BOOK EXCERPT: “Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails”

Before you follow the science, follow the money trail, follow the documents.

40 minute read

In a recent interview with the DisInformation Chronicle, author and investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson discussed her new book on the history of pharma scandals, how corruption in medicine reached a new apex during COVID, and how nobody has been punished for lies during the pandemic about the vaccines, masks, and lockdowns. Attkisson’s new bestseller is “Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails,” and can be purchased at the Harper Collins’ website.

An excerpted chapter follows:

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Chapter 3: “Third Rail” Vaccines

Has your doctor warned you about potential side effects each time you or a loved one got a vaccine? Under established ethics guidelines, you should be informed about everything from the risk of paralysis to brain damage and death, depending on the vaccine. If you weren’t told of these risks, then did you truly give your informed consent to be vaccinated?

It was a long time ago, but I recall being surprised when I first discovered public health officials using official channels to perpetrate vaccine misinformation. I was startled by their manipulation of news and information. A large part of their propaganda campaign revolves around mislabeling accurate facts as “disinformation,” smearing certain scientists, and falsely attacking people as “anti-vaccine.”

Let me pause to state something that should be obvious. It’s not “anti-vaccine” to ask questions, research, or report about vaccine safety. In all my years of investigating topics, this one stands alone in terms of the magnitude of orchestrated pushback it draws. When I broke international news about deadly rollovers of Ford Explorers outfitted with Firestone tires, nobody suggested I was “anti-car” or “anti-tire.” That would be absurd. When I uncovered fraud at the Red Cross involving 9/11 donations, nobody suggested I was “anti–Red Cross,” “anti-charity,” or “anti-9/11 donations.” When I investigated other drug safety issues, nobody considered me to be “anti-medicine.” If I were to talk about studies showing that some people are allergic to penicillin, it wouldn’t make me “anti-penicillin.”

Ask yourself why the game changes when it comes to vaccines. The fact that people feel compelled to say, “I’m not anti-vaccine . . .” before making perfectly grounded statements or asking rational questions speaks to the success of one of the most influential propaganda movements of our time.

One of the cruelest things our government does is smear the poor parents of vaccine-injured children. For daring to speak publicly about what happened to their loved ones, these parents are attacked by public health officials and held up to ridicule by the media. Parents have told me the government has proven vindictive and they fear if they don’t keep their mouths shut, the government will take back payments awarded by courts to care for their vaccine-injured children. They’re literally bullied into silence. I think part of the reason why vaccine interests are so intent on neutralizing parents is that parents are the most important and credible spokesmen when it comes to vaccine safety.

By definition, they weren’t “anti-vaxxers.” They vaccinated their children.

All medicine has side effects. But in today’s manipulated information landscape, efforts to learn the most about side effects of vaccines, products given multiple times to virtually every American, are actively discouraged. We’re made to think that questions are not even to be raised. This is the antithesis of good science and public health. Without risks being addressed, our national vaccine program is neither as safe nor as effective as it could be. The fact that even medical professionals who should know better treat vaccine safety as a third rail not to be touched makes no logical sense and serves as an important giveaway that a commanding narrative is in play.

15 Eye-Openers

Many books could be written as to why federal agencies and public health officials entrusted with our well-being are part of the global vaccine propaganda campaign. I’ll succinctly highlight fifteen eye-openers that I discovered through extensive research. These examples helped shape my reporting and how I approach current medical stories.

Prior to my years of research, I wouldn’t have believed any of these examples were true! When I eventually published news stories on these topics, it was usually after months or years of investigation. I wanted to make certain I was relying on accurate research and credible sources—precisely because there’s so much propaganda claiming the opposite of what turns out to be true. Also, please note that due to a broad misinformation campaign, if you google these topics, you’ll be bombarded by “fact-checks,” news articles, and medical citations that “debunk” the truth. We’ll dissect that a bit later. For the sake of brevity and clarity, I’m using examples here that cannot be legitimately disputed. And I’m including some simple references and citations, in case you want to learn more.

1.     DPT: The shot so many of us got as children to protect against diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus, the DPT triple vaccine, caused seizures and brain injuries in some children, according to medical testimony and scientists. In 1994, a US Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee agreed that “the balance of evidence is consistent with a causal relation between DPT” and brain damage. Numerous lawsuits awarded up to $5 million to each injured child. This was a precursor to the wave of “autism” that some researchers say is simply the name we’ve given to specific types of brain damage. In response to the 1994 DPT brain injury determination, the government recommended a revised formulation in 1996 hoping it would be safer for children (though there was no evidence to say one way or another): DTaP. Like all childhood vaccines, the DTaP version was never tested in combination with other shots babies get. If you google vaccine safety, it returns an impressive body of propaganda falsely insisting that no products have been more rigorously tested for safety and effectiveness than vaccines. In fact, there are no public studies showing the cumulative, real-world impact of the CDC’s recommended childhood vaccine schedule on any individual.

In 2013, the powerful Institute of Medicine (IOM) weighed in on this research deficit. The IOM was a unique group of experts, chartered by Congress, intended to provide objective medical advice on health matters. In the view of critics, the IOM frequently acted largely as an arm of the government and pharmaceutical industry on some controversies. In 2015, it changed its name to the National Academy of Medicine. But in 2013, the IOM actually admitted the cold, hard reality. “Most vaccine-related research focuses on the outcomes of single immunizations or combinations of vaccines administered at a single visit,” wrote an IOM committee. “Thus, key elements of the entire schedule—the number, frequency, timing, order, and age at administration of vaccines—have not been systematically examined in research studies.” So, did the National Institutes of Health or our public health experts snap to and close this glaring research gap? Nah. Billions upon billions of tax dollars are spent on research, but not a penny to study the exposure nearly every American baby gets.

Read about the government’s findings on DPT at this link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK225455/

Read an example of DPT vaccine injury here: https://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions/Almeida2.pdf

Read the National Vaccine Information Center’s summary of vaccine risks at this link: https://www.nvic.org/vaccination -decisions/know-the-risks

2. Vaccine Court: By the early 1980s, DPT vaccine makers were already facing so many brain damage lawsuits, they got together and threatened to stop producing the shots unless Congress protected them from liability. As a result, in 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. The Act did something unheard-of. It created a special vaccine court under the United States Court of Federal Claims to handle vaccine injuries. The court operates under unique rules. The burden of proof required of a vaccine-injured patient is unrealistically high, and the statute of limitations is unfairly short, according to victims’ advocates. Patients are denied the normal “discovery” process that could show what the drug companies knew and when they knew it. By the time many parents suspect their child has suffered autism or another vaccine injury, it’s often too late for them to obtain the contemporaneous documentation the court requires. A majority of claims are denied. Though most parents aren’t aware vaccine court exists, the relative few who do find it, and have the required documentation, have received a cumulative $5 billion for more than 10,600 claims.

Incredibly, under this sweetheart arrangement for the industry, our own Department of Justice defends vaccine makers. This oddly pits taxpayer-funded government against injured patients and exempts the guilty party: vaccine makers. And when damages to victims are paid, the money doesn’t come from the culpable vaccine makers. It comes from a fund built with fees charged to patients on each vaccine dose they receive. In other words, vaccine makers don’t bear the cost of their products’ damage—we do. Vaccine court has unwittingly created a database of thousands of self-identified, injured patients whose families would be happy to be studied so that risk factors for vaccine injuries could be identified and mitigated. Yet the government leaves that gold mine of data untouched.

Read more at the government court website here: https://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/vaccine-programoffice-special-masters

Vaccine injury compensation data can be found at this link: https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/data

One-Two, Switcheroo: America’s stunning spike in autism cases directly coincides with the dramatic uptick in childhood vaccines. By 2019, most children were getting three times as many vaccinations as kids got in 1983. By the early 2000s, large groups of autism claims were finding their way to vaccine court. And the vaccine industry, with help from the government, began a stepped-up PR strategy to avoid what threatened to become a monumental financial disaster.

By way of background, studies and court cases today document many links between vaccines and instances of autism, both suspected and firmly proven. The variability in mechanisms and side effects makes it easy to throw the public off the scent. Vaccines aren’t the only “cause” of autism. And “autism,” say many experts, is simply a name assigned to a group of confusing and disparate symptoms surrounding encephalitis or brain damage. How vaccines cause or trigger autism isn’t one simple, identifiable thing.

Some scientists blame the preservative known as thimerosal, which contains toxic mercury. Others believe it’s the live virus component of the MMR vaccine, or the combination of mercury-containing shots given near the same time as shots containing actual live viruses. Some court cases have found damage is caused by the immune assault on vulnerable kids and adults when they get multiple vaccines. Some studies have fingered additives or “adjuvants” such as aluminum that are supposed to make vaccines work better. Maybe it’s the administration of vaccines to a child who’s immune-suppressed or whose immune system is challenged by illness.

You’ll never read about this on CDC’s website, but the government has conceded that shots triggered autism in a child who had an undiagnosed vulnerability: a disorder involving her mitochondria, the structures that provide energy to our cells.

Vaccines given to kids born with a condition called tuberous sclerosis have also resulted in autism, and families have gone to court and won payments for that. Some scientists say the whooping cough or pertussis component of the triple DTaP shot can be problematic. The vaccine connection to autism could be any single one of these factors or a combination, depending on the child. And if that’s not confusing enough, many other illnesses besides autism have spiked in an alarming way and are linked to vaccines, including immune-related disorders such as juvenile diabetes, Crohn’s disease, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Graves’ disease, Addison’s disease, lupus, psoriasis, inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, skin rashes, and more. As you can see, it’s about as easy to grasp on to as a warm bowl of Jell-O.

In any event, by 2002, so many parents were filing autism claims, the vaccine court devised a unique plan to address them. Rather than litigate thousands of cases one by one, the court decided to hear out two specific theories. Even amid the autism epidemic, most ordinary people knew little about this giant set of cases.

The first theory to be tested was that the triple dose measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine containing live measles virus somehow interacts with mercury-containing vaccines, such as the triple dose diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis shot (DTP), to cause autism. Following the MMR DTP vaccine combo, many parents watched their children regress from healthy, normal development into a severely autistic state. The second theory the vaccine court planned to test was that mercury-containing vaccines alone can cause autism.

The process to litigate autism was given a name: the Omnibus Autism Proceeding. Six representative cases were chosen to test the two theories. They were heard by a type of appointed judge called special masters. If vaccines were found to cause autism in any or all of the test cases, then other autism cases with a similar set of facts would be automatically presumed to be vaccine injuries and compensated accordingly. The result prom- ised to either quell growing questions about vaccine safety and government health policies or open the world’s eyes to a hidden world of incompetence, conflicts of interest, and corruption.

Either way, it would be earthshaking.

I’d been learning about the vaccine-autism controversy for several years as a CBS News investigative correspondent. This scandal was proving eerily similar to others I’d investigated involving government, corporations, money, whistleblowers, and power. It involved subterfuge, dishonesty, and distractions. And always more than meets the eye.

I discovered that, despite insistences to the contrary in mainstream medicine and media, there’s an impressive body of convincing evidence pointing to vaccines as triggering autism in some children. Numerous scientists assured me it’s entirely possible for research to identify the vulnerabilities that make an individual child susceptible to vaccine injury, and to correct for them. These same scientists also told me that establishment medicine—from the CDC to some inside the Institute of Medicine (IOM)—had made a group decision to pretend there was no issue. In fact, they schemed to demonize those trying to expose the truth. The altruistic explanation for why they would be willing to mislead the public on such a grand scale? For the greater good. If public trust in vaccines were chiseled away by the truth, then preventable infectious diseases—they claimed—would make a major comeback, and we’d have a public health disaster on our hands. The non-altruistic explanation, which I came to believe is probably closer to the truth, is that industry interests so permeate our health institutions, they’re able to control narratives to protect their multibillion-dollar cash cows.

The Biggest Cover-up

Years after the Omnibus Autism Proceeding began, it’s finally nearing a decision. I’m in my office at CBS News in Washington, DC, when I’m contacted by an impeccable, firsthand source connected to the vaccine court. We’ll refer to him as James Howard (not his real name), to protect his identity. Howard has provided me with valuable background over a period of time, helping me become conversant on a variety of complex vaccine safety issues, how vaccine court works, and how much is at stake with the Omnibus cases. He is fiercely pro-vaccine. Yet, after becoming intricately familiar with many vaccine injury cases, he’s also a thoughtful realist in terms of the damage they can do. On this day, he invites me to his office for an in-person meeting.

When I arrive, Howard delivers the bombshell. In the special masters’ upcoming court decisions, he tells me, they’ll announce at least one of the children in a test case did get autism as a result of vaccination. Am I hearing this correctly? I think.

“What does that mean?” I ask, for clarity.

It means, Howard tells me, that thousands more autism claims will be unleashed. Catastrophe will be visited upon the trust fund that pays families of the vaccine-injured. It will quickly go bankrupt. An entirely new way to replenish it will have to be devised. Unnamed government officials have already been briefed, he implies. The decision will rock the foundation of America’s much-heralded vaccine campaigns. It will shake people’s faith in vaccinations and—even more importantly—in the system that’s developed, recommended, and pushed them on our children in radically increasing numbers.

Howard intends for our meeting to be a heads-up so I can prepare to report the story when the decision is announced. It will be one of the biggest news stories of our time, and it’s important to get it right. After the meeting, back at my office, I alert my bosses that a decision on the vaccine-autism cases is imminent, and I have reason to believe it will be Very Big.

Days pass, and there’s no announcement. I’m not sure why the delay. Then, finally, the news crosses the wire services. The vaccine court has rejected all of the vaccine-autism claims. Denied them. Kaput. What on earth had happened between my briefing from Howard—and now?

If I were covering the same story today, I’d have some idea of how to report on the contradiction between what I knew had been decided—and what was announced. I should have immediately started my detective work to report on the discrepancy. Who and what were responsible? But back then, I wasn’t as knowledgeable about the secret machinations and how to deal with them. I was just dumb-struck. So the story was covered on the CBS Evening News the same way it was everywhere else. There’s no vaccine-autism link. The vaccine court says so. Case closed.

It would be several years before I’d develop a reasoned hypothesis as to what had actually happened. One of the autism test cases that would have been “founded,” or proven if not for the last-minute reversal was that of Hannah Poling.

Hannah’s Precedent

Hannah was described as normal, happy, and precocious in her first eighteen months. Then, in July of 2000, she was vaccinated against nine diseases in one doctor’s visit: measles, mumps, rubella, polio, varicella, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, and haemophilus influenza. Afterward, her health declined rapidly. She developed high fevers, stopped eating, didn’t respond when spoken to, began showing signs of autism, and began having screaming fits. In 2002, Hannah’s parents filed an autism claim in vaccine court. It became one of the test cases in the Omnibus proceedings. It was a strong case. Hannah’s father was a Johns Hopkins neurologist. Her mother, a nurse and lawyer. It would be hard for the government and vaccine industry to convince the media that these parents were “nutty, anti-vaccine kooks.”

But before the historic precedent of Hannah’s autism case could be announced, somebody powerful got to the court. A decision was made to quietly carve her out from the Omnibus group of test cases and replace it with a weaker case that the court could publicly smack down. The switcheroo was made. The government secretly paid the Polings, then had Hannah’s case sealed under confidentiality so that no other parents would know about it. The Polings received more than $1.5 million for Hannah’s life care, lost earnings, and pain and suffering for the first year alone, and then $500,000 per year thereafter. They weren’t allowed to tell anybody. So as far as the public was concerned, there was no precedent. No vaccine-autism link. There would be no flood of similar cases. No financial disaster for the vaccine industry. Even more insidious: knowing full well that the admission had been made in private, officials like CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding continued to let the public think the vaccine-autism connection was a debunked myth.

In 2008, fate kicked in, and news of the Poling settlement leaked out to the press. I covered the story. Hannah’s parents held a press conference and provided credible accounts of their daughter’s descent into illness and autism after vaccination. Time summed up the relevance this way: “[T]here’s no denying that the court’s decision to award damages to the Poling family puts a chink—a question mark—in what had been an unqualified defense of vaccine safety with regard to autism. If Hannah Poling had an underlying condition that made her vulnerable to being harmed by vaccines, it stands to reason that other children might also have such vulnerabilities.”

By then, Dr. Gerberding of the CDC had gone on to another job. She was now president of Merck Vaccines. From that perch, she addressed news of the Poling precedent. “The government has made absolutely no statement indicating that vaccines are a cause of autism,” she insisted. “This does not represent anything other than a very specific situation and a very sad situation as far as the family of the affected child.”

Read about the $1.5 million secret settlement paid for the vaccine-autism injury of Hannah Poling here: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vaccine-case-an-exception-or-a-precedent/

Read the Poling case documents here: https://www.ageofautism.com/2008/02/full-text-autis.html

4. The Zimmerman Revelations: A decade after the Poling autism news conference, the government’s top expert medical witness, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, came forward with his own remarkable account of what had actually gone on behind closed doors. He told his full story in 2018 in a sworn statement. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer and advocate who was helping fight on the side of vaccine-injured children in court, was instrumental in convincing Dr. Zimmerman to document his incredible claim all these years later in an affidavit. “This was one of the most consequential frauds, arguably, in human history,” Kennedy tells me in an interview about the scandal for my television program.

According to Dr. Zimmerman, on June 15, 2007, he took aside two Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers for whom he worked defending vaccines in vaccine court. As I mentioned earlier, DOJ lawyers, paid by us, take the side of the pharmaceutical industry against patients claiming vaccine injuries in court. On this day, Dr. Zimmerman told the DOJ lawyers something they likely never expected to hear: that “vaccinations could cause autism,” after all, in some cases. In fact, he told them that he’d personally treated such patients. This was akin to an accused killer’s best friend admitting his buddy committed murder. The government’s own star witness was conceding the vaccine-autism theory was true!

“I explained that in a subset of children, vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation did cause regressive brain disease with features of autism spectrum disorder,” Dr. Zimmerman stated in his affidavit. He says it was a Friday when he delivered the unwelcome news to the DOJ lawyers outside the courtroom. Then, over the weekend, the DOJ attorneys called and informed Dr. Zimmerman that his services as their expert witness in court were longer needed. As if that weren’t bad enough, Dr. Zimmerman alleges that days later, the DOJ lawyers went on to misrepresent his opinion in court to continue debunking autism claims. Records show that on June 18, 2007, after the DOJ had in essence fired Dr. Zimmerman, one of the DOJ attorneys falsely told the vaccine court, “We know [Dr. Zimmerman’s] views on the issue. . . . There is no scientific basis for a connection” between vaccines and autism. A decade later, Dr. Zimmerman called that DOJ statement “highly misleading.”

In 2018, when I tried to ask the DOJ about Dr. Zimmerman’s allegations, which could merit serious sanctions against the DOJ lawyers, the agency didn’t return my calls. Nobody was ever held accountable. To this day, public health officials continue to actively mislead.

As of 2023, the autism epidemic had grown so ubiquitous that the CDC admitted an alarming 1 in 36 eight-year-olds have been diagnosed with the disorder. The true rate is significantly higher, since it’s understood that many cases go undiagnosed, and the rate goes up as you look at children under age eight. Can you think of another disorder that went from almost unheard-of to striking 1 in 36 American kids in the span of a generation? Wouldn’t it be reasonable to declare a public health emergency and call for urgent study to identify what we’re doing to our children that could be to blame? Isn’t it one of the biggest failings of our well-funded public health structure that we haven’t?

Instead, autism is normalized and billions of dollars are made treating sick children. Autism studies get published and publicized as long as they point to factors like genetic predispositions or age of the father. Our top experts act not the least bit curious to solve the puzzle. They say they can’t explain the sudden epidemic—but insist the one thing they’ve admitted to privately cannot possibly be a factor.

In a Q and A on the CDC website, one question asks: “Do vaccines cause autism spectrum disorder (ASD)?” CDC’s answer: “To date, the studies continue to show that vaccines are not associated with ASD.”

Read Dr. Zimmerman’s full affidavit at this link: https:// sharylattkisson.com/2019/01/dr-andrew-zimmermans-full-affidavit-on-alleged-link-between-vaccines-and-autism-that-u-s-govt-covered-up/

5. Switcheroo, Part Two: In the middle of covering stories about vaccine controversies in the early 2000s, I keep asking the CDC for interviews. One fateful day, agency officials agree to an on-camera interview with me for the CBS Evening News.

I fly from Washington, DC, to the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. The agency’s public relations official greets me, stations me in a waiting room, and preps me for what I’m about to be told in the interview. “We’ll be making a big announcement,” he says. “We’ll be recommending that thimerosal not be used in flu shots for pregnant women.”

I hadn’t expected the agency to acknowledge any potential risk to thimerosal. CDC officials had long fended off all suggestions that the mercury preservative in vaccines had any downside. The fact that the CDC is now willing to open the door, even a crack, to health concerns about thimerosal would be major news.

As the CDC press person chats me up, he tells me that he personally still thinks there’s really nothing dangerous about thimerosal, but adds that it’s easy enough for pregnant women to ask their doctor for a thimerosal-free version of flu shots. He uses the word “nutty” and other slurs to describe parents who are concerned, and says their activism has pretty much forced the agency’s hand.

As I wait to be escorted into the CDC studio where the interview will take place, there’s an unexplained delay. The appointed time for our interview passes, and the clock ticks on. Time is of the essence when I’m producing a story for that night’s Evening News. I wonder what’s going on.

At last, I’m escorted to the interview room. I sit down across from the CDC official and ask about the potential risks of mercury, or thimerosal, in vaccines. I wait to hear the CDC announce the new recommendation that pregnant women should avoid it. But to my surprise, the CDC official tells me there is no issue! Thimerosal is safe. There’s nothing to fear. Thoughts spin around inside my head. After telling me one thing privately, they’ve decided to tow the industry line publicly.

I re-ask the question. I get the same answer.

I have no way to know what happened behind closed doors prior to the interview, but I sense that a great debate has taken place. That our most powerful political figures and drug industry moguls had reached down at the very last minute and stopped the CDC from making its planned statement. Somebody doesn’t want the door to be opened even a crack. Who are the people pulling strings? Where do they hold their secret talks? Who has that kind of power?

6. Vaccine-Autism Link “Worthy of Investigation”: In 2008, the medical establishment was busy trying to put to rest controversy over vaccine-autism links. But the former head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Bernadine Healy, bravely told me in an on-camera interview that it very much remained an open question. She said her colleagues at the Institute of Medicine were willfully turning a blind eye to research that could identify children who are “vulnerable” to vaccine injury.

The interview, like much of my work on medical scandals, was somehow wiped from nearly every corner of the Internet, but I was able to repost a copy on my Rumble page.

You can watch the interview with Dr. Healy here: https://rumble.com/v23b9tu-dr.-bernadine-healy-interview-with-sharyl -attkisson-on-vaccine-autism-link.html

7. What’s in a Name? In covering vaccine stories for CBS News, I discovered a telling trend. In vaccine court, when autism is alleged, the cases are lost. But when the plaintiffs avoid using the word “autism” and instead highlight “encephalopathy” or general brain damage, the cases are often won. That makes no logical sense to families who say that autism is nothing more than a subset of encephalopathy. But as a result of the wholesale rejection of autism claims, some are circulating these words of advice: use the word “encephalopathy” in your vaccine court claim, and you’re more likely to win. Call the same injury “autism,” and you’re sure to lose.

“I purposely avoided mentioning ‘autism’ in the claim,” says the attorney for a child diagnosed with brain damage and autism after her DTaP vaccination at eighteen months. The lawsuit alleged only “encephalopathy,” general brain dysfunction. “Using (the child’s) autism diagnosis would have dragged out the lawsuit for years,” observes the family’s attorney. “The point wasn’t to try to win the autism debate. It was to get this family the compensation they need to take care of their injured child.” They promptly won a significant award.

The case of poor Michelle Cedillo couldn’t have turned out more differently because her case did utter the dreaded “autism” word. It was one of the “test cases” in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding we’ve discussed. Michelle’s attorney argued that an MMR shot on December 20, 1995, directly caused her severe autism. But the vaccine court was unequivocal in smacking down the claim in 2009, saying there was no credible proof that vaccines caused her autism. Michelle’s diagnosis includes severe encephalopathy. Her mother, Theresa Cedillo, says they might have won their claim if they’d simply called Michelle’s brain injury “encephalopathy” and left out the autism part of the diagnosis. Mrs. Cedillo told me she doesn’t regret her daughter being a landmark case in the Omnibus proceedings, even though they lost. But for future families, she advises, “If you want to be compensated, I would say stay away from the ‘autism’ word.”

Some years earlier, I’d gotten an inside tip that the vaccine court had been paying autism claims for years under the guise of “encephalopathy.” With that in mind, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn just how many brain damage cases had been paid, and what subset of those were actually autism. To my surprise, the government provided some information without much delay. According to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), by May of 2010 more than half of vaccine injury awards were given for brain injuries. Here’s how the numbers broke down:

Number of Brain Injury Cases Compensated in Federal Vaccine Court

Encephalitis or Encephalopathy 639

Seizure Disorders 656

Total 1,295

But the government told me it could not answer the crucial question: How many of those brain damage cases involve children who also ended up with autism, like Hannah? If the court is compensating more than just a few brain-damaged children who were diagnosed with autism as part of the injury, it’s important information. The answer could help prove or disprove the vaccine-autism link. Inexplicably, the government isn’t tracking that data.

Government officials told me, “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.” I read this to mean they acknowledge that vaccines can cause brain damage, including autism. Yet the vaccine court and government seem to claim some sort of technical loophole to deny claims when they specifically mention an autism diagnosis.

When I asked government officials at the time why they weren’t examining or tracking the rate of autism among brain-damaged vaccine victims, including the thousands who brought cases to vaccine court, they told me, “The Court allowed the filing of ‘shortform’ petitions, but without medical records. As a result, a very small number of the pending 5,000 claims have medical records, making it impossible for us to review and compare commonalities, patterns, or any general trends among all of the petitioners. Over time, we may learn more about patterns of pre-existing conditions and the role vaccines play, if any, in their progression. As we have done in the past, the [Vaccine Injury Compensation Program] medical staff will look at the court findings and any new scientific information, and may publish scientific articles as appropriate.” This explanation is seriously flawed. The vaccine court has a self-selected population of thousands of ready and willing study subjects just waiting to be examined. To look at this wealth of data and let it go unmined makes no logical sense unless you don’t really want to find answers. For every vaccine brain injury claim filed, the government need only contact the family for more details, or get access to medical records to look for autism diagnoses among them, and identify patterns that might show why those particular children got hurt.

The fact that they aren’t trying to answer the important questions speaks volumes.

Read more on the topic here: https://www.cbsnews.com /news/vaccines-autism-and-brain-damage-whats-in-a-name/

8. What’s in a Name? Part Two: In 2001, the government addressed escalating worries about the controversial mercury-laden preservative “thimerosal” and its possible links to autism by urging its removal from most vaccines. At the same time, the government still insisted thimerosal was perfectly safe. It seemed to be an effort to split the baby.

While thimerosal was greatly reduced in vaccines, many public health officials and resources seemed to purposely try to mislead people into believing it was simply no longer in any vaccines their children might get from 2001 on. But that’s not true at all.

Today, a large heading on a CDC web page reads, “Thimerosal was taken out of childhood vaccines in the United States in 2001.” The thimerosal information page on the website of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, approved by none other than Dr. Offit, states “Thimerosal was removed from vaccines after an amendment to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Modernization Act was signed into law on Nov. 21, 1997.”

These statements should receive five Pinocchios from any honest fact checking organization.

For example, the long list of shots that still contained thimerosal in 2004, according to an FDA chart published at the time, include Tripedia’s DTaP vaccine, some Td shots, one formulation of DTaP-Hib, a pediatric HepB vaccine, DT shots, Tetanus Toxoid shots, and many flu shots—all of these listed by the government as “routinely recommended pediatric vaccines” or “recommended for some children.” Thimerosal also remained in the Hepatitis A-Hepatitis B dual shot at the time, as well as the meningococcal vaccine approved for children as young as age two, and a Japanese Encephalitis shot sometimes given to youngsters age one and up.

It’s difficult to square those facts with the public messaging. When I was assigned to cover vaccine safety issues during this time period at CBS, one managing producer had been lobbied by and held meetings with vaccine industry advocates who sought to influence the network’s reporting on growing vaccine controversies. One day while this producer reviewed one of my reports prior to air, she parroted the industry-government line declaring, “Thimerosal isn’t in any vaccines, anymore.” I knew she was wrong and was taken aback by the idea that a news person at the network level would accept the word of a special interest without checking. I was able to disprove her assumption by showing her a government produced chart of thimerosal-containing vaccines.

Sometimes the presence of thimerosal in vaccines is brushed off as just a “trace” without the acknowledgment that even the tiniest amounts may prove harmful to some children and can accumulate with each shot, according to some scientists. You might also see wordsmithing that states a particular vaccine “no longer contains thimerosal as a preservative [emphasis added].” Most would infer that to mean the vaccine is thimerosal-free. Yet it might contain thimerosal left over from the manufacturing process. Just not as a preservative. If your child has a peanut allergy, would it be okay for products that may contain small amounts of peanut dust to be labelled in a way that implies there isn’t any?

As of this writing in 2024, CDC’s difficult to find chart of thimerosal-containing flu shots includes Aflura, given to kids as young as age five; Fluvirin, approved for kids as young as age four; and FluLaval Quadrivalent and Fluzone Quadrivalent, both approved for babies as young as six months old. The TDVAX vaccine against diphtheria and tetanus for children as young as age seven also contains thimerosal, according to the chart. In March of 2024, the manufacturer announced it was discontinuing that shot, but remaining supplies were still being used up.

When pressed, public health officials are fond of saying that there are thimerosal-free formulations of any shot your child might get. But it’s fair to think the vast majority of parents don’t know to ask for such a thing. And a cursory search online reveals that not every provider offers thimerosal-free versions.

Tracking down the truth about thimerosal amid a sea of propaganda shows how difficult it can be to find unbiased, straight facts on important health controversies. Government and establishment medicine websites generally promote a singular view without fairly acknowledging opposing studies or research except to dismiss them. Everything they publish is designed to persuade you that thimerosal is safe, while they paradoxically devote quite a bit of ink to explaining how they’ve been working for decades to eliminate it from all vaccines anyway.

The public and many in media tend to think of the CDC as an unbiased expert resource for health advice and information. That’s not what the agency is. The CDC and some health officials serving in other public bodies see their mandate as persuading us to believe certain things, behave a certain way, and take certain vaccines or other medicine for the supposed good of society. That means they typically cherry pick through the available data and research, promoting what they wish and discrediting or ignoring the rest. What’s worse, critics have built a strong case over the decades that these self-appointed, unelected guardians of our health have sometimes been hopelessly captured by big money interests that can benefit from the actions we’re urged to take.

Here’s a list of how much thimerosal is in which flu shots (search the page for “thimerosal” to find chart: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/rr/rr7202a1.htm

9. “Autism” Listed on Vaccine Warning Label: The DTaP shot, or diphtheria and tetanus toxoids and acellular pertussis vaccine known as Tripedia, listed “autism” as a reported adverse event on its package insert. It was right there, plain and simple, in black and white, on the label, at the very time when vaccine interests were insisting that it was a “debunked conspiracy theory.” When vaccine safety advocates discovered the autism mention and began publicizing it, the Internet began to fill with “fact checks” to undermine it. Some of the fact checkers falsely claimed “autism” simply wasn’t on any vaccine labels. Others said the listing of “autism” under adverse events should be disregarded as a big mistake—that it was included in error only because some misguided parents reported it. If you understand even a little about the review process drugmakers go through to add a single word to their warnings, you’d know how silly that claim is. Interestingly, the Tripedia shot was discontinued in 2013. Not long ago, you could still easily find the Tripedia package insert and the “autism” mention on the FDA’s website, but it now seems to have been wiped. You can find it archived at the link below.

Read the vaccine package insert mentioning “autism” here: https://web.archive.org/web/20111104223906/https://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/ApprovedProducts/UCM101580.pdf

10. CDC “Cover-up”: In 2014, a CDC senior scientist, Dr. William Thompson, confessed that he and his CDC colleagues had conspired to cover up a vaccine-autism link in a study of black boys. He further claimed that he and his CDC study partners “scheduled a meeting to destroy documents related to the study.” Dr. Thompson testified that they “all met and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room and reviewed and went through all the hardcopy documents that we had thought we should discard, and put them into a huge garbage can.” They literally trashed study documents.

Dr. Thompson became a whistleblower, hired a lawyer, saved copies of the original data in a safe, and turned it over to the only member of Congress willing to look at vaccine safety scandals, Representative Bill Posey, a Republican from Florida. Posey could not convince anyone in congressional leadership to investigate the matter and was mercilessly attacked by the media and other vaccine industry interests when he spoke about Dr. Thompson’s allegations. The other CDC scientists who were implicated denied doing anything improper. And the CDC has defended the controversial study as published.

Read more about Dr. Thompson’s allegations here: https://sharylattkisson.com/2021/01/cdc-scientist-we-scheduled -meeting-to-destroy-vaccine-autism-study-documents/

Watch Representative Bill Posey’s statement on Dr. Thompson’s testimony: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4554834/user -clip-rep-bill-posey-cdc-whistleblower

11. CDC Official Says Vaccine-Autism Link “Possible”: While the CDC consistently misrepresents studies on vaccines and autism, implying there’s no possible link, Dr. Frank DeStefano, director of the CDC Immunization Safety Office, made an important admission in a 2014 telephone interview with me.

Dr. DeStefano was one of Dr. Thompson’s colleagues who allegedly took part in trashing data from the study about autism in black boys. Anyway, Dr. DeStefano acknowledged to me that vaccines may, rarely, trigger autism in susceptible children. This was quite an admission, and came only after I phrased the question in a way that he could not easily dodge. When I persisted with follow-up questions, Dr. DeStefano suggested that somebody should conduct studies on the topic. Did the National Institutes of Health step forward and carve out a slice of their research billions to answer this important question? Nah.

Read more, and listen to the interview with Dr. DeStefano at this link: https://sharylattkisson.com/2018/12/cdc-possibility-that-vaccines-rarely-trigger-autism/

12. No Flu Shot Benefits for Elderly: During a flu shot shortage in 2004, the medical establishment had used such frightening scare tactics to sell vaccines that thousands of elderly Americans stood in long pharmacy lines trying to score a shot. There were reports of some passing out or even dying while waiting for their jab. The emergency medicine chair at Emory University issued an ominous warning. He said, “The combination of the vaccine shortage, more than 80 million Americans at high risk of flu complications, and a nationwide emergency department crowding crisis means . . . the prospect of the ‘perfect storm’—a surge of critically ill flu patients and no resources to care for them.”

No such disaster materialized. But given the government’s hard-sell tactics, it might surprise you to learn that, as government scientists later explained to me, no definitive study had ever proven that flu shots even work! It turns out that over the decades, our top experts were doing something very unscientific—the polar opposite of “following the science.” They were rejecting what the science really showed about flu shots.

Honest, top government scientists who later ended up revealing the truth explained to me that the best studies had long indicated flu shots don’t work. But the medical establishment agreed, as a group, that “the best studies”—had to be wrong. Flu shots must work, they told themselves; they had to work! So they became conveniently selective about the flu vaccine studies they would cite. They tended to rely on less definitive but positive sounding reports. And they would twist data from negative studies to try to make the results seem positive. It’s hard to imagine a more serious violation of sound scientific practices.

Faced with the persistent and inconvenient facts, and ever determined to shape the science to fit its desires, the government launched a major study designed to hopefully show, once and for all, that flu shots do work. The vaccine industry surely favored that approach. The esteemed government researchers assigned to conduct the study, who later spoke with me, admitted they began with a bias in favor of flu shots. Yet they said that no matter how they crunched the data or tweaked the stats, they ended up with the same awful truth: as more and more older people got flu shots, more of them died.

Specifically, they concluded, “We could not correlate increasing vaccination coverage after 1980 with declining mortality [death] rates in any age group . . . we conclude that observational studies substantially overestimate vaccination benefit.” Studies in Italy and other countries found the same problem with flu shots.

I was pretty shocked too when I learned about all of this in 2006 after the government study was published. (In today’s scientific environment, I don’t think the study would have seen the light of day since it produced an undesired answer to the question.) I was able to talk to some of the study scientists themselves to get background and context for my reporting. They confessed that they were stunned by their own findings. They knew the implications were dire.

This blockbuster news about the ineffectiveness of flu shots should have made global headlines, led to an international reexamination of flu vaccine policies, and prompted a serious analysis of how our top officials could have gotten things so wrong. But none of that happened. US government officials would not allow the scientists to do on-camera interviews with me, and the CDC decided to continue recommending flu shots for the elderly.

I asked a top government vaccine source at the time why they weren’t going to back off flu shots in light of their own study. He told me, “We can’t take flu shots away from the elderly after we’ve spent so many years convincing them they’ll die without them.” He then explained that the government would “have to come up with a new strategy.” He told me that would likely mean they’d start recommending flu shots for children for the first time so that they don’t carry the flu to the elderly. The official told me, “The hard part will be convincing parents to give flu shots to their kids when it’s not for their child’s benefit.” Indeed, the following year, the CDC began recommending flu shots for children, insisting it was for their own good. And the government still recommends annual flu shots for the elderly too, spending hundreds of millions of tax dollars to pay for them. The less helpful the vaccine proved to be, the more people were urged to get it.

Read the full flu shot study article here: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/486407

Read my full report on the study here: https://sharylattkisson .com/2022/11/govt-study-finds-flu-shots-not-effective-in-elderly -after-all/

13. Polio from Polio Vaccine: Though parents were not routinely told this alarming fact, the oral version of the polio vaccine, sometimes referred to as “sugar water,” carries a slight risk of giving the child polio. For years this version was given to American children even though there was a safer injectable version that had no chance of transmitting polio. The oral version was finally pulled off the US market in 2000 but is still used in other countries. The last cases of polio in the United States were all caused by the oral vaccine. The first outbreak in the US in years, in New York State in 2022, was from an oral polio vaccine strain, according to the CDC. The oral vaccine strain also carries a risk of morphing into a more dangerous version. The CDC responded to news of the 2022 outbreak by announcing that to try to curb it, the agency is considering restarting controversial oral polio vaccinations in the US—the ones that can cause polio.

Read more on the “vaccine-derived polio outbreak” in New York at this CDC link: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/s0913-polio.html

14. Swine Flu Exaggerated: In 2009, based on two insider tips, I began investigating America’s supposed “swine flu epidemic” and learned there was almost no actual swine flu circulating in the US. The CDC was fabricating the emergency.

I made the discovery based on an examination of lab results from all fifty states, which I had to obtain state by state because the CDC refused to promptly turn over the data it had from the states even though it was required to do so under Freedom of Information law. The state data was important because it contained lab test results of ill patients most likely to have swine flu, based on their symptoms and risk factors. In other words, these “most likely” specimens should have tested nearly 100 percent positive for swine flu if the CDC were correct that we were suffering a true emergency. But I found a far different reality.

There was very little swine flu. In Florida, out of all the specimens believed to be swine flu, just 17 percent actually turned out to be swine flu. In Georgia and California, only 2 percent of supposed swine flu specimens were swine flu. And in Alaska, only a scant 1 percent of the samples deemed most likely to be swine flu—tested positive for swine flu.

Despite the fact that a swine flu epidemic didn’t exist, the government pressed forward with a hastily developed “emergency” swine flu vaccine that ended up causing numerous injuries. A few of the vaccine-injured patients were ultimately compensated in vaccine court.

Read my swine flu investigation here: https://www.cbsnews .com/news/swine-flu-cases-overestimated/

15. Vaccine Ad Loopholes: If you’re young, you don’t remember a time before drug ads flooded the television airwaves and Internet. As I’ve mentioned, ads for prescription drugs used to be banned on TV and are still prohibited in almost every other nation on the globe. The long-standing and prevailing belief is that only trained medical professionals should be determining when to prescribe which drugs to whom.

But drug ads were permitted in the US after a fierce lobbying campaign by the pharmaceutical industry. Now companies spend billions of dollars a year on this advertising, creating the mutually beneficial but ethically conflicted dynamic between news, media, and Big Pharma.

As a supposed safety measure, drug ads are required to clearly disclose some risks. Yet when it comes to commercials for vaccines, you’ll often see no mention of risks at all! The advertisements leave the false impression that there’s simply no possible downside. I decided to look into how vaccines managed to escape FDA rules that require risks to be disclosed.

It turns out vaccine makers are exploiting a type of loophole, and the FDA allows it. Vaccine commercials fall under a conveniently created category the FDA calls “disease awareness ads.” In short, as long as the ads don’t mention a specific brand, such as Pfizer or Merck, they’re considered “educational” and don’t have to tell consumers about any risks. The justification given is that these ads aren’t really pushing a particular medicine. They’re just creating awareness about medical conditions. But critics say it’s a dangerous practice that allows drug companies to promote vaccines in a slanted fashion.

For example, a GlaxoSmithKline TV ad for adult whooping cough vaccine (that doesn’t mention GlaxoSmithKline) doesn’t warn about the vaccine’s links to paralysis and possible heart problems. It also doesn’t mention that 4 percent of patients who get the adult whooping cough vaccine report having serious adverse events within six months.

Merck’s disease awareness ads for HPV cervical cancer vaccine prey on parental guilt. And because they don’t say the word “Merck,” there’s no mention required of the vaccine’s risk of blood clots, seizure, appendicitis, and paralysis. The ads falsely make it seem as though there’s only an upside to getting the vaccine—and that you’re a bad parent if you don’t take your kid to the doctor to get it.

In early 2019, I asked the FDA about “disease awareness” advertising and the loopholes that allow risks to be hidden. A spokesman told me he understands the controversy and assured me the FDA was looking into the practice to determine if it “may result in consumers misinterpreting and being confused.” However, there was no apparent movement on that front before Covid hit. Naturally, when the Covid vaccines went to market, the media was flooded by “disease awareness” ads that failed to disclose any of the serious safety concerns, exaggerated vaccine effectiveness, disregarded natural immunity, and promoted vaccination for all, even if it could prove life-threatening for some.

Read more about drug ad practices here: https://fullmeasure.news/news/cover-story/the-pill-pitch

That’s a lot to absorb! The point is to give you a taste of some startling facts that are little reported but provide important balance to widespread claims in the media. It all makes a strong case for the idea that we cannot accept at face value scientific information from the media, federal agencies, medical journals, government and industry experts, medical professionals, academic researchers, or public health officials.

This is vital background bringing us to the moment when Covid changed all of our lives.

To learn more about Sharyl Attkisson, please see her author page or follow her on X @SharylAttkisson. You can purchase “Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails,” at the website of Harper Collins Publishers. Proceeds benefit independent reporting causes.