It is very risky, if not perilous, to assume that those in positions of
responsibility are responsible.1
—David McCullough
Autism is just a bullshit name that they give our children because they can’t admit that they’re vaccine injured.2
—Polly Tommey
Top-ranking vaccine insiders—believers and sociopaths alike—devised a plan to pull off the illusion that vaccines do not cause autism. The plan included the following elements:
1. Direct the “independent” Institute of Medicine to make a statement declaring that vaccines do not cause autism and that no further research funds should be spent to prove otherwise,
2. Gin up several “outside” studies designed to reach the preordained conclusion that thimerosal does not cause autism,
3. Conduct internal epidemiological studies designed to reach the pre-ordained conclusion that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism,
4. Hide and/or destroy evidence that substantiates the link between vaccines and autism,
5. Hinder or block public access to government data including the Vaccine Safety Datalink and the data used to create the fraudulent 2004 CDC paper that concluded that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism,
6. Take the focus off of vaccines by funding research into non-vaccine-related causes of autism,
7. Deny funding for vaccine-induced autism research and biomedical treatment of autism,
8. Intimidate scientists who research the relationship between vaccines and autism, and
9. Have Department of Justice lawyers lie in the Vaccine Court about the known and proven link between vaccines and autism.
The plan hit pay dirt in 2009 when a government-funded “special master” with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program ruled in favor of government-funded lawyers, throwing out more than 5,000 claims filed by parents who had watched their children regress into autism following vaccination.3
The aggregate frauds committed from 2000 to 2010 (the year the General Medical Council stripped Dr. Andrew Wakefield and Professor John Walker-Smith of their medical licenses) have without doubt impacted the lives of more people than any other frauds perpetrated in the history of medical science. Every person on the planet is affected to a lesser or greater degree. The details of this crime against humanity fill volumes and will yet fill many more. A brief telling of the story follows:
On January 12th, 2001, the Institute of Medicine’s Immunization Safety Review Committee held a closed meeting. Dr. Marie McCormick, committee chair, laid out the ground rules at the meeting’s start assuring participants that the “closed session transcripts will never be shared with anybody outside the committee and the staff.”4 The transcripts were later leaked, revealing both the IOM’s master and its mandate. It’s important to note that Dr. Dick Johnston, the concrete thinking “vaccinologist” who chaired the Simpsonwood meeting and who would never inject a thimerosal-containing vaccine into his own grandchildren, was present at this meeting, as well. Following are a few quotations from McCormick and Dr. Kathleen Stratton, a member of IOM staff and study director of the committee:
DR. MCCORMICK: [The CDC] wants us to declare, well, these things are pretty safe on a population basis [p. 33].
DR. STRATTON: The point of no return, the line we will not cross in public policy is pull the vaccine, change the schedule. We could say it is time to revisit this, but we would never recommend that level. Even recommending research is recommendations for policy. We wouldn’t say compensate, we wouldn’t say pull the vaccine, we wouldn’t say stop the program. [p. 74]
DR. MCCORMICK: We wouldn’t talk about the policy of exemptions, but we could certainly talk about the implications of not immunizing, for whatever reason. [p. 74]
DR. MCCORMICK: . . . we are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect . . . . [p. 97]5
The IOM held a second closed door meeting on March 10, 2001, which included the following exchange between committee member Dr. Gerald Medoff and McCormick:
DR. MEDOFF: You just want us to say the evidence favors rejection of the hypothesis?
DR. MCCORMICK: Yes, that’s what they want to say.6
True to McCormick’s word, the IOM committee later issued the following “Causality Conclusions”: “The committee concludes that the evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism. The committee concludes that the evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between MMR vaccine and autism.”7
The committee also recommended that “available funding for autism research be channeled to the most promising areas,” while recommending against further investigation into the relationship between vaccines and autism:
At this time, the committee does not recommend a policy review of the licensure of MMR vaccine or of the current schedule and recommendations for the administration of the MMR vaccine.
At this time, the committee does not recommend a policy review of the current schedule and recommendations for the administration of routine childhood vaccines based on hypotheses regarding thimerosal and autism.
Given the lack of direct evidence for a biological mechanism and the fact that all well-designed epidemiological studies provide evidence of no association between thimerosal and autism, the committee recommends that cost-benefit assessments regarding the use of thimerosal-containing versus thimerosal-free vaccines and other biological or pharmaceutical products, whether in the United States or other countries, should not include autism as a potential risk.8
Surely, the committee’s final recommendation earned the approval of the vaccine sociopath John Clements with the World Health Organization who told his Simpsonwood peers that the Verstraeten study never should have been done.
In 2005, key members of both the Senate and the House reviewed a 55-page document titled “Conflicts of Interest: How the CDC Exerted Influence over the 5 Epidemiological Studies Used to Dismiss the thimerosal-Autism Link.”9, 10 The document highlighted pervasive conflicts of interest in five European-based studies the IOM used to support its conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism, including the CDC’s relationship with one of the major players in the studies, Poul Thorsen, who later played the CDC when he absconded with almost two million dollars earmarked for vaccine research.11 According to Dr. William Thompson, Thorsen continues to share his loot and his love in Denmark with Diana Schendel, a former CDC researcher.12 Thorsen’s story gets full book coverage in James Ottar Grundvig’s 2016 publication of Master Manipulator: The Explosive True Story of Fraud, Embezzlement, and Government Betrayal at the CDC.13
In addition to the European studies, the government presentation notes that the IOM also reviewed the 2003 Verstraeten et al. study, which, after five revisions, had managed to erase the association between thimerosal and autism. The document exposed the tangled web of relationships and crooked methodologies that led to the IOM’s faulty if not fraudulent report. The conclusions follow:
• The CDC NIP [National Immunization Program] is both vaccine advocate and vaccine safety watchdog for the United States, which constitutes a huge conflict of interest.
• The CDC funded the IOM VSR [Vaccine Safety Review] Committee and all associated activities.
• The CDC had both monetary and personnel connections to all five epidemiology studies used as the basis of the final IOM VSR Committee Reports conclusions on causality between thimerosal and autism.
• Coauthors on all five epidemiological studies used as the basis for the IOM VSR Committee 5/14/04 report final conclusion have direct ties to vaccine manufacturers.14
As previously cited, the vaccine-informed public gained additional information regarding the CDC fraud that influenced the IOM’s incorrect 2004 conclusion when Dr. William Thompson passed thousands of documents to Representative Bill Posey in 2014. Dr. Brian Hooker, the scientist who recorded four of numerous conversations with Thompson, coauthored a complaint dated October 14, 2014, with Dr. Andrew Wakefield and James Moody, JD. Addressed to Dr. Harold Jaffee, MD, MA, CDC’s associate director for science, and Dr. Don Wright, MD, MPH, acting director of the HHS’s Office of Research Integrity, the three men identify the key players and the far-reaching consequences in what Thompson described as CDC fraud. Following are a few excerpts:
We write to report apparent research misconduct by senior investigators within the National Immunization Program (NIP), Battelle Memorial Institute at the Centers for Public Health Evaluation (CPHE), and the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD), and to request an immediate investigation.
The Analysis Plan dated September 5, 2001 [Exhibit 2] set forth the objective of the research reported in the above-titled article, to compare ages at first MMR vaccination between children with autism and children who did not have autism, and to test the hypothesis that age of first MMR vaccination is associated with autism risk.
The research team . . . found statistically significant associations between the age of first MMR and autism in (a) the entire autism cohort, (b) African-American children, and (c) children with “isolated” autism, a subset defined by The Group as those with autism and without comorbid developmental disabilities.
However, valid results pertaining to the latter groups (b) and (c), crucial to resolving the debate over MMR and autism causality, obtained according to the Analysis Plan, were omitted from The Paper. The concealed results rendered The Paper’s conclusion false and misleading: “we found that, overall, the age at time of first MMR administration was similar among case and control children.” . . .
This false and misleading report contributed to the CDC’s conclusion that MMR vaccine did and does not cause autism, to rejection of a causal association by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), and to denial of compensation mandated by Congress in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP).15
Thompson was assigned to present the CDC’s fraudulent findings to the IOM in its Vaccine Safety Review scheduled for February 9, 2004. “As the date approached he became more and more uneasy about the prospect of presenting false and misleading findings.”16 Breaking protocol, the conflicted researcher wrote directly to CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding, informing her, “I will have to present several problematic results relating to statistical associations between receipt of the MMR vaccine and autism.”17 Thompson’s job was threatened, he was replaced at the IOM meeting by the serial liar, Dr. Frank DeStefano, and he signed off on the fraudulent paper. More than 10 years later, treating Hooker as a friend, confidant, and priest, Thompson confessed,
. . . I was basically telling this guy [Thompson’s whistleblower lawyer] I was complicit, and I went along with this, we did not report significant findings. . . . I’m not proud of that . . . it’s the lowest point in my career that I went along with that paper. . . . When I talk to you [Dr. Hooker], you have a son with autism. I have great shame now when I meet families with kids with autism because I have been part of the problem. . . . Here’s what I shoulder. I shoulder that the CDC has put the research ten years behind. Because the CDC has not been transparent, we’ve missed ten years of research because the CDC is so paralyzed right now by anything related to autism. They’re not doing what they should be doing because they’re afraid to look for things that might be associated.18
As previously cited, Congressman Bill Posey quoted Thompson on the floor of the House in July 2015, describing the MMR vaccine’s particularly devastating effects on black children.19
Representative Dave Weldon, MD, scolded the IOM in its February 2004 meeting for taking part in a culture that persecutes scientists who pursue the link between vaccines and autism:
I must begin by sharing how disappointed I am by the number of reports I continue to receive from researchers regarding their difficulties in pursuing answers to these questions. It is past time that individuals are persecuted for asking questions about vaccine safety; we have recognized error before in the case of live polio, whole-cell pertussis, and rotavirus.
I am repeatedly informed by researchers who encounter apathy from government officials charged with investigating these matters, difficulty in getting their papers published, and the loss of research grants. Some report overt discouragement, intimidation and threats, and have abandoned this field of research. Some have had their clinical privileges revoked and others have been hounded out of their institutions. . . .
This atmosphere of intimidation even surrounds today’s hearing. I received numerous complaints that this event is not a further attempt to get at the facts but rather a desire to sweep these issues under the rug.20
Considering the abundant evidence, it’s apparent to honest investigators that when the CDC trashed damning evidence that contributed to the IOM’s flawed findings and antiscientific recommendations, it also trashed the lives of millions of people who would fall victim to their treachery. Further treachery occurred when the CDC lost or destroyed the original data sets Verstraeten used to calculate his original, never-published findings.21 If that were not enough, in 2002, the CDC paid the American Association of Health Plans (AAHP) to hide the Vaccine Safety Datalink from public access, preventing independent researchers from uncovering its secrets.22
In spite of the IOM’s recommendation that no further vaccine-autism research be done, the CDC just can’t seem to leave it alone. The AAP’s journal Pediatrics published one of the more recent and more absurd CDC studies in 2013. The first name attached to the paper is none other than Frank DeStefano, the man who played a major role in erasing the autism signal in both Verstraeten’s study and the CDC’s fraudulent MMR study. The researchers found that “Increasing Exposure to Antibody-Stimulating Proteins and Polysaccharides in Vaccines Is Not Associated with Risk of Autism,” leading them to conclude that vaccines are not associated with autism.23 The late Dr. Mayer Eisenstein got such a laugh out of the paper that he posted an April Fools’ Day critique:
The following study must have been prepared especially for April Fools Day. It appeared in the March 29th issue of The Journal of Pediatrics. . . . What a nonsensical study! And the best response to that was in the Philadelphia newspaper. . . . “You have to be kidding me! Did I read this right? Children with autism and those without have the same total exposure to vaccine antigens. That is like saying, because I smoked as much as the guy down the street and he got cancer and I did not, smoking does not cause cancer. The one with cancer and the one without were both exposed to the same amount of smoke.”
You know, the real study is finding unvaccinated children and I’m blessed to have over 50,000 of them in my 40 years of practice. Virtually no autism! Virtually none! And I’ve made this statement now for more than 10 years. And yet we’ve had virtually no one come forth and say, “I have no vaccines in my children and they have autism.” But it’s more than autism. It’s autism, ADD, ADHD, peanut allergy. All these things have some kind of link to vaccines.24
Dr. Brian Hooker trashed the paper for its lack of new data, meaningless antigen correlation, selection bias due to high participant refusal rate, overmatching statistical error, lack of an unvaccinated control group, autism variances from neurotypical children not studied, and CDC conflicts of interest. Hooker concluded,
Of all of the papers I have reviewed over my 26-year career as a research scientist, this is perhaps the most flawed and disingenuous study I have encountered. The DeStefano et al. 2013 study is to science what the movie Ishtar was to cinema.25
In spite of the government’s efforts to convince parents that their children’s regression into autism was not related to vaccines, parents didn’t buy it. They knew what their kids were like prior to vaccinating; they were with their kids through the fevers, the lethargy, and the high-pitched screams. They grieved as their children faded away right before their eyes. The Department of Justice lumped over 5,000 of the parents’ claims together in a process that was anything but just. “Special magistrates” heard six cases and applied their findings to all the other cases. George Hastings, Jr., the special magistrate in the Cedillo case, expressed “deep sympathy and admiration” for the family and expressed contempt for doctors who mislead parents into believing that vaccines cause autism, which is, in Hastings’s opinion, “gross medical misjudgment.”26
Hannah Poling, one of the original six case subjects in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding (OAP), was removed, and her case was heard prior to the OAP. Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a senior pediatric neurologist from Johns Hopkins, served as the government’s expert witness in the Poling case. In 2006, Zimmerman coauthored a paper with Hannah Poling’s father, John Poling, and two other researchers.27
The paper concluded that not only did vaccines cause Hannah’s autism, it also described the mechanism by which the injury occurred:
The cause for regressive encephalopathy in Hannah at age 19 months was underlying mitochondrial dysfunction, exacerbated by vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation that exceeded metabolic energy reserves. This acute expenditure of metabolic reserves led to permanent irreversible brain injury.28
On a side note, Hannah’s mitochondrial disorder is not rare. Her mother has the same disorder with no clinical manifestations. Dr. Wakefield wrote that approximately 20% of autistic children have mitochondrial disorder and “as many as 1 in 50 to 1 in 200 children might carry the DNA mutation that predisposes them to vaccine-induced mitochondrial disorder.”29
The two Department of Justice lawyers in the Poling hearing, Lynn Ricciardella and Vincent Matonoski, concurred with the court’s ruling to award money to Hannah’s parents for their daughter’s injury, and they conceded the mechanism of injury as explained by their expert witness, Dr. Zimmerman. The case was closed and the records were sealed.
When Ricciardella and Matonoski argued on behalf of the government and against the parents in the OAP, Zimmerman provided the lawyers with a different report that claimed, “There is no scientific basis for a connection between measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine or mercury (Hg) intoxication and autism.” Matonoski quoted Zimmerman in his closing arguments saying, “We know [Dr. Zimmerman’s] views on this.” He and his partner in crime did indeed know Zimmerman’s “views on this.” They knew that Zimmerman was lying. They knew because they had conceded the Hannah Poling case based on Zimmerman’s previous report, which clearly implicated vaccines in Hannah’s regression into autism. Based on the lawyers’ presentation of Zimmerman’s deceptive report, the court threw out the six test cases and with them 5,000 similar cases.
Rolf Hazlehurst, assistant district attorney general for the State of Tennessee, is the father of Yates Hazlehurst, one of the six test cases that were thrown out due to Ricciardella and Matonoski’s use of Zimmerman’s second report. Hazlehurst appealed the case. Ricciardella represented the government in the appeal. The judge asked if perhaps the burden of proof on parents was too high. Surely there was some evidence that vaccines can cause autism in some cases. Ricciardella replied, “. . . [W]e are not even at a stage where [a link] is medically or scientifically possible.” Ricciardella’s statement was a lie. She had Zimmerman’s original report in her possession.
There is great irony in the fact that Matonoski and Ricciardella were representing the Department of Justice when their actions, combined with Zimmerman’s false report, resulted in the obstruction of justice, which in fact denied justice to the families in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding as well as to the families who would later appeal for help from the corrupted court system.
In opposition to Hazlehurst and tens of thousands of other parents around the world, Dr. Michael T. Brady, a pediatrician and spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the academy was “obviously very satisfied” with the omnibus ruling. He was hopeful “that pediatricians would meet less resistance from parents over vaccinating children.”30 Would the Academy be equally satisfied knowing that the omnibus rulings were the result of industry influence over government and obstruction of justice?
As an attorney, Hazlehurst is well qualified to make the following accusation:
The bottom line is that during the autism omnibus proceedings, the United States Department of Justice, representing the United States Department of Health and Human Services, willfully and intentionally concealed critical material evidence about how vaccines cause autism. . . .
Let me put that in perspective for you. If I did to a criminal, in a United States court of law, what the Department of Justice did to vaccine injured children in the so-called vaccine court, I would be disbarred and I would be facing criminal charges.31
Hazlehurst spoke of his experience in a 2013 congressional briefing, saying, “The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program is an absolute invitation for an abuse of power. That’s what I witnessed—a level of deceit, dishonesty and abuse of power which I would not have believed if I had not witnessed it for myself.”32
It is interesting to note that Zimmerman was never called as a witness in the omnibus cases. Why? Dr. Wakefield provides the probable answer: “I would speculate because under cross-examination that previous report might have emerged. But if he wasn’t there and there was no compulsion for him . . . in this court system to come forward, then it never happened and the case was denied.”33
The vaccine autism cover-up surely ranks among the greatest cover-ups in US and world history. The Age of Autism website summarized the situation in a blog titled “The Vaccine Autism Link”:
Autism is the defining disorder of our Age and points to the terrible state of health care in America, the suppression of free speech and the triumph of a kind of political correctness that is essentially a smiling mask for good old-fashioned bullying.34
One only needs to examine what the Unholy Trinity has added to the US schedule since the year 2000 to see why the worst of the autism epidemic as well as a host of other disorders is likely yet to come:
• 2000 – Pneumococcal conjugate vaccine
• 2003 – Intranasal influenza vaccine – trivalent
• 2005 – Meningococcal conjugate vaccine for adolescents
• 2005 – Tdap vaccine for adolescents
• 2006 – HPV vaccine for adolescent girls
• 2006 – Rotavirus vaccine (RotaTeq®)
• 2006 – Shingles vaccine (60 yrs & older)
• 2008 – Rotavirus vaccine (RotaRix®)
• 2009 – HPV vaccine for adolescent boys
• 2013 – Inactivated and intranasal influenza vaccine – quadrivalent
• 2014 – Meningococcal B vaccine licensed
• 2015 – 9vHPV (Merck’s Gardasil 9 replaced the prior 4-valent version)
• 2015 – FDA approved Quadracel, a new combination DTaP+IPV vaccine for use in children age 4–6 years.
• 2015 – FDA approved new injectable influenza vaccine, Fluad, for use in people age 65 years and older.
• 2015 – FDA expanded Gardasil 9 licensure to include males age 16–26 years.
• 2016 – FDA approved Hiberix for full Hib vaccine series.
• 2016 – ACIP voted that live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) should not be used during the 2016–2017 flu season.
• 2016 – FDA extended the age indication for PCV13 (Prevnar 13) to include adults age 18 through 49 years.
• 2016 – FDA approved extending the age range for use of FluLaval Quadrivalent to include children 6 to 35 months of age.
• 2017 – AAP issued policy stating that newborns should routinely receive hepatitis B vaccine within 24 hours of birth.
• 2017 – FDA expanded licensure of Afluria quadrivalent (Seqirus) to include people age 5 years and older.
• 2017 – FDA licensed Shingrix, the new shingles vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline, for use in adults age 50 and older.
• 2018 – ACIP recommended Heplisav-B vaccine against hepatitis B virus.
• 2018 – ACIP recommended the live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) (with no evidence that it’s more effective than the LAIV it advised against using in 2016).35 36 37 38
The flu jab, added to the childhood schedule in 2003, and the HPV vaccine merit special attention in the following chapters.