Last August, CDC senior scientist, Dr. William Thompson, reportedly invoked federal whistleblower status and confessed that the CDC has allegedly known since 2001 that black American male children exposed to the MMR vaccine have a disproportionate risk of autism.


Thompson, a 17 year CDC veteran, is the author of some of the leading studies cited by CDC to exculpate vaccines from the autism epidemic.  Thompson, who still works at CDC, released the raw data sets that he says his bosses at CDC ordered him to conceal.  Those data allegedly show that black boys who received the MMR vaccine prior to three years old, as the CDC recommends – were 3.36 times more likely to receive an autism diagnosis than those who received the vaccine after 3 years of age.  This effect was not observed in other race categories. Nevertheless, when the CDC scientists published their results in Pediatrics in 2004, they reportedly omitted the damaging data, fraudulently declaring there was no risk of autism from the MMR vaccination.  In August 2014, Dr. Thompson issued a press release through his attorney stating, “I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics.  The omitted data suggested that black male children who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism.”

The buried data were disturbing, but hardly surprising.  The most reliable studies in the scientific literature indicate that black people are more susceptible to vaccine injury and may also have increased susceptibility to neurological disorders such as autism (1).

A 2010 nationwide study of CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disability Monitoring Network, found autism incidence about 25% higher in black Americans than white Americans (2).  A 2014 study published in Pediatrics, showed higher rates of all categories of autism among black Americans in Los Angeles County compared to white Americans, with the incidence of severe autism elevated by 263% among foreign-born black people and 152% for U.S.-born black people as compared to U.S.-born whites (3).

A 2010 study in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health showed that “nonwhite boys” were at significantly greater risk of regressing into autism after receiving the thimerosal-containing Hepatitis B vaccination series as infants (4).

Based upon all the population data and CDC’s most recent autism incidence estimates, at least 100,000 black male children could have been spared debilitating neurological injury if the CDC scientists had told the truth when the increased risk was first known to them in 2001 (5).

Dr. Thompson has requested to testify before Congress about corruption at CDC and has handed Congress over thousands of pages of documents showing widespread fraud in CDC’s vaccine division.

It’s not the first time the CDC has concealed vaccine risks from black Americans. In June 1996, black Americans in Los Angeles learned that CDC had reportedly been conducting vaccine experiments in their communities.  Beginning in 1989, CDC conducted an experiment on nearly 1,500 minority infants using an unlicensed measles vaccine without disclosing to parents that the drug was a high potency experimental vaccine designed to overwhelm the baby’s maternal immune system (7, 8).  CDC only halted its secret experiment in 1991 when companion clinical trials conducted in Africa and Haiti showed increased death rate and severe immune system disorder among female infants who received the vaccine.  Those children died within two years after the vaccination.

“A mistake was made.  It shocked me”, then CDC Director Dr. David Satcher, told the LA Times. “We need to move to a new level of assurance so people can trust what we’re doing.” (8)  CDC denies that any Los Angeles black male children were injured by the unlicensed vaccine, but has not produced any studies to confirm that claim.

In 1972, a government whistleblower, Peter Buxtun, revealed that for the previous forty years, beginning in 1932, both CDC and the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted the so called “Tuskegee Experiment” to study the progression of untreated syphilis in impoverished black men in rural Alabama (9).  Public health regulators lured illiterate sharecroppers with the promise of hot meals, funeral costs and free health care from the U.S. government.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, which took over the study in the early 1960’s, none of 299 syphilitic sharecroppers were ever told they had the disease.  It’s reported that CDC purposefully withheld penicillin, after the antibiotic became a proven treatment in 1947, as well as actively prevented participants from accessing syphilis treatment programs elsewhere.  The victims in that study included numerous men who died of syphilis, 40 wives who contracted the disease, and 19 children born with congenital syphilis.

To bolster its position, the CDC sought, and gained support for the study’s extension, from the American Medical Association (AMA).

Buxton finally told his story to my uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy in July of 1972.  Senator Kennedy convened Senate hearings, at which Buxton and HEW officials testified and CDC finally terminated the study.

On May 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton formally apologized at a White house ceremony attended by five of the eight study survivors promising “our African American citizens” that “clearly racist” public health policies would never happen again.

By concealing the link between vaccines and autism in black male children, CDC had once again violated that public trust. Still, the fraudulent 2004 study has reportedly been cited in 91 subsequent studies as one of the principle proofs of CDC’s claim that vaccines are not linked to the autism epidemic.  This calls into question the validity of the entire body of research that families, medical professionals and policy-makers rely on when making decisions for the health of children.  “I have a boss who is asking me to lie,” Thompson allegedly said in a taped conversation with Simpson University Professor, Dr. Brian Hooker.  “I have great shame now when I meet a family with kids with autism, because I have been a part of the problem...because the CDC has not been transparent, we’ve missed ten years of research, because the CDC is so paralyzed right now by anything related to autism.  They’re not doing what they should be doing.They are afraid to look for things that might be associated.  I’m completely ashamed of what I did.  The higher ups wanted to do certain things and I went along with it.”

The time has come in this country for everyone – press, regulators and politicians – to stop “going along with it.”

References:
1.   
Durkin et al. 2010 (PMID 20634960), Becerra et al. 2014 (PMID 24958588), Haralambieva et al. 2014 (PMID 24530932)
2.   
Durkin et al. 2010 (PMID 20634960)
3.   
Becerra et al. 2014 (PMID 24958588)
4.   
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15287394.2010.519317
5.   
The 100,000 black males figure was derived by taking the average U.S. birth rate over the period 2001 to 2014 (3.9 million) and multiplying it by the percentage of blacks making up the total U.S. population (16%).  Assuming an autism rate of 1 in 68 children (CDC, 2014) based on children born in 2002, the total number of black autistic children were calculated.  Black boys were then calculated using the widely accepted male: female autism incidence ratio of 4:1.
6.   
http://www.nvic.org/nvic-archives/newsletter/vaccinereactionjune1996.aspx
7.   
http://www.lapublichealth.org/acd/reports/spclrpts/spcrpt95/cd95edmo.pdf
8.   
http://articles.latimes.com/1996-06-20/local/me-16843_1_los-angeles
9.   
http://whistleblower.org/blog/04302014-whistleblower-peter-buxtun-and-tuskegee-syphilis-study

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ora Media, LLC its affiliates, or its employees.

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