Vaccines: Are they safe and effective?
Vaccines: Are they safe and effective?
Dr. Paul Offit says "Yes".
Dr. Boyd Haley says "No".
Dr. Offit argues that vaccines are all that stand between us and a plague of infectious diseases; that while admittedly, a few of us are injured by vaccines, the vast majority are protected by them.
Dr. Haley argues that vaccines are not very effective at all. And that our childhood vaccine program has been responsible for disabling an entire generation of children.
Vaccines
Dr. Boyd Haley, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of Chemistry/Biochemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the Markey Cancer Center, University of Kentucky. In the past 25 years Dr. Haley has emphasized studies onthe biochemistry of Alzheimer's and Autism Spectrum Disorders. His research into the biochemical aberrancies in these diseases led to his identifying mercury toxicity as a major exacerbating factor, perhaps even a causal factor for them.
Dr. Paul Offit, MD is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the Cief of the Division of Infectious Disease and Director of the Vaccine Information Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He is co-author of the medical textbook, Vaccines. And has written over 130 scientific articles and several books for lay readers on vaccine issues.
Dr. Haley has published over 120 articles in scientific journals, and has testified on the toxic effects of mercury and other heavy metals before numerous government agencies and international conferences.
As a leading proponent of mandatory vaccinations, Dr. Offit has appeared over television and radio networks, and has written articles for several major newspapers. One of the developers of a vaccine against diarrhea, he has served on teh Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC. This committee recommends vaccines to the Mandatory Childhood Vaccine Schedule in all fifty states.
QUESTION TO OFFIT: So as a pediatrician you would deepen your knowledge of molecular biology or the brain or other things like that that would be referred out to another specialist, for example, if you saw a child with a concussion or you saw a child with some kind of brain injury. You wouldn't treat that would you?
PAUL OFFIT: No, in other words I am chief of infectious diseases here at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia and so what we do here in the infectious disease division is we see children who are in-patients who have severe or chronic or persistent or unknown infectious diseases. Or we see children as out-patients who are generally referred by pediatricians in the community with an infectious disease that they're having difficulty handling.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: He has his M.D. degrees in pediatrics, as I recall. And I can tell you having been in a Medical Center and having taught biochemistry to medical students and talking to a huge number, I don't know how many hundreds of medical doctors I've talked to, they get very little training in toxicology. I mean no courses are specifically designed, such as a PhD student in toxicology would have or a PhD student in biochemistry. They don't understand it at all. They are not trained to evaluate the toxic effect of chemicals, especially at the research level. I mean for one they don't do research programs. They don't the insight that is developed and required for someone writing a PhD thesis in toxicology or biochemistry of materials that inhibit enzymes. They just don't understand the science and the chemistry at that level. And certainly pediatricians don't.
PAUL OFFIT: Vaccines are the best of two worlds. What they do is they induce roughly the same immune response that would be induced by natural infection without having to pay the price of natural infection.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: Well, that is known not to be true. I mean, exposure through the nasal mucosa causes a totally different immune response than injecting something directly into the body. I mean, this is just not true, what he is saying there. If you get measles, you are immune for life. If you vaccinated against the measles, you're not.
PAUL OFFIT: In the United States before 1983 when we introduced the measles vaccine, there were more than a hundred thousand children who were hospitalized every year and between 500 and 1000 died every year.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: Well, Dr. Offit's comment that the measles vaccine dramatically reduced the rate of measles in the United States is just not based on any sound foundation. Before the vaccine was introduced the rate of measles was dropping dramatically and it dropped over 90% from its peak, for certain over 90%. And they had the measles vaccine introduced, it didn't drop significantly after that compared to what it had been dropping before.
PAUL OFFIT: So the best of both worlds. You get the immune response that will protect you against a subsequent measles challenge but you don't have to pay the price of a measles infection which can be a high price.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: He is making the claim that this does prevent you from ever getting the measles and the data when you go to the measles epidemics that have jumped up in the United States in any small localized areas, kids who got the measles were vaccinated.
PAUL OFFIT: It's certainly true that if you look at diseases like whooping cough or even to a lesser extent diphtheria, you start to see some decline as we got better sanitation, better hygiene in our country. but you didn't start to see a dramatic decline, virtual elimination until we introduced vaccines.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: They want to take claim for every decrease in a disease. We have diseases like scarlet fever and typhoid that have disappeared, essentially disappeared and no one ever made a vaccine for them. They were eliminated by better hygiene. I mean he is trying take claims and what he is saying isn't exactly true. The major drop from the peak height say back in the early 1900's when they measured the measles to 1960 something when the measles vaccine was introduced, I'd say it was way over 90% decrease in the rate before the measles vaccine was ever introduced. And to say that the measles vaccine was really the cause of this is based on faulty logic.
COMMENTATOR: This chart of deaths from pertussis is from vital and historical statistics in the United States from 1900 to 1968. I shows a dramatic decline in deaths from pertussis well before the pertussis vaccine came into wide use in the 1940's. The death rate falls from as many as 17 per hundred thousand to less than 2 before the vaccine came into widespread use.
This chart of New York City mortality rates tracks infectious disease from 1880 to 1911. It shows that deaths from diphtheria (the blue line) fell precipitously from a high of 175 deaths per hundred thousand to less than 25 by 1911.
This chart of U.S. mortality rates shows continued deaths from diphtheria (the lighter blue line) had fallen below 15 per hundred thousand before the vaccine was introduced in 1920. Whooping cough or pertussis deaths (the tan line) were already well below one in 100,000 before the vaccine came into widespread use in the 1940's. Likewise, measles deaths (the green line) were already at less than one in 100,000 by 1949, a full fourteen years before the introduction of the vaccine. Scarlet fever (the red line) and typhoid (the darker blue line) also declined dramatically below one in 100,000 during the same period without a vaccine.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: If you talk about how many millions of dollars we spend on a vaccine program with the few number of people we have, if that money was spent on increasing hygiene which we absolutely know decrease infectious diseases, would this not be better?
PAUL OFFIT: And so I live in Philadelphia and feel compelled to quote Ben Franklin whenever possible now "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". That's always true. You'd much rather prevent something than to tryand have to treat it.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: You know his concept that you want to prevent disease, then we have to explain why in the United States with our very high, very early introduction of vaccines into infants, much higher than any place else in the world in developed countries, why the United States has one of the highest infant death rates in the world, one of the highest childhood death rates in the world, while we are still vaccinating. So the question that comes out of this, that a scientist would ask, if you are having this big successful CDC mandated program against infectious diseases and you have one of the worst infant death rates, infant mortality rates in the world, what's causing this? What are our children dying of? And if you are injecting them with compounds that you know are toxic, especially in combination with synergistic toxic effects, such as thimerasal or ethyl mercury and aluminum, and you are seeing all the increase in neurological illness. The CDC says one out of 6 children in the United States has a neurodevelopmental disorder. We have the highest infant death rate. Why wouldn't you look at the toxic effect and say what are we doing that they are not doing in Sweden? Well, the one thing we are not doing, is we are not injecting our children on the day of birth with a hugh amount of thimerisal. And they say it is not a huge amount, well, they're wrong. For the toxic effect it would be a safe EPA.. baby weighed 275 pounds.
PAUL OFFIT: What I would argue though is that we can be very proud of vaccines because the kind of catchment systems, safety catchment systems for vaccines like so-called VSD or vaccine safety datalink, frankly don't exist for drugs.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: For all the children whose mothers, the parents say, and their attending doctors sometimes say, vaccines caused my child's neurological problems, they just ignore it. They say "no, it didn't." So I don't think he is right. I think he is making a wild assumption that the VSD catches most of the problems. I heard that less than one out of 10 is even reported, adverse effects against the vaccine. And I don't know what it is but it is not a solid system. It's not a system and I think that anyone that is really expert in what that system comes up with and how it is organized, would say that it doesn't catch even near the number of children that are adversely affected, not at all.
PAUL OFFIT: I think vaccines are very safe. Often we use the dichotomy of safe/unsafe. I think a more fairly one should say very safe because vaccines, like anything, that induces an effect in the body can induce a side effect and certainly vaccines do have side effects but I think one can argue that their benefits clearly outweigh the risks. And unfortunately, the risks are often misunderstood by the public.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: It's been shown recently [11:50] when you look at some of these vaccines the viral vaccines they have fragments of DNA, and fragments of DNA that were non-human that you were injecting into a human. If you understand how DNA fragments can be inserted into the normal human DNA under certain conditions. This is not a safe system.
QUESTION TO OFFIT: Do vaccines cause autism?
PAUL OFFIT: No. Vaccines don't cause autism.
QUESTION TO OFFIT: Absolutely sure?
PAUL OFFIT: Absolutely sure of that. It doesn't make sense that they would, it never made sense that they would, and now we have a wealth of epidemiological studies proving that they didn't.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: He is showing his ignorance here.
COMMENTATOR: In all but one of the epidemiological or statistical studies that Dr. Offit refers to were carried out before 2003. They were reviewed as part of a five-year congressional investigation in hearings ended in that year. According to the report of the investigation:
"To date, studies conducted or funded by the CDC that purportedly dispute any correlation between autism and vaccine injury have been of poor design, under-powered, and fatally flawed. The CDC's rush to support and promote such research is reflective of a philosophical conflict in looking fairly at emerging theories and clinical data related to adverse reactions from vaccinations."
QUESTION TO OFFIT: Then why do all these parents say "We got a vaccine, then my child got autism? Like, right after."
PAUL OFFIT: They are perfectly reasonable. You know from a parent's standpoint, their child was fine, they got a vaccine, and then their child wasn't fine any more. The question is did the vaccine cause it. I mean just because one event follows another, it doesn't that it is causally associated with the other.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: Number one, autism didn't exist before the advent of these mercury... compounds, organic mercury compounds such as thimerisal. Number two, it went up in all fifty states when we increased the CDC vaccine program that gave the vaccines earlier and at a much higher rate to our infants in the hospital. The fact that thimerisal is a neurotoxin; autism is a neurological disorder. The fact that thimerisal is much more toxic to males than females and autism and autism spectrum disorders is much higher in males than females. We are finding more and more papers showing that thimerisal can cause the v--- biochemistry [14:14] that we are seeing in autistic children.
And we've put in into animals. And if we look at what we've done to the animals and look at the autistic child. I'm all science. The fact that the government refuses to look at the unvaccinated population. And don't tell me that they are not here and you couldn't find them. I mean you could ask for volunteers and go out and find them. The fact that they refuse to do that on an issue that is so important to the health of our country.
The fact that we now have what we now call the boy problem in academics. Boys are doing much worse on academic tests. Remember about 20 years ago the boys were doing better in math and science than the girls? And everybody was worried about in teaching that keeps the girls from being the best in math and science? And now that is reversed and it is not because the girls have gone up, it's because the boys have dropped so much. So we're decreasing the ability of boys to concentrate and to use their brain properly.
We have all of these issues that are hard science that other people are putting into the newspaper and I'm reading it saying "My, Gosh, what's going on here? Why do we have the highest infant death rate in 43 modern countries?" If you can have the highest infant death rate and the highest childhood - that's from 1 to 5 - death rate of all the modern countries, that's the equivalent in the first year of 16,000 babies dying that wouldn't need to die if we had Sweden's death rate, infant death rate. That's alot more than the 3,000 that were killed at 9/11. And yet you don't see any concern about this at all. And I have asked who head State Medical Health boards and asked "What are you doing about this?" And they just look at you. What are our children dying of to make us have such a high infant death rate? Are they dying of whooping cough or are they dying of SIDS? Or are they dying of asthma-related diseases caused by vaccines? You know, no one wants to look at that, discuss it, or even mention it. I mean, we have a sickness in this country, if you don't care for your children, you are in big trouble. The country is in big trouble. But when you can sit there and say we are satisfied that we spent all this money on medicine and still have the highest infant death rate in the [developed] world, your medical associations, your medical establishment is sick. It is either sick or it's criminal, or both.
QUESTION TO OFFIT: Wouldn't you be able to say, "OK, let's look at this. Is there a population that went through this health care system that did not get autism and did not get vaccines." Can we determine that that would be true or false?
PAUL OFFIT: I think that what you would have to do if you were going to look, for example, at an unvaccinated population in Chicago, a home school population in Chicago and try and compare them then to the surrounding community where vaccine rates are where they should be. You would have to prospectively do that study. Because you would have to control for the fact that health care seeking behavior is different. You could do that study but it would not be an ethical study. First, it is not ethical not to give vaccines to children because children can die from vaccine-preventable diseases and when you do that who is responsible for that?
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: It's claimed that it is unethical. But this is a prospective. They haven't been vaccinated to date. You've got their medical records. You don't have to make a decision whether to go or not vaccinate them.
PAUL OFFIT: It's frankly been done in the Amish community and now one knows that in the Amish community the autism rates are probably exactly identical to that in the surrounding communities. In fact, there are clinics for children who are Amish, that have autism, so for that, the original hypothesis was wrong.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: at the autistic children in Lancaster, Pennsylvania to see if the Amish children had autism. He found three, all he could find. He should have found hundreds. At least a couple hundred. I don't know how many Amish live there or how many children are there. But he only found three and both of them had been vaccinated. One was an adopted child that was autistic when the Amish adopted her. And the other one was a young boy who was quite normal for a certain period of his life. The husband was gone one day, the state health department came by and the mother agreed to have her child vaccinated and he became autistic after that vaccination. He became diagnosed with autism. So, you know, he's wrong. He is trying to say we found one autistic in the Amish communities so they have autism, too. That's not the question. It is not a question of whether the Amish have autism, it is a whether the non-vaccinated Amish which is at a higher level, have autism. And the government could afford to do this. They can hire the university of Pennsylvania to do that in a heartbeat. And they don't do that. Our government is afraid of an evaluation of our vaccine program.
QUESTION TO OFFIT: Have we really taken thimerisal out of vaccines?
PAUL OFFIT: Yeah, well there are multi-dose preparations of influenza vaccine which are given to two years old which may contain thimerasal at preservative levels. And I think there is a preparation of diphtheria tetanus containing vaccine which contains thimerisal at preservative levels but that's it.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: I don't know if he's telling the truth. I don't know if he knows. How does he know? All I know is the government has not made the use of thimerisal containing vaccines illegal. It is legal to use them yet. And when you have an HMO that is buying vaccines for 5-10,000 children in their care. And they say what do we have here, what can we use. The CDC says thimerisal containing vaccines are safe and it's OK. Why wouldn't they buy them. They're alot cheaper.
QUESTION TO OFFIT: One thing that I don't know whether it's a point they took brain put them in a solution of different heavy metals on the neurons and what they showed at least on camera is the neuron being torn apart. Then they put a solution of mercury on there and as I understand it, it is elemental mercury but I'm not certain, you can correct me. And then they also say when they add aluminum to that mix it catalyzes. Are you familiar with that? Response to that. Explain that in a different way?
PAUL OFFIT: No, I think that historically in medicine that studies in laboratory cells or studies in experimental animals are not always predictive in events in children.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: What that experiment done at the University of Calvary showed that of thimerisal or mercury when added to a neuron culture causes them to disrupt nd to produce which is one of the diagnostic hallmarks of alzheimers disease. It fit into what we saw in AD brain and it fit in to what we saw when we exposed rats to mercury vapor. The neurons, in the brain disintegrates. That's science. You do those studies. You can't do that in humans. You can't give humans dose of mercury for a period of time then sacrifice humans and look at their brains. You have to do it in animals. That's science. That's says this is very realistic. And that level of mercury in the and when he says that doesn't count. But when you look at the mercury level in the brains of aging people and especially those with alzheimer's disease, it is in the evel range. That's a higher. That's one thousandth of the amount of mercury that we now know is in the human can cause that disruption that is seen in all 80 of the patients. The will disintegrate. Mercury ... tangles will form. And our government chooses not to look at that. I mean here we have huge amounts of mercury being released in your dental amalgams, you're injecting mercury into old people in the form of flu shots and that's a toxin, a neural toxin and we have all this big increase in neurotoxic diseases in the United States and we don't want to consider that mercury might be one of those or at least an exacerbating factor? Dr. Offit is more anti-science than anybody I've ever listened to or read an article from. He is totally against science. I mean if it doesn't kill them in a petri dish, it's probably not going to kill you if you eat it. And that's the kind of studies that the FDA expects you to do if you are going to develop a drug. I mean, you don't go around testing on humans you do all these animal and petri dish and cell studies before you ever take it to a human. And that's science, he is now refuting science. And he doesn't want to look at and he talks about the petri dish, I would submit to you that the babies, the 10 out of 13 babies that died in Toronto by having thimerisal painted on their stomachs. They weren't petri dishes.
QUESTION TO OFFIT: Let's get back to the same point. The appears to be saying is it's not ethyl mercury is not eliminated from the body, it just clears the blood, goes to the organs. Well, is that new information or is that disputed information?
PAUL OFFIT: What Burbacher found is that it is possible for mercury, either as ethyl mercury or methyl mercury to exist in the brain as essentially inorganic mercury that the methyl or ethyl molecule gets cleaned up. Is that toxic? Is that dangerous? There's no evidence that that's true. His study in experimental monkeys showed something that is interesting but hasn't to my knowledge no correlation in harm. I mean it is certainly known that organic mercury in the form of methyl mercury can be harmful or logarthmically higher quantities of ethyl mercury logarthmically higher than one is getting in vaccines is harmful. But the important thing is the proof is in the pudding. If it was harmful then it should be shown in a study to be harmful and the most sensitive way to answer that question is with an epidemiological study not with an animal model study, not with a cell study of cells in a laboratory. If you want to know whether or not something is harmful in children, test it in children. And that's been done redundantly.
QUESTION TO OFFIT: So you're saying elemental mercury in the brain is not a problem.
PAUL OFFIT: I don't know.
QUESTION TO OFFIT: That you know of.
PAUL OFFIT: I don't know. I don't know. It's an interesting finding.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: This shows his total lack of understanding. I mean you can do the epidemiology but it has to be done by honest people. The epidemiology studies that he refers to, would have shown this, it they were done honestly but they weren't done honestly. They were done by someone paid by the CDC who is a proven crook because he embezzled a million dollars from the CDC and is now on the run, I think. I don't know where he is. But epidemiology doesn't prove anything. It says "Here's an indication that this is involved." The epidemiological studies that we know about that were done properly showed that there was an increase in the risk of autism from thimerisol and vaccines. I mean. And to say that you can't do this, there is nothing better. I mean there are animal models that have been used for years and years. The Brubacher study. Does the ethyl mercury get in the brain. If ethyl mercury gets in the brain and deposits mercury in the brain, it's going to have a toxic effect. There has never been a study except done by a vaccinologist and the CDC where thimerisol or mercury has been exposed to children where you don't see a negative side effect. I mean mercury is not a vitamin. It is a very toxic neurotoxic compound.
PAUL OFFIT: Mercury certain is a toxin, there's no doubt about it but as Paracelsus said, you know the 16th century, you know the dose makes the poison. I mean that's always true.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: You know in his response he quotes Paracelsus that the dose makes the toxin that was stated several hundred years ago and he's right but he doesn't understand synergistic toxicities. For example, we know that if you take a non-lethal dose of mercury that would kill one of a hundred rats and you add to that a level of lead that would kill less than one of a hundred rats, that mixture will kill a hundred of a hundred rats. So the presence of lead in very low levels can enhance the toxicity of a known level of mercury by over a 100 fold. So they add to that cadmium, and other toxic metals aluminum, etc. You don't know what that is in each child or each person that comes in and gets a vaccination. So no one can predict what the level of toxicity is for each individual human being around.
PAUL OFFIT: But aluminum, you know, it's certainly not as well studied. I think, as has been thimerisal. You don't have that "got aluminum/did't get" aluminum study because you really can't have it because some vaccines require an adjuvant.
COMMENTATOR: This chart from David A U Southern Illinois University School of Medicine compares the aluminum and aluminum content in vaccines given to children by 18 months. From 1970 to 1985, these children received four shots with both mercury and aluminum. That went to five in 1986, 10 in 1994, and 11 in 2000. Then in 2001 mercury was removed while shots containing aluminum went to 15. By 2004 three shots with mercury were added back while aluminum containing shots remained the same. By 2007, children under 18 months received three shots containing mercury and 17 containing aluminum.
QUESTION TO OFFIT: Can our immune response hurt us? Can that be the problem with vaccines what our immune system does as a result of seeing a foreign protein?
PAUL OFFIT: It is certainly true that some infectious diseases can cause your body to react against itself. Think campylobacter is an intestinal bacterial infection that can itself cause something called Guillain Barre syndrome which is this descending paralysis. And Lyme bacteria can cause you to respond to react not only to the bacteria but also at the same time to the cells that line your joints causing chronic arthritis. But there's no evidence that vaccines do that.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: What has been published with regards to vaccines causing arthritis and certain other diseases. That where you see a bacteria getting into locations where it shouldn't be. What we do know, absolutely do know, is that thimerisal and methy mercury both cause a breakdown of the vital membranes making them leaky causing leaky gut syndrome or athrosclerotic plaques in the blood. And there have been studies where they have shown if you treat brown Norway rats and inject the bacteria that causes arthritis into these rats, they'll excrete the bacteria. They'll kill it and get rid of it. But if you treat those rats with mercury first and then put that bacteria in, they become arthritic. So what mercury does, it's the terrain argument. Is it the microbe present or the terrain. Like the microbes he is saying are already present in our bodies all the time, then it's the terrain. How healthy that body is that keeps the infection from taking off. And what mercury does, is it starts disrupting the biomembranes in the body causing leakage which causes the microbes to get from the gut into the blood stream. Causes the microbes to get from the bloodstream into the athrosclerotic plaques. Mercury breaks down those biomembranes. That's a big study. It's not anything that's debatable. It's been proven. And so when you start breaking down the biomembranes, then the bacteria that were around all the time every day get down into the places where they shouldn't get and they replicate and the immune system can't stop them. So while the mercury and the vaccine may not cause it, putting the mercury in the vaccine can definitely increase the rate of bacterial and microbial infections in places where we normally wouldn't get them.
PAUL OFFIT: But I think there's been now excellent data looking at children who have received vaccines compared to those who didn't. To answer the question are you a greater risk with asthma. Are you at greater risk and I think the answer's been very clearly that you're not.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: Studies were done at Ohio State University where they looked at the effect of methyl mercury, mercury, and thimerisal on the endotheil and membranes of the arteries and the intestine. When you do a model study and culture, and what they find is these compounds cause these membranes to break down and start leaking at lowerconcentrations. When that happens your immune system is no longer compartmentalized. In other words it is not just kept [31:39] to react to things that get into the bloodstream normally. You are now opening up these membranes and letting food particles from the intestines that are not fully digested to leak into the arteries and set off an immune response. And that is the reason alot of people that have antibodies in their blood to certain foods. I mean, you can't make antibodies to these foods unless the food particle is hat food are leaking into the blood stream. That's the way the immune system works.
So when he's talking about all these things, he doesn't know enough science to make an intelligent comment about it because you have to look at all the toxic effects of mercury. And the toxic effects of mercury are not just related to the neurological system. I mean it can it can tear your intestinal membranes apart and cause food particles to leak from your intestines and also additional metals to leak from your intestines that should be excluded, into the blood stream. And the same thing in the blood stream, if the mercury gets into your bloodstream, it starts breaking down the endothelium membrane, you're going to start developing arthroscleratic plaques which correlates to heart disease and correlates to the fact that mercury is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Because it is breaking down the membranes that protect and keep the immune system compartmentalized.
Then you have to extend this further. You also have to have your blood brain barrier which has been affected by the mercury that is flowing in your blood stream, any time t can cause those membranes to become more leaky and allow things that shouldn't be getting in there including components of your immune system. Every organ in our body, the pituitary gland, the thyroid gland, etc., keeps out the immune system by forming a biomembrane that keeps a separation or compartmentalization of your immune system from getting into the organs. I mean when you have an antibody basic protein that tells you myalin basic protein, this is in the central nervous system has somehow come in contact with your immune system. I mean it's just that simple. And so to look at mercury toxicity and the effect of thimerisol on the body, you have to look at more than what mercury does when it gets inside cells. What does it do to the membranes that keep our body in a compartment state so if functions in the compartments that are supposed to be. And I think that is the one overlooked aspect of this. When they say they have and autoimmune problem. They don't have an autoimmune problem they have a membrane leaky problem that is allowing the immune system to go places where it shouldn't go. The immune system is just doing what it is designed to do.
QUESTION TO OFFIT: The critics of the genetic thing would say well there's no such thing as a genetic epidemic. Would you agree with that statement?
PAUL OFFIT: I don't think there is an epidemic of autism, I think if we went into a time machine and went back 30 or 40 years and used the same diagnostic criteria that we currently use to diagnose autism and introduce it into the community so that everybody is aware as they are now and also make it very clear in that community now, 30 years in the past that you will qualify for services if you have this diagnosis. I think you will find the instance about autism would be the same thirty years ago as it is now.
DR. HALEY COMMENTS: Well, I don't claim to have lived before 1940, so I don't know. But all I know when I read the literature and I readweren't there. I also knew that when I grew up, went through school, one building with all 12 grades in it, I knew every kid in first grade and I don't know how many kids I've known in college, I never knew of an autistic until recently. Never met one. Never heard of one. Never saw one.
On Screen comments: [35:38] There were no reported cases of Autism prior to its discovery in 1943 by Leo Kanner. It continued to be rare for decades, but gradually increased. Now, according to the CDC, it affects 1 in 88 children. It is 4 times more common in boys (1 in 54) than girls (1 in 252).
In the early 1980's, children received 5 vaccines in 5 doses. from 1988 onward, many vaccines were added. While at the same time, Autism became an epidemic. Today, children receive 15 vaccines in 69 doses before they reach age 18.
[35:56] US Prevalence figures for mercury-related diseases:
Autism Spectrum Disorders - 4.9 million (mainly children).
Alzheimer's Disease - 5.4 million.
Autoimmune Diseases: Allergies, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Lupus, Lou Gehrig's Disease, Rheumatoid Arthritis and Multiple Sclerosis - 15-25 million.
Asthma - 43 million.
Cardiovascular disease - 88.6 million.
Copyright 2014 Public Affairs Media, Inc.
All Rights Reserved