Dear [Senator] [Representative]

You will have received, or will shortly receive, an invitation from Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) to attend a “special briefing” Wednesday, September 24 at 2:00 PM 210 Cannon House Office Building on “recent developments in the vaccine-autism debate.”

The briefing will feature two speakers: David Kirby and Mark Blaxill. Mr. Kirby has no scientific training. His “credentials” as an autism expert are that he published a shoddily-researched book, “Evidence of Harm”, with financial backing from the anti-vaccination advocacy group, Safe Minds. Mr. Blaxill is a co-founder of Safe Minds.

I strongly urge you to decline the invitation. There is no “vaccine- autism debate.” As numerous studies have shown, there is no evidence that vaccination is in any way causal in autism. It is a failed hypothesis. The continued focus on this failed hypothesis are hurting children with autism and their families.

Peter Hotez is the Walter G. Ross Professor and chairman of Microbiology and Tropical Medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine. He is also the father of an autistic daughter, now a teenager.

Paul Offit interviewed Dr. Hotez, and quotes him in Offit’s new book, Autism’s False Prophets*,

“One of the reasons that I believe that we are at least ten years behind in providing the right kind of services for autistic children is because of the distraction that this whole vaccine-autism debate has caused. It’s led to a lack of focus on what’s really needed. I get very angry at a lot of these autism groups, like Safe Minds. It’s so difficult for me not to want to shake them and say, ‘Don’t you realize that you’re really doing a disservice to parents, not a service?’ And they’re so self-righteous. They don’t speak for all autistic parents. They’re certainly not speaking for me.”

*Paul Offit, MD: Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure (2008) p. 227.

Sincerely,

Find your senator here:

http://www.senate.gov/general/.....rs_cfm.cfm

Find your congressional representative here (must know your zip + 4)

http://www.house.gov/

I thought i’d do some congressional outreach of my own, just to make sure the senators and representatives know that the forum will prominently feature an organization whose treasurer recently said, “Death may be better than autism in some cases.”

Funny thing, though. I heard back from a rep for one of the senators listed on the site as a confirmed attendee. She said unequivocally that the senator “isn’t attending the forum you referred to. It’s actually the first we’ve heard of it.”

You don’t suppose someone might be trying to plump up the numbers?

(At any rate, for those in the U.S., it might be worth cordially contacting your own local members of Congress to make sure they know the full story. Kirby and Blaxill are the featured speakers.)

d) No definitive evidence that current chelators even cross the blood brain barrier
e) No definitive evidence that current chelators are removing heavy metals from the brain
f) Even if they did work, no definitive evidence that neurological damage caused by heavy metals would be reversible
g) Chelators might redistribute heavy metals into the brain
h) No definitive evidence that autistic children have more mercury in the brain or body in the first place
i) No definitive evidence of inability to excrete heavy metals – only hypotheses (”poor excretor”, “temporary poor excretor”)

The parents who were walking into the NIH and CDC and throwing around demands that resulted in this idiotic chelation study being considered are not merely gullible patients of some DAN! doc. They are greedy and they are selfish. These are the ones I was describing. I was specifying parents who were backed by politicians, as in the politician calls up someone at the NIMH or CDC and says, “you better listen to Mrs. X or Mr. Z.” This IS what happened and is part of what explains how the mercury parents got so much power at a high level in various gov’t agencies.
I was not thinking of parents like your friend, unless she happens also to be a “mover and shaker” among the mercury parents.

Can we please start going after the Drs Megson and Mumper of the world, instead of the naive, desperate, hopeful parents who believe what they say?

No-one considers the most likely reason for this cancellation:
a) There is no evidence metals cause autism
b) There is evidence chelation can cause injury
c) There is therefore what any rational person would see as an unacceptable amount of risk to children.

I would add that it was probably canceled because:

d)the powers that let this travesty through the door at the NIMH (thank you Tom Insel, and thank you Susan Swedo) knew and know the only reason they had considered doing it to begin with was because of pressure from some idiot politician(s) who were backing some self-centered and greedy parents who had a hope that they and/or their friends would win in a toxic-tort lawsuit. These parents with the advice of their lawyers, no doubt, were trying to get the NIMH to lend credibility to the cases cooked by these same ambulance chasers.

Before a treatment is tested in humans, generally considerable experimental evidence is needed from multiple sources, basic science (such as cell culture and biochemistry) and animal studies. Anecdotal evidence, particularly poor quality anecdotal evidence permeated with groupthink is not enough.

Unfortunately, the NIH is forgetting this, and not just for dubious therapies beloved of antivaccinationists. It’s a problem in the entire field of “complementary and alternative medicine” clinical trials. Hence, we have $30 million spent on a huge, poorly designed multicenter trial testing chelation therapy in cardiovascular disease (for which many of the centers were chelation mills who misrepresented the study) and randomized clinical studies funded by the NIH for the Gonzalez regimen for pancreatic cancer based on a tiny, single-arm retrospective trial riddled with selection bias and questions about whether a couple of the patients even had pancreatic cancer in the first place. That’s why I saw the greenlighting of the chelation trial for autism to be a symptom of this new mentality, in which we test whatever woo adherents believe in not because it’s good science but because the woo-meisters clamor for it.

I only hope the rejection of this trial is a sign that the NIH is moving away from pandering to the activists and towards concentrating on using good science to decide what trials to fund.

Meanwhile, over at AoA, it is very much like a cult. In fact, it is a cult, a cult of antivaccinationism. They know that it absolutely, positively has to be the vaccines, and nothing will persuade them otherwise. The ludicrous conspiracy-mongering in response to the decision to axe this study is completely consistent with cult behavior.

Finally, I know why these “recovery” stories never get written up as case reports for peer-reviewed medical journals. (Now that’s what a real anecdote looks like in scientific medicine.) They don’t get written up because they don’t meet even the minimal criteria accepted by medical scientists to be accepted.

AoA has become a cult. They refuse to address all of the issues, dwell only on the ones they deem relevant, and deny what does not fit into their narrow scope of understanding. It is no different than a group of believers waiting for Haley Bop to come around and pick them up and take them to heaven (hey, they had their ‘evidence’ too), except, in the end, the real victims are their children.