David Kirby in the Huffington Post on Bernadine Healy on CBS news

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2008/05/12/couricandco/entry4090144.shtml


David Kirby


Misery loves company, and so do controversial journalists.
Dr. Bernadine Healy: Don't Dismiss Vaccine Link
Posted May 12, 2008 | 08:44 PM (EST)
As someone who has come under, shall we say, "sniper fire" for refusing to concede that there is no link between vaccines and autism, I now have a semi tongue-in-cheek response to my once and future critics: "Go tell it to Dr. Healy."

Tonight on CBS News, Sharyl Attkisson, (another reporter who questions the government's dismissal of any vaccine-autism link) conducted an extraordinary interview with "a powerful medical voice," who is "breaking ranks with her colleagues" on the autism contretemps: Dr. Bernadine Healy, former head of the National Institutes of Health.

She was interviewed on the first day of the first test-case hearing in so-called Vaccine Court, on whether the mercury-based preservative thimerosal can cause autism.

"I think public health officials have been too quick to dismiss the hypothesis as 'irrational,' without sufficient studies of causation... without studying the population that got sick," Dr. Healy told Attkisson. "I have not seen major studies that focus on 300 kids who got autistic symptoms within a period of a few weeks of the vaccines."

This is exactly what I, and many other government critics have been saying for years: Large population studies are not enough to disprove a link. One must look at the kids who actually regressed into autism, and determine what factor or factors might have contributed to their regression.

This is especially true if there is a subset of children who are particularly susceptible to such environmental triggers. "Populations do not test causality," Dr. Healy said, "they test associations."

And she noted, "We do have the opportunity to understand whether or not there are susceptible children -- perhaps medically, perhaps they have a metabolic issue, mitochondrial disorder, medical issue -- that makes them more susceptible to vaccines, plural, or to one particular vaccine, or to a component of vaccines, like mercury."

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Adventures in Autism: Former Head Of NIH Says Time to Investigate Vaccines and Autism#links#links#links#links