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June 25, 2015

CDC’s Latest Tuskegee Experiment African American Autism and Vaccines

 

Last August, CDC senior scientist, Dr. William Thompson, invoked federal whistleblower status and confessed that the CDC has known since 2001 that black boys 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 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 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 African American males 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 African Americans are more susceptible to vaccine injury and may also have increased susceptibility to neurological disorders such as autism.

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

A 2010 study in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health showed that blacks were at significantly greater risk of regressing into autism after receiving the thimerosal-containing Hepatitis B vaccination series as infants. When analyzed further, the data showed that black boys receiving the HepB series were 53% more likely to have autism than those black boys not receiving any HepB shot.

Based upon all the population data and CDC’s most recent autism incidence estimates, at least 100,000 African-American 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.
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 African Americans. Less than ten years ago, in June 1996, African Americans in Los Angeles learned that CDC has been conducting vaccine experiments in their communities. Beginning in 1989, CDC conducted an experiment on nearly 1500 black and hispanic 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. 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.” CDC denies that any Los Angeles black children were injured by the unlicensed vaccine, but has not produced any studies to confirm that claim.

In 1972, a government whistleblower, Peter Buxton, 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 African-American men in rural Alabama. Public health regulators lured iliterate 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. CDC purposefully withheld penicillin after the antibiotic became a proven treatment in 1947. CDC actively prevented participants from accessing syphilis treatment programs elsewhere. CDC’s victims in that study included numerous men who died of syphilis, 40 wives who contracted the disease, and 19 children born with congenital syphilis.

When, in 1966, Buxton sent a letter to government regulators complaining about the ethics and morality of the study, CDC reaffirmed the need to continue the research until all subjects had died and been autopsied. 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.

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