Archive | Safe Minds RSS feed for this section

David Kirby vs Accuracy

20 Jul

As I’ve said before, I like David Kirby personally. We exchange friendly emails. We even recently discussed the idea of having a private blog – readable by all but one that allowed only two posters (David and I) and no commenters. This would, I suggested, give us the opportunity to have a civil debate.

Unfortunately, David was too busy, which was a shame. However, the offers always open should he find a bit more time.

He did have time yesterday to blog a piece for the Huffington Post in which he discussed Amanda Peet and said she was ‘against the medical establishment’ for taking the stance she did. He cited a few things to support his point. I’d like to discuss these things but before I do I’d like you Dear Reader to take note: someone who was at the IACC meeting David talks about (he wasn’t there) will hopefully be posting their account of proceedings on LB/RB.

Anyway. Lets proceed. David’s first piece of rhetoric to support the idea Amanda Peet was against the medical establishment was:

A workgroup report of the IACC (the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, which includes HHS, CDC, NIH and others) says that some members want “specific objectives on vaccine research” included in the new, multimillion-dollar national autism research program, as mandated by Congress in the Combatting Autism Act.

I’m sure that some members do want this. Lynn Redwood and Mark Baxhill to be precise. As the upcoming IACC account will show, I don’t think any other IACC workgroup members were interested. (Please see this correction of an ignorant Limey’s take on the US system.)

I would also like to correct David on his characterisation of the Combating Autism Act. The Act contains no mention of vaccines. It specifies environmental research but the words ‘vaccine’, ‘vaccination’ ‘immunize’, ‘immunization’, ‘mmr’ or ‘thimerosal’ appear nowhere in the CAA. I hope David will correct his HuffPo piece accordingly.

Notes from the meeting indicate that workgroup members want federal researchers to consider “shortfalls” in epidemiological studies cited as proof against a vaccine-autism association (by Offit, Peet, et al); as well as a specific plan “for researching vaccines as a potential cause of autism.” The workgroup also says that the final research agenda should “state that the issue is open.”

Once again, David’s notes are coming from two people, Lynn Redwood and Mark Blaxill and indeed – they asked for all these things. The account of the meeting I have heard (from someone who was there) differed somewhat. As a flavour of how much the majority of the working group listened to Redwood and Blaxill, I enclose a teaser quote from chairperson Tom Insel:

“Lyn, your community is not the whole community and there are many people with well thought out concerns about ethics of the concept of prevention and if we want to be inclusive we will not do this.”

Back to David:

July 14, 2008 – Rep. Brad Miller (R-NC), Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, (Committe on Science and Technology) writes to HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt to complain that current federal autism research “shows a strong preference to fund genetic-based studies,” even though there is, “growing evidence that suggests a wide range of conditions or environmental exposures may play a role” in autism.

I blogged that episode here. Suffice it to say that a _politician_ is not representative of the medical establishment. I would urge everyone reading this to read that piece as it suggests amongst other things that Generation Rescue and SafeMinds be responsible for a Board that would serve as a liaison between the IACC and parents of autistic people and autistic people themselves!. After reading that I would urge everyone to contact the following people to express your thoughts (politely!) to the decision makers:

HHS Sec Mike Leavitt (mike.leavittAThhs.gov)
NIMH director/IACC director Tom Insel (tinselATmail.nih.gov)
Everyone here: http://science.house.gov/about/members.htm

Once again, back to David:

Dr. Bernadine Healy, former head of the NIH and the American Red Cross and current Health Editor of US News & World Report tells CBS News that, “Officials have been too quick to dismiss the hypothesis as irrational,” and says they “don’t want to pursue a hypothesis because that hypothesis could be damaging to the public health community at large by scaring people.”

I still can’t get over the fact that David is using this person to back up his points! He continues to trumpet the opinion of Bernadine Healy who actually did assert that cigarettes do not cause cancer and worked closely with Philip Morris to do so. She also totally reneged on her stance on fetal tissue research when she found herself in the same camp as President Bush. In AoA language she’s a shill.

David then goes on to cite al three Presidential Candidates – as if a politicians opinion in an election year means anything! I definitely fail to see what any of them have to do with being part of the medical establishment.

Onwards:

March 29, 2008 – Dr. Julie Gerberding, Director of the CDC, speaking about the Hannah Poling case on CNN says: “If a child was immunized, got a fever, had other complications from the vaccines, and was pre-disposed with the mitochondrial disorder, it can certainly set off some damage (including) symptoms that have characteristics of autism.”

Er, so? I’m really not sure how this is a ‘point’ for David (or anyone else who thinks its supportive of the idea vaccines cause autism). If she’d said ‘yes, vaccines caused autism in Hannah Poling’s case’ (which no-one ever has by the way, despite statements to the contrary) than _that_ would be a bombshell. As it was Dr. Gerberding was simply speaking what is obvious.

David again:

The CISA Network (Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment), headed by the CDC, receives a report from top researchers at Johns Hopkins University that 30 typically developing children with mitochondrial dysfunction all regressed into autism between 12 and 24 months of life. At least two of them (6%) showed brain damage within one week of receiving simultaneous multiple vaccinations.

Now, I can’t answer this as much as I’d like to. I have spoken to people involved in the preparation and writing of this report (as has David) and I was given two take home points from our email chat:

1) The science is _not yet complete_ . The paper is not published.
2) The authors feel ‘disappointed’ in the slant David has put on their work and are loth to discuss it with anyone else due to that. I was told that David might be rather surprised when everything comes out later in the year.

David once more:

Medical Personnel at HHS concede an autism case filed by the family of Hannah Poling in the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, before the claim can go to trial as a “test case” of the theory that thimerosal causes autism. Though portrayed by some (ie, Dr. Offit) as a legal decision, it is in fact a medical decision. HHS doctors admit that the “cause” of Hannah’s “autistic encephalopathy” was “vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation that exceeded metabolic reserves,”

First of all, I beg to differ with David. The concession was a legal one. By definition the phrase “autistic encephalopathy” does not exist in mainstream science so if it was used (a fact which has yet to be determined – I invite David once more to link through to the document where this is stated). A simple test of its non-existence is to search for the phrase on PubMed. I got:

Quoted phrase not found.

So we have a multitude of uncertainties here:

1) Nowhere (except in David’s writings) can we find evidence of HHS apparently saying “autistic encephalopathy” caused Hannah Poling’s autism.

2) The phrase itself (“autistic encephalopathy”) does not appear in the entire PubMed database, thus causing me to doubt its use by the medical establishment.

3) Is the concession legal or medical? If a diagnosis does not exist but is used in a legal document then by definition it must be legal – thats my opinion anyway.

David also mentions a HHS Vaccine Safety Working Group meeting but I know next to nothing about that so can’t comment.

I have to say that based on the above, David seems to be attempting nothing more than an intellectual ‘land grab’ i.e. to attempt to paint those who claim vaccines cause autism as part of the medical establishment and those who stand against them as not. Its a good political idea but I don’t think its going to work. There are just too many holes in this particular boat for it to float for long.

Age of Autism still don't get it

15 Jul

Over on our favourite pompous blog, the authors and readers still seem to have trouble processing their collective importance to autism related science (none at all) as well as how successful politicians are at directing science (not at all).

They flourish a letter from the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the House Science and Technology Committee (long enough name fellers?) which is itself breathtaking in its dumbness.

In the Combating Autism Act, Congress directed DHHS to conduct research into screening, diagnosis, treatment and medical care for individuals with autism. These areas of research are essential to a balanced approach. In addition to these areas, I strongly encourage the IACC to promote a balanced research portfolio when examining the underlying causes of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). An examination of the FY07 ASD Research Portfolio shows a strong preference to fund genetic-based studies related to autism. There is growing evidence that suggests a wide range of conditions or environmental exposures may play a role in the emergence of ASD.

So, they firstly admit the role of CAA did not ask DHHS to examine the causes of autism but then ask the IACC (a committee appointed as a result of the CAA) to do it anyway. They then tick the IACC off for having a preference for genetic based studies and say there’s growing evidence that a ‘wide range’ of things cause autism. Possibly thats true, but the reference they provide to support that statement belies their beliefs. They reference the recent IMFAR poster presentation of Laura Hewitson. A study that has not even been published. This _is_ a science committee right?

They then go on to repeat a number of anti-vaccinationist talking points (Hannah Poling, biomedical treatment etc etc) and then make their recommendation:

I urge you to consider forming a Secretarial-level Autism Advisory Board (AAB). While the IACC is the primary mechanism for the coordination of research, surveillance, and early detection activities within the Department of Health and Human Services, an AAB could provide additional public feedback and serve as a liaison between parents, individuals with ASD, advocacy groups and the Department of Health and Human Services, and would assist in reestablishing public confidence

and whom might be on such a board I wonder?

Groups such as SafeMinds, Generation Rescue, Autism Speaks, the Simons Institute, the National Autism Alliance, and the Autism Research Institute all have or are currently supporting research. Such groups have experience evaluating research, an in-depth knowledge of the current body of ASD research, and an appreciation of the new questions that may need to be examined in order to move our understanding of ASD forward.

This is a bad joke, surely. What is driving this is the fact that some IACC members are annoyed that the IACC didn’t immediately capitulate to their demands to study vaccines and vaccines only. There was a good reason why they didn’t. Its already been done. No association. Move on.

I have to say the idea of SafeMinds and Generation Rescue being on a board that is to restore public confidence to “parents [and] individuals with ASD” amuses and scares me in equal part. Maybe Mr Miller hasn’t seen founding members of Generation Rescue calling autistic people ‘trailor dwelling coo-coos’ or founder members of SafeMinds referring to blogs authored by autistic people and parents of autistic people as part of a ‘Wackosphere’? I think once he has (and he will, as will Secretary Leavitt and Dr Insel) he might stop and think futher.

Anyway, I digress, back to AoA. They employ a clever bit of deviousness to try and lever vaccines into the CAA:

The CAA listed 13 scientific fields but the only specific research topic mentioned in the legislative history was vaccines and their preservations as a possible cause of autism.

Hey, why would they need to? The Omnibus Autism hearings are doing that right?

But read carefully. It looks on a quick pass like vaccines are mentioned in the CAA. But they aren’t. They are mentioned in the ‘legislative history’. What that means is that there is no mention of vaccines in the CAA (and there isn’t. Read for yourself.)

Another word that would equate with ‘legislative history’ is ‘rubbish’ meaning ‘that which has been thrown away’. AoA – or in this instance Kelli Anne Davis (apparently the DC Political Liaison for Generation Rescue) – will be using the phrase ‘legislative history’ to try and afford some weight to the idea of vaccines being in drafts of the CAA. I really doubt anyone is going to fall for that little sleight of hand Kelli Ann.

And here’s the kicker:

This letter is the result of a year-long, collaborative effort between Generation Rescue, SafeMinds and the Investigation and Oversight Subcommittee.

I’ll bet it is.

Just this week, yet more genetic evidence was uncovered into the aetiology of autism. Y’know, the kind of evidence AoA et al are saying is useless and there’s too much of.

Let this be a marking point. Let us all remember that this is the week that the political process was co-opted in order to achieve a useless goal. The results of that, if successful, will be even less research into what could be vital therapies, educational strategies, residential innovations and means of garnering respect for autistic people.

How many autistic amish?

3 Jun

Yesterday, Joseph wrote a great post that looked at the prevalence of low functioning autism amongst the Amish and found it correlated strongly with non Amish sources.

Today, I want to look at the Amish through the lens of the ‘new’ prevalence that The Autism Omnibus Petitioners expert witness (for the families) Professor Sander Greenland testified to.

Now, as we all know, when Dan Olmsted first started writing about the Amish he claimed that both Amish children are never vaccinated and that the Amish either don’t have autism, or it is very rare.

It has been established since than that Omsted’s ‘reporting’ (which constituted asking a water cooler salesman) somehow missed the fact that the Amish actually do vaccinate in pretty high numbers.

Since that time, as the autism/vaccine hypothesis has become weaker and weaker we have seen a ‘silent switch’ amongst its proponents. Gone is the talk about ‘epidemic’ and hundred of thousands of children ‘poisoned’ to be replaced with talk such as:

My message is this: “We need more research to determine if a small subset of kids is genetically susceptible to lifelong neurological injury from something, or things, in our current vaccine program.

This has been echoed by Dan Olmsted. When Autism News Beat stepped into woo-land and visited Autism One, Dan Olmsted was quoted on camera as saying (this is a hurried transcription, apologies for slight errors):

…you try to listen for anything that’s useful in terms of information. Sometimes they tell you things that they don’t mean to in terms of how..uh..you know we learned things about the Amish from a blogger who tried to destroy my reporting about that because he basically talked to somebody who confirmed that there were very few cases of classic, regressive autism. So…it’s, you know…that’s the way it is…

So, we can see that the ‘silent shift’ is underway. Nobody acknowledges it but the media people amongst the autism/vaccine believers have switched their stance. Now we’re only looking for a small subset of regressive cases.

This was born out by the families expert witness Professor Greenland. He was asked to tackle the epidemiology for autism and stated that the number of kids made autistic by vaccines (assuming it had happened at all) was so small it could not be detected by epidemiology. He contended that it was in fact a subset of a subset he called ‘clearly regressive autism’.

Using his data, we could see that ‘clearly regressive autism’ accounts for 0.015% of a given population. According to Elizabethtown College the Amish population of the US is about 220,000.

So, in real terms we are looking for (0.015% of 220,000) 33 ‘clearly regressive autistic’ people.

According to Mark Blaxill, Olmsted has already found:

….less than 20 cases

Which is good news. It means he must already be over halfway in finding all the ‘clearly regressive autistic’ people he needs to in order to establish the Amish have the same rate of ‘clearly regressive autism’ as the rest of us.

The Amish Anomaly is an anomaly in one respect only – it is anomalous to keep silently shifting the numbers you want to find. Now that David Kirby, Dan Olmsted and the Autism Omnibus families are all on record as only looking for a ‘small subset’ isn’t it time that the Amish Anomaly was seen for what it is – anomalous.

Dr. Johnson testifies in the Autism Omnibus Hearing

24 May

Dr. Johnson’s testimony was fabulous and I think it’s safe to say that it wreaks more devastation on the petitioners'(the parents) case. As of this moment, I can’t give you a lot of detail about Dr. Johnson’s qualifications, unfortunately. For some reason a portion of the audio recording (MP3) that would have included Dr. Johnson’s statement of his qualifications is missing.

One thing I think is important to point out here is that the respondents experts’ (written) reports, and even the list of the respondents’ experts has not been posted to the Autism Omnibus docket. The parents’ lawyers (the Petitioners Steering Committee, or PSC) do have their experts list posted to the docket. Some time ago (I think it was more than a year ago) the Department of Justice attorneys asked the Special Master if the Federal Court would refrain from posting the lists of the respondent’s experts for fear that their experts would be subjected to harassment. That request doesn’t seem to be on the docket now, but it used to be. It’s likely that after the experts were listed the first time the experts for the government were harassed. This would be in keeping with the way different experts, and even parents such as myself and Kevin Leitch and others, have been harassed by “mercury parents” or their friends. You can see from the Autism Omnibus Proceedings Docket Here: http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/node/2718 that the there are no more postings of lists of respondents’ experts after mid 2006. There’s an entry from March of 2007 that is called, “Respondent’s Notice of Expert Witnesses,” but there’s no document now linked to that entry.

The point I’m trying to make about the missing expert list is: I can’t pull up the list of expert witnesses for the respondents (the US government, essentially) for this hearing because it’s not available. So I can’t find out easily who Dr. Johnson is, though he is a professor at university, and has a lab, and has published on neurophyisology and neurodegenerative diseases, and he uses tissue slides and tissue cultures. Worse, “Johnson” is a very common name so if you go looking for experts named Johnson who publish in neurodegenerative diseases, you’ll find 3 or 4 of them in pubmed. The DoJ lawyer here is one of Mr. Matanoski’s team of attorneys. As far as I can tell the junior attorneys on the team are Bo (Beau?) Johnson, Ms. Ricciardella, Ms. Renzi and Ms. Espinoza (Espinosa?).

I don’t know which lawyer is examining Dr. Johnson. From her voice, I’m guessing (again) that it’s Ms. Renzi. Again this is my transcribing of what was said, some of it is word for word, some of it is a close paraphrase of what was said you can find the following somewhere around 8 minutes 43 seconds on the second MP3 file from Day 7 (May 20). Here is some of the very interesting testimony from Dr. Johnson:

Ms. Renzi: Dr. Deth cited a paper by Mady Hornig in support of his arguments. You mentioned that the mouse strain Dr. Hornig used was selected because it had a stronger immune response, but took issue with Dr. Deth’s explanation of the rationale behind the use of the strain. … Deth said hers was a mouse strain harboring genetic deficits in redox related enzymes… What strain of mouse was used?

Dr. Johnson: It was an SJL-J mouse. (Dr. Deth) was inferring that there was a redox enzyme differential, or some kind of differential (in this strain) and that’s absolutely not true. The mice have a this increased immune response and that’s why they were selected. … There’s absolutely no data supporting the fact that there is a redox enzyme differential. Now I can understand the reason that it’s in there because it supports his hypothesis… but it’s not an accurate representation of these mice.

Renzi: Do you have confidence in Dr. Hornig’s reported results?

Johnson: Uh, no.

Renzi: Part of that has to do with the hippocampal sections, correct?

Johnson: The quality of the images,… I’ll point this out, (the sections from the Hornig paper) .. What you can see is when you look at these images–to me these images are absolutely awful, now the staining here is hematoxylin and eosin, and it’s supposed to stain for architecture and cell integrity and a variety of other things. The pictures are diffuse, there’s no clear neuronal fields. Right here there is weak staining. … If you look here, the cells that are dark right there, those are the neuronal fields. The quality is just extremely low. … Quality of the sections themselves are low. … Let’s put it this way, I’ve seen this in my lab before. I’ve seen people come to me with sections stained like this. I’ll say: Something’s wrong. OK? The tissue wasn’t prepared right. There’s something definately wrong here. Because these do not maintain the nice cellular architecture that you should see if the experiment is done right and the tissue is harvested correctly.

Renzi: Problems with these slides led you to doubt the findings of the Hornig paper? Has a recent paper contradicted Hornig’s findings? …

Johnson: The… comparable fields in the Berman paper. To me they are absolutely beautiful. … It looks very, very, very good.

Renzi: … What dose of thimerosal was used in the Berman paper?

Johnson: …They also used a does that was 10 times higher…

Renzi: Did both studies (stain with antibodies)?

Johnson: There is a distinct difference between Berman and Hornig studies’ slides… If you look at the architecture of the tissue in the Berman study…. (there is) nice staining in the hippocampus….

Special Master:… (interrupt for clarification)

Johnson: … Berman sections are the two sections on the left side… What you can see is there’s very nice staining in the field, the neuronal field are not staining intensely (which is what they are expected to show)

Now if you look at the upper 4 panels on the right side these are from the similar panels from the Hornig study. The first thing that I want to point out is that if you look at the tissue, it’s full of holes… Look at this enhanced image right here, the bottom two panels C and D from the Hornig. You can see that the tissue almost looks like it’s disintegrating, It’s breaking down. There’s holes all over in the tissue.

I know from experience when you see tissue like this the amount of nonspecific staining by antibodies could be intense.

Basically, if someone came to me with this kind of staining in my laboratory I would say to go back and do the whole experiment again,… I would not want… for one these are unpublishable to me, and two the potential for artifactual data to be generated from this kind of (poor quality tissue) is extremely high. … This is very important. You know, you can do whatever you want after you’ve got the tissue, but it’s the process of getting the tissue so that the quality is extremely good. You need to start with high quality tissue.

… The Berman tissue was absolutely perfect. … The sections are beautiful.

One thing I took away from Dr. Johnson’s testimony is that there’s no way that the Hornig paper should

have made it past a competent peer review and into a “peer reviewed” publication. The Hornig paper has a few other problems that have been discussed before, but these problems never been reported in into a letter to the journal that published that paper, Molecular Psychology, as they should have. (Click here to download a copy of that paper from the SAFE MINDS website.)

Hornig wrote that paper with her main squeeze, Ian Lipkin, and with David Chian. This research was funded by the UC Davis MIND Institute, SAFE MINDS and by part of an NIH grant of Ian Lipkin’s. Surely someone knew how bad those tissue slides were even before it was submitted to the journal. Surely someone at the journal should have had a person with some kind of expertise review the article. Surely in 2004 some person with expertise would have noticed the problems with the degraded and uninterpretable tissue slides in the Hornig paper. I didn’t notice any problems with the slides when I read the paper because I don’t know what stained tissue of mouse hippocampus is supposed to look like and neither would most of the mercury parents who have tried to use this paper to show that their own child was made autistic by vaccines containing thimerosal.

The MIND Institute scientists must have seen the problems with Mady Hornig’s study, but they invited her to come speak about her thimerosal-causes-susceptible-mice-to-become-mindlessly-violent-killers hypothesis at the conference I call the “MIND’s mini-DAN!”. Video of her speaking at that conference is still available on the MIND’s website here: http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/mindinstitute/events/toxicology_recorded_events.html

And you can see video of John Green speaking there, too. He was described in the most glowing terms by Dr. Robert Hendren. Maybe Dr. Hendren didn’t know about the “earthworm eggs” and “fecal implantation enemas” that Dr. Green had prescribed to some of his patients. After Green spoke, Dr. Hendren knew about the problems with Green’s citing of a provoked urine toxic heavy metals lab result from Doctor’s Data Inc that was in Dr. Green’s slides, because I told Dr. Hendren about the problem with that lab report. As far as I could tell, Dr. Hendren wasn’t particularly worried about that. The video of Dr. Green “explaining” what that lab test meant to him is still on the MIND’s website. I have a problem with that, since parents can watch those videos and make poor treatment decisions for their children based on them. On the other hand, those videos seem to stand as a testimony to something less than scientific that seems to be going on at the MIND Institute. To UC Davis’ credit however, the Berman (2008) study that totally contradicts the Hornig (2004) study was also conducted at UCD.

Dr. Johnson has plenty of interesting things to say about Dr. Richard Deth and his neuroblastoma cell line experiments. Apparently, Dr. Deth will be back to testify again in the autism omnibus. Perhaps he will explain why he seemed to cut his experiments short (time-wise) and why he called neuroblastoma cells “neronal cells” when they should not be called neuronal cells, and why he didn’t show critically important “dose response curves”.credit: taminsea

I may have to devote a separate post to the issue of Deth taking data from (but not citing) a 1958 paper (pdf) that reported the level of cystathionine in duck brains (besides duck, also, human, cat, rat, guinea pig, horseshoe crab, chicken, cow and monkey).

Ya ken that hidden horde, aye?

24 Feb

So – the ‘Hidden Horde’ – the term that anti-vaccinationists like to smirk about as evidence of an autism epidemic. The logic goes like this: if there’s no autism epidemic then where are all the [insert age here] year old autistic adults? I’ve heard people asking for evidence of 75 year old autistics (conveniently forgetting that the average mortality age in the US and UK is around 70), 50 year olds – even 30 year olds.

Never mind that there’s been plenty of evidence for adult autistics. Thats not convenient for the anti-vaccinationist agenda so it gets ignored.

Anyway, todays Sunday Herald carries another story about adult autistics in Scotland called ‘Revealed: ‘invisible’ adults living with autism’.

According to the National Autistic Society (NAS) Scotland report, due to be launched this week, 52% of adults have not had an assessment of their needs since the age of 18…..It is estimated that more than 35,000 adults in Scotland have the condition, but campaigners said they were “invisible” to local authorities, who are failing to record the number of people with autism in their area.

The population of Scotland is 5,062,011. The latest prevalence estimates for the UK are 1 in 100. This means that 50,620 people are autistic. If 35,000 adults in Scotland are autistic then 69% of autistic people in Scotland are adults.

Hidden horde aye?

Brad Handley Offers Us A Chance To Evaluate

6 Feb

A couple of days ago, Brad Handley wrote a blog entry on Age of Autism called ‘DR. NANCY MINSHEW & ME: WHO’S CRAZY?’.

Let us instead examine Brad’s criteria for deciding on who is crazy and who is not between Dr Minshew and he.

I disagree with almost every single thing you have written or said about autism. Since we both can’t possibly be right, one of us has to be crazy. I’m scared to death it might be me. As a psychiatrist, I thought you could help.

Says Brad to Dr Minshew in an email. He then continues with:

It is maddening for parents like me that our “experts” can’t agree on the most fundamentally important and critical data point in the entire field of autism: is prevalence truly rising or not? This very binary notion impacts everything else. If it’s growing, it’s the environment. If it’s not, it’s genetics. From you perspective, “The increase in number of cases reflects the increase in recognition of verbal children.” I was confounded by this point, because I can’t find a single sentence in the scientific literature to support this. What I do look to is the following:

OK, lets pause. Brad says there’s no scientific literature to support the idea that there isn’t an epidemic. We’ll come back to that. Firstly, however, he cites a few bits and bobs to support his hypothesis that there is.

First off he cites:

[1]Report to the Legislature on the Principle Findings from The Epidemiology of Autism in California: A Comprehensive Pilot Study MIND Institute, UC Davis, Oct 2002.

This is not in the scientific literature. It is not peer reviewed. According to Brad’s own specified criteria of utilising the scientific literature, he cannot cite this document.

The second (and last) paper he cites is:

[2]National Autism Prevalence Trends From United States Special Education Data. Pediatrics, March 2005. Craig J. Newschaffer, PhD..

Using Special Education data has been debunked in a paper published four months after that Newschaffer paper. The author (James Laidler) says:

Many autism advocacy groups use the data collected by the US Department of Education (USDE) to show a rapidly increasing prevalence of autism. Closer examination of these data to follow each birth-year cohort reveals anomalies within the USDE data on autism……These anomalies point to internal problems in the USDE data that make them unsuitable for tracking autism prevalence.

and Shattuck says:

The mean administrative prevalence of autism in US special education among children ages 6 to 11 in 1994 was only 0.6 per 1000, less than one-fifth of the lowest CDC estimate from Atlanta (based on surveillance data from 1996). Therefore, special education counts of children with autism in the early 1990s were dramatic underestimates of population prevalence and really had nowhere to go but up. This finding highlights the inappropriateness of using special education trends to make declarations about an epidemic of autism, as has been common in recent media and advocacy reports.

So thats the sum total of Brad’s ‘science’ regarding the autism epidemic. A non-science report and a twice debunked study.

Is there actually anything in the scientific literature that suggests the ‘epidemic’ is not anything of the sort?

Variation in the administrative prevalence of ASD is associated with education-related spending, which may be associated with better-trained educational staff who can recognize the problem, and more and better trained in-school specialists who can provide screening. It is also associated with the availability of health care resources. Increased access to pediatricians and school-based health centers may lead to improved recognition of ASD. Interstate variability in the identification of ASD should be taken into account when interpreting the results of prevalence studies based on administrative data and the associated system characteristics taken into account by policy makers working to improve the recognition of ASD.

David S. Mandell, ScD; Raymond Palmer, PhD

The incidence of research-identified autism increased in Olmsted County from 1976 to 1997, with the increase occurring among young children after the introduction of broader, more precise diagnostic criteria, increased availability of services, and increased awareness of autism. Although it is possible that unidentified environmental factors have contributed to an increase in autism, the timing of the increase suggests that it may be due to improved awareness, changes in diagnostic criteria, and availability of services, leading to identification of previously unrecognized young children with autism.

William J. Barbaresi, MD; Slavica K. Katusic, MD; Robert C. Colligan, PhD; Amy L. Weaver, MS; Steven J. Jacobsen, MD, PhD

We observed dramatic increases in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder as a primary special educational disability starting in the 1991-1992 school year, and the trends show no sign of abatement. We found no corresponding decrease in any special educational disability category to suggest diagnostic substitution as an explanation for the autism trends in Minnesota. We could not assess changes in actual disease incidence with these data, but federal and state administrative changes in policy and law favoring better identification and reporting of autism are likely contributing factors to the prevalence increases and may imply that autism spectrum disorder has been underdiagnosed in the past.

James G. Gurney, PhD; Melissa S. Fritz, MPH; Kirsten K. Ness, MPH; Phillip Sievers, MA;Craig J. Newschaffer, PhD; Elsa G. Shapiro, PhD

Brad continues:

You say vaccines are proven to not cause autism and that parents should vaccinate their children.

Dr. Minshew, you are either being intellectually dishonest on this point or it is outside of your expertise as a psychiatrist to understand the vaccine-autism issue, Let me explain:

Brad _seems_ to be basing this belief on the news article he quotes:

Dr. Nancy Minshew, Director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Excellence in Autism Research, says it’s time to end the debate [about vaccines and autism] because research overwhelmingly proves there’s no connection and parents don’t need to worry about that anymore. Minshew says it’s time real experts dispel the rumors for concerned parents. “They deserve to hear the evidence, the real evidence. So I thought, ‘Enough is enough,'” she said. Minshew says people’s lives are at stake because some kids aren’t getting vaccinated for life-threatening diseases due to incorrect information. Since Thimerosal, an ethyl mercury preservative, was banned from most childhood vaccines in the U.S. seven years ago, autism rates have continued to increase – disproving the link. Minshew says it’s only a coincidence that toddlers are vaccinated around the same time autism is usually diagnosed.

Minshew did _not_ say ‘vaccines are proven to not cause autism’, that is what the article she was quoted in says. You can tell the bits she actually said as they will be surrounded with quote marks.

– Thimerosal was not banned from vaccines as you are quoted as saying, so this is a falsehood.

Minshew was not quoted as saying this. This is a falsehood.

– Thimerosal did not come out of vaccines seven years ago as you are quoted as saying, so this is a falsehood. In fact, it’s still in the overwhelming majority of the flu shot supply at full dose- the flu shot was recently added (2004) to the CDC’s recommended schedule.

Once more, Minshew was _not_ quoted as saying thiomersal came out of vaccines seven year ago. This is a falsehood. Your statement that it is still in the overwhelming majority of the flu shot is speculative and without foundation – unless you have something to back that up….?

And in *fact* – although Minshew never claims it, a CDC meeting reported on a study that said:

N.I.P. estimated the amount of thimerosal in provider vaccine inventories in a survey conducted September 20, 2001 to February 20, 2002. The targets were a convenience sample of providers getting site visits from public health officials across the country. Inventory counts were done of all refrigerators for D.T.a.P., Hib, and hep B pediatric vaccines. The thimerosal classification was based on the lot number information, which was verified by the manufacturers. In September 2001, 225 sites were canvassed, and 447 by February 2002…..During the visits, the providers were surveyed about thimerosal-containing vaccines in their inventories. Of the 447 interviews, 83.5 percent reported no thimerosal-containing vaccines in stock at any time since October 2001.

and

in September 2001, only 5.6%1 of all vaccines contained thiomersal. By Feb 2002, only 1.9% of all vaccines contained thiomersal.

(NB: The 5.6% figure seems to be a typo in the report. It should be 56%. From 33,500 doses out of 63,600; to 2,796 doses out of 149,147)

– If you believe that focusing on a single ingredient in vaccines (mercury) exonerates vaccines in totality, that’s an impossibility. We have grown our vaccine schedule from 10 vaccines in the early 1980s to 36 today. Yet, we never test the “combination risk” of so many vaccines. No one, except Generation Rescue, has ever studied unvaccinated children and looked at their autism rates. We never look at the aluminum that replaced thimerosal, the live viruses, or the many other toxic ingredients in vaccines at all.

So, Brad says that its not just mercury. Which is weird because in Feb 2005 (click the first video) he was saying:

What we immediately realised – and I think this is something that is a surprise to lots of people – um that autism is a misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning. If you line up 100 symptoms of mercury poisoning and 100 symptoms of autism they are exactly the same

So, to borrow a phrase, both can’t be true….is it a misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning or is it the combination of vaccines?

– The parent reports of children going upside-down and developing autism right after vaccination continues unabated. Will you ever listen to them?

People such as Minshew have done nothing _but_ listen. Generation Rescue keep promising something for them to listen to but keep failing to provide it.

Brad continues:

It strikes me, and perhaps I’m crazy for saying this, that now that you have publicly reassured parents that vaccines are safe, that you may well be the last person on earth, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, to concede that vaccines are in fact playing a role in autism.

That, my friend, is called ‘projection’. Now you have publicly hemmed and hawed about what vaccines role is in autism and now all your projections and predictions have singularly failed to materialise (read the rest of that blog entry with the video for details), even with an overwhelming lack of any evidence whatsoever you will be the last person to ever admit you were plain old wrong time and time again.

And yet there’s more.

You never mention recovered children.

In all the writings and quotes of yours, Doctor, I didn’t read one thing about children who have recovered from autism. Have you ever met a recovered child? Would you like to? Would you care to scan their brains and see how they look? I heard a noted neurologist mention an idea that we should scan the brains of children newly diagnosed with autism, let their parents who want to treat the children biomedically, and then re-scan the brains of any children who have recovered. Does that strike you as an interesting idea?

Ah, the famous recovered children. I wrote about this awhile ago. The upshot of it is that when actually looks in detail at the kids Generation Rescue claims as recovered, kids who no longer have a diagnosis account for about 5-7% of the total he presents as recovered. Its a con trick. I even managed to get my own daughter listed as a recovery story on his website.

Brad continues:

As a courtesy, I forwarded the above piece to Dr. Minshew one day in advance of posting it on Age of Autism. What follows is a short email exchange between us:

———————

Dr. Minshew:

What’s written below, by me, will be posted at The Age of Autism blog tomorrow. As a courtesy, I’m sending it to you first.

I have no issues with you personally. In fact, reading that you lost a child makes me very, very empathetic.

That said, it is my heartfelt belief that you are actually part of the problem with autism, rather than part of the solution. I’m sure that’s a comment you disagree with profoundly, but I really believe history will be a harsh judge of scientists like you who continue to deny the existence of a rising prevalence of autism and mistakenly reassure parents that vaccines are safe – a topic you can’t possibly be an expert on, by the way.

I also thought your email to Mr. —- reeked of intellectual arrogance in a very close-minded sort of a way. There are many well-credentialed scientists who would take exception to almost everything you believe about autism, but you speak with sweeping generalizations like you are in the only camp that actually knows where truth lies. I also found your continual reference to a court case in Maryland, while 2 tests cases before the Vaccine Court remain WIDE OPEN, to demonstrate either ignorance on your part or a case of selective fact gathering. What if the test cases in D.C. rule in favor of the plaintiffs?

So, I don’t expect us to be pen pals anytime soon, but I’m including the open letter to you below.

Sincerely,

JB Handley

——————–

From: Nancy Minshew
To: J.B. Handley
Sent: Mon Feb 04 11:50:31 2008
Subject: RE: Nancy & Me: Who’s crazy

Mr. Handley none of you have permission to share emails that i have sent to you as individuals with anyone besides the intended receiver nor do you have permission to quote me publicly. Unlike the newspaper which was public, private emails to individuals sent confidentially are not for public quotation.

——————–

From: J.B. Handley
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2008 11:54 AM
To: Nancy Minshew
Subject: Re: Nancy & Me: Who’s crazy

Says who?

And, tough shit.

J.B. Handley

——————–

Nice guy huh?

And also further example of Brad’s hypocrisy. Our very first online set-to Brad commented (in the comment section) about me publishing part of an email he sent me:

Mr. Leitch sent me an email on my private email account, I responded, and he put my comments on his blog without asking me.

Which wasn’t strictly true but anyway – if I’d known how Brad would chop and change his mind I would’ve just said ‘tough shit’.

Anyway, Brad concludes:

This is my world, Dr. Minshew, it seems clear as day. It’s so different from yours, I really, really need to know: which one of us is crazy?

Lets recap. In Brad’s world science isn’t science unless he says it is. He can chop and change his mind without it invalidating his earlier, contradictory beliefs and its OK to be a massive hypocrite. Are these the actions of a crazy man?

Mark Blaxill Thinks Bloggers Are Mean

4 Feb

Mark Blaxill, the token man of the mercury moms at SafeMinds, has written a lip-trembling post over on Age of Autism about how mean bloggers can be. Lets have a bit of fun with it shall we?

The rapid evolution of the Internet has created a host of fascinating, exhilarating and occasionally despicable new things. The Age of Autism is a blog and we’re proud to be a part of a new phenomenon called the blogosphere……But as one might expect with any new form of cultural expression, there’s a bizarre variant of the blogosphere out there. It’s a strange hybrid: it looks like a regular low end blog, based almost entirely on opinion, a dressed up version of the typical online discussion groups and chat rooms….In a disturbing way, this new hybrid has found its way into the debates and controversies around autism science…..Often connected with the so-called “neurodiversity” movement, many of these game players seem to define themselves by their own “autism”

So if I’m understanding Marky Mark, the blogosphere is a ‘new phenomenon’ upon which the light of the countenance of the Age of Autism has charitably fallen.

This ‘new phenomenon’ actually was first realised nine years ago Marky Mark. I await with bated breath Marky’s breathless announcement come 2017 that Age of Autism has discovered a ‘new phenomenon’ called Facebook. Truly the interweb is a wondrous thing. A piece of advice though Mark – never, ever type ‘Google’ into Google.

And these ‘low ends blogs’….my, my whomever could he be referring to? Surely not Autism Diva’s blog with a Google PR of 5 on the home page and over 1,150 Google backlinks to it? Or maybe Orac’s with a PR of 7 for the home page and which has over 6,100 Google backlinks to it? or maybe my own which has a PR 6 on the home page of the blog and over 2,700 Google backlinks to it.

Or maybe ‘low end’ might refer to a blog which has a PR of 3 on its home page and Google link operator can find no back link data for. I wonder, can anyone suggest a blog with user stats that low end?

Anyway, Marky Mark has a point to make and by god he’s eventually going to get around to making it dammit! Even if he has to rhetoricise our asses into verbal comas!!

But unlike people that engage in the blogosphere using their real names and identities, these avatars all have one thing in common.

They’re cowards.

Hmmmm, really? Is that why some people choose to blog anonymously?

I really hate to break this piece of news to Marky Mark but passing opinions online predates the web. Why go back to the old BBS’s and you’d find a whole bunch of people chatting away with (gasp!) fake names. In fact, I hear tell that some CB radio enthusiasts use fake names too!! The dirty cowards!

There’s a damn good reason why some people blog anonymously Marky Mark as I have good reason to know about – people who espouse similar views to you Marky Mark, target their children. People like John Best for example are very good reasons for preserving anonymity. Here’s what happens when one of his friends annoys him. What do you suppose he has in store for my child?

But who Marky Mark is really pouting about is Do’C and Interverbal, two bloggers who took the time out to look at a recent paper that Marky Mark was counting on to support his kook hypotheses. So annoyed by these two ‘low end’ bloggers (PR 5 on each of their blogs) that he elected to censor out the name of the blog they wrote at!

“Unfortunately, the main bloggers of [censored wackosphere site name] have taken the time to respond to almost all of the other blogs about this article

‘wackosphere’ (tee-hee!!) is the name Marky Mark has bestowed upon autism related blogs more popular than his it seems. That’s a lot of blogs.

So shocked was I at this blatant censorship that I nearly contacted the Ever So Important Editor on Age of Autism to ask if they would write a piece about this – after all they penned 10 blog entries last week decrying censorship – they must really hate it!

In fact so grasping does Marky Mark become that he actually says:

In fact, at a deeper level, there’s a widespread pattern of scientific intimidation and censorship underway in autism science that relies on a wide range of attack dogs…

Hey yeah – I know what you mean Marky Mark like what happened to Dr Paul Offit at the hands of the mercury militia:

….as Paul Offit, a vaccine expert who served on the committee, tried to make his way through the crowd, one of the protestors screamed at him through a megaphone: “The devil—it’s the devil!” One protester held a sign that read “TERRORIST” with a photo of Offit’s face. Just before Offit reached the door, a man dressed in a prison uniform grabbed Offit’s jacket. “It was harrowing,” Offit recalls.

….
He has since received hundreds of malicious and threatening emails, letters and phone calls accusing him of poisoning children and “selling out” to pharmaceutical companies. One phone caller listed the names of Offit’s two young children and the name of their school. One email contained a death threat—”I will hang you by your neck until you’re dead”—that Offit reported to federal investigators.

Or Paul Shattuck, also from the mercury militia:

One person said, “Don’t be surprised if you get a knock on your door in the middle of the night and I’ll be there.” Another message said it was easy in the age of the Internet to find out where people live.

Shattuck also had various utterly untrue allegations made about him by the NAA.

Or how about Arthur Allen and Professor Roy Grinker who have also been on the receiving end of threats of violence:

these people need to be horse whipped…

Or how about Ray Gallup, Director and co-founder of the Vaccine Autoimmune Project? here’s what he had to say recently:

Dear ****:

Since you seem to follow what is going on with the Leitch list let me know if Leitch, Deer and the others get hit with a fast moving truck or bus that leaves their carcasses mangled and bloodly on the street.

I will be devotely praying night and day that something like this happens to them and their followers. Especially since these creeps say such hurtful things to parents. They deserve all the best in something terrible happening to every last one of them and I will pray daily.

I usually pray for good things for families that suffer but in their case I will make a big exception.

Ray Gallup

Or what about this Marky Mark?

A-YEAR-and-a-half ago, a vaccines expert in the eastern US received a phone call at home. The man on the line did not identify himself; he simply stated the names and ages of the researcher’s two children and the schools they attended, then hung up. The threat was shocking, but not a surprise. “I get hate mail every day,” says the researcher, who asked not to be named.

Many vaccine scientists in the US have received similar threats in recent years. They are thought to come from a hard core of parents who, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, are convinced that small amounts of mercury in vaccines have made their children autistic. What’s more, they believe that researchers are complicit in the scandal.

How about what EoH member and mercury militia jackass Brian Hooker did to Dr Sarah Parker? He harasses her to the point her campus security services had to get involved and she sent this email to Hooker – which he proudly displayed online:

Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 14:03:17 -0600
From: Sarah Parker
Subject: Re: Sarah Parker on the show “To The Point”
To:
Cc:

I have received your phone messages (yesterday evening and today) and emails. I would like to inform you that due to your previous threat to me in November and the tone and content of these current calls and emails I consider these as threats/harassment as well and am documenting them with the campus police department. I respect your right to disagree and wish you would respect that same right with me. Please do not contact me again in the future.

Sarah Parker

How about Brad Handley of Generation rescue saying to me:

If we were on a rugby pitch, Kev, I’d put my boot in your eye and twist…

Marky Mark is quite right that there are wacko’s in the online autism community. All he has to do to find them is look to his left and right. He closes his diatribe with:

We need to defend some minimum standards for how people are permitted to participate in a public debate. At the top of the list of these standards should be this: if anyone wants to participate in a debate about autism, put your real self on the line: your real name, your actual body of work (if you have any) and your professional accomplishments and reputation. Put the things that really matter — your family’s future and your personal career prospects — out in public for everyone to see if you want to exercise the privilege of participation in civil society. If you’re willing to do that, then you have a right to be heard. If you’re not, then you should go back to your game and keep playing with yourself. Let serious people do serious work.

And he’s serious. He means it. How he:

a) Expects to set himself up as the arbiter of whats acceptable online and;
b) Expects people to be comfortable using their real names when he stands alongside the people listed above

I really can’t imagine. Believe me, if I’d known that pond scum like John Best shared a planet with me I would never have used my real identity. Its also quote clear that Mark Blaxills friends and colleagues hold no compunctions about besmirching reputations with groundless attacks and or threats of violence upon them or their children.

Look around you Marky Mark. That rarefied air you’re sucking down? Its the polluted air of the real wackosphere. A land where threats against children is fair game and where killers and paedophiles are welcomed in with no checks and open arms and the leaders of the many antivaccine kook organisations encourage and salivate after violence against anyone who disagrees with them.

CDC: “Thank you, Sallie, May We Have Another?”

27 Sep

A CDC study released yesterday found no evidence to support “a causal association between early exposure to mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines and immune globulins and deficits in neuropsychological functioning at the age of 7 to 10 years.” In other words, vaccines don’t scramble your brain.

The study didn’t examine autism as an outcome, although that is almost certainly what it was intended to get at. Instead, it looked for whether children’s exposure to thimerosal before birth or in infancy had any relationship to their later performance on 42 standardized tests which one would expect to be affected by autism. For each of the 1,047 children in the study, the researchers assessed speech and language; verbal memory; achievement (letter and word identification); fine motor coordination; visuospatial ability; attention and executive function; behavior regulation; tics; and general intellectual functioning.

CDC tried so hard. They invited one of the queen mercury moms, Sallie Bernard of “SAFEMINDs,” to participate in the planning of the study. They brought on a panel of outside advisors. The team spent at least two years administering forty-seven separate tests to each of the children and analyzing and writing up the results. They printed every piece of data generated in a companion volume to the published study.

They got kicked in the teeth, but don’t feel bad for them. They should have known better.

The autism-vaccine contingent has responded by spluttering about the study not having been large or random enough, and by accusing the researchers of being biased and of ignoring important associations in the data. It’s no news that these people don’t believe anything that comes from CDC – they’ve said as much, very clearly. But one would think that if you let the antivaxers in on the process from day one, if you were totally transparent, they couldn’t object, could they? They’d have to see the light when the results came back and say, “Well! I guess it’s not the vaccines after all!”

CDC, if you really thought that would happen, you were so, so wrong.

The appearance is that Sallie Bernard was going along with all this up until the day the results came in and – shockingly! – showed thimerosal didn’t do one bit of harm. If she’d thought from the outset, as a SAFEMINDs press release now claims, that there weren’t enough kids in the study or the sampling were biased, does anybody think this gadfly would have nodded and smiled and gone right along with it?

No, everything was fine and dandy as long as she was enjoying being fawned over as a “representative of the autism community” and a fellow-scientist instead of the commercial marketer she actually is. Here’s a clue, Sallie: If you’re going to play scientist, you have to follow the rules of science, and that means you stand by your results. You don’t get to say “heads I win, tails you lose” by waiting to see the outcome before deciding whether the study was any good.

And you really don’t get to have CDC at your beck and call, spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to do a study to your specifications, then turn around and call them liars when you don’t like how it comes out.

And you, CDC? You’re not just a victim here. Every time you say “let’s do more research” or “we are examining this issue” in order to appease the mercury moms, you increase the chances that kids will go unvaccinated because you failed to give their parents confidence in the safety of vaccines. When you say a study is reassuring and then highlight what is virtually certain to have been a chance finding (a statistical association between higher thimerosal exposure and transient tics in boys) without making it abundantly clear that some false associations were inevitable given the study design, you defeat the purpose of doing the study. People who understand statistics weren’t the ones who needed to be convinced thimerosal is safe; the antivax crowd will never be convinced no matter what. You needed to speak to the well-meaning parents who worry about the rumors they hear at playgroup, and not only did you give them something new to worry about and whiff the opportunity to show them that the likes of Sallie Bernard are all about the rhetoric – you managed to tee up for yet another round of Righteous Long-Suffering Parents vs. Heartless Government Scientists.

Haven’t you learned yet who wins that one? Or are you going to invite Sallie back for another round of research?

Postscript: More commentary on this study by Arthur Allen, Orac, Joseph, Interverbal, and Kristina Chew.

Safe Minds and David Kirby

5 Jul

Suspicions have been circling for a long time that there was more than just coincidence to the timing of writing and publication of Kirby’s Evidence of Harm. Those suspicions were enhanced for me when it became clear that a lot of Kirby’s associations with certain autism/anti-vaccine groups such as the National Autism Association were on a financial footing.

The ‘official’ story regarding the writing of Evidence of Harm, as reported by Kirby himself, was that Kirby was casting about for something to write about of book length and had been approached by several autism parents who wanted to share their beliefs that vaccines had made their kids autistic. According to Kirby, he was skeptical and unsure about whether to proceed with it or not. What made up his mind apparently was seeing a news report that a politician had managed to attach a no fault rider to a bill passing through Congress, absolving vaccine makers of any legal responsibility.

However, I don’t believe him. Up until recently, that belief was simply a belief. Rumours circulated that Sallie Bernard of Safe Minds was listed as the domain controller (i.e. she’d bought and paid for) the domain evidenceofharm.com. I emailed her to ask her one way or the other. She refused to answer that question. Kathleen Seidel has asked David Kirby that question. He refused to answer.

Why does it matter? Because Kirby claims to be impartial in this debate. His reviewers claim he ‘walks the middle line’ in his book. that his account is ‘even handed’. I would like to know how someone who has an established financial relationship to one major autism/anti-vax group can possibly be impartial. Would the NAA continue to fund Kirby’s website if he said he didn’t think thiomersal caused autism? I doubt it.

Turning our attention to Safe Minds, we can look at their records – records they must supply be law as they’re a non-profit organisation – and see exactly what they have financed. You can access these records via the orgs IRS Form 990:

Form 990 is an annual reporting return that certain federally tax-exempt organizations must file with the IRS. It provides information on the filing organization’s mission, programs, and finances.

Attached is Safe Minds 990 for 2005. It has some interesting details in it.

If we look at line 43, it has a listing amount of $99,196 for ‘Professional Fees’ expenses placed under the ‘Program Services’ Category.

This means that they paid people they considered professionals almost $100k to provide services to their programs. On page 15 of this same document they go into detail about what these services are.

…..THE BOOK “EVIDENCE OF HARM, MERCURY IN VACCINES AND THE AUSTISM EPIDEMIC: A MEDICAL CONTROVERSY” WAS RELEASED IN 2004 AND SAFEMINDS PRESIDENT, LYN REDWOOD, WAS FEATURED ON THE MONTEL WILLIAMS SHOW ALONG WITH AUTHOR, DAVID KIRBY. THIS IMPORTANT BOOK EXAMINES BOTH THE PERSONAL STORIES OF FAMILIES AND THE UNFOLDING DRAMA IN THE COURTS AND HALLS OF CONGRESS.

This is listed as a ‘Program Service Accomplishment’.

So what can we conclude? To me, this is pretty damning evidence that David Kirby was paid by Safe Minds to write Evidence of Harm. It certainly ties in with Kirby’s other financial benefits from the NAA. So much for impartiality.

I have some questions for Safe Minds and David Kirby.

1) Did David Kirby receive any kind of financial incentive from Safe Minds or NAA or any of their boards prior to writing Evidence of Harm?
2) If so, how much?
3) If not, please explain the 990 form from 2005 above and tell us exactly what the information in it means.

Newer Entries →