Autism and Vaccines - What's the Connection?

[Corey Blair]

According to Autism Speaks, an advocacy group, autism incidences have
increased 10-17% every year for the past decade. Boys are more than
four times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with the disorder. All
three presidential candidates in the 2008 election have agreed with
Bernadine Healy, the former head of the National Institute of Health,
that the connection between vaccinations and autism be studied in a
properly controlled, double-blind experiment. Healy accuses her
colleagues of not wanting "to pursue a hypothesis because that
hypothesis could be damaging to the public health community at large
by scaring people."
In her best-selling memoir "Louder than Words" actress and model Jenny
McCarthy, wife of actor Jim Carrey, tells a compelling story of her
attempts to rescue her son from autism with a regimen of vitamins and
minerals and a diet free of gluten, yeast, and wheat. Talk About
Curing Autism (TACA), the group that McCarthy recently became national
spokeswoman for, makes the reality clear: "Recovery is like a car
accident, where some individuals may die and some receive different
wounds," said TACA founder Lisa Ackerman, "you can't be cured, but you
can recover through treatment and time to heal."
Autism and vaccine schedules seem to have an intuitively-obvious
connection. In the '80s, U.S. kids were given 10 vaccines by age 5.
Today's kids are on a strict schedule for no fewer than 36
vaccinations by age 2. Connect that with the fact that the number of
children diagnosed with autism has grown 10% every year for the past
decade. Jim Carrey, who believes that his wife's son was 'vaccine-
damaged', said of the situation: "With billions of pharmaceutical
dollars, could it be possible that the vaccine program is becoming
more of a profit engine then a means of prevention?"
On May 20, '08, the University of Pittsburgh declared that autism and
vaccines recommended by the CDC and the AAP have been linked in
experiments performed on monkeys. The article I found (http://
www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/107993.php) declares "Safety studies
of medicines are typically conducted in monkeys prior to use in
humans, yet such basic research on the current childhood vaccination
regimen has never before been done."
One of the theories linking vaccines and autism is the presence in
many vaccines of a mercury-based preservative called "thimerosal".
Mercury has long been known to cause mental disorders - in fact, the
Mad Hatter of Alice in Wonderland fame was Mad because of mercury
poisoning. The CDC demanded in 1998 that the drug companies stop
producing vaccines with thimerosal in them, but never demanded that
they destroy or stop using their existing stock. Though the last
reported thimerosal-laden vaccine usage was way back in 2007, some
companies may well still be using vaccines with thimerosal in them.
Even today, Google News shows article after article in which children
who developed autism spontaneously after receiving their vaccines had
high levels of mercury in their systems. I'm not a conspiracy
theorist, but that's a connection between autism and vaccines that's
hard to ignore.