In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health
officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference
center in Norcross, Georgia. Convened by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist
retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee
River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public
announcement of the session -- only private invitations to fifty-two
attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the
Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from
the World Health Organization in Geneva and representatives of
every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck,
Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion,
CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly
"embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of
documents, no taking papers with them when they left.
The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled
to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions
about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered
to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist
named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database
containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based
preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible
for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological
disorders among children. "I was actually stunned by what
I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood,
citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate
a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit
disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and
the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with
the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one
case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of
autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children
to one in 166 children.
Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues
of life and death, the findings were frightening. "You can
play with this all you want," Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant
for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results
"are statistically significant." Dr. Richard Johnston,
an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado
whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's
first day, was even more alarmed. "My gut feeling?"
he said. "Forgive this personal comment -- I do not want
my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know
better what is going on."
But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and
rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives
at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how
to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained
under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were
concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal
would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line. "We are
in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits,"
said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont
Hospital for Children in Delaware. "This will be a resource
to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country." Dr.
Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief
that "given the sensitivity of the information, we have been
able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible
hands." Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World
Health Organization, declared that "perhaps this study should
not have been done at all." He added that "the research
results have to be handled," warning that the study "will
be taken by others and will be used in other ways beyond the control
of this group."
In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling
the damage than at protecting children's health. The CDC paid
the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash
the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out"
the chemical's link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten's findings,
even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and
told other scientists that his original data had been "lost"
and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information
Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a
private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the
time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone
to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the
link between thimerosal and autism.
Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out
of injections given to American infants -- but they continued
to sell off their mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last
year. The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying up the tainted
vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug
companies to continue using the preservative in some American
vaccines -- including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus
boosters routinely given to eleven-year-olds.
The drug companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers
in Washington. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received
$873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has
been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200
lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children.
On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the
government's vaccine-related documents -- including the Simpsonwood
transcripts -- and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal,
from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a
rider known as the "Eli Lilly Protection Act" into a
homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his
campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism.
The measure was repealed by Congress in 2003 -- but earlier this
year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill
that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related
brain disorders. "The lawsuits are of such magnitude that
they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our
capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists,"
says Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to Frist.
Even many conservatives are shocked by the government's effort
to cover up the dangers of thimerosal. Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican
from Indiana, oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal
after his grandson was diagnosed with autism. "Thimerosal
used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the
autism epidemic," his House Government Reform Committee concluded
in its final report. "This epidemic in all probability may
have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at
the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected
thimerosal, a known neurotoxin." The FDA and other public-health
agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of "institutional
malfeasance for self protection" and "misplaced protectionism
of the pharmaceutical industry."
The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big
Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling
case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed. I was
drawn into the controversy only reluctantly. As an attorney and
environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury
toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were
absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines.
Privately, I was skeptical.
I doubted that autism could be blamed on a single source, and
I certainly understood the government's need to reassure parents
that vaccinations are safe; the eradication of deadly childhood
diseases depends on it. I tended to agree with skeptics like Rep.
Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, who criticized his colleagues
on the House Government Reform Committee for leaping to conclusions
about autism and vaccinations. "Why should we scare people
about immunization," Waxman pointed out at one hearing, "until
we know the facts?"
It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying
the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation's
pre-eminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that
the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological
disorders is real. Five of my own children are members of the
Thimerosal Generation -- those born between 1989 and 2003 -- who
received heavy doses of mercury from vaccines. "The elementary
grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological
or immune-system damage," Patti White, a school nurse, told
the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. "Vaccines
are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in twenty-five
years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids.
Something very, very wrong is happening to our children."
More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and pediatricians
diagnose more than 40,000 new cases every year. The disease was
unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among
eleven children born in the months after thimerosal was first
added to baby vaccines in 1931.
Some skeptics dispute that the rise in autism is caused by thimerosal-tainted
vaccinations. They argue that the increase is a result of better
diagnosis -- a theory that seems questionable at best, given that
most of the new cases of autism are clustered within a single
generation of children. "If the epidemic is truly an artifact
of poor diagnosis," scoffs Dr. Boyd Haley, one of the world's
authorities on mercury toxicity, "then where are all the
twenty-year-old autistics?" Other researchers point out that
Americans are exposed to a greater cumulative "load"
of mercury than ever before, from contaminated fish to dental
fillings, and suggest that thimerosal in vaccines may be only
part of a much larger problem. It's a concern that certainly deserves
far more attention than it has received -- but it overlooks the
fact that the mercury concentrations in vaccines dwarf other sources
of exposure to our children.
What is most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading
detectives have gone to ignore -- and cover up -- the evidence
against thimerosal. From the very beginning, the scientific case
against the mercury additive has been overwhelming. The preservative,
which is used to stem fungi and bacterial growth in vaccines,
contains ethylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. Truckloads of studies
have shown that mercury tends to accumulate in the brains of primates
and other animals after they are injected with vaccines -- and
that the developing brains of infants are particularly susceptible.
In 1977, a Russian study found that adults exposed to much lower
concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to American children
still suffered brain damage years later. Russia banned thimerosal
from children's vaccines twenty years ago, and Denmark, Austria,
Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since
followed suit.
"You couldn't even construct a study that shows thimerosal
is safe," says Haley, who heads the chemistry department
at the University of Kentucky. "It's just too darn toxic.
If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken.
If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it
in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would
be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing
damage."
Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed
thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage
-- and even death -- in both animals and humans. In 1930, the
company tested thimerosal by administering it to twenty-two patients
with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being
injected -- a fact Lilly didn't bother to report in its study
declaring thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at another vaccine
manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims about
thimerosal's safety "did not check with ours." Half
the dogs Pittman injected with thimerosal-based vaccines became
sick, leading researchers there to declare the preservative "unsatisfactory
as a serum intended for use on dogs."
In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal
continued to mount. During the Second World War, when the Department
of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required
Lilly to label it "poison." In 1967, a study in Applied
Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected
vaccines. Four years later, Lilly's own studies discerned that
thimerosal was "toxic to tissue cells" in concentrations
as low as one part per million -- 100 times weaker than the concentration
in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote
thimerosal as "nontoxic" and also incorporated it into
topical disinfectants. In 1977, ten babies at a Toronto hospital
died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto
their umbilical cords.
In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products
that contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning
it from animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC
recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced
vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within
twenty-four hours of birth, and two-month-old infants would be
immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.
The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger.
The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice
Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccine programs, warned
the company that six-month-olds who were administered the shots
would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended that
thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants
and children," noting that the industry knew of nontoxic
alternatives. "The best way to go," he added, "is
to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives."
For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was
money. Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package
vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional
protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple
needle entries. The larger vials cost half as much to produce
as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international
agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of
epidemics. Faced with this "cost consideration," Merck
ignored Hilleman's warnings, and government officials continued
to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children.
Before 1989, American preschoolers received eleven vaccinations
-- for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella.
A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were
receiving a total of twenty-two immunizations by the time they
reached first grade.
As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among
children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were
injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented
levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development.
Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears
that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury
that children would receive from the mandated vaccines. "What
took the FDA so long to do the calculations?" Peter Patriarca,
director of viral products for the agency, asked in an e-mail
to the CDC in 1999. "Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies
do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood
immunization schedule?"
But by that time, the damage was done. At two months, when the
infant brain is still at a critical stage of development, infants
routinely received three inoculations that contained a total of
62.5 micrograms of ethylmercury -- a level 99 times greater than
the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related
neurotoxin. Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury
poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed
by the body, several studies -- including one published in April
by the National Institutes of Health -- suggest that ethylmercury
is actually more toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain
longer than methylmercury.
Officials responsible for childhood immunizations insist that
the additional vaccines were necessary to protect infants from
disease and that thimerosal is still essential in developing nations,
which, they often claim, cannot afford the single-dose vials that
don't require a preservative. Dr. Paul Offit, one of CDC's top
vaccine advisers, told me, "I think if we really have an
influenza pandemic -- and certainly we will in the next twenty
years, because we always do -- there's no way on God's earth that
we immunize 280 million people with single-dose vials. There has
to be multidose vials."
But while public-health officials may have been well-intentioned,
many of those on the CDC advisory committee who backed the additional
vaccines had close ties to the industry. Dr. Sam Katz, the committee's
chair, was a paid consultant for most of the major vaccine makers
and was part of a team that developed the measles vaccine and
brought it to licensure in 1963. Dr. Neal Halsey, another committee
member, worked as a researcher for the vaccine companies and received
honoraria from Abbott Labs for his research on the hepatitis B
vaccine.
Indeed, in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines,
such conflicts of interest are common. Rep. Burton says that the
CDC "routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of
interest to serve on intellectual advisory committees that make
recommendations on new vaccines," even though they have "interests
in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be
providing unbiased oversight." The House Government Reform
Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisers who approved
guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine "had financial ties to
the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions
of the vaccine."
Offit, who shares a patent on one of the vaccines, acknowledged
to me that he "would make money" if his vote eventually
leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion
that a scientist's direct financial stake in CDC approval might
bias his judgment. "It provides no conflict for me,"
he insists. "I have simply been informed by the process,
not corrupted by it. When I sat around that table, my sole intent
was trying to make recommendations that best benefited the children
in this country. It's offensive to say that physicians and public-health
people are in the pocket of industry and thus are making decisions
that they know are unsafe for children. It's just not the way
it works."
Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances.
Like Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of children's
health, proud of their "partnerships" with pharmaceutical
companies, immune to the seductions of personal profit, besieged
by irrational activists whose anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering
children's health. They are often resentful of questioning. "Science,"
says Offit, "is best left to scientists."
Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent
conflicts of interest. In his e-mail to CDC administrators in
1999, Paul Patriarca of the FDA blasted federal regulators for
failing to adequately scrutinize the danger posed by the added
baby vaccines. "I'm not sure there will be an easy way out
of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and immunization-policy
bodies may have been asleep at the switch re: thimerosal until
now," Patriarca wrote. The close ties between regulatory
officials and the pharmaceutical industry, he added, "will
also raise questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive
recommendations for use" of thimerosal in child vaccines.
If federal regulators and government scientists failed to grasp
the potential risks of thimerosal over the years, no one could
claim ignorance after the secret meeting at Simpsonwood. But rather
than conduct more studies to test the link to autism and other
forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science. The
agency turned its database on childhood vaccines -- which had
been developed largely at taxpayer expense -- over to a private
agency, America's Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could
not be used for additional research. It also instructed the Institute
of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National
Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the link between
thimerosal and brain disorders. The CDC "wants us to declare,
well, that these things are pretty safe," Dr. Marie McCormick,
who chaired the IOM's Immunization Safety Review Committee, told
her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. "We
are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect"
of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting,
the committee's chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that
the IOM would conclude that the evidence was "inadequate
to accept or reject a causal relation" between thimerosal
and autism. That, she added, was the result "Walt wants"
-- a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National
Immunization Program for the CDC.
For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination,
the revelations about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything
they had worked for. "We've got a dragon by the tail here,"
said Dr. Michael Kaback, another committee member. "The more
negative that [our] presentation is, the less likely people are
to use vaccination, immunization -- and we know what the results
of that will be. We are kind of caught in a trap. How we work
our way out of the trap, I think is the charge."
Even in public, federal officials made it clear that their primary
goal in studying thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines.
"Four current studies are taking place to rule out the proposed
link between autism and thimerosal," Dr. Gordon Douglas,
then-director of strategic planning for vaccine research at the
National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton University
gathering in May 2001. "In order to undo the harmful effects
of research claiming to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated
risk of autism, we need to conduct and publicize additional studies
to assure parents of safety." Douglas formerly served as
president of vaccinations for Merck, where he ignored warnings
about thimerosal's risks.
In May of last year, the Institute of Medicine issued its final
report. Its conclusion: There is no proven link between autism
and thimerosal in vaccines. Rather than reviewing the large body
of literature describing the toxicity of thimerosal, the report
relied on four disastrously flawed epidemiological studies examining
European countries, where children received much smaller doses
of thimerosal than American kids. It also cited a new version
of the Verstraeten study, published in the journal Pediatrics,
that had been reworked to reduce the link between thimerosal and
autism. The new study included children too young to have been
diagnosed with autism and overlooked others who showed signs of
the disease. The IOM declared the case closed and -- in a startling
position for a scientific body -- recommended that no further
research be conducted.
The report may have satisfied the CDC, but it convinced no one.
Rep. David Weldon, a Republican physician from Florida who serves
on the House Government Reform Committee, attacked the Institute
of Medicine, saying it relied on a handful of studies that were
"fatally flawed" by "poor design" and failed
to represent "all the available scientific and medical research."
CDC officials are not interested in an honest search for the truth,
Weldon told me, because "an association between vaccines
and autism would force them to admit that their policies irreparably
damaged thousands of children. Who would want to make that conclusion
about themselves?"
Under pressure from Congress and parents, the Institute of Medicine
convened another panel to address continuing concerns about the
Vaccine Safety Datalink Data Sharing program. In February, the
new panel, composed of different scientists, criticized the way
the VSD had been used in the Verstraeten study, and urged the
CDC to make its vaccine database available to the public.
So far, though, only two scientists have managed to gain access.
Dr. Mark Geier, president of the Genetics Center of America, and
his son, David, spent a year battling to obtain the medical records
from the CDC. Since August 2002, when members of Congress pressured
the agency to turn over the data, the Geiers have completed six
studies that demonstrate a powerful correlation between thimerosal
and neurological damage in children. One study, which compares
the cumulative dose of mercury received by children born between
1981 and 1985 with those born between 1990 and 1996, found a "very
significant relationship" between autism and vaccines. Another
study of educational performance found that kids who received
higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines were nearly three times
as likely to be diagnosed with autism and more than three times
as likely to suffer from speech disorders and mental retardation.
Another soon-to-be published study shows that autism rates are
in decline following the recent elimination of thimerosal from
most vaccines.
As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying
vaccines, others have stepped in to study the link to autism.
In April, reporter Dan Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more
interesting studies himself. Searching for children who had not
been exposed to mercury in vaccines -- the kind of population
that scientists typically use as a "control" in experiments
-- Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,
who refuse to immunize their infants. Given the national rate
of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics
among the Amish. He found only four. One had been exposed to high
levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three -- including
one child adopted from outside the Amish community -- had received
their vaccines.
At the state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth
reviews of thimerosal. While the Institute of Medicine was busy
whitewashing the risks, the Iowa legislature was carefully combing
through all of the available scientific and biological data. "After
three years of review, I became convinced there was sufficient
credible research to show a link between mercury and the increased
incidences in autism," says state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a Republican
who oversaw the investigation. "The fact that Iowa's 700
percent increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more
and more vaccines were added to the children's vaccine schedules,
is solid evidence alone." Last year, Iowa became the first
state to ban mercury in vaccines, followed by California. Similar
bans are now under consideration in thirty-two other states.
But instead of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers
to include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications
as well as steroids and injected collagen. Even more alarming,
the government continues to ship vaccines preserved with thimerosal
to developing countries -- some of which are now experiencing
a sudden explosion in autism rates. In China, where the disease
was virtually unknown prior to the introduction of thimerosal
by U.S. drug manufacturers in 1999, news reports indicate that
there are now more than 1.8 million autistics. Although reliable
numbers are hard to come by, autistic disorders also appear to
be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua and other developing
countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines. The World
Health Organization continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but
it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological
disorders "under review."
I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this
is a moral crisis that must be addressed. If, as the evidence
suggests, our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the
pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American
children, their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest
scandals in the annals of American medicine. "The CDC is
guilty of incompetence and gross negligence," says Mark Blaxill,
vice president of Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization concerned
about the role of mercury in medicines. "The damage caused
by vaccine exposure is massive. It's bigger than asbestos, bigger
than tobacco, bigger than anything you've ever seen."
It's hard to calculate the damage to our country -- and to the
international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases -- if Third
World nations come to believe that America's most heralded foreign-aid
initiative is poisoning their children. It's not difficult to
predict how this scenario will be interpreted by America's enemies
abroad. The scientists and researchers -- many of them sincere,
even idealistic -- who are participating in efforts to hide the
science on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the
lofty goal of protecting children in developing nations from disease
pandemics. They are badly misguided. Their failure to come clean
on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt our country and
the world's poorest populations.
NOTE: This story has been updated to correct several inaccuracies
in the original, published version. As originally reported, American
preschoolers received only three vaccinations before 1989, but
the article failed to note that they were innoculated a total
of eleven times with those vaccines, including boosters. The article
also misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected
with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms
- an amount forty percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA's
limit for daily exposure to methylmercury. Finally, because of
an editing error, the article misstated the contents of the rotavirus
vaccine approved by the CDC. It did not contain thimerosal. Salon
and Rolling Stone regret the errors.
An earlier version of this story stated that the Institute of
Medicine convened a second panel to review the work of the Immunization
Safety Review Committee that had found no evidence of a link between
thimerosal and autism. In fact, the IOM convened the second panel
to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety Datalink
Data Sharing program, including those raised by critics of the
IOM's earlier work. But the panel was not charged with reviewing
the committee's findings. The story also inadvertently omitted
a word and transposed two sentences in a quote by Dr. John Clements,
and incorrectly stated that Dr. Sam Katz held a patent with Merck
on the measles vaccine. In fact, Dr. Katz was part of a team that
developed the vaccine and brought it to licensure, but he never
held the patent. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors.
CLARIFICATION: After publication of this story, Salon and Rolling
Stone corrected an error that misstated the level of ethylmercury
received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of
six months. It was 187 micrograms ? an amount forty percent, not
187 times, greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to
methylmercury. At the time of the correction, we were aware that
the comparison itself was flawed, but as journalists we considered
it more appropriate to state the correct figure rather than replace
it with another number entirely.
Since that earlier correction, however, it has become clear from
responses to the article that the forty-percent number, while
accurate, is misleading. It measures the total mercury load an
infant received from vaccines during the first six months, calculates
the daily average received based on average body weight, and then
compares that number to the EPA daily limit. But infants did not
receive the vaccines as a ?daily average? ? they received massive
doses on a single day, through multiple shots. As the story states,
these single-day doses exceeded the EPA limit by as much as 99
times. Based on the misunderstanding, and to avoid further confusion,
we have amended the story to eliminate the forty-percent figure.
Correction: The story misattributed a quote to Andy Olson, former
legislative counsel to Senator Bill Frist. The comment was made
by Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to the senator. Rolling Stone
and Salon.com regret the error.
Kennedy
Report Sparks Controversy
(Posted Jun 20, 2005)
|