POSITION PAPER BY THE MMR RESEARCH TRUST

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE POINTING TO A LINK BETWEEN VACCINATION AND AUTISM

1. The use of mercury in numerous vaccines since the introduction of mass vaccination programmes in the United States in the late 1930s just three or four years before Leo Kanner identified autism as a ‘a new and hitherto unknown condition’ in the US in 1943. The first victims of this profoundly disabling condition were children of professional classes leading to ideas about ‘cold parents’ etc. In fact they simply happened to be the groups leading the response to new public health programmes. Mercury is highly toxic in any form. Vaccine makers have relied upon a disgraceful lack of knowledge of this material by health departments, to persuade them to accept health safety claims subsequently shown to have been based upon concealed and distorted research findings. Even today vaccines are not subject to the high level of scrutiny brought to bear upon medicines and drugs although mercury-containing vaccine materials are routinely administered to very young infants by direct injection.

2. The apparent huge increase in numbers of young autistic people in the 1980s and 90s in the United States, the United Kingdom and western countries, mirroring high profile promotion campaigns for vaccines containing mercury as well as the launch of new multiple vaccines in the late eighties.

3. The acceptance by the MRC of ‘apparent similarities between symptoms of autism and mercury poisoning’ whilst claiming that ‘no evidence currently exists that proves a link’. Similarly the US Institute of Medicine accepts that ‘mercury poisoning is a biologically plausible explanation but is unproven’. Unsurprisingly, despite the US Institute’s call for more research none seems to be being done. Nor is there any evidence that research actually looking for a link between vaccination and autism has ever been done either in the USA or the UK. A leading US Government advisor and strong supporter of established vaccine policy since 1989 Neal Halsey has dramatically shifted his position to that of insisting that more research must now be done (New Yorker Nov 2002) ‘because people had no idea of the aggregate amounts of mercury being injected into infants’ greatly exceeding World Health Organisation guidelines.

4. The outright and repeated rejection by governments, particularly the United Kingdom Government and UK medical establishment of any such link despite increasing circumstantial evidence of its existence. This clearly has not convinced the UK public only 25% of whom trust the Government to give impartial advice on health risks (Health Which).

5. The unwillingness of governments and medical establishments to collect any new data or to examine or release existing data bearing upon the issue. Especially the rejection by the United Kingdom Government of a recommendation by a Commons Health Committee to set up a register of autism although a register is proposed for ‘children at risk’ as a result of social services failures in child abuse cases.

6. The existence of an extensive compensation scheme in the United States that has paid out nearly one and a half billion dollars to vaccine damage claims over the last twenty years or so. Three quarters of this has been paid in respect of vaccines containing mercury.

7. The presence of vaccine strain virus material in the gut of autistic young people many years after this should have been eliminated from their bodies if MMR vaccines had worked as intended. The presence of this material must imply vaccine damage.

8. The failure of this trust, the MMR Research Trust to identify a single wholly unvaccinated autistic individual despite an estimated two thousand plus ad hoc contacts with the families of autistic people, via direct enquiries, over a hundred and fifty letters to families and researchers, dozens of letters published in newspapers and many articles in the press, a web site that has received several hundred visits and a recent presentation to over a hundred and fifty United States workers in the field of autism, all over a period of eighteen months or so. Despite there being in the United Kingdom many thousands of unvaccinated individuals born since the late 1970s whose parents rejected DTP triple vaccinations for them because of adverse publicity over the P (Pertussis component) and may have refused all alternatives. If UK Government figures are correct the true number of individuals unvaccinated with DTP and MMR may reach some millions. But there do not seem to be any autistic people amongst their number. Almost as disturbing is the fact that no health researcher or statutory body has ever sought to reject the implication that autism may only exist in the presence of vaccination.

9. The striking accounts of thousands of parents who have observed first hand frightening and immediate adverse reactions to DTP and/or an immediate or early obvious impact upon their child’s behaviour following vaccination with MMR. It seems probable that latent and slowly developing harm caused by mercury in DTP can lead to collateral damage from accumulated viral and bacterial toxins including MMR thus precipitating the start of a marked decline in a young child’s pattern of development and behaviour. Compare these behaviours with reported accounts of Minimata (mercury poisoning in Japan 1956), Iraq 1970 when mercury got into bread, Mad Hatters Disease (hat industry occupational condition arising from the use of mercury in making headpieces) and Pink Disease, arising from the use of mercury in teething powder and purgatives. There is a startlingly common set of behaviours throughout. Furthermore Professor Boyd Haley of the University of Kentucky who has studied mercury since 1986 claims that mercury potentiates with high levels of testosterone in young boy babies to cause damage which may lead to autism but which significantly might explain the gender ratio common in autism in which three or four times as many boys are affected as girls.

10. Hundreds of early childhood records of autistic people have ‘gone missing’. These papers are ordinarily held by a patient’s general practitioner or by health authorities. Their absence is so far unexplained.

Conclusions

If autism only exists in the presence of vaccination this will have enormous ramifications for the question of incidence. Currently the highest incidence figures quoted suggest one in eighty six to account for the very high numbers of autistic people overall thought to be found in the UK population (520,000 NAS 2002. This is a vast increase from a generally accepted estimated total number of about 6,000 in the late 1970s), but if autism only affects individuals who have been vaccinated, the incidence in the vaccinated group will be alarming. 60% of people born since the mid seventies are believed to have been vaccinated with DTP and MMR suggesting an incidence of about one in fifty in that group. New data from Rhode Island, USA talks of an increase in autism in Rhode Island children of 1,115% between 1994 and June 2000.

It seems to be inescapable that vaccines are related to autism, to ASD and potentially to other serious adverse health events including sudden infant death syndrome. It also seems inescapable that well informed politicians, officials and doctors already know this, especially doctors in government service and those employed by the pharmaceutical industry. It could explain why the residents of Kensington, Westminster and Chelsea (where MPs and people in government service live, ie; a well informed elite) have the lowest uptake figures of MMR in the UK (64% in June 2002 and perhaps fallen further since) and why government lawyers defending the MMR case in the courts are said not to allow their children to have the MMR.

The problem of course is that it is a case of politics and money. The political classes would have serious difficulties if it turned out that officially promoted vaccines had disabled millions of young people in the western world destroying families and incurring enormous burdens upon care resources, at a time when longer living populations are putting great pressure on elderly care provision. Even more so if those politicians and officials have accepted corrupt data from pharmaceutical companies upon which they have based vast public health programmes. Surely any fifth former knows instinctively that mercury is a highly toxic poison and hardly one of them will not have been warned by their parents not to play around with old thermometers or any other discarded items containing mercury. But officials somehow decided to approve the injection of multiple doses of this material directly into the bloodstream of two months, three months and four months old babies. The use of mercury in teething powders occurred in the dim distant past perhaps, but not beyond living memory for it caused serious ill health and death. Was this ignored or not known about? (any form of research that is claimed to have been done with mercury-containing vaccines appears to have been conducted with 12 months and older children who may have acquired the beginnings of an immune system). Mercury causes harm, particular harm perhaps to those with a genetic predisposition, it kills brain cells, it penetrates membranes and opens up internal pathways where they are not meant to be. Recent magnetic imaging has shown neurological pathway defects in the brains of autistic individuals. An undeveloped immune system may not be able to protect against this and if mercury is accompanied by or followed by viral or bacterial toxins contained in vaccines it would not be surprising if such toxins also find their way to parts of the body for which they are not intended, such as the brain.

When pharmaceutical companies are selling over the counter remedies they happily inform us that ‘children do not develop a good immune system until they are several years of age’ (the makers of Nurofen in press and TV advertising).

Pharmaceuticals are the most profitable industry in the United States where more than thirty vaccines are administered by mandate to all children by the time they reach their teens. Although not compulsory it is not possible to get schooling at any level or to become a member of the armed forces or take up government employment without a full immunisation card. Parents rejecting DTP and MMR have cost the pharmaceutical industry multi $millions and it is not surprising that the industry has brought pressure to bear upon governments to help them to restore their profitability so as to ‘enable continued research and development’. Both the USA and the UK launched high profile, coercive campaigns to encourage doctors to insist parents have their children vaccinated. Doctors turned unwilling families away from their surgeries because they receive bonuses for high levels of vaccine take up (Tunbridge Wells UK January 2003), although members of the British Medical Association have called for this arrangement to stop.

The United States Government has paid out nearly one and a half billion dollars to vaccine damage cases but the cost, if all autism and ASD cases were proven to be caused by vaccine damage, could dwarf this. The US Government has since 1986 given an indemnity to pharmaceutical companies against vaccine damage claims. Payments are made under a government scheme into which vaccine makers pay a levy. In the last few weeks the US Government appears to have given vaccine makers further retrospective immunity against mercury claims in the Homeland Security Bill. In the United Kingdom vaccine makers rejected a request from the Government to pay such a levy and no further action seems to have been taken to require this of them.

But things are changing, in the United States the Food and Drugs Administration issued a request to United States manufacturers to withdraw mercury compounds from infant vaccines in the United States from the beginning of 1999. This is now being partially met, although there are many instances of old stocks being used, mercury free vaccines should be widely available in due course. But not for vaccines administered to older age groups, for diseases such as Hepatitis B, Meningitis and Influenza etc.

United States voluntary and parent led organisations are also leading the way in seeking to find a means of removing mercury from affected individuals and there are several promising possibilities that are being researched as well as clinical studies yielding positive results.

Immediate Plans for the MMR Research Trust

In the United Kingdom, however, much remains to be done. Despite the failure of the MMR Research Trust to identify unvaccinated autistic individuals it is accepted that some parents believe their child was born autistic and others claim their autistic child was unvaccinated. However, because of the numbers of parents rejecting DTP and MMR in recent years a large pool of unvaccinated young people exists and we can research this group in a formal and structured way to establish whether or not vaccination is implicated in autism and ASD etc. During this year, 2003, exactly sixty years after Kanner first described autism we aim to find out whether Kanner’s ideas that children might be born autistic holds good or not and if not whether vaccination is a factor.

We have not yet established proof of a single autistic individual who was not vaccinated and the premise that all babies ‘born autistic’ are subsequently vaccinated is difficult to accept. As is the contention by some researchers that mercury in the environment is a potential cause of autism. Again this presupposes that all children made autistic by mercury in the environment also go on to be vaccinated. Up to 40% of all young people born since the mid nineteen seventies in the United Kingdom are not vaccinated with DTP triple vaccine and a large group are not vaccinated with MMR rendering both arguments highly suspect.

The MMR Research Trust will take advice from leading medical and research figures who have offered to help, albeit we will not identify or use the name of any researcher in papers or in reports detailing the research work we will conduct. It will involve reaching 10,000 families of autistic individuals to establish vaccine histories and other relevant matters relating to their autistic family member. Research will be conducted in a neutral manner and will not be linked with any particular point of view about autism or its possible causes.

Findings from this study will be reviewed by respected and informed independent individuals before draft conclusions are presented to appropriate bodies for their consideration. As far as we know, no other body is doing this work in Britain, the UK Government having rejected further epidemiological studies as not being justified. It is accepted that the proposed study will not meet stringent ‘good science’ criteria or ‘good epidemiological practice’ to which the authors of some vaccine studies refer. Perhaps it should be noted that ‘these very high research standards were developed and honed as a recipe for turning science into a tool for spreading uncertainty and delaying regulation by the tobacco industry in the 1960s’ (New Scientist January 2003). In short ‘good science’ can be bogus and may be likely to be bogus when its advocates are defending our pill dispensing and vaccine dependent culture.

Some of these tactics can be seen today but policy makers should note carefully that Richard Doll demolished scientific uncertainty in the smoking and health issue by pointing out that over 90% of lung cancer patients had been smokers whilst only 30% of the population smoked. Our study may not be good science but it will no doubt show researchers what they will find when they get round to doing the ‘good science’.

At the same time that a 10,000 case study research programme is being conducted the MMR Research Trust will fund independent studies by appropriately qualified scientists 1) to clarify exactly what the differences are between ethyl and methyl mercury and their affects and 2) to examine the behavioural characteristics of autism and ASDs with mercury poisoning, substantial descriptions of the latter having been documented in scientific reports for over a century.

Separately from its main work of researching 10,000 families and the studies described above the MMR Research Trust will also seek to secure stringent controls over vaccines and their use at least compatible with the scrutiny brought to bear upon all medicines and drugs sold over the counter and/or prescribed for UK citizens. This is not currently the case.

The MMR Research Trust will also monitor closely the work of United States researchers in finding ways of eliminating the effects of mercury in the systems of those people affected by mercury and will promote such work to be carried out in the United Kingdom.

MMR Research Trust February 2003