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Mercury : Child vaccines under threat in pay row
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Posted by sylvia on Saturday, March 25, 2006 (09:57:45)
Times Online
By Nigel Hawkes
VACCINATIONS for children could be under threat from changes to the way that family doctors are paid. A survey suggests that more than one in seven GPs is considering opting out of providing immunisations and another 10 per cent may stop chasing up children’s vaccinations because the money they are paid for doing them has dropped by more than half.
Any reduction in vaccine coverage would be “a population health disasterâ€, Mark Lambert, director of public health at Gateshead Primary Care Trust, told the medical newspaper Pulse, which has been conducting a campaign on the issue.
GPs complain that the changes in payments were introduced surreptitiously. Many are angry at the British Medical Association (BMA) for allowing the changes to go through.
To maximise coverage, GPs are paid extra if they achieve 90 per cent of childhood vaccines. Until April this was counted by totalling up four vaccines — MMR, DTP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis) polio and Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type b, a vaccine against bacterial meningitis). Doctors who achieved coverage of more than 90 per cent, with each vaccine counting for a quarter, were paid an average of £8,500 for a three-partner practice.
The rules then changed to reflect the introduction of a five-in-one vaccine, Pediacel, which covers diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, Hib and polio. This meant that the vaccine payments were based on just two vaccines, MMR and Pediacel.
Many parents remain reluctant to have their children immunised with MMR, a hangover from the discredited claims that it is linked to autism. Since it now counts for half of the calculation rather than a quarter, the low take-up means that many GPs cannot achieve the 90 per cent target. Instead, they get a lower payment on reaching 70 per cent — a significant drop in income.
Dr Jenny Lebus, a GP in Putney, southwest London, said that her practice had been assured that there had been no change in calculating targets.
“But at the end of June we failed to achieve our targets for two-year-olds for the first time, with a huge loss of income,†she said. “With warning, we might have been able to chase up a few. We were well over 90 per cent under the old scheme.â€
In Kent, the estimate is that the number of practices hitting the target has fallen from 92 per cent to 16 per cent. Dr Susan Toothill, from Sevenoaks, said that her practice was on course to lose £9,000 this year.
Pulse conducted a survey among GPs to assess the extent of the losses. The first 200 responses showed that one in seven GPs was considering not providing childhood vaccinations, and another 10 per cent said that they would not chase parents who had not actively sought vaccination.
The Department of Health said that, because only two vaccines are now administered, the workload is less and the pay cut justified. It also claimed that it offered the BMA a compromise that would have involved including meningitis C vaccinations in the target, but that this was rejected.
Dr Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the BMA GP committee (GPC), denied that this was ever offered formally. The GPC argues that the MMR target should be relaxed to allow GPs to count as vaccinated those children whose parents had been counselled but still refused MMR, but the department has declined.
So the negotiations are at a stalemate. Dr George Kassianos, spokesman on vaccination for the Royal College of General Practitioners, said: “There will be dire consequences, huge consequences. The department will have the biggest problem it has ever had on vaccination.â€
THIS MIGHT HURT
# Childhood immunisation is the single most effective medical intervention
# Polio, which killed 270 people in Britain in 1955, has been eliminated here
# A practice that reaches 90 per cent of children with MMR and the five-in-one jab gets a bonus. With MMR uptake in England at 81 per cent, for a bonus the average GP must give 99 per cent the five-in-one jab
# MMR uptake in London was 71.4 per cent in 2004, making a bonus impossible for the average doctor
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Mercury : Time To Pay Up Again
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Posted by sylvia on Saturday, March 25, 2006 (09:08:00)
OP ED News
By Evelyn Pringle
The generation of children injured by vaccines containing the mercury-based preservative thimerosal is now reaching puberty. Many of these children will require life-long care and support. The cost to their parents by today's standards, will reportedly exceed $2 million dollars for each child.
An ever-growing number of health care professionals point to thimerosal as the culprit behind the explosion in cases of autism and other neurological disorders. The only common thread connecting these damaged children to one another is their exposure to mercury through childhood immunizations.
Accountability from vaccine makers is something that parents of injured children have been seeking for years; but accountability appears more illusive with each year's passage. On October 27 2005, the Hartford Courant reported that "Congress is considering a bill that would allow the government to order that vaccines be given to every U.S. citizen in a national emergency, even if a vaccine has previously harmed some people."
The Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005 (S 1873), is being pushed through Congress without giving voters the chance to make their objections known to their elected officials.
Nicknamed "Bioshield Two," the bill's primary sponsor, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), claims the Act will give the Department of Health and Human Services "additional authority and resources to partner with the private sector to rapidly develop drugs and vaccines."
Co-sponsored by Senators Bill Frist (R-TN), Mike Enzi (R-WY), and Judd Gregg (R-NH), the Act will in truth, eliminate current regulatory and legal safeguards applied to vaccines.
What kind of profits need protecting? A good example is GlaxoSmithKline, which predicts that some of its new vaccines will become blockbusters with projected sales of more than $1 billion a year, according to Reuters on June 30, 2005. Glaxo aims to launch five major vaccines by 2010, it said.
Another example, for people who believe there’s no profit in vaccine making, “tell it to Wyeth, a big drug maker whose vaccine Prevnar ... costs more than $250 for the four-dose treatment given to infants,†says Kristine Severyn, PhD, author of the report, Profits, Not Science, Motivate Vaccine Mandates Vaccine Policy Institute.
Despite the price, "the government has recommended that all infants get the vaccine, and insurers generally pay for it - as does the federal Vaccines for Children program for low-income families. Prevnar, with sales expected to top $1 billion this year," says Severyn.
Severyn's predictions were right on. According to Wyeth's 2005 first quarter earnings report, Prevnar achieved net revenue of $391 million, more than double the first quarter earnings in 2004.
Bush’s FY2006 budget proposes to improve access to vaccines by allowing underinsured children to receive Vaccines for Children at state and local health clinics. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that cost of the proposal will be $140 million in 2006, and $700 million over the 2006-2010 period.
How much does this sort of government protection cost? For starters, according to the Center for Public Integrity, the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), is the industry's trade organization and it has topped the list of pharmaceutical lobbying spending since 1998, shelling out $74 million. Its members include 16 of the industry's 20 largest companies and their subsidiaries and its current president is Billy Tauzin, is a former Republican congressman from Louisiana.
In the 2002 election cycle, PhRMA gave $3,505,052 with 95% going to Republicans. The top recipient in the Senate was none other than Senator Richard Burr, who received $288,684, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. So far in the 2006 cycle, Gregg has received over $106,000 and Enzi has taken in $21,000 in pharma money.
Frist is a real piece of work. He has been trying to get a law passed to protect the drug companies for years. In 2002, he was behind the dead of night insertion of a provision into the Homeland Security bill that would have immunized vaccine makers from lawsuits related to thimerosal.
Frist has made millions upon millions profiting off human misery. The basis of the family fortune is the Hospital Corporation of America, the largest for-profit hospital conglomerate in the nation. However, the corporation also paid the largest health care settlement in history of more than $1.7 billion in civil and criminal penalties to settle charges of massive Medicare and Medicaid billing fraud.
Until recently, Frist and his wife owned $26 million worth of HCA stock. They are currently being investigated on charges of insider trading in the sale of HCA stock in the weeks immediately before the stock's value plummeted, and conflict of interest charges involving his ownership of HCA stock which he had previously claimed he knew nothing about because in accordance with ethics rules, it was in a "blind trust."
According to the Center for Justice and Democracy, Frist has received more than $2.3 million from doctors, health insurers, drug companies and others in the health care industry, raising more cash from health-care interests than 98% of his colleagues. In return, his legislative work in the Senate consists of almost nothing but trying to push through laws to increase profits for his number one backer.
Its worth noting that while Frist was its chairman, the pharmaceutical industry was also the largest single contributor to the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, doling out about $4 million, with Eli Lilly, the company that invented thimerosal, being the single biggest contributor, giving $1.6 million.
The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a watchdog advocacy group, is highly critical of the pending protection legislation. According to the group's President, Barbara Loe Fisher, "It is a big lie that drug companies have been driven out of business by lawsuits in the past two decades.†The NVIC calls the Act "a drug company stockholder's dream and a consumer's worst nightmare."
According to NVIC, currently there are at least ten different bills pending in Congress that will contain provisions to shield drug companies from lawsuits including S3, S975, S1437, S1828, S1873, S1880, HR650, HR3154, HR3970, and HR4245.
"This proposed legislation," Fisher told UPI, "is an unconstitutional attempt by some in Congress to give a taxpayer-funded handout to pharmaceutical companies for drugs and vaccines the government can force all citizens to use while absolving everyone connected from any responsibility for injuries and deaths which occur."
The bill establishes the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA), as the single authority for the advanced research and development of drugs and vaccines and grants the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, the sole authority to determine whether a drug maker violated drug safety laws. In addition, the Act specifically bars citizens from challenging the Secretary's rulings in court.
BARDA will be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act, to ensure that no evidence related to injuries caused by vaccines classified as "countermeasures" will become public.
"It means that, if an American is injured by an experimental flu or anthrax vaccine he or she is mandated to take," Fisher told UPI, "that citizen will be banned from exercising the Constitutional right to a jury trial even if it is revealed that the vaccine maker engaged in criminal fraud and negligence in the manufacture of the vaccine."
In a November 15, 2005, letter to Senator Burr's staff director, Fisher describes S 1873 as "arguably unconstitutional" because it (1) lacks transparency into the research, development, licensure and post-licensure surveillance of vaccines and drugs used in public health emergencies; (2) lacks accountability for either manufacturers of these products or government health officials who mandate their use without informed consent; and (3) lacks justice for those who will inevitably die or suffer chronic illnesses after being compelled to take these products.
“It is exactly this type of legislation that leads to civil disobedience and many times in the extreme form,†Dr Boyd Haley, a well-known expert on heavy metal toxicity, told this author, “I am very fearful of how certain segments of our society will respond to any mass vaccination program---especially if it does cause a problem like the thimerosal/autism situation,†he said.
As it stands today, if the Bush administration and its puppets in Congress achieve their common goal of protecting pharma profits by shielding vaccine makers from lawsuits, tax payers will have to foot the bill for the life-long costs of caring for millions of injured children.
Tax payers are already funding their special education needs. In a January 14, 2005, letter to a Congressional Subcommittee on Human Rights, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), informed committee members that the number of children diagnosed with autism served under the IDEA has increased by more than 500% in the last decade and that "about 1.5 million Americans are currently living with some form of autism."
In a recent interview with Teri Small published in the journal, Medical Veritas 2 (2005), Dr Geier said that he believes that this may be the greatest iatrogenic epidemic in history. "The damage already done to our society is already in the trillions of dollars," he warns. "The damage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that of the AIDS epidemic pale when compared to the current epidemic of autism," he told Veritas.
"All of us alive," Dr Geier says, "will have to bear its effects both in the lifetime care of the damaged children and the loss of what they otherwise might have contributed to our society."
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Mercury : Startling rise in autism stirs questions about the cause
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Posted by sylvia on Saturday, December 17, 2005 (14:08:26)
Kansas City October 2005
By Judy L. Thomas
Once considered rare, autism — a collection of neurologically based developmental disorders characterized by social withdrawal and repetitive behaviors — now afflicts 1 in 166 American children.
What’s more, the Autism Society of America estimates that the number of autistic children is growing by 10 percent to 17 percent every year.
U.S. Department of Education statistics show that in the past decade the number of children ages 6-21 who were diagnosed with autism and served under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act increased more than 500 percent.
In Kansas, the number of children served in 1993 was 147. In 2003, the number was 993, a 575 percent increase. In Missouri, 399 children were served in 1993, compared with 2,664 in 2003, a 568 percent increase.
“It is obvious from all accounts that there is a crisis in the United States regarding the dramatic rise in autism rates and the resulting strain placed on families, the education system, and state Medicaid and disability programs,†a congressional report concluded in 2003. “A further crisis will ensue in the next two decades when we see an explosion in the need for adult services and long-term housing.â€
The cause of autism has been hotly debated for years. Many experts think it involves a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
One theory is that the increase of mercury in childhood vaccines may have triggered a response in children who were genetically predisposed to being more vulnerable to neurological damage from mercury. But government health officials say that research indicates no connection between mercury in vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders.
The issue intensified in 1999, when health officials announced that thimerosal — a compound that is 49.6 percent mercury by weight — no longer would be used as a preservative in children’s vaccines. They stressed, however, that the action was merely precautionary.
But those who think there is a correlation between mercury and autism note that the alarming growth in autism cases coincided with an increase in the number of recommended childhood vaccines that contained thimerosal.
Throughout most of the 20th century, children were not required to receive many vaccines. The only vaccine routinely given to infants that contained thimerosal was the DTP vaccine. It contained 25 micrograms of ethylmercury and was administered three times in the first six months of life, with a total of four times in two years.
But in 1991, when the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began recommending the hepatitis B vaccine and increased the doses of Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccine, the amount of mercury exposure to infants increased significantly.
Many Hib vaccines contained 25 micrograms of mercury and, like the DTP vaccines, were given three times in the first six months and a total of four times in the first two years. The hepatitis B vaccine contained 12.5 micrograms of mercury and was given shortly after birth, then two more times in the first six months of life.
That means babies receiving the recommended vaccines at their checkups went from getting 25 micrograms of mercury in one day to up to 62.5 micrograms in one day.
The daily limit set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is 0.1 microgram of methylmercury for every kilogram of body weight. For an 11-pound baby — about the weight of a 2-month old — the daily limit would have been about 0.5 micrograms. So that baby would have received 125 times the EPA’s daily threshold.
How did this happen?
In 1997, Congress ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to determine the effects of mercury on the human body through foods and drugs.
But when the agency examined the amounts of ethylmercury being injected into children, it faced a problem: The effects of ethylmercury had not been studied as extensively as methylmercury — the kind found in seafood — and the government had not established safety limits for ethylmercury exposure.
As a result, the agency ended up comparing the exposure from the vaccines with the federal limits for methylmercury exposure. And what they found was that the cumulative amount of mercury in the vaccines exceeded the EPA’s threshold.
“For years, nobody sat down to do the math to figure it out,†said U.S. Rep. Dave Weldon, a Florida Republican who has introduced legislation in Congress to ban the use of mercury in childhood vaccines.
That delayed discovery led the FDA and other agencies in 1999 to recommend, but not order, the removal of thimerosal from most childhood vaccines.
A June 29, 1999, e-mail sent to colleagues by a former senior FDA official said the news would “raise questions about FDA 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.â€
“We must keep in mind that the dose of ethylmercury was not generated by ‘rocket science’: conversion of the percentage of thimerosal to actual ug (micrograms) of mercury involves 9th grade algebra,†the FDA official wrote. “What took the FDA so long to do the calculations? Why didn’t CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations while rapidly expanding the childhood immunization schedule?â€
Those who have studied the issue say it could take a few more years before it is known whether thimerosal causes autism.
“Time will tell,†said David Kirby, author of Evidence of Harm, a new book about the controversy over mercury in vaccines. “One way or another, this is all going to come out.â€
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Mercury : Autism: the mercury trail
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Posted by sylvia on Friday, September 30, 2005 (11:34:55)
NewsStatesman August 2005
By Margaret Cook
Powerful evidence points to a preservative in vaccines as the likely culprit.
The classic juvenile tactic to get out of a scrape is to deny it vehemently, even if that means claiming black is white. Curiously, governments adopt the same technique, reinforcing their indignant denials with name-calling.
This has been the response from both US and British establishments to parental fears that autism is causally related to vaccines. Andrew Wakefield was sent packing after he suggested MMR vaccines were suspect. His failure to declare an interest in connection with his research was used to destroy his career, even though his lapse pales into insignificance beside the conflicting incentives present in the entire chain of vaccine-policy command from Cabinet Office to consulting room.
But it is more difficult to bully away the question of mercury in vaccines and its putative link with autism. A book published in the US this year, Evidence of Harm by David Kirby, makes a compel-ling case. Any unbiased doctor who reads it, following the golden rules of listening to the parents' stories and assessing the evidence the book quotes, cannot fail to be persuaded.
Yet the response in the British Medical Journal, in a review by Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, is to rubbish it in a hectoring tirade, the theme of which is that parents are not reliable witnesses and the experts know best. How dare the parents side with "credulous journalists" and defy the "authoritative US Institute of Medicine"?
Since 1939 a preservative called thiomersal (thimerosal in the US) has been used in some vaccines, and it contains nearly 50 per cent mercury. Mercury is a nerve-cell poison, but the amounts in vaccines were said to be "traces" only. It was used in, among others, the diphtheria/tetanus/ pertussis vaccine given in three doses early in infancy. It is not present in MMR or other vaccines containing live viruses. In the US, pre-school vaccinations are compulsory and, under this blanket, jabs upon jabs were added to make a worryingly crowded programme.
It was nearly a decade before the Food and Drug Administration added up the mercury being injected into infants in the first few months of life, and then it found that it was well in excess of federal legal limits even for adults. In 1999 regulators in the US and Europe advised phasing out mercury in childhood vaccines in the shortest possible time - while continuing to deny it was harmful. Believe that if you will.
Autism and related disorders were un-known before 1939. The exponential in-crease in recent years seems to parallel the rising number of mercury-containing vaccines given at an ever earlier age. The infant blood-brain barrier is not developed until six months of age, and it is to be expected that even minuscule amounts of this cumulative toxin can do harm. A causal association between the metal and autistic disorders is wholly biologically plausible. Epidemiological studies have come up with conflicting results, depending on the mindset of the researcher.
There is evidence that autistic children have a (probably genetic) problem in excreting mercury. It now seems likely that these predisposed children, burdened and immuno-suppressed with toxic metal, then given a dose of MMR live vaccine, suffered a triple whammy causing full-blown autism. The history obtained from parents of children with autism is consistent and should not be dismissed so contemptuously as the reviewer Fitzpatrick did. The story that a child progressed normally until an adverse reaction to a vaccine seemed to tip him or her into a slide into autism is heard again and again.
The extraordinary increase in autism among children - one child in 166 now suffers from an autism spectrum disor- der - cannot be explained away by better recognition and diagnosis, as claimed by psychiatrists. If it were so, where are all the adults with covert autism?
So worried was the US government about the mercury question that a rider barring thiomersal litigation was tacked on at the 11th hour to the (unconnected) Homeland Security Bill 2002 - a sign of the US health, federal and industrial establishments ganging up to evade a mercury fallout.
Mercury was removed from UK infant vaccines in 2004. Parents of autistic children in the UK struggle to engage the support of public services, and many find that physical symptoms are ignored. Autism is compartmentalised as a mental illness and doctors tend to leave it to psychiatrists. Gastro-intestinal aspects of autism were Wakefield's speciality, and look what happened to him.
Yet this disease needs to be wrested back into mainstream medicine and that will happen only when the establishment seriously addresses the theory of mercury as a contributory cause.
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Mercury : Two Sides: Wrangle over autism refuses to subside
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Posted by sylvia on Saturday, August 06, 2005 (13:17:20)
JournalNow.com 26/06/05
Wesley Sykes is in a rage. Dinner was late. His cup held water, not soda. Strangers had stolen his mother's attention all afternoon. It was too much for the 9-year-old autistic child to bear. He began to flap his arms and shriek, working himself into murderous screams that shatter his suburban home and all hope of a normal life.
His mother, the Rev. Lisa Sykes, has her own rage against the demon she blames for Wesley's condition. It is thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that she received in a shot during pregnancy and he received in childhood vaccines.
To Sykes, a pastor in Richmond, Va., this is a just crusade. To most scientists, it's a leap of faith. The levels of mercury in vaccines - now and in the past - do not cause autism, they repeatedly have declared.
But not everyone is convinced. Seven years after it began, the debate over vaccines and autism just won't die.
In fact, it appears to be finding new life. Several churches have started a grass-roots movement to rid vaccines of mercury. A new book on the issue is getting attention. A Kennedy has entered the fray.
"I think this issue has persisted despite a boatload of scientific evidence ... because there are no answers for parents of children with autism," said Dr. Sharon Humiston, a pediatrician at the University of Rochester who has a foot in both worlds. She once worked for the government's National Immunization Program, and she has a son whose autism she refuses to blame on vaccines.
Medical controversies flourish when science is lacking. In this case, both sides have limited science, and each criticizes the other's.
Vested interests make it tough to know whom to believe. Many parents have filed lawsuits. Many scientists have ties to vaccine-makers or are selling their expertise in court cases. Government officials don't want people to turn away from vaccines, which have clearly benefited public health.
Both sides also have credibility problems. Opponents at first accused the measles vaccine, which never contained the preservative, of causing autism. The government defended a troubled pertussis vaccine for more than 10 years before switching to a safer version.
"There's conflict on all sides," said David Kirby, the author of Evidence of Harm, a book urging more research.
There are two main questions:
• Did older vaccines, which contained more thimerosal than the trace amounts in modern ones, raise the risk of autism?
• Are there risks today? Flu vaccine sold in multidose vials still contains thimerosal, and the government urges flu shots for pregnant women and young children even though not enough thimerosal-free ones are available, critics say.
Finding answers is tough because autism, a little-understood developmental disorder, is often diagnosed at the very ages when children get vaccines.
The stories are remarkably similar: A seemingly normal child gets a shot, and days, weeks or months later, withdraws from the world, stops speaking, becomes upset at random stimulation such as a doorbell, and adopts such compulsive behaviors as head-banging.
Parents blame vaccines, but "that doesn't make it true, no matter how strongly they believe it," said Dr. Steve Goodman, a biostatistician at Johns Hopkins University who served on an Institute of Medicine panel convened last year to take an independent look at the evidence, which it found unconvincing.
Beliefs and evidence are things that Sykes, the pastor of Richmond's Christ United Methodist Church, understands. A soft-spoken woman, she does not come off as a radical. She has a degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. The daughter of two CIA employees, she was brought up to trust the government.
"I dare them to call me hysterical," she said. "I'm the last one who should be screaming conspiracy."
Her son was a normal, active baby. A photo shows Wesley clutching an Elmo doll, his blue eyes shining and aware. But in a later photo, taken after autism had set in, Wesley stares vacantly next to his smiling brother.
Through a local autism group, Sykes heard that a doctor was advising cod-liver oil as a treatment. She gave it to Wesley for three days, then tried an experiment on her son, who had stopped responding even to screams. "Wesley," she said. He looked up at her.
Sykes was sold. She tracked down the doctor, Mary Megson, who did a test on Wesley that showed a level of mercury that flowed off the chart.
"That was my baptism into this issue," Sykes said. During pregnancy, she had been given a shot to prevent problems because she and her baby had a mismatched blood factor. Now, she learned that the drug contained thimerosal, which is half mercury. The additive was also in most childhood vaccines and had been used since the 1930s to prevent bacterial contamination, especially in multidose vials.
By November 1997, Congress was getting complaints. It ordered the Food and Drug Administration to review mercury in vaccines, drugs and food. The government and a doctors' group said that there was no evidence of harm but that vaccine-makers should move toward eliminating thimerosal to be safe. It wasn't until 1999 that vaccines with only trace amounts of thimerosal started to be introduced. By then, parents had organized. Barbara Loe Fisher, a Virginia mom who is the president of the National Vaccine Information Center, which had successfully campaigned for the safer pertussis vaccine, was disturbed that federal officials didn't order thimerosal removed.
She believes a theory, supported by many, that a subset of kids can't handle mercury because of a genetic or other kind of predisposition. Some scientists say that it might be something else in the vaccines, such as aluminum, or a hyper-reaction to the vaccine itself. There's a 3 percent to 8 percent recurrence rate of autism in families, and the disorder is four times more common in boys - more suggestion of a genetic link.
The experiences of a suburban Kansas City family suggest such a link. The afternoon after Kelly Kerns' 2-month-old daughter, Kaylee, got several vaccines was "living hell," her mother said. The child screamed and arched her back.
When Kaylee was 18 months old, her white-blonde hair began falling out, and she stopped talking. Meanwhile, Kerns had twin boys - Andrew and Daniel. When they were 15 months old, they received three vaccines. A week later, they stopped talking. All three children have since been found to be autistic.
In June 2000, government officials, scientists and vaccine-makers held an invitation-only meeting at a Georgia retreat to review safety data that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had from several large HMOs.
The CDC's Dr. Tom Verstraeten presented results of a crude analysis suggesting that mercury might be linked to some problems such as language delays. As for autism, "we don't see much of a trend except for a slight, but not significant, increase for the highest exposure," he said, according to a transcript that vaccine opponents have posted on the Internet.
Fights over limits to damages that families could ask for in lawsuits followed. They drew the attention of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer and environmentalist.
Kennedy, who has promoted the issue on news shows, said that when he looked at the government's evidence, it was "laughably flawed."
"It was clear to me that the reports they're relying on are 'cigarette science,'" he said, referring to tobacco companies' past arguments that there was no proof that cigarettes caused cancer.
Meanwhile at Sykes' home, the day that melted down with her son's screams was turning into night. Wesley has drifted off to sleep. The phone's incessant ringing stops. Sykes' husband, Seth, returns home from work.
Later, Wesley wakes up and finishes his dinner. He cuddles with his dad in the recliner and watches TV before going to bed.
There will be more tantrums, more battles, more tears for the Sykes family.
But for a rare moment, everything seems normal. There is just sweet, blessed peace.
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