Hearings Provide Vaccine-Injured Children Opportunity for Justice
Compromised epidemiology no match for science indicating vaccine injury, says NAA

Washington, DC - Today’s start of the Autism Omnibus Proceeding in the U.S Federal Claims Court has already evoked concerns over the handling and whitewashing of the Centers for Disease Control’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD). The VSD houses vaccine safety information to which government lawyers were allowed access, while attorneys representing families were barred.

The raw VSD data may have served to support 4,800 claims from parents that the mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal triggered their children’s autism.

“The public has every right to view the taxpayer-funded VSD data being used against children in these hearings, yet access is being denied,” stated National Autism Association (NAA) board member and parent Lori McIlwain.

Nearly all the VSD data to be used by the government against families during the proceedings were drawn from industry-guided epidemiological studies incapable of detecting an association with neurological injury in susceptible subsets of children. Plaintiff evidence consists of peer-reviewed published science substantiating injury to children from mercury-containing vaccines including:

• the development of blood levels of mercury after vaccination that meet the CDC’s own diagnostic criteria for mercury poisoning

• vaccine levels of mercury resulting in significant accumulation in primate brains

• elevated levels of mercury in children diagnosed with autism who are unable to effectively eliminate the neurotoxin following exposure

• thimerosal’s disruption of the methylation process necessary for neural function, attention, and memory
  CDC studies from 2000 obtained by FOIA used the VSD data, which indicated a link between thimerosal exposure and several specific neurological injuries including autism. By the time the data was published in Pediatrics in 2004, the link diminished and public access to the raw data was repeatedly denied while the study’s data sets were “missing.”

Thomas Verstraeten, lead author of the original CDC studies, objected to CDC manipulation of VSD data in a subsequent letter to Pediatrics stating, "The article does not state that we found evidence against an association, as a negative study would. It does state, on the contrary, that additional study is recommended…The bottom line is and always has been the same: an association between thimerosal and neurological outcomes could neither be confirmed nor refuted…”

A May 2006 Congressionally-commissioned study performed by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences entitled, Thimerosal Exposure in Pediatric Vaccines: Feasibility of Studies Using the Vaccine Safety Datalink, found that the VSD had "several serious problems" and concluded, "In light of the cumulative effect of these limitations, the panel reached consensus that an analysis comparing the rates of AD/ASD [Autism Disorder/Autism Spectrum Disorder] in the VSD over the time period before, during and after the removal of thimerosal from most childhood vaccines would be uninformative and potentially misleading."