Time for RFK Jr. to Come Clean · 2006-03-01 20:45

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s latest tirade against the CDC, Time for CDC to Come Clean, was published today in the Huffington Post. His assertion that “Thimerosal… has been linked to epidemics of neurological disorders, including autism, in American children born after 1989,” and his suggestion that “deception and obfuscation” pose a “danger to public health,” prompted me to leave the following comment.

It’s time for RFK Jr. to come clean about the fact that he represents the interests of private litigants seeking compensation for supposed vaccine injury when in fact many of those litigants have no evidence that such injury occurred. Many never even suspected that their children were “damaged” until they were convinced after the fact that vaccines offered the only possible explanation for their children’s autism. The sense of entitlement and certainty expressed by many autism=poisoning crusaders is not always based on a careful review of a wide range of information. The numerous studies exonerating vaccines as a cause of autism are often dismissed out of hand, simply because they do not support litigants’ preconceptions. Widespread suspicions are fueled by an aggressive public relations campaign engineered by wealthy PR maven and pioneering “mercury mom” Sally Bernard, early litigant Lyn Redwood, their close associates, faux-journalists David Kirby and Dan Olmsted, and a core of personal injury lawyers who have cultivated this market for years.

A lot of money has gone into convincing parents of autistic children that their kids were poisoned. Back in 2002, attorney Jeff Sell stated,

I don’t think the pharm companies will just declare bankruptcy AND/OR congress will just end up bailing out pharm companies/doctors from liability and no one will get much of anything… If I did we surely would not have invested over a million dollars to date in these cases. I fully understand that folks will need serious money to provide for their children and loved ones—I have autistic twins remember, so I get a double whammy on everything from nutritional supplements to OT services.

It’s easy to appeal to parents who are worried about their kids’ future, to mobilize them with worst-case scenarios (even though there are more relatively “high functioning” children currently being diagnosed than ever before), and to dangle before them the carrot of Big Government and Big Pharma’s Big Pockets. Many have taken the bait. One of the most interesting points made in Michael Goodman and James Nordin’s recent review of VAERS data was that,

the vaccine receipt date is missing in 8% of VAERS records but in 27% of the VAERS reports that were related to litigation.

This suggests something of a disconnect between a significant number of parents’ real-time observations and their eventual attributions regarding autism and vaccination.

The autism=poisoning campaign is also driven by a handful of scientists in academia who support the autism=poisoning hypothesis (most of whom happen to be serving as expert witnesses in thimerosal lawsuits, a role that is usually generously compensated), and a motley crew of practitioners and manufacturers who market various therapies to parents of autistic children, proceeding from the conclusion that autism is a consequence of mercury toxicity or vaccine-induced immune dysfunction. Some promote sensationally negative stereotypes about autism and autistic people. Most promote the idea that all autistics are “toxic”; promote experimental treatments when precious few rigorous clinical studies with informed consent exist to support the premises for or efficacy of those treatments; encourage parents to spend enormous amounts of money on pills, potions and detoxification paraphernalia; insist that parents patronize specific mail-order labs that predictably keep them convinced they need to stay on the biomedical treadmill; and encourage parents to take extraordinary risks with their autistic children’s health. Risky treatments include:

chelation (often administered by individuals with no demonstrable expertise in toxicology);
administration of dangerously high doses of Vitamin A;
intravenous immune globulin therapy (which poses the risk of aseptic meningitis to people with a family history of migraine, a group that includes many autistic children);
and, believe it or not, administration of Lupron on the recommendation of individuals with no demonstrable expertise in endocrinology, who make hasty diagnoses of “precocious puberty” (diagnoses that conveniently facilitate insurance reimbursement for this very powerful and expensive drug), on the utterly speculative premise that “testosterone regulation” might increase the efficacy of chelation to remove mercury.

RFK Jr. should take a good, hard look behind the information sources he’s chosen to trust, and consider the broader ramifications of his participation in the autism-cure-and-litigation circus.

My commentary on these subjects, and others, can be found at http://www.neurodiversity.com/weblog.

Kathleen Seidel

Comments


  1. Well said Kathleen. Thank you.

    — Dad Of Cameron    2006-03-02 00:04    #

  2. Jeff Sell (the one who said, “we have spent a million dollars already…”) is on the board of directors of ASA isn’t he? That explains alot about ASA’s position on the epidemic and their non-stance on chelation and vaccines.

    Then there’s that fellow who owns Kirkman’s lab, he’s on their board, too, now.

    It’s disgusting.

    — Ms Clark    2006-03-02 14:32    #

  3. Bobby is sorely in need of an intervention! Thanks for taking him to task, Kathleen.

    — HJ    2006-03-02 22:48    #

  4. Excellent.
    Thanks Kathleen

    — Mike Stanton    2006-03-05 07:07    #

  5. Nicely done… it’s always interesting to wonder about this, but it’s obviously never something that one can really know: I wonder what RFK really thinks, now that he’s been conclusively proven wrong? He obviously has enough time, money and professional energy invested in this litigation that he can’t publicly backtrack and admit reality. Is he still lying to himself, or is he just putting up the front at this point so he can keep his career afloat?

    — Matt    2006-03-09 11:49    #

  6. Thanks for visiting, everyone.

    Matt, I don’t know whether RFK Jr. has personally invested money in this litigation, except for whatever drop in the bucket it might cost him to travel around pounding the podium for the benefit of his informants. But time, professional energy and reputation, certainly. If you read the comments thread on his latest piece at Huffington Post, you’ll see him roundly thrashed by a few fellow environmentalists for his NIMBY opposition to the Cape Wind Project. Looks like he’s a leap-before-you-look kind of guy, capable of sustaining a notable level of cognitive dissonance.

    Maybe someday he’ll be able to learn a lesson from blogger NotMercury and have the fortitude to admit that he was wrong.

    — Kathleen Seidel    2006-03-09 11:57    #