A overview on the usage of the preservative thimerosal in vaccines slated to be offered on Thursday to the U.S. Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention’s outdoors vaccine committee cites a examine that doesn’t exist, in response to the scientist listed because the examine’s writer.
The report, titled “Thimerosal as a Vaccine Preservative” printed on the CDC web site Tuesday, is to be offered by Lyn Redwood, a former chief of the anti-vaccine group Kids’s Well being Protection.
It makes reference to a examine known as “Low-level neonatal thimerosal publicity: Lengthy-term penalties within the mind,” printed within the journal Neurotoxicology in 2008, and co-authored by College of California, Davis professor emeritus Robert Berman.
However in response to Berman, “it is not making reference to a examine I printed or carried out.”
Berman stated he co-authored a equally named examine in a distinct journal — Toxicological Sciences — that got here to completely different conclusions than these instructed by Redwood.
“We didn’t study the consequences of thimerosal in microglia,” he stated. “I don’t endorse this misrepresentation of the analysis.”
Slide faraway from presentation
Reuters is the primary to report on the wrong quotation from Redwood’s deliberate presentation. In a while Tuesday, the CDC uploaded a brand new model of Redwood’s presentation, eradicating the slide citing the Berman examine.
The assembly has develop into more and more controversial after Well being Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. simply weeks in the past abruptly fired all earlier 17 members of the knowledgeable panel and named eight new members, half of whom have advocated in opposition to vaccines.
WATCH | RFK Jr. ‘gutting’ vaccine advisory panel may have penalties, knowledgeable warns:
RFK Jr. ‘gutting’ vaccine advisory panel may erode public belief, says knowledgeable
U.S. Well being Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has eliminated each member of a scientific committee that advises the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention on vaccination. Infectious ailments specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch says the transfer lacks transparency and dangers eroding the general public’s belief in vaccines.
Kennedy, a long-time anti-vaccine activist, based Kids’s Well being Protection.
The abstract of the presentation instructed that there are sufficient thimerosal-free flu vaccines and that every one pregnant girls, infants and kids ought to obtain solely these pictures. It was not clear if the brand new advisory panel could be requested to vote on such a transfer.
Redwood’s presentation was in distinction to a separate report posted on the CDC web site Tuesday that claims proof doesn’t help a hyperlink between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism or different neurodevelopmental problems.
Kennedy has lengthy pushed a hyperlink between vaccines and autism, which is opposite to scientific proof.
Redwood couldn’t be instantly reached for remark. A spokesperson for HHS stated the examine being referenced was the one in Toxicological Sciences, which Berman stated was being misrepresented.
Senators push to postpone assembly
Each Republican U.S. Senator Invoice Cassidy of Louisiana and Democratic U.S. Senator Patty Murray of Washington stated the assembly, scheduled for June 25 and 26, needs to be postponed.
On Monday, Cassidy, who heads the U.S. Senate Committee on Well being, Schooling, Labour and Pensions (HELP), known as for the assembly to be delayed, saying it shouldn’t happen with a comparatively small panel and with no CDC director in place.
Murray, a senior member and former chair of the HELP committee, has additionally known as for the fired panel members to be reinstated or the assembly be delayed till new members are appropriately vetted.
