Lilly refused saying the drug had been used for some 30 years at that point and that was proof enough of its safety. The FDA apparently agreed, because they dropped the case.

In the early days of vaccines, thimerosal was only used in the shots for diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus, later combined into one DPT shot. In those early days, only the well-to-do kids received vaccines. Autism was discovered in 1943 by Dr. Leo Kanner. These autistic children were always from the well-to-do families, which led Dr. Kanner to believe that these mothers were somehow colder in their child-rearing and that that was the cause of this disorder. As insurance companies began paying for vaccines, autism became evenly distributed amongst all classes of children.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, two more shots were added to the vaccine schedule: HiB and hepatitis B. Each of these shots contained thimerosal as a preservative, thus tripling the child’s exposure to mercury and raising the contaminant level far above what the EPA says is safe. Even worse, the hepatitis B shot was to be given within the child’s first 12 hours on the planet. In the early 1990s, the CDC began receiving reports showing much higher rates of autism. What had been a relatively rare disorder affecting maybe one child in 100,000 was now affecting one child in every 1,500. In 2002, they performed another study and found that autism was now affecting one in every 150 children. In 2006, they increased their number again to one in every 100. In 2007 they adjusted it yet again to one in every 90 children. This dramatic increase in autism rates corresponded exactly with the increase in mercury exposure, just as the initial diagnosis corresponded with the first use of the drug in the 1930s.

We’ve known for many years that mercury is toxic to nerve cells and that it tends to preferentially accumulate there. It’s also been shown that certain children lack a particular brain protein that helps to clear mercury from the brain. Autistic children lack this protein and therefore have much more mercury in their brains than normal children do. This is the genetic link to autism—an inability to clear mercury from the tissues.

The government and the drug companies claim there’s no proof that autism is caused by mercury. By this, they mean there are no double-blind, placebo-controlled studies confirming the theory. This is because nobody does long-term double-blind, placebo-controlled studies on vaccines. They just do a short study and then give it to every child on the planet. Without a group of children who do not receive vaccines, it’s very hard to prove that vaccines cause autism. Luckily, there is one group of kids who’ve been spared this assault—the Amish. The Amish generally refuse to vaccinate their children. Based on the number of children in their population and the CDC’s national averages, we would expect to find 130 autistic Amish children. What we find, however, is that they only have four autistic kids amongst them. Of those four, three have been vaccinated and the other had a large mercury exposure from a power plant.

Further, in 2000, a House Committee on Government Reform, led by Representative Dan Burton (whose grandson developed autism after receiving several vaccines) began studying the issue of autism and vaccines. After almost three years of conducting hearings and requesting records, their final report stated, “Through a Congressional mandate to review thimerosal content in medicines, the FDA learned that childhood vaccines, when given according to the CDC’s recommendations exposed over 8,000 children a day in the United States to levels of mercury that exceeded Federal guidelines… Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly 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, a known neurotoxin.”

Also in 2000, a secret meeting was held by the CDC, reported on by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in an article titled “Deadly Immunity.” Here, they discussed a large study that had been conducted on the CDC’s own database pertaining to this subject. Their conclusion was that thimerosal was the cause of autism and that they needed to bury the information before the public found out and began rejecting vaccines altogether. But rather than destroy all the thimerosal-containing vaccines that had already been produced, they decided to phase thimerosal out over the next several years. This was done, of course, to save the billion-dollar drug makers from financial losses.

In 2001, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist introduced the Eli Lilly Protection Act, which was inserted as a rider on the Homeland Security Bill. This act was meant to protect the main producer of thimerosal (who had also made several large campaign contributions to Senator Frist) from potential lawsuits regarding the autism debacle. The bill passed but the rider was later repealed when angry parents who had children damaged by the drug sued.

Thimerosal has now been removed from most (but not all) childhood vaccines. It’s still in most flu shots and it’s in several booster shots given to adolescents. One recent study suggests that since the removal of thimerosal from most vaccines, the rate of autism is now declining.

Don’t believe the stories when you hear that this issue is dead. Mercury and thimerosal did cause the autism epidemic. As Dr. Mark Geier, a scientist who has studied the issue in depth has said, “This is about as proven an issue as you’re going to see… what is occurring here is a cover-up under the guise of protecting the vaccine program.” The drug companies are not going to admit that they caused this horrendous problem, which will cost us billions of dollars to handle, not to mention the lives of hundreds of thousands of children and their parents. And the government will continue to protect the drug companies because they (the FDA) are the ones who allowed it to happen and they (the CDC) are the ones pushing the vaccines on our kids. This means it’s up to us to educate ourselves and put the pieces together.

Please help spread the word about this issue. It’s finally making its way into the mainstream and people are waking up, though many still refuse to believe the facts that are staring them in the face. Again, I’ve only scratched the surface of this story here. Much more is included in my book, "Thugs, Drugs and the War On Bugs, How the Natural Healthcare Revolution Will Lead Us Past Greed, Ego and Scary Germs." You can go to my website www.HealthIsNatural.com to learn more about this ground-breaking book and to order your copy.

If you like this article, please rate it and Tweet it. Thanks!