Letter from Shamez Kanji to the Wall Street Journal:
Dear Sir / Madam,
Your editorial on Politicizing Vaccines (WSJ 11/18) displayed a surprising
ignorance of the facts surrounding the thimerisol lawsuits given your
surprisingly strong point of view that these suits do not belong in the
court system. Thimerisol was a non-essential component of a number of
childhood vaccines that lowered the cost of delivering vaccines for drug
companies. It is an anti-bacterial formulated with 50% mercury, one of
the most potent neurotoxins known to man. It was used to prevent
contamination of multidose vials of vaccines, which are cheaper to
manufacture and ship than single dose vials which do not require a
preservative. During the 1990s it was injected into children's arms
starting on the day of their birth.
In 1991, public health authorities introduced a slew of new vaccines and
mandated their administration earlier in life. After that time, babies
received (on average) 190 micrograms of mercury by being injected with
thimerisol. When the FDA finally did the math in the late 1990s, they
realized that babies were receiving up to 128x the recommended maximum
daily exposure of mercury for an adult.
In 1999, the National Academy of Sciences (not some Clinton stooges as
your editorial implies) recommended the removal of thimerisol from
vaccines. Scientific researchers and doctors began examining the
connection between vaccine mercury exposure and neurological disorders
including autism. The details of that research are too rich and complex
for this letter, but I suggest that your editorial writer reads them.
Suffice it to say that a broad base of research shows that mercury had a
dramatic impact on the development of certain groups of susceptible
children (susceptible for reasons as various as enzymatic deficiencies to
the fact that they had a cold on the day they were vaccinated). The
research shows that mercury from preservatives may have had a major role
in the dramatic increase in autism during the 1990s. It also may have led
to increases in other neurological disorders that effect millions of
children (ADHD, speech and language disorders, etc).
The CDC and NIH are not jumping forward to fund the massive research that
is required to fully understand the magnitude of the problems created, and
how, if at all, it is possible to reverse the damage done to these
children. The reason for this is obvious -- they share blame for creating
this problem by increasing the number of vaccines administered that
contained mercury. Neal Halsey, head of the CDC's vaccine program through
the 1990s has famously stated that the CDC never examined the amount of
thimerisol in vaccines because they didn't realize how much mercury was in
it -- ooops. One of the main objectives of the thimerisol law suits is to
force the vaccine manufacturers to disclose what they know about
thimerisol and to fund further research. The objective is not to enrich
plaintiff's attorneys as your editorial alleges. Incidentally, the only
human trial the vaccine companies did on the safety of thimerisol ended in
the deaths of all the patients involved.
If you want to make the argument that parents who have seen their children
dissolve into autism should lose their quest for answers and justice in
the court system, you are free to do so. Do not, however, imply that the
underlying issues are spurious or driven by plaintiff's attorneys. That
is both ignorant of the facts and an insult to families and children who
have suffered so much. The Wall Street Journal should be better than
that.
Sincerely,
Shamez Kanji
Boston, MA
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