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By STEVEN HIGGS
J.B. Handley concluded long ago that mercury is but one component in childhood vaccines that could be contributing to the epidemics of autism and developmental disabilities in American children. And after following two decades of ferocious debate and misdirected, inadequate study, he finds the topic a bit outmoded, the question a non sequitur. He answers it with a series of questions.
"Do I know that it and it alone is why we have all these kids with autism?" the co-founder of Generation Rescue said of mercury, a neurotoxin used for decades in childhood vaccines. "... How am I supposed to know whether it was the (mercury-laden) thimerosal, the aluminum, the antigen, the timing of the shot, the combination of the shots or all of the above? How in the world could I divine that?"
The studies that have been done on these questions were conducted for the wrong reasons, Handley said. And the children whose regression into autism corresponded with their vaccinations have not been studied at all. In fact, they have been deliberately avoided.
While mainstream science is coming to the view that autism is linked to environmental toxins, the issue is vast and vexing, he said. Mercury through vaccines is but one of dozens of toxic exposures children experience before and after birth, while their social, behavioral and intellectual systems are forming.
But the one commonality nearly all kids diagnosed with autism since the early 1990s share is that their parents followed a vaccination schedule that demands 25 injections by their first birthdays.
"When you really know what's been studied and what's not been studied, you'd have to be a moron to not put vaccines in your top three of possible toxins," Handley said. "You have to be a moron."
***
In 1999, federal health officials recommended that manufacturers take thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative, out of vaccines, when possible, Handley said, emphasizing the last point. "They never told them to take it out. They encouraged them to."
Handley disputes the 2002 date by which government and industry say they effectively reached that goal. But the salient point is that some vaccines still contain mercury, he said, including flu shots that are recommended annually for children. "Today, 80 percent of the normal flu and most of the H1N1 all have thimerosal," he said. "So this notion of a binary world where thimerosal no longer exists but used to is just fiction."
One father of an autistic child analyzed the data, Handley said. "If you gave a kid all the shots he needed today and a thimerosal-laden flu shot every year, then by the time he was 5 he'd have gotten 60 percent of the amount of thimerosal gotten at the peak of the scheduling in '99."
***
But given the knowledge today about pre- and postnatal toxic exposures for children, arguing that mercury or any other individual component in vaccines is solely responsible for the epidemics of autism, learning delays and other disabilities is nonsensical, Handley maintained.
"The truth is we have no idea because thimerosal is but one of dozens of ingredients in vaccines," he said.
And the science that his critics often cite as proof that vaccines do not cause autism -- like a 2002 Danish study published in the New England Journal of Medicine -- has studied populations, not causality. The Danish study found that autism rates went up after thimerosal was banned.
"If you take it out and the rate doesn't go down, that doesn't mean vaccines don't cause autism," Handley said. "... Yes, it seemed like a great idea to pull mercury out of a kid's shot. I applaud it. But there's aluminum chloride in there today in very high quantities, which is a profound neurotoxin."
The bottom line, he said, is no one has any clue what causes autism or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or any other disability. Nothing has been ruled in or out as a cause. And he still receives calls from parents who relate the same stories he's heard for years about their children's vaccine-connected regression into autism.
"These things are still happening to the kids," he said.
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He cited as one example an interview that Dr. Bernadine Healy, a former director of the National Institutes of Health, gave in 2008 in which she called for major studies on children who regressed into autism like Handley's 7-year-old son Jamie did. In an interview with CBS News, Healy accused public health officials of turning their backs on the vaccine-autism link out of concerns that merely talking about the subject would scare parents away from vaccinations.
"What she's saying is, 'I'm profoundly disappointed in my colleagues, who could easily do the work to get to the answer, who don't want to know the answer for fear of what it might say,'" he said. "So the work hasn't been done yet."
The work that has been done was not conducted to find answers but to address public furor, specifically related to thimerosal and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, Handley said.
The thimerosal concerns evolved from a congresspersons's attempt to ban mercury from consumer products, which led to the Food and Drug Administration acknowledging that thimerosal contained mercury. "When someone finally ran the math they realized it was a very high number compared to the EPA safe limits," he said.
That led to the July 1999 news release "that kind of set the world on fire" when it recommended thimerosal be removed from vaccines, which started the public questioning vaccine safety and scientists studying it, Handley said. Several studies of the MMR vaccine in Europe and Japan followed concerns raised in England about its connection to autism.
"If you look at every piece of science ever published, they've only been done to quell concerns, ... to address the headlines," Handley said, not to explore valid hypotheses. "We're no closer to knowing than we were before."
Yet another example of the industry's indifference toward the threats vaccines may pose to children's developmental health is the fact that thimerosal-laden vaccines are routinely shipped overseas, he added. "I mean to a shot, there's no single shot of thimerosal-free vaccine being given in Uganda right now."
And mainstream science hasn't even considered studying how different combinations of vaccines given in single settings might affect children's developing systems, Handley said. "Read anywhere in the CDC literature, if you really look, they've only tested each shot by itself for an adverse event. But as you know, drugs have interactions."
Kids typically get six shots in three to four minutes during their "well-baby" doctor visits, he explained. "What if each additional shot kids get at these appointments in rapid succession compounds the risk of an adverse event? Maybe one shot would be fine for many, but five or six shots at one time is bad for many or most."
***
As complicated as the issue is, Handley believes that some answers are readily available if science were designed in the real world.
"It's a lot easier than you think," he said, suggesting a two-pronged approach. One would involve animal experimentation that would mimic the human experience with vaccines, the other children whose parents, for religious or personal reasons, did not vaccinate them. "You go find all the unvaccinated kids in the United States of America, and there are many," he said, "and you look at their autism rate."
The Centers for Disease Control reports that 15 percent of children in Jackson County, Ore., are unvaccinated, Handley said. Someone needs to find out how these kids look comparatively. "It's in the pockets of the unvaccinated kids where the first truths may be found," he said.
And then there are the baby siblings, like Handley's 3-year-old daughter, "who was born after we knew what we know." She received no vaccines and only one round of antibiotics when her life was at risk. "Everything I wish I had done with Jamie I did with her, and of course she's developmentally perfect."
Baby sibs, he said, offer another avenue for study, if science were truly interested. "Let's go look at the parents who are most careful with toxins during the stages of development and figure out what the autism rate is amongst those kids."
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By STEVEN HIGGS
Nothing makes J.B. Handley laugh more quickly than the suggestion that he and other parents who question the safety of the American vaccine schedule are "radicals." The Portland, Oregon, businessman is a managing partner in a leverage buyout fund. And when it came to vaccinating their first two children, he and wife Lisa religiously followed the vaccination schedule set by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
"We were as mainstream as they come," the father of three said during a telephone interview. "We were the ones who followed the letter of the law."
Questioning their doctor about the risks of vaccination never occurred to them, Handley continued. The same goes for hundreds of parents he has spoken with who watched their children's health steadily decline following their vaccinations, eventually regressing into autism, like 7-year-old Jamie Handley did as an infant.
"Almost to a person, we were the ones who fully vaccinated," he said. "You know?"
It's not like Handley doesn't understand the vitriol regularly aimed at him by what he routinely calls "the other side." He is a pointed, straight-talking pain in their asses.
In 2005, a year after Jamie was diagnosed with autism following a "stair-step physical decline" timed to each vaccination, J.B. and Lisa created a nonprofit organization and Web site called Generation Rescue. They dedicated it to "those who came before us and pioneered a lot of the work," he said, a place where "parents who could help other parents were all in one place."
And from their efforts emerged an influential organization with a celebrity-mother voice that has kept the issue of vaccine-induced autism in the public eye, to the eternal chagrin of, and cost to, the medical-industrial complex. "Dumb luck happened in the form of Jenny McCarthy finding our site, literally six weeks after it launched, and using it as a guide to treat her son, who then recovered fully," Handley said.
McCarthy quickly took the helm and has been responsible for its exponential growth the past several years, he said. "She's now, literally, not only the spokesperson, not only a board member, but she really runs the day-to-day operations. Jenny is the engine, life, chief fundraiser, bottle washer, you name it. She is the lifeblood of the organization and the public face."
McCarthy's presence, Handley said, allows him to "hang out in the cheap seats and opine and write my own stuff and challenge people." And in that regard, his style doesn't earn him any props with the vaccines-are-sacrosanct crowd -- the AAP, the pharmaceutical companies, and the government officials and researchers they financially support. He's described their positions as "atomic stupidity" in articles he has written. Moron is a term he uses often, in print and in conversation.
"I can be vitriolic and hyperbolic," he said.
***
Even over the telephone from two-thirds of a continent away, J.B. Handley exudes a large personality and supreme confidence in his experiences and conclusions about his son's autism. And, as he points out often, his story is not unique, by any stretch."I'll speak both from personal experience and from literally hundreds of extensive phone calls with other parents," he said early in a 45-minute interview, "... all of us trying to piece things together and understand what happened to our kids."
While Handley said he is encouraged to see the emerging consensus that the autism epidemic is real and caused by environmental toxins, the number of toxic exposures autism parents do not have in common dwarf the number they do.
"Some of us have wives with silver fillings in their teeth, but some don't," he said. "Some of us live near coal plants, but some of us don't. Some of us live in houses with lead paint, but some of us don't. Some of us didn't know plastics were bad for you, but some of us did."
The exposures their children all shared were multiple vaccines containing the neurotoxins mercury and aluminum and dozens of other chemicals injected directly into their bodies. "All the parents are telling me the same damned story," he said. "The kid goes on a stair-step physical decline after each shot appointment and ultimately is diagnosed with autism."
Handley prefaces the tale of son Jamie's regression with what he calls his five-minute monologue, which begins: "Autism is a process. It is not an event. Every parent
I know had a child who was developing normally and was healthy and whose health took a substantial decline over time."
Jamie's first vaccinations came at his two-month visit, when he received the typical "six vaccines in about three or four minutes ... exactly what the CDC schedule recommended," Handley said. Within two days, Lisa was back in the doctor's office with him, complaining of eczema, diarrhea and poor sleep, none of which had previously been issues.
The CDC/AAP schedule then calls for four-month, six-month and 12-month appointments with 19 more shots. And with each round of injections, Handley said, symptoms appeared and worsened -- fevers, diarrhea and ear infections immediately afterward, followed by rounds of antibiotics and cognitive declines. Jamie's pediatric records indicate that after one appointment he couldn't recognize his name.
"This chronic decline and this alignment with vaccine appointments is not something we're conjuring up retrospectively," the Stanford-educated Handley insisted. "The overwhelming majority of us were literally sitting there looking at our pediatric records and looking for cause and effect."
Among the possible side effects from vaccines the CDC lists are diarrhea, stomach aches, fevers, vomiting and brain injury. "I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to wonder if something might be going on," he said.
Throughout the interview, Handley repeatedly emphasized that he has no idea what causes autism. And he knows he couldn't prove vaccines contributed to his son's in a court of law. But he could document the regression.
"What I can prove is my son experienced a chronic decline in health, in a stair-step fashion, immediately after each of his vaccine appointments and subsequently was diagnosed with autism. That's what I know for sure."
***
Among the subjects that inflate Handley's voice is the mainstream media and "how ignorant they are" when they report on vaccines and autism. They don't even know how many shots kids get, he said, citing coverage of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines as the classic case in point.Of the 11 vaccines American children are given before first grade, MMR is the only one that has been studied, albeit faultily, Handley said. But when the media report stories relating to MMR and autism, the implicit and usually explicit message is that vaccines in general have been exonerated as a causative factor.
What reporters don't understand, or at least don't report, is that the CDC/AAP immunization schedule requires 36 vaccinations by the time a child is five, with 55 percent of them by the first birthday, he said. The vaccine schedule begins at birth for children who are born in hospitals, with a vaccination for hepatitis B. By 6 months, a child religiously following the program has received 19 shots.
And while there are pockets of unimmunized children around the country, schools require children be immunized as a condition of enrollment. "Pediatricians who aren't on that schedule have to explain it to health insurers and the AAP," Handley said.
Never reported is the fact that only two of the three dozen shots kids receive are MMR, and the first one isn't scheduled until the 12-month visit, and then it's given in combination with five other vaccines. "MMR is the 20th shot that they get," Handley said, noting that the second is given at 48 months, well after autistic symptoms appear in the vast majority of children. "To think for a moment that solely isolating that shot exonerates the other shots is foolishness."
The journalistic malfeasance that characterizes media coverage of vaccines was acutely evident in the recent decision in Great Britain to censure Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist whose 1998 study in the British medical journal The Lancet suggested possible links between autism, a rare bowel disease and the MMR vaccine.
"I mean, before you knew it, the headline basically read, 'Wakefield lied, all vaccines are safe,'" Handley said, expressing awe at the other side's ability to manipulate the media with such blatant, transparent lies. "What a remarkable spin job. But what a remarkably dishonest thing to say."
Handley said he has personally read the Wakefield study 10 times. It followed 12 kids with autism whose guts swelled to the size of grapefruits, who suffered chronic diarrhea and were in extreme pain all day. All it said was that parents noted a relationship with the MMR shots.
"Onset of behavioural symptoms was associated, by the parents, with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination in eight of the 12 children," the five-page paper says.
Handley elaborated: "It takes great pains to say, 'We have no proof that MMR is correlated with anything, but it merits further study,' which is what you typically do in scientific inquiry." At a news conference, Wakefield said he didn't believe that the combined MMR vaccine had been adequately studied and recommended parents have their children immunized against measles, mumps and rubella individually.
"I am as sure as the day is long that what I've given you is 100 percent factually accurate," he said. "You can read The Lancet study to confirm what I've told you. Everything else from there is all uproar."
As a result of the misinformed media coverage, Handley said, many believe those who challenge the wisdom of America's vaccination program have lost the debate, that they must be devastated. "No," he said, "when you understand the issues as well as we do, all it tells us is how devious the other side is willing to behave, and it makes us more angry."
The fact that any reporter would imply that vaccines are 100 percent safe is a testament to their laziness and ignorance, he added.
Before the industry began dramatically increasing the American vaccination schedule in 1989, Congressman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., engineered legislation that "indemnified vaccine makers from any liability from vaccines," Handley said. The law, which became effective Oct. 1, 1988, created a judicial system under which all claims of vaccine-induced injury, be they autism or otherwise, are heard by a special federal court in Washington, D.C.
"You can go to their Web site," Handley said. "You can look it up for yourself. We've paid $1.9 billion for vaccine injuries, over 80 percent of which are to children. So it's unequivocal that vaccines hurt some kids."
***
As recently as two years ago, Handley said, parents were told they were imagining their children's regression from normality to autism. But validation for their arguments recently came from the most unlikely of sources, Yale neurologist Dr. Steven Novella, whom Handley describes in an article in the Age of Autism as a "major league hater of our community.""Dr. Novella's piece details a recent study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry titled 'A Prospective Study of the Emergence of Early Behavioral Signs of Autism' that tried to figure out when signs of autism first emerge in babies," Handley wrote. "Ironically, the study Novella references is quite supportive of the theory that autism is caused by the environment and most notably vaccines."
The March 2010 study compared two groups of children, one at high risk for autism and one at low risk, and noted the onset of symptoms in children who developed autism. It found no difference in the frequency of visual contact, shared smiles and vocalizations at 6 months. The differences, however, "were significant by 12 months of age on most variables."
In a blog post on the Web site Science-Based Medicine, Novella wrote, "What these results indicate is that clear signs of autism emerge between 6 and 12 months of age."
Novella concluded that the study disproved a link between autism and vaccines. "Many children are diagnosed between the age of 2 and 3, during the height of the childhood vaccine schedule. This lends itself to the assumption of correlation and causation on the part of some parents."
In an addendum to the blog, Novella acknowledged that he erred when he wrote that line, but he insisted, "Many parents blame their children's autism on vaccines they received after the true onset of symptoms."
While Handley didn't comment on the addendum in his Age of Autism counterpost, he said the original line made him "shout and laugh at the same time." Children have received 19 shots by 6 months -- 52 percent of the total vaccination schedule -- when the study says early symptoms of autism begin to appear.
"Between 6 and 12 months, that's when Jamie started going awry," he said. "So, it makes perfect sense to me. ... Their point was that between 6 and 12 months the kids started to exhibit the symptoms.
"Remember, it's a process, it's not an event."
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