Maine Coalition for Vaccine Choice on Maine Informed Consent Bills

Marching orders on supporting the Maine bill.

U.S Attorney General Issues Press Release on Poul Thorsen

Gotta admit... I truly never thought I would see Thorsen held responsible for this.

So here is the next question... the DOJ lawyers used Thorsen's research in the Autism Omnibus hearings as evidence that vaccines don't cause autism. Now the DOJ is prosecuting him for fraud. Conflict of interest?

Can-O-Worms.

Here is the DOJ's statement:

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

AUTISM RESEARCHER INDICTED FOR STEALING GRANT MONEY

Thorsen Allegedly Absconded With Over $1 Million

ATLANTA, GA - POUL THORSEN, 49, of Denmark, has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud and money laundering based on a scheme to steal grant money the CDC had awarded to governmental agencies in Denmark for autism research.

United States Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said of the case, “Grant money for disease research is a precious commodity. When grant funds are stolen, we lose not only the money, but also the opportunity to better understand and cure debilitating diseases. This defendant is alleged to have orchestrated a scheme to steal over $1 million in CDC grant money earmarked for autism research. We will now seek the defendant’s extradition for him to face federal charges in the United States.”

“Stealing research grant money to line his pockets, as Poul Thorsen stands accused of here today, cheats U.S. taxpayers and will simply not be tolerated,” said Derrick L. Jackson, Special Agent in Charge of the Atlanta Region for the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health & Human Services. “HHS/OIG will continue to work closely with our law enforcement partners to bring these criminals to justice.”

Reginael D. McDaniel, Special Agent in Charge of the Atlanta Region for Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation said, “Today’s global economy demands a high-level coordinated approach by multiple agencies and authorities in the investigation of financial crimes. While schemes often become more sophisticated over time, fortunately, so do our investigative techniques. IRS Criminal Investigation is proud to have shared its hallmark expertise in following the money trail in the scheme alleged in this indictment.”

According to United States Attorney Yates, the charges and other information presented in court: In the 1990s, THORSEN worked as a visiting scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Division of Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, when the CDC was soliciting grant applications for research related to infant disabilities. THORSEN successfully promoted the idea of awarding the grant to Denmark and provided input and guidance for the research to be conducted. From 2000 to 2009, the CDC awarded over $11 million to two governmental agencies in Denmark to study the relationship between autism and exposure to vaccines, between cerebral palsy and infection during pregnancy, and between childhood development and fetal alcohol exposure. In 2002, THORSEN moved to Denmark and became the principal investigator for the grant, responsible for administering the research money awarded by the CDC.

Once in Denmark, THORSEN allegedly began stealing the grant money by submitting fraudulent documents to have expenses supposedly related to the Danish studies be paid with the grant money. He provided the documents to the Danish government, and to Aarhus University and Odense University Hospital, where scientists performed research under the grant. From February 2004 through June 2008, THORSEN allegedly submitted over a dozen fraudulent invoices, purportedly signed by a laboratory section chief at the CDC, for reimbursement of expenses that THORSEN claimed were incurred in connection with the CDC grant. The invoices falsely claimed that a CDC laboratory had performed work and was owed grant money. Based on these invoices, Aarhus University, where THORSEN also held a faculty position, transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to bank accounts held at the CDC Federal Credit Union in Atlanta, accounts which Aarhus University believed belonged to the CDC. In truth, the CDC Federal Credit Union accounts were personal accounts held by THORSEN. After the money was transferred, THORSEN allegedly withdrew it for his own personal use, buying a home in Atlanta, a Harley Davidson motorcycle, and Audi and Honda vehicles, and obtaining numerous cashier’s checks, from the fraud proceeds. THORSEN allegedly absconded with over $1 million from the scheme.

The indictment charges THORSEN with 13 counts of wire fraud and 9 counts of money laundering. The wire fraud counts each carry a maximum of 20 years in prison, and the money laundering counts each carry a maximum of 10 years in prison, with a fine of up to $250,000 for each count. The indictment also contains a forfeiture provision seeking forfeiture of all property derived from the offenses, including an Atlanta residence, two cars, and a Harley Davidson motorcycle. In determining the actual sentence, the Court will consider the United States Sentencing Guidelines, which are not binding but provide appropriate sentencing ranges for most offenders.

This case is being investigated by Special Agents of the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health & Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division.

Assistant United States Attorneys Stephen H. McClain and Michael J. Brown are prosecuting the case.

Members of the public are reminded that the indictment contains only allegations. A defendant is presumed innocent of the charges and it will be the government’s burden to prove a defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.

My Interview with The Lindermans on the Maine Legislation on Autism One

Linderman Live on Autism One Radio.  They wanted the details on my exchange with Representative Anne Graham.

Mark Blaxill Public Comment to the IACC: A Time to Lead

AoA ran this piece a few days ago. I am reprinting it here to make sure my readers didn't miss it.

Please repost everywhere.

Blaxill has spoken for us, yet again, and landed an eloquent punch.

How ever long they think they can ignore this, they cannot outlast us.

A Time to Lead

My name is Mark Blaxill. I am the father of a 15 year old daughter diagnosed with autism, a Director of SafeMinds and editor-at-large of Age of Autism. I am also a co-author of The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic. Since our book was published last September I have had the privilege of traveling across the country to meet with dozens of groups and thousands of families affected by autism. I was deeply impressed by the affected individuals, mothers, fathers and family members I met on our tour. Above all else, I was impressed by how so many families have the same story to tell and by how many of us are asking for the same things. We are asking for bold leadership that unfortunately we have not yet seen.

Most directly, in the midst of the greatest childhood epidemic of all of our lives, we are trapped in an historic failure of the scientific process. Thomas Kuhn taught us how communities of “normal scientists” can prevent progress and trap important field of inquiry in scientific orthodoxy. We have seen this pattern play itself out in autism, first in the idea that parents and especially mothers caused autism because they hated, indeed even wanted to murder their children. More recently we have been trapped in the equally failed search for inherited autism genes. In the meantime, we are investing next to nothing in environmental causation. This is a fundamentally irrational approach, yet the orthodox researchers who benefit from this irrationality have defended their territory while they invoke science in the name of their own interests. Not a single dollar spent in the process has prevented a single case of autism. Worse than that, we are spending millions of dollars to promote denial.

In an environment of increasing budget scarcity, this is more than just a scientific failure; it’s an economic one as well. We are wasting taxpayer resources and approaching the governance process with a lack of urgency that seeps into all aspects of autism science. As a near monopsonistic buyer, NIH has a unique power in setting scientific agendas. The IACC should serve the consumers of autism science. Instead you appear to most of us to serve the medical industry, aiding and abetting the fiction that the controversies over autism research pit “parents vs. science.” In reality, that couldn’t be further from the truth. The real controversy is one between critical consumers of autism science and the orthodox producers whose work has failed us. In the debate between the autism community and the medical industry, your responsibility here should be clear.

This is not an abstract problem. Before 1930, the rate of autism was effectively zero. Before 1990, autism in the United States was exceedingly rare, as low as 1 in 10,000. Today, with roughly 1% of children born in the 1990s, it should be breathtakingly clear that autism is manmade. And that makes the autism epidemic not merely a public health crisis but a crisis of public ethics and morality as well. Hundreds of thousands of children, now growing to adulthood, are victims of preventable injury, a form of invisible violence. It is a form of violence that requires witnesses. Yet because of the nature of the injuries involved those witnesses must typically have scientific, medical or technical training. In large part, this witness pool also has career and economic interest in the medical industry, one of the main suspects. Tragically, but perhaps not surprisingly, we are seeing a moral failure of enormous proportions, as potential witnesses are sanctioned, censored and intimidated while the entrenched power of the orthodoxy has successfully sustained its prerogatives. This is not right. More to the point, it is not good. And it is long past time for a change.

More than any other single group of individuals, you members of the IACC are in a position to lead that change. That requires many things of you. It requires you to pay attention. It requires you to think independently and rationally. It requires you to take personal risk. It requires you to challenge close friends and colleagues who are part of the orthodoxy that perpetuates the problem. Above all, it requires moral courage. The only thing it does not require is that you wade through the complex machinations of denial because the problem is simple and staring you in the face. We are staring you in the face. And because autism is what it is, we will be standing in front of you until we are gone, or until you have done the right thing, whichever comes first.

Poul Thorsen Indicted on 13 Counts of Fraud and 9 Counts of Money Laundering

From the Atlanta Business Chronicle:

Atlanta Business Chronicle
Date: Wednesday, April 13, 2011, 3:42pm EDT

Dane indicted for defrauding CDC | Atlanta Business Chronicle

A Danish man was indicted Wednesday on charges of wire fraud and money laundering for allegedly concocting a scheme to steal more than $1 million in autism research money from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The indictment charges Poul Thorsen, 49, with 13 counts of wire fraud and nine counts of money laundering. The wire fraud counts each carry a maximum of 20 years in prison and the money laundering counts each carry a maximum of 10 years in prison, with a fine of up to $250,000 for each count.

The federal government also seeks forfeiture of all property derived from the alleged offenses, including an Atlanta residence, two cars and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

According to U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates, the charges and other information presented in court, Thorsen worked in the 1990s as a visiting scientist at the CDC Division of Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, when the CDC was soliciting grant applications for research related to infant disabilities.

Thorsen promoted the idea of awarding the grant to Denmark and provided input and guidance for the research. From 2000 to 2009, the CDC awarded more than $11 million to two governmental agencies in Denmark to study the relationship between autism and exposure to vaccines, between cerebral palsy and infection during pregnancy and between childhood development and fetal alcohol exposure.

In 2002, Thorsen moved to Denmark and became the principal investigator for the grant, responsible for administering the research money awarded by the CDC.

Once in Denmark, Thorsen allegedly began stealing the grant money by submitting fraudulent documents to have expenses supposedly related to the Danish studies be paid with the grant money. He provided the documents to the Danish government, Aarhus University and Odense University Hospital, where scientists performed research under the grant.

From February 2004 through June 2008, Thorsen allegedly submitted more than a dozen fraudulent invoices, purportedly signed by a laboratory section chief at the CDC, for reimbursement of expenses that Thorsen claimed were incurred in connection with the CDC grant. The invoices falsely claimed that a CDC laboratory had performed work and was owed grant money.

Based on these invoices, Aarhus University, where Thorsen also held a faculty position, transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to bank accounts held at the CDC Federal Credit Union in Atlanta -- accounts that Aarhus University believed belonged to the CDC. The CDC Federal Credit Union accounts were instead personal accounts held by Thorsen, the federal government said.

After the money was transferred, Thorsen allegedly withdrew the fraud proceeds for his own personal use to buy a home in Atlanta, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and Audi and Honda vehicles, and to get numerous cashier’s checks.

Thorsen allegedly pocketed more than $1 million from the scheme.

My prediction? Another attack will be launched on Wakefield. ;)

Maine HHS Committee Votes Against Informed Consent in Vaccination

UPDATE! Apparently I am a TERRIBLE reporter! I left too soon! (had my boys with me) One other committee member, Representative Richard S. Malaby (Republican from Hancock, Maine, father of three) returned to the room and voted with our three heroes for the bills to move forward. And I was uninformed on procedure. I thought this was a majority vote, but apparently because the vote was divided, it will go to the full legislature to be voted on!

Could not be more happy to be so wrong. (Study your state civics people)

Mainers, call your state Senators and Representatives! Ask for meetings! Educate! Go, go, go!

Go to Maine Coalition for Vaccine Choice and get on the mailing list.

Original post:

The highs and lows of trying to prevent vaccine injury...

Today the Maine Legislature's HHS committee voted NOT to allow the two informed consent bills to go to the floor to be voted on.

Much of the discussion again centered around the fact that if you tell parents what is in a vaccine, and then give them a choice, they will say no in greater numbers. And that they will do so out of "unnecessary fear." That doctors operate on the facts and mom's operate on emotion, so the state, therfore must save us parents from putting our children at "unnecessary risk". And of course, the Medical Establishment is to decide for you, what you should think about their practices.

Low point of the hearing... one committee member sharing his decision on why he would be voting the measures down. He shared that the legislature came up against the fears of the public on a regular basis and that he believed that his job as a legislator was to separate the real fears from the unfounded fears. In his estimation, fears of damage from vaccination are unfounded. I do not know the scope of his research into this opinion, but it may be as simple as, docs testified that vaccines are safe, so vaccines are safe. But he also shared that he is in the construction business and comes up against a lot of unfounded fears by people on renovations. He believes that these two situations are analogous.

What he had clearly not factored into his equation is that he, his employees, his company and his material manufacturers can be sued for making false safety claims or hurting their customers when they are wrong, and that when those big lawsuits come, they serve to first keep those in the renovation business honest, and second, the force the industry to reform itself at various stages of its evolution. No such mechanism exists in vaccination.

The Vaccine Program is Self-Policing.

I wanted to ask that committee member, "If your industry had enjoyed liability protection for the last quarter century, would you want to force builders to disclose their materials? Would you EVER renovate your house? Just how corrupt do you think that the construction business would be? Why do you assume that liability protection has not corrupted vaccine safety reporting?"

But, of course, all I could do is sit there and listen. And scream on the inside.

The high point of the proceeding today for me however was the vote, because three smart, conservative mothers, who completely got it and asked all the best questions, voted to allow the bills to continue on. They were:


Deborah J. Sanderson, Republican from Chelsea, Maine


Beth A. O'Connor, Republican from Berwick, Maine


Heather W. Sirocki, Republican from Scarborough, Maine

Between them they have 12 children and 1 grandchild. They seem to know that mom's aren't morons. And they repeatedly made the simple and straight forward case that parents need to know and have the right to decide.

I offer a very public thank you to these women for their service to our families and our children.

I hope you will consider contacting these three women in appreciation for their efforts. We are no Big Pharma, but I would like for us to thank them on behalf of Little Parenting. I am going to send them each a five dollar contribution to their campaign funds. I hope you will consider doing the same and let them know that our community values legislators like this that can think independently and that want to preserve the rights of parents to make informed decisions for their children.

As I was on the way out, the three of them were standing in the hallway together (in the same spot where I took that tongue lashing the week before), and as I passed I thanked them for their support. Like a dork, I started crying. I have gotten so cynical, run up against so much resistance to facts and logic, that just knowing that there were three people who were listening ... well it hit me kinda hard. Made me realize that it does not have to be this way. Made be grieve that we are going to go through another flu season where parents have no idea they they are injecting their 6 month old babies with levels of mercury that the EPA says its not safe for a 200lb man. Another year of parents being told to just love and accept their child, while their baby is suffering an unrecognized neurological emergency in front of them. Another year of children in medical crisis being denied treatment.

It doesn't have to be this way.

The Godboldo Case: How Mainstream Med Continues to Self Immolate

Maryanne Godboldo vaccinated her child and the child suffered a severe neurological regression.

So Maryanne naturally took her child to the doctor to get help.

Doctor prescribed Ripseridal, which did not help, but made the child aggressive.

Mom took child off dangerous/ineffective drug, just as she should have.

Seems like a story you and I have heard a thousand times, right?

But the Mainstream Med is getting more and more touchy about being questioned, and actually thinks that this mother had no right to stop a drug (that has killed dozens of children a year) that was HURTING her child. CPS shows up (with out a warrant as far as we can tell), cops come, escalation, jail, foster care, public outcry and now the end result for Mainstream Medicine...

More earnest parents walking away because they see that it is only growing in its abuse of power and children.

This post on facebook today from a mom captures the sentiment that has become more prevalent and is making a big jump with the publicity in this case:

"Ok, that's it. I'm never going to a mainstream pediatrician again. They can call CPS, say "This woman is not giving her child the meds we prescribed. Take the child away from her"...and they get an emergency order rather than giving this family a hearing. Well, my son was prescribed Flonase for a sinus infection, I wouldn't give it to him. Come and get me."

So I continue to ask the question I have been asking for years....

Hey Mainstream Med... WHAT IS YOUR PLAN? How long will you wring your hands at the lack of trust that parents have for you, before you take a look in the mirror and face the fact that you are not trustworthy?

Individual doctors, do you see that you are being pushed away from being healers to simply becoming drug pushers?  Is that why you went to medical school in the first place?  Of course it wasn't.

And again I make my plea... WISE PEDIATRICIANS... RISE UP AND TAKE BACK YOUR PROFESSION!

My Testimony to the Maine Legislature on Two Informed Consent Vaccine Bills

This week I have written about my experience testifying before the Maine Legislature's Joint Standing Committee on Health and Human Services and my exchanges with another State Representative who testified in opposition to the bills that I was supporting.

The bills are:
LD 694 (HP 523) "An Act To Encourage Transparency in Disclosing the Ingredients in Vaccinations for Children to Parents and Guardians" Sponsored by Representative Andrea Boland, that would make doctors tell patients the ingredients of a vaccine before administering it to them, just like food.

And

LD 941 (SP 287) "An Act To Prohibit Mandatory Immunizations" Sponsored by Senator Douglas Thomas, which would simply state that no one could force a Mainer to be vaccinated against their wishes.

I had heard about the hearing some what last minute and was not able to prepare written testimony before hand, but submitted it today.

I am linking to the documents here so that they may be reviewed by the public.

I encourage Mainers to get involved in supporting these common sense measures to protect the human rights of those in our state. You can contact the committee here to offer your support and testimony.

Further, I encourage Mainers who want to be able to know what is in a vaccine, and preserve the right to say no to a vaccine if they so choose, to let their voice be heard over at the Portland Press Herald who has come out in support of removing your right for you to decide what goes into your body and what goes in the body of your children in an op ed piece.

I am posting my cover page to the testimony, and will link to the actual documents in the body of it below. While I submitted two chapters of our book Vaccine Epidemic, I will not be posting those, as I am sure that our publisher would not be pleased, so if you have not done so, please consider buying the book.

Written testimony by Ginger Taylor M.S. to the Maine Joint Standing Committee on Health and Human Services

In support of: LD 694 (HP 523) "An Act To Encourage Transparency in Disclosing the Ingredients in Vaccinations for Children to Parents and Guardians" Sponsored by Representative Andrea Boland, and LD 941 (SP 287) "An Act To Prohibit Mandatory Immunizations" Sponsored by Senator Douglas Thomas


My name is Ginger Taylor and I am resident of Brunswick. I hold a BS in Psychology with a concentration in child development and an MS in Clinical Counseling from Johns Hopkins University with a concentration if adolescent and family therapy. I am a co-author and contributing editor on the new book, “Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children,” which makes the argument that informed consent in vaccination is a fundamental human right. I served on the steering committee for the 2009 Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Autism Conference to educate medical professionals on the current state of the research and treatment of Autism. I am the founder of Greater Brunswick Special Families, but most significant to these proceedings, I am the mother of a child who regressed into autism following the simultaneous administration of the DTaP, Hepatitis B, Polio, HIB and Pnumo vaccines. When I discovered that none of the vaccines My son received that day had been studied for their relationship to autism, and that my pediatrician’s opinion that his vaccines did not cause his autism had no basis in science, I began to investigate and document the vaccine-autism causation theory and other vaccine injuries.

My thanks to the committee for indulging my impromptu oral testimony on these bills and for allowing me to submit further written testimony on these matters.

Drastic changes have taken place in the vaccine program since I was a child growing up in the 1970s and 1980s and when vaccination is discussed most people’s frame of reference on vaccination was their own experience growing up. Vaccination has gone from a tool used to protect the health of individuals and to prevent deadly epidemics, to an over aggressive, under researched, one size fits all program to eradicate disease, even at the expense of individual patients. At the heart of this phenomenon is the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act that granted liability protection to everyone involved in vaccination from the manufacturer who makes it to the public health official that recommends or mandates it to the school system that requires it and even to the doctors and nurses who administer any FDA approved vaccine regardless of the damage or death of the child or adult being vaccinated.

Because of this, over the last quarter century the vaccine program has changed drastically. Pharmaceutical companies realized what a cash cow they had on their hands when suddenly they had a product line that the government could require people to buy, and that Pharma could not be sued for. They began pouring funds into vaccine research and development and only a few short years after the act was passed, began adding new and more cheaply made vaccines to the market, and using their considerable political influence to get CDC to recommend these vaccines and states to require their purchase and administration for school entrance.

As a result the vaccine schedule has ballooned to three times its previous size, and vaccines have become a 27 billion dollar a year industry.

Children born between the mid 1960s and the mid 1980s were subject to a childhood vaccine schedule that recommended between 24 and 25 doses of vaccine (depending on whether or not they received the small pox vaccine that was discontinued in the early 1970s.) Children born today are subject to a vaccine schedule that has just had its 70th dose of vaccine added to it as of late 2010.

A child born today, if vaccinated according to the CDC recommended schedule will receive more doses of vaccine by the time he is six months old than his mother did by the time she went to college. Unlike his mother, his vaccines will begin with in hours of his birth, before he has even established a health history which can be used to evaluate whether or not a particular vaccine is safe for him.

Disturbingly, there is not one study to investigate what this aggressive vaccine schedule may do to a child and there is no safety testing of vaccines in the combinations which are recommended on the infant schedule. For example, at two months old babies are vaccinated for Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis, Hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type b, Polio, Rotavirus and Pneumococcal, and there is no study to find out if this is a safe practice or what long term health problems it may lead to.

Further, CDC now has an adult vaccine schedule, and if the schedule is followed to the letter by someone living the average life span of 78 years, they will receive 167 doses of vaccine.

Aggressive insistence from the vaccine injury and vaccine safety community has yielded almost no results in requiring improved safety research and accurate risk information, rather the medical community labels all vaccine safety advocates as “anti-vaccine” and demonizes them in the press. Ironically this includes parents who continue to vaccinate their children, and even doctors who administer and advocate for vaccination, but publicly state that they do cause autism and other adverse reactions. The most recent example of this was Bill Gates appearing on CNN last month and insisting that parents who assert that vaccines can cause autism, as I am asserting to you today, are “child killers.” This is analogous to calling those who advocate for safer infant car seats and accurate product safety information, “baby killers.”

My personal appeals to the Maine CDC under the previous administration to conduct reviews of vaccine safety information and recommendations offered to Maine by the federal government on vaccine policy before adopting them have been rebuffed. As a result, Maine vaccine policy is for all practical purposes, set by a panel of only 16 people at the CDC in Atlanta on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, who bear no burden if the policy they set is errant. Instead, Maine bears almost all the cost of these flawed decisions via medical expenses, HHS, special education programs, Maine Care, law enforcement agencies and individuals and families like mine paying for the consequences of inappropriate vaccination.

There are no checks and balances in the vaccine program, and the costs of damages roll down hill from the CDC to ME to me.

The dangers of adopting the policies of the federal government on vaccine policy are most clearly highlighted during the H1N1 scare generated by Atlanta, who declared an epidemic, declared a state of emergency, activated their emergency powers, rushed an inadequately tested vaccine to market, held out the option to FORCE administration of that vaccine, and spent several billion dollars for what turned out to be the mildest flu season on record. This despite the very low uptake of the flu vaccine, as the public did not buy the hype.

Further, we had ample evidence that the H1N1 flu was no serious threat to the American people, as it was not causing problems in the southern hemisphere during their flu season in their winter (our summer) of 2009. Yet despite the evidence that this flu was actually a very weak one, CDC continued to sound a false alarm for the entire 2009 – 2010 flu season.

Neither Kathleen Sebelius nor any public official involved lost their jobs over the debacle, no investigation was launched and CDC continued to attempt to push the H1N1 scare into the following flu season.

I submit to you that the vaccine program has become a run away train that abuses its power and the trust of the public, asserts safety and efficacy claims that are not supported by the science and that there is no way for the public to challenge bad vaccine policy under current US law.

Because of this it is imperative for the legislature of the State of Maine to protect the rights of Mainers to Informed Consent in vaccination.

We must have the right to all known information about any vaccine that we may be considering for administration, and if we believe that it is not a wise health choice for ourselves and our children, then we must be allowed exercise our fundamental human right to decline a vaccine.

These two measures are reasonable protection of my rights as a citizen and a mother, and I hope you will consider the information that I am presenting to you and support these measures.

Supporting arguments:

1. Why These Laws are Needed
a. The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act
b. Vaccination Choice is a Fundamental Human Right
2. A Review of Vaccine Safety Claims
a. IOM Vaccine Safety Review Bibliography Additions
b. Evidence that vaccines can cause autism
c. The Dangers of Mercury in the H1N1 Vaccine
3. Informed Consent: HHS states that vaccines DO cause autism
a. HHS, HRSA, Vaccine Injury Compensation Table
b. Julie Gerberding Admits on CNN that Vaccines Can Cause Autism
4. An Evaluation of the Trustworthiness of Federal Public Health Assertions
a. The Role of Government and Media
5. Additional Comments

In closing, it is my opinion and experience that the majority of the medical community is employing the Semmelweiss Reflex and in denial about the true incidence of serious vaccine adverse reactions; and it is unwilling to look at the evidence to this effect. I have included a discussion of the Semmelweiss Reflex in my chapter in Vaccine Epidemic on the Role of Government and Media, and hope you will pay particular attention to it.

No doctor gets into this difficult profession in order to harm patients, and facing the fact that a practice that they are employing to make people better is many cases causing more harm than good, is not something that they have demonstrated that they are willing to do.

In light of this, I believe it is the responsibility of this committee to look at this topic in a fresh light, look at testimony of health officials, organizations and physicians with a critical eye, and make them actually prove their case. It is my belief that most of them do not know they are providing false information. Avoidable vaccine damage continues because state and federal legislators are taking the unsupported claims of these parties at face value and not forcing them under oath to address the challenges of vaccine safety and choice advocates.

Further I encourage the committee to consider formal hearings on the evidence that I have in included in my testimony and that we have compiled in Vaccine Epidemic and several other books published on the subject of vaccines and their component parts.

I thank the members of the committee and appreciate the thoughtful way in which these hearings have been carried out thus far. I will be happy to be at your disposal in providing any further information you may need to carry out your responsibilities on these matters.

The First Amendment is Good

Attempts at stifling free discussion are bad.

The Most Dangerous Question in Public Health: "What can you tell me about vaccine encephalopathy?"

So Tuesday a thing happened and on Wednesday I talked about the thing on FB and on this blog.

I had no idea when I talked about that thing, the errors of the testimony of a state representative on bills addressing informed consent in vaccination, and her poor behavior following the hearing when I tried to ask her a simple question, would draw such a strong reaction from my readers. She was wrong and behaved badly, but it is SO common in our struggle just to get correct information into the hands of medical professionals and public health officials, that I honestly thought I would get maybe 10 FB comments from fellow activists rolling their eyes that it happened yet again.

I didn't even consider posting the story on my public facebook page (linked on the top right) or putting it on this blog.

But to my surprise, I got more than 200 responses (and counting) on FB and so I posted the whole exchange there in a "note," then after my last email from the subject of my discussion, I was so disgusted that I posted the whole thing here so everyone could see what it is really like to try to talk to a medical professional/public health official about vaccine injury and then be done with it.

But, apparently that is not the end of it, as someone (I assume that it is the subject of my previous post, but cannot say for certain) has flagged the link to my blog on the matter as "objectionable material." So it can no longer be shared on Facebook.

And the crazy thing is, while I suspect the subject of my previous post has flagged my previous post to shut down the conversation on the matter, I also suspect that the irony is completely lost on her that she has upped the ante by trying to shut down the discussion on the fact that she is trying to shut down a discussion!

Portions of my letters to her from yesterday's article (emphasis added):

...This unwillingness to have an open exchange with me, and your additional pressure on me not to talk about your poor behavior, is exactly why the vaccine rates are dropping in Maine. This happens time and time again. Elected officials, public health officials and medical professionals make untenable vaccine safety statements, members of the public attempt to engage them on the veracity of those statements, and the conversation is shut down, often by bullying those members of the public. This does not inspire confidence in the vaccine program, it alerts the public in a very loud way, that those repeating the mantra, "vaccines are safe" either have something to hide, or know they cannot win a true vaccine safety debate.

When you shut down the debate, you tell the public that you know you are wrong...

...I repeatedly ask the question of public health officials who have chosen the route you are taking the question... "what is your plan?" Refusal to engage vaccine safety advocates and parents of vaccine injured children is not working. Vaccine rates are dropping BECAUSE of the shut down of public debate.

So not only is my personal discussion with this subject shut down, not only does she want the discussion of the fact that she shut down her her personal discussion with me shut down, NOW she apparently also wants the discussion about the fact that all these shut downs are what is driving down vaccination rates SHUT DOWN!

(So with this discussion on attempts to shut down plain old free speech suffer an attempt by her or her agents or random people to be shut down too? Let's see how long this link is able to be shared on Facebook.)

I was sitting here considering all this, kinda stunned that this person and/or anyone acting on what they believe to be her interests keep upping the ante on this.. why keep escalating her bad behavior... why not just ignore it like 90% of public officials do when they are legitimately criticized... and then it hit me.

What she said to me in her first email to me was that she felt "attacked" by me.

Of course if someone says that, you have to stop and go over the whole thing in your mind and make sure you didn't do anything inappropriate, so I reviewed the whole thing, and nope... standard 'asking a question to a public official in a state office hallway' fare. And... I actually have a control group against which to measure the whole kuffeffel.

Because there were three other doctors who testified at the hearing whom I also stopped in the atrium after the hearing and asked them my question, "What can you tell me about vaccine encephalopathy." Holding out my little book to write notes down in just as I had with "The Subject"

They were very nice. All three gave me basic answers, one made her way out then the other two stayed talking to me, answered a few clarifying questions, stood as if they were happy to keep talking, but frankly I was so spooked by my previous encounter, I whipped their answers down in my book and thanked them and left. I should have actually stayed and talked to them.

And one of the doctors, a pediatrician who talked to me the longest and offered me the most input, was one of the people whose testimony I had corrected. She said, "Vaccines are safe," I told the committee that they were legally "Unavoidably Unsafe" and referenced Bruesewitz v. Wyeth and the 1986 vaccine injury law. So if correcting someone's testimony was grounds for getting yelled at after the hearing, then why was she the nicest and most open?

So this is where my epiphany begins...

I think that I got the reaction that I did from that public official, that made her feel "attacked" because I had actually asked her a VERY dangerous question.

"What can you tell me about vaccine encephalopathy?"

Think about it... that is a very frightening question to both people who know the issues in this debate and those who know nothing in this debate, if they are public officials.

If you know nothing about vaccine encephalopathy, you are about to have your ignorance exposed. Not good if you are pretending to know anything about vaccine safety.

If you know everything about vaccine encephalopathy, then you know that HHS says that it develops into autism, and you are not allowing that inconvenient truth to be the basis for a discussion on vaccine/autism causation, then you are about to have your cover blown.

All so much more true if you are a public health official who can be held accountable for your opinions.

But if your understanding of vaccine encephalopathy is somewhere in the middle, if you know the horrid version of it with seizures and coma and massive brain damage, but don't know that HHS defines it as simply as loss of eye contact, not answering when spoken to and not seeming to recognize people they should, then it is much more likely that you will get the reaction that I did from those three earnest doctors.

Because their answers all fit what I understand to be the general notion of the symptoms of vaccine encephalopathy/encephalitis in the medical community. Fevers, vomiting, seizures, coma and altered mental status. But what I was looking for is, have they been educated on the HHS definition, and do they know that a kid acting "spacey" with that autism hallmark, "loss of eye contact" may be suffering vaccine reaction/brain inflammation, or do they see "loss of eye contact" and in the absence of perceivable seizures, and those more pronounced symptoms instead call it "autism, genetic, no known cause or cure, vaccines don't cause it, send to ABA and Speech."

Because frankly, if I had brought my child in and said, "doc... Chandler is just really spaced out since his shots a few days ago.. he is barely interacting with us," I can't imagine the doc would say anything other than, "well kids get a little sick from their shots and that it totally normal. He will probably feel puny for a few days." When in fact what was likely happening was his immune system ramping up, inflammation ramping up in his brain, brain damage beginning to occur, and autistic regression commencing.

The bottom line is that if physicians do not know how MILD the symptoms of vaccine encephalopathy as stated by HHS actually are, and that reaction leads to brain damage that causes autism, then OF COURSE brain damage being caused by vaccines is being missed and called "autism, no cause no cure blah blah blah." Then what is needed is an education campaign for docs telling them how mild the presentation can look, and that it can progress into as common of disorder as ADS's (1% of the population, not 1 in a million)

In fact, I asked the docs about loss of eye contact as a symptom and Nice Lady said, "it would not just be loss of eye contact, there would have to be other symptoms". I asked, "What symptoms?" She said, "Fevers, nausea, vomiting, seizures."

Now I don't know if she meant any of those or all of those, probably any of those, but again, if there is no fever, or fever took place while baby is asleep, if there is no vommitting, if baby can't report nausea and if there are no seizures (or one took place during the 75% of the day baby is sleeping and momma's eyes are not on him), then does she know that the "other symptoms" can simply present as "acting spacey?"

The other doc who stayed, let's call him Quiet Man, did add, "altered mental status," which is pretty close! But again, was in addition to those dramatic symptoms or instead of. Should have stayed and asked. (Apparently I am a bigger coward than I think I am because I am realizing that I was afraid that people I have just described as "Nice Lady" and "Quiet Man" were going to yell at me).

So if I had taken the VICP Table with me and read the symptoms of vax encph to them, and showed them how mild they were, and asked them if they saw kids like this but thought it was "autism," what would their reaction be?

If they didn't know it could present so mildly, an earnest doc would have to at least review their "autism" cases, check their shot records, call the families back in and start asking them more questions about the progression of the disorder. They might even contact public health officials and ask for more guidance on differentiating "VE" from "Autism" and then public health is kinda screwed, since they have already admitted that can be the same thing.

Then we are confronted with the potential for the Semmelweiss Reflex OR being honest with this difficult truth and talking about it in the medical community, and then comes the pressure to shut up and if that is not obeyed they know that the Wakefield treatment is coming and on down the hill things go.

And if you are a public health official, forget it. If vaccine encephalopathy is autism then you have to change ALL the vaccine laws and the end result is that the earth willfall into the sun.

So I think that in this unpleasant experience we have tripped over a powerful truth...

The most dangerous question in public health is:

"What can you tell me about vaccine encephalopathy"?

So no wonder THEY want this conversation shut down.

I think that this may need to become our mantra. I think that this needs to be asked of every doctor and every public health official in the vaccine debate. This is the question that begins the discussion that knocks down all the Pharma fallacies about vaccine/autism causation.

1. What can you tell me about vaccine encephalopathy?
2. Do you know how mildly it can present?
3. Do you know that it is the position of HHS that it causes autism?

That is the basic letter I sent for which I was shut down. I think that initiating this simple discussion will likely either make huge public health awareness breakthroughs, or get us shot.

Who knew advocating for our disabled children would be such dangerous work.

UPDATE at 11:52:

The post you just read... yeah... it has already been tagged as spam and blocked on facebook. It happened in under 34 minutes from the time it was posted.

So... I think that we can start the discussion on public officials attempting to shut down the free speech of critical bloggers.

I request that anyone who considers this article and the previous and who requested that this content be blocked from sharing on facebook, come forward and challenge me publicly for anything that I have said or written and explain their attempt at suppressing this conversation.

"I'm from the government and I'm here to help"

Ronald Reagan's "nine most terrifying words in the English language."

The state of Maine is considering, get this shocker, passing a law to prevent forced vaccination.

End of the world... I know.

So yesterday I hopped up to the state house when I heard that they were having debate on this bill. Turned out they were also considering a bill to, horror of all horrors... compel doctors to tell patients what is in a vaccine before administering it to them. I can almost hear the bodies dropping dead left and right as the pleague sweeps the nation because people know what is in a vaccine.

(BTW... if you are a Mainer, call your reps and senators and support these bills. Call the HHS committee and offer testimony.)

Of course the AMA, AAP, Insert alphabet soup Suits/hired guns lined up to tell us why these are horrible ideas, how vaccines are safe and magical and have saved the earth from falling into the sun and all sorts of the usual song and dance to prevent simply people from knowing what is in a vaccine and being able to say no.

The oddest thing to me is that they repeatedly, openly stated that they didn't want to tell people what is in a vaccine and give them a choice, because if they did, then more people would turn down vaccines. THEN they claimed to be for informed consent! I wanted to ask if they actually knew what informed consent was.

As has not been the norm in my experience of these types of proceedings, the committee hearing the testimony was really open and quite logical. It is odd for me to see public health officials being logical during vaccine hearings.

But the low point of the hearings was the testimony of one state representative from a town near mine who was also a former pediatric neurology nurse. Amidst the serious testimony of the vaccine injured and one woman who had lost her husband to mercury poisoning, this representative was jocular and truculent and found it an occasion to entertain the panel. But worse is that she truly had no understanding of the issues on which she was testifying. She said that vaccines were safe. She gushed with shallow pity for her patients that believed that their developmental delay was caused by their vaccines, claiming that she truly, earnestly wished that there was research that could tell us that vaccines caused autism, but there was just none that existed. And the cherry on the ignorance sunday was when she claimed that we know that mercury in vaccines does not cause autism, because the MMR study that said so was retracted.

I think at that point I had a mini stroke.

Fortunately I had a chance to testify and crammed as many facts into my three minutes as I could. Telling them, no vaccines are not "safe", they are legally and factually "Unavoidably Unsafe" that they kill and maim some which is why we have a VICP to begin with. Telling them that I would be producing 48 studies showing that vaccines can cause autism. And finally telling them how upsetting it was to hear a medical professional/elected official testify to the fact that MMR contained mercury when in fact the MMR and mercury have nothing to do with each other, and that the woman in question had not even ready the study on which she was testifying.

Following the hearing, I caught the representative in the lobby and asked her a simple question, "What can you tell me about vaccine encephalopathy?" I was trying to figure out if anyone had ever educated her on the fact that HHS has ruled and openly stated that vaccine encephalopathy causes autism. She did not respond well, at one point actually aggressively questioning me, "I have a masters degree from Yale! Where is your degree from?!" She has since apologized. At the end of the exchange she said she would read whatever research I sent to her, but insisted that none of it should be from junk sources. She would only accept university studies, peer-reviewed journal articles, federal public health emanations and the like. Although she was not so friendly about it, I thought "Great! I didn't even ask her if she would read anything and she just volunteered!"

So this morning I sent her a letter with my list of 48 studies.

What ensued is just another microcosm of the same old same old. I am publishing it all here to yet again, belabor the point that... well that public health is doomed. It is another Bagdad Bob story where someone who knows it all is going to plant her feet and insist that everything is sun and picnics on the Tigris when in truth the army is three blocks away. It is Geri Dawson issuing missives from her ivory tower that we are not to talk about vaccines and autism any more. It is delusion that parents are going to shut up and stop talking about vaccine dangers. It is just flat out denial of a reality that is pretty clear to at least half of all Americans now.

Bottom line, she offered false testimony to the State and refuses to hear corrections. Which means that she will continue to make bad decisions for Mainers health because they will be based on what is going on in the castle she has built in her head. I rarely share my exchanges with public health officials, but as she is both an elected official AND a medical professional holding herself out as a vaccine expert AND it turns out, a former board member of the Maine Autism Society and asserting autism expertise, she should be held triply accountable for her bad judgement and insistence on disseminating false information. So she does not get a pass.

Representative Graham,

As per our conversation yesterday following your testimony, I am forwarding you a list of the research that supports the supposition that vaccines can cause autism, as well as the federal government's own admission that vaccines can cause autism. The documents I am sending you are a part of the written testimony that I am submitting to the HHS committee.

As you can see, when you have been advising your patients that vaccination could not be responsible for their developmental delays and disabilities or autism, you have been offering them false information. I have been working very hard at the federal level, along with many other vaccine safety advocates, to get public health officials to inform those involved in vaccine administration and the care of children and to put this information in the hands of professionals like yourself so that they can understand the true known risks of vaccination. Unfortunately, as the hearings yesterday have demonstrated, they have failed to do so.

I am hoping that you will review the information I am attaching, and be spurred to investigate them and how they fit into the vaccine injury picture and the current autism epidemic.

I am also hoping you will hold your professional associations and public health authorities accountable for not informing you of this research and allowing you to give false testimony to patients and the State of Maine.

I also wanted to call your attention to the US Department of Health and Human Resources, Health Resources Services Administration, Vaccine Injury Compensation Program's table of compensated vaccine injuries which I will also be including in my written testimony. http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/table.htm

You will note that HRSA recognizes and compensates vaccine deaths as well as an array of neurological and autoimmune conditions known to be caused by vaccines. You will also note that both MMR and DTaP are known to cause vaccine encephalopathy (brain damage). If you check the symptoms of this encephalopathy (scroll down to the middle of the page) in children 18 months and older, you will find that they include:

1. Loss of eye contact
2. Not responsive to normal speech
3. Don't seem to recognize familiar people

This is a description of a child regressing into autism. This is an accurate description of my child following his DTaP vaccine. However for displaying these symptoms following the shot, he was diagnosed with "autism" and never even evaluated for "vaccine encephalopathy," despite my continued insistence to my pediatrician that I believed his vaccines were involved. He insisted that the AAP assured him that vaccines were not involved in autism causation. Later when I learned about the HRSA description of this vaccine injury, I forwarded it to my pediatrician with a letter asking if he knew about this vaccine reaction and if this is what could have happened to my son. He has never responded to my queries. It was past the 3 year statute of limitations placed on vaccine injury, and I can now never file for compensation for my son's likely vaccine induced brain damage that was called "autism" by his doctors.

(You will also note that seizures are often a feature of vaccine encephalopathy, and about a third of those diagnosed with "autism" also have seizures.)

Following the publication of the Hannah Poling case in 2008 in which HRSA compensated a child for her DTaP/MMR induced encephalopathy that caused her autism, and CBS News investigation that showed that VICP has been paying autism cases since at least 1991, HRSA was forced to admit that yes, vaccine encephalopathy causes autism. This was their official statement on the case to a reporter's inquiry. (emphasis added)

From: Bowman, David (HRSA) [mailto:DBowman@hrsa.gov]
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 5:22 PM
To: 'dkirby@nyc.rr.com'
Subject: HRSA Statement

David,

In response to your most recent inquiry, HRSA has the following
statement:

The government has never compensated, nor has it ever been ordered to
compensate, any case based on a determination that autism was actually
caused by vaccines. We have compensated cases in which children
exhibited an encephalopathy, or general brain disease.
Encephalopathy may be accompanied by a medical progression of an array
of symptoms including autistic behavior, autism, or seizures.

Some children who have been compensated for vaccine injuries may have
shown signs of autism before the decision to compensate, or may
ultimately end up with autism or autistic symptoms, but
we do not track
cases on this basis.

Regards,

David Bowman
Office of Communications
Health Resources and Services Administration
301-443-3376

Note that HRSA freely admits that they don't even track how often vaccines cause autism, after admitting that HRSA knows that they do cause autism. This is dereliction of duty. HHS owes this information to the public.

Further, in correcting you on the fact that mercury has never been included in the MMR, as the MMR vaccine is a live virus vaccine and mercury kills all living things it comes into contact with rendering the vaccine useless, I have had to do what parents who have been studying vaccine injuries have had to do with medical professionals far too often. Explain to those presenting themselves as experts on vaccination, what the basics of vaccine/autism causation theory are. It is heartbreaking to find out how many doctors don't even know what the issues involved are.

This is a colleague of mine, Rebecca Estepp of San Diego, having to explain on Fox News to Dr. Marc Seigel, their medical expert, that the MMR has never contained mercury. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp5YWZVnpeI

It should not be that parents like Ms. Estepp and myself have to educate medical professionals on their own professed field of expertise.

I understand, as you stated to me, that you do not like "self-proclaimed experts," but I hope you can see why parents have had to become self-informed on vaccine injury. Because the medical profession is ignoring the evidence of widespread vaccine damage that they are causing by closing their eyes and repeating talking points, and because families carry the burden of injury while public health and Pharma remains both untouchable and unaccountable because of the unjust 1986 childhood vaccine injury law.

I hope that you will do as I have done and do your own independent research into vaccine injury for the sake of children in Maine.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the information I have given you, and would be happy to make myself available to you for questions, to point you toward further resources or to sit down with you to discuss the information further.

Sincerely,
Ginger Taylor, M.S.
Maine Coalition for Vaccine Choice
Adventures In Autism

Research list here: http://adventuresinautism.com/StudiesforGraham.doc

Representative Graham responded to the large amount of information that I sent to her in the time span of 1 hour and 20 minutes. This makes it unlikely that she had the time to review the 48 research papers that I sent to her. Although she asked me for information from only reputable sources (which at the time she said she considered to be something to the effect of universities, journals, public health statement) she apparently had changed her critera for what is acceptable debate material and will now only accept, "studies certified through the National Institutes of Health or the CDC"

Further, she took issue with the fact that I discussed my exchange with her on my private facebook account (I mean, "mercury in the MMR" and "I went to Yale!"... cummon... how do you NOT share that on facebook). She believed it was "inappropriate" for me to do so.

Her response to me.

Subject: RE: Research on Vaccine Autism Causation
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2011 13:39:38 -0400 From:
Anne Graham
Reply-To:
To: 'Ginger Taylor'

Ms Taylor,

First I apologize for being frustrated with you yesterday. As I said 3 times outside the hearing that I could not speak with you as I had a meeting to get to. It was a town council meeting that it was important that I attend. I typically am calmer but I felt attacked by you.

I see no studies that you sent certified through the National Institutes of Health or the CDC. Until a direct cause and effect relationship can be established for the cause of Autism Spectrum disorder, no one can say that vaccines or their ingredients are the cause. I am committed to the care of children and adults with ASD and I have been on the Board of the Autism Society of Maine. I am a pediatric nurse practitioner and worked in for 6 years with children with developmental delay, autism and epilepsy. My job was to treat and support children and families as best I could. There rest of career has been committed to providing primary care for children and families. As a Legislator, I will be a voice for children and their families.

I do not intend to continue a discussion with you. We will not agree. Angry divisive debates get us no where fast. I ask for your respect. I have been notified that you are making inappropriate comments about me on Facebook. I would urge you not to continue.

Let us agree to disagree and move on.

Anne
Rep. Anne P Graham
House District #109, Parts of Gray, North Yarmouth and Pownal

Her commitment to be a voice for children and families apparently does not extend to my children or my family.

She does not have my respect.

My response to her:

Rep. Graham,

Thank you for your response and thank you for your apology. While I believed I was simply asking you what you could tell me about vaccine encephalopathy, I do regret that you felt attacked by my question.

While I strongly disagree with your assessment of the material I have sent you that met your request of being only from established universities, peer-reviewed journals and federal health authorities, and I disagree that debates that are divisive should not take place, I will respect your request not to contact you again on the matter.

However, I do not believe my public comments about your testimony or your behavior toward me are inappropriate, as you are a publicly elected official and your testimony and behavior in the state offices toward citizens of Maine is open for public discussion and scrutiny. I believe your defensiveness and unwillingness to answer earnest questions about the topic of vaccination and autism on which you claim to be an expert, speaks to your credibility on the subject and your fitness to serve in public office. While I am sure this is one of the more difficult aspects of holding elected office and may make you feel uncomfortable, which is unfortunate, I feel it is in the greater public interest to document, as I feel appropriate, your vaccine injury denialism in the face of copious amounts of published science and HRSA admissions. This will allow members of the public and your colleagues in the Maine Legislature to have a fuller understanding of your understanding of the facts of the matter so that they can judge your credibility as a source for vaccine safety information.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

Sincerely,
Ginger Taylor, M.S.

But apparently that was not her last comment. She really does not think that I should be able to talk about her on facebook.

Subject: RE: Research on Vaccine Autism Causation
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2011 15:01:14 -0400
From: Anne Graham
Reply-To:
To: 'Ginger Taylor'

This is my last comment. I don’t mind feedback but comments that border on slander on Facebook are highly inappropriate and I ask that you refrain from such postings.

Anne
Rep. Anne P Graham
House District #109, Parts of Gray, North Yarmouth and Pownal
RepAnne.Graham@legislature.maine.gov

Note that the worst accusation she can make is that it "borders on slander", not that it is slander. (Slander - noun. a malicious, false, and defamatory statement or report: a slander against his good name.) No where has she pointed out where I have even come close to slander or asked me to retract anything. (She does know she is a public official, right?) Further note that she does not claim that anything I have written is not an accurate account of what happened.

My reply to her.

Representative Graham,

Thank you for reiterating your request. I will respond by reiterating my intention to continue to discuss the matter openly and accurately, and assert that there is absolutely nothing slanderous or even "borderline slander" about my comments online.

I am sure this is completely presumptuous of me to offer you advice on how you have chosen to conduct your exchanges with me on vaccine safety, but I will offer it anyway and you are free to ignore me as you have said you will not be contacting me again.

This unwillingness to have an open exchange with me, and your additional pressure on me not to talk about your poor behavior, is exactly why the vaccine rates are dropping in Maine. This happens time and time again. Elected officials, public health officials and medical professionals make untenable vaccine safety statements, members of the public attempt to engage them on the veracity of those statements, and the conversation is shut down, often by bullying those members of the public. This does not inspire confidence in the vaccine program, it alerts the public in a very loud way, that those repeating the mantra, "vaccines are safe" either have something to hide, or know they cannot win a true vaccine safety debate.

When you shut down the debate, you tell the public that you know you are wrong. Why would you run away and suppress discussion if all the facts where on your side? Mainer's are not suckers Representative Graham. You can have all the letters after your name in the world, and a resume as long as Abe Lincoln's hat, but if you can't stand up to a single question from the mother of a disabled child, you loose the argument. You didn't avoid a divisive debate with me, you lost the debate on the first question then stormed out of the arena.

I believe that if you truly cared about childrens' safety, as you claim to, you would have embraced the chance to educate me on true vaccine injury when I asked you the simple question, "What can you tell me about vaccine encephalopathy?"

Vaccine uptake is decreasing, not because of one study on MMR (which again, has nothing to do with mercury), it is because like the more than 100 people who have responded to my facebook post on our exchange, so many Mainers have all seen some or all of the 48 studies and HRSA admission that I sent you, as well as the head of CDC admitting CNN that vaccines cause autism (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh-nkD5LSIg). The public is willing to look at the science that you declare by some strange executive caviat 'not applicable'. To them, you betray the fact that you live in an arcane construct where people with letters after their name get to say things in complete contradiction to available evidence, and even common sense, and are expected to be believed because... well... "I went to Yale!"

This subject is literally a matter of life and death for the most vulnerable among us. Both children at risk from death and disability from disease and children at risk for death and disability from vaccination. Your refusal to even answer one simple question, or engage the mother of a disabled child/published author on vaccine safety, in my estimation, ensures that the public confidence in the vaccine program will continue to erode, that more parents will come to refuse vaccination all together. The end result of that will be that children who could be safely vaccinated will go completely unvaccinated, and children for whom vaccination is not safe, will continue to be inappropriately vaccinated, permanently injured and killed by vaccines.

I think that your choices over the last two days are destructive and I implore you to change your course.

I have been writing about vaccine injury for five years on my blog, Adventures In Autism. I repeatedly ask the question of public health officials who have chosen the route you are taking the question... "what is your plan?" Refusal to engage vaccine safety advocates and parents of vaccine injured children is not working. Vaccine rates are dropping BECAUSE of the shut down of public debate. You have asked me not to talk to you about vaccine injury any more... Do you think that fixes the problem? Do you think that makes all the questions and facts I have sent you go away? It is the political equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling, "La, la, la... I'm not listening."

Five years ago a few friends kinda of looked at me politely and you could tell they thought I was a little crazy to say vaccines caused my son's autism. Now they all call me for advice on how to deal with their pediatricians who are pushing them on vaccines they don't want and where to go for vaccine vaccine decision making. I don't even think I know any parents who adhere to the recommended schedule any more. You are loosing the "vaccine wars" because you won't take people like me seriously and treat me like an equal worthy of being heard. Because I don't have an MD? You do remember that I am the injured party here, right? But trying to ask you, the self-proclaimed expert, about things that apply to my son's case make you feel "attacked?" The only thing my questions do is point out your lack of credibility. Am I not owed answers for my son's condition by those who hold them selves out as vaccine experts? Remember, I cannot go to court and force any doctor to answer my questions. CDC and AAP literally don't return my calls or letters.

As I testified in the hearing... once you have a vaccine injury... YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. The public sees how true that is when people like you respond to parent like me, then way you have this week.

So, Representative Graham... I am going to ask my question to you again, although I know it is likely simply a rhetorical one as you refuse to engage me on substantive issues of vaccine safety.

WHAT IS YOUR PLAN?

There are only more and more parents just like me out there who want answers. And none of them care that you went to Yale if you continue to make statements so erroneous as to claim there is mercury in the MMR, which shows you know about as much on the vaccine safety debates as might be expected of a gas station attendant. Are they allowed to ask you questions? Are they not allowed to talk about the fact that you don't know what you are talking about? Because the whole world is taking about vaccine injury and they are not going to stop and wait for people like you who are stuck in a 1950's paradigm that says the guy in the white coat is the only one who can read a study and draw a conclusion.

What is your plan?

I hope that this difficult experience will be a humbling one and that you will realize how destructive the course you are on is for children like my son and for children who need vaccines and will not receive them because parents know that "experts" like you are not trustworthy. So there is my advice to you.

I understand you do not wish to speak with me further on this, but I remain open to whatever discussion you are willing to have with me. I am sorry that my advice has been so long winded and unless I hear from you, I will not contact you again.

But honestly, my beautiful baby was given a DTaP vaccine, and suffered a vaccine encephalopathy that was misdiagnosed as "autism." So I don't really care if you feel offended or your feathers are ruffled because I have called you out publicly. His injury has devastated our family and our lives revolve around finding answers for him and preventing this horrible thing from happening to any other child. I believe that people like you owe me answers. I believe people like you own me solutions. I believe people like you owe me help in getting an accurate picture of his medical condition and effective medical care for his physical illness. It is very difficult for me to have to swallow that I am not allowed to question elected official/vaccine/autism/neurology expert on my son's life altering brain damage/autism. I hope you understand that your false information, your arrogance and your abysmal treatment of me is very difficult for me to bear, as you suffer no consequences for it, but families like mine do.

In Tears,
Ginger Taylor,
Master of Science, Clinical Counseling
Johns Hopkins University
Mother of Chandler Taylor, age 8
A little boy of whom you claim to care about the health and welfare, but refuse to answer questions that may make him better.
A little boy that cannot receive appropriate medical treatment for his condition because medical professionals like you continue to deny that it even exists even though HHS has said that it does.

P.S. I will be publishing all the letters in this exchange.

By the time I finished this thing I was just weeping.

And I am just so disgusted.

This is one of the public officials that I have to go to, and beg for permission to say no to a vaccine?

Exactly how many rings am I supposed to kiss to get public officials to perform their civic duty? How many insults am I supposed to take for trying to get information to help our kids... MY OWN SON! How long will I get the - Who the hell do you think you are for challenging and expert with published research and statements by federal health agencies - treatment? I am supposed to walk on egg shells for people like this prideful woman living in her self-imposed ignorance that she pours out on the public like she was blessing them with holy water?

Excuse me... this allegedly prideful woman living in her suspected, self-imposed, probable ignorance. I wouldn't want to upset her highness with my "borderline slander" by calling a duck, a duck.

Plus until CDC or NIH issues a study saying that in their opinion Anne P. Graham is prideful or ignorant, I don't think anyone is allowed to say that she is.

Have I mentioned that she went to Yale?

Addendum: I have been contacted by an earnest member of the Maine Legislature with the following message:

"Anne Graham is claiming she is being harassed by some who were opposed to her testimony at the public hearing. If you know of any of that would you ask those people to please stop?"

I replied that I know of no one who has contacted her, and on two occasions that people on fb raised the issue of contacting her, I have asked them not to, as she stated that she felt "attacked" by me merely asking her a simple question following the meeting, so it stands to reason that having my writing about her behavior when I asked the simple questions would be seen by her as a further attack.

However, I will put out the message again that Representative Graham does not want be harassed on this matter. I do not know what she considers "harassment." So to be on the safe side, please consider not contacting her on this matter.

On a related note, this blog piece has apparently been tagged on Facebook as "objectionable material" and people are having trouble sharing the link for the page. I am assuming that Representative Graham has complained about it to prevent this story from spreading, but have no way of knowing for sure.

As always, I expect that my readers who speak to any of the subjects of my articles to behave respectfully toward them. Even when they are angry.

But of course, this is a free country and expressing your experiences and opinions about elected officials is THE point of the first amendment to the US Constitution, so if Rep. Graham's expectation is that such speech about her should be suppressed... well... it can't and shouldn't and that is something that she should have gotten straight on before she put her name on a ballot.

So. Don't harass Rep. Graham. Whatever that means.

World Autism Awareness Day: Autism Exists, Let's Celebrate? Even Though It's Killing our Children?

My regular readers already know how I feel about Autism Awarness Day/Month. Everyone is aware already, how about actually doing something about it? No... instead let's just wear blue and do nothing. Except, of course, give money to Autism Speaks. Their party budget is getting low and Geri Dawson has horses to feed.*

Anne Dachel makes the case yet again this year:

I have a hard time each year with AUTISM AWARENESS DAY/MONTH. This is the Fourth Annual International Autism Awareness Day. How long are we going to pretend that all this autism is normal and acceptable? Seriously, how bad do the numbers have to get?

A number of stories out in the news calling for the public to "celebrate" the day. Today is World Autism Awareness Day by Kristina Chew "Today, April 2, is the fourth annual World Autism Awareness Day, during which 'autism organizations around the world celebrate the day with unique fundraising and awareness-raising events.' "

Pueblo Chieftain: Blue balloons raise autism awareness, "The baby blue balloons that Jonah and his classmates at Beulah Heights Elementary School released were to celebrate the beginning of National Autism Awareness Month. The event is celebrated each April, while the World Autism Awareness Day is today."

Sioux Falls Argus Leader: 5 questions: Shedding light on autism, "The falls will be colored blue by lights in support of the Autism Speaks' global Light It Up Blue campaign to celebrate World Autism Awareness Day and Autism Awareness Month."

Lufkin Daily News: Peavy students working to raise autism awareness, "Because of the prominence of the disorder in boys, blue is the official color for autism awareness and the reason the entire Peavy campus was encouraged to don the color Friday to celebrate Autism Awareness Month."

Berkshires.com: Diversity Takes Center Stage in the Berkshires, "'We have so many people supporting this committee right now,' said MaryLee Daniels, director of the Berkshire office of the Department of Developmental Services, and committee member.

"BFAIR, BCArc, the list goes on as to how many organizations support this initiative. We especially want people to join us in celebrating three different months of diversity. Of course, last month was Black History month. This month is Developmental Disabilities month and next month is Autism Awareness month. We have so much to celebrate here."

What is there to celebrate?

Lots of stories are about lighting things up in blue for autism awareness. Lots of them talk about autism being a developmental disorder affecting one percent of children whose cause is unknown. This is done without any alarm or demand for answers. We have been conditioned to accept autism as the perpetual mystery.

As the parent of a son in his 20’s with autism, I’ve had several decades of experts knowing nothing about this disorder. Is this to be the epidemic without a cause?

Looming in the background is the reality of what autism is doing to us. As I listen to the dire predictions about the hard economic times we're in and the need for austerity, I have to ask how in the world we're going to address the needs of the generation of children with autism about to descend on America as adults.

Dr. Thomas Insel is the wet blanket in all this celebration, acceptance, and awareness of autism.

He's the head of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee created by Congress to deal with with the disorder and he says that 80 percent of Americans with autism are under the age of 18. He's warned us we have to prepare for a million dependent adults "who may be in need of significant services." The IACC now calls autism "a national health emergency."

Maybe a better name for April 2 is World Autism Emergency Day.

Anne Dachel
Media editor: Age of Autism

Anne is right. And I gotta wonder, exactly how long this PR BS is going to continue.

And the biomed community isn't even being remotely polite about this any more. These are the two images that are being passed around on facebook today:





Last year I began a new blog. Lives Lost to Autism. I got more than a little bit sick of the blatant fear mongering of death by diseases that are NOT killing Americans, like measles, while the deaths of our children caused by their autism go unlamented and ignored by health authorities.

Last year 10 children died of Pertussis and the response was a national campaign to get people vaccinated (both adults and children), new state vaccine mandates are being pushed through, and the press on it has been everywhere. Last year at least 27 children and adults died as a direct result of autism, and unless you are in the autism community, or one of these deaths happened in your town, you probably never knew it. Even then, it is always an isolated incident, yes? (There were 41 reported deaths following the pertussis vaccine last year, but that is a whole other story.)

And those 27 autism deaths are only the ones who came across my google alerts for "autism deaths" or "autism died" or "autism drowning." The test I use on how to include them is basically, "would this have happened to this this person was neurotypical?" Who knows how many more went unreported or didn't get picked up by google. I would love to quote an actual statistic on how often autism kills, or how their incidence of premature death compares to the general population, but no public health agency cares enough to track this.

But insurance companies, whose bottom lines are effected by deaths and actually need to know if autism is deadly, won't sell life insurance policies on children with autism younger than 10, because it is not a good risk for them. See the problem there?

Our precious ones drowned, were murdered by caretakers and loved ones, were shot by police, suffocated while being restrained, were hit by cars, burned to death in fires, died from neglect and were killed by seizures. A few of them even killed others during their own melt downs.

Bryan Nevins, age 20, died because, on a hot day, he could not simply open the door of a van and get out. His institutional caretaker was on her cell phone and forgot about him for five hours. She is in jail now.

Autism kills and our government could not give less of a damn.

Autism Speaks doesn't seem to want to make that point that autism kills more than whooping cough, because then the public might actually begin to see this as a public health emergency and demand results... and then were would AS be? The party financing would dry up. Better for them to let autism linger and keep sucking up cash from suckers as they pretend to do something about it. Autism Speaks has found quite the cash cow.

(Speaking of... Guidestar finally posted AS's 2009 tax returns... they took in 45.5 million, and less than a quarter of it went to grants to do what the purported purpose of the org is, "Autism Speaks (AS) funds research into the causes, prevention, treatment and cure for autism. AS raises public awareness about autism and its effects on individuals, families, and society. AS aims to bring the autism community together to urge government and the provate sector to take action to address this urgent global health crisis." Of the whole list, "autism awareness" is the only thing that I think they actually have accomplished since their inception.)

And HHS's admissions that yes, vaccines CAN AND DO CAUSE AUTISM would mean that HHS has been able to do something about this FOR YEARS and has not done it. It means that those vaccine cases can be avoided by screening for mitochondrial disorders, autoimmunity and toxicity, and treated early on if doctors were actually taught that "vaccine induced encephalopathy" exists and if recognized and treated immediately that it may minimize or even prevent many cases of autism from developing.

And that might also mean that the people who have been sitting on this information for years, and decades, might suffer some consequences.

But AS has decided to ignore HHS's own claims of vaccine autism causation and openly declared that everyone should stop talking about the vaccine autism link.

Better that we just "wear blue" because dealing with all that ugliness would just be too ugly.

This is my post on "Autism Awareness" from 2008 entitled, "Insensitive Jerk Makes a Good Point". Nick sees all the signs that tell him that Autism is everywhere, but tells him nothing about what to do about it. And this was three years ago. I should try to track Nick down and see if he has figured out what he can do about it yet.

HAPPY PHONY, BS, ARCHAIC, DESCRIPTION OF BEHAVIORS DIAGNOSIS THAT TELLS US NOTHING ABOUT WHAT IS GOING ON MEDICALLY SO WE CAN KEEP IGNORING THE TOXIC CAUSES OF WHATEVER THE HELL IT REALLY IS WHILE IT CONTINUES TO KILL PEOPLE CELEBRATION DAY!

Make sure you wear blue, write a check to AS, vaccinate your baby, give him a dose of Tylenol, feed him GMO's and then go back to sleep. They experts are handling it for you.


Insensitive Jerk Makes a Good Point
By Ginger Taylor, Adventures In Autism
APRIL 13, 2008

Last week Nick Jameson, college smart ass, wrote a piece on his reaction to the autism awareness campaign currently under way. One currently struggling with autism might be put off by his callousness until one remembers that he is only 22 and that we were all pretty much insensitive smart asses at 22.

I would encourage all to allow Nick a chance to grow and check back with him in 10 years or so when he is expecting his first child and see if maturity has tempered his stance.

But what is useful from Nick, random college punk, is this reaction:

For example, what is the purpose of putting up a billboard that is telling me a child is born with autism every 20 minutes? What can I possibly do other than sit in my car and mutter to myself, “Well that sucks.” Maybe if there was a cure or even ways to help prevent autism, it might make more sense to have a billboard. Then it would reinforce concepts in people’s head that they could apply later like “only you could prevent forest fires” or “don’t eat cheese before noon.” But frankly, all this billboard is really saying is, “Beware, autistic people are everywhere,” and I’m sure that isn’t the message they want to get across. We already know autism exists; give us something we can work with. If the autism front wants to put us through a year of sappy ads and TV specials, than at least make it worth the time and money and headache. Teach us something. I was on my way to New York City this weekend and every toll booth was littered with autism propaganda. Did I learn anything? No. There are more intelligent ways to get out a message to the public.

Does Nick know that there are successful treatments available? Does Nick know that there are some kids who are completely recover from autism? Does Nick know that there are things that he can do to prevent his own children (should he ever become soft hearted enough for a woman to agree to marry and/or procreate with him) from slipping in to autism?

Apparently not. And that is the fault of the media who won't report the whole story.

So our young Nick has made a great point. One that parents like me have been trying to make for years now. "Autism Exists" is a message that everyone got a few years back now. But the important message, "Autism is Treatable and Preventable" is one that the media will not share with him.

What is it going to take for them to tell the whole story?

In ten years, when Nick is expecting, will he have heard this message from the media? Or, like us, will he hear it from another parent on the playground after Nick Jr. is diagnosed with autism?

Addendum: Autism Speaks had a huge chance this month to get the treatment message out and yet again, they are screwing children by with holding the important message. They certainly have the cash to do it.

/End 2008 article

*Ok... I actually have no idea if Geri Dawson has horses, but I do know she lives on a ranch or a farm or something, so horses... not out of the question really.