Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Launches The World Mercury Project
Segment # 017
The Mercury Project organized by Kennedy has been around since 2016; however, many are unaware of the important work they have done on consumer protection issues. As you will note, Kennedy’s groups have been screaming for reform well before the U.S. was confronted with COVID 19. We should start listening to his message.
Nov 16, 2016, 01:42 ET
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced today the launch of the World Mercury Project (WMP), a public health advocacy organization dedicated to ending exposure to neurotoxic mercury in fish, medical products, dental amalgams and vaccines. The group will focus on making sound science the driver of public policy.
"We will expose the government and corporate corruption that has led to increasing exposures to neurotoxic mercury in foods and medicines," said Lyn Redwood, RN, MSN, the group's executive director.
Grassroots organizations who support vaccine choice and autism advocacy, representing thousands of families in the U.S., celebrate the WMP and applaud its actions to ban mercury from all medical products, including vaccines. They stand with WMP to soberly reflect on the 30th anniversary this week of Congress' enactment of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), which launched the $32.2 billion yearly vaccine market and some argue indirectly spawned the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders, including autism.
WMP joins these organizations calling for the repeal or radical reform of NCVIA. "This act provided vaccine manufacturers blanket immunity for any harm caused by injuries from vaccines, no matter how wanton, reckless or negligent the manufacturing, how anemic the testing or how grievous the injury," Kennedy said. "That act and the mountains of pharma cash going to politicians, regulators and the press have helped obliterate all the checks and balances that normally stand between a rapacious industry and vulnerable children in a free and Democratic society. The complete vacuum of accountability caused by the NCVIA has emboldened the worst kind of behavior by vaccine makers including the continued use of mercury in vaccines."
"We want robust and transparent science, independent and honest regulators, safe vaccines and healthy children," Kennedy added. "Although Congress intended this law to make children healthier and safer, it has paradoxically made them less healthy and less safe, allowing them to receive mercury-contaminated vaccines that other countries have long outlawed."
Visit our Facts for Media page and www.WORLDMERCURYPROJECT.org to learn more, sign up for free updates, become a member to help our litigation efforts, make a tax-deductible donation and read a list of supporting organizations.
SOURCE World Mercury Project
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http://www.worldmercuryproject.org
The US Needs an Independent Vaccine Safety Organization - World Mercury Team Project
May 25, 2018 Updated: May 29, 2018
Most Americans are oblivious to the huge annual burden of chronic illness, injuries, and deaths linked to vaccines. Some of the blame for the public’s ignorance belongs to a complicit media that “pretends that vaccine-related injuries do not occur.”
However, the lion’s share of culpability for the buried story likely rests with the two federal agencies charged with vaccine oversight—the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—both of which regularly engage in various forms of deception to uphold their bland narrative that vaccines are unambiguously safe.
The two agencies claim that they only license vaccines and allow them to remain on the market if the vaccines’ benefits outweigh their potential risks. Yet credible accusations have surfaced for years—aired by legislators, researchers, watchdog groups, and many others—that both the FDA and CDC lack the impartiality required to make accurate judgments about vaccine safety. How can they, when the CDC’s dual mandate is both to monitor vaccine safety and promote vaccines?
Recognizing that this represents an “enormous” and “inherent” conflict of interest, a few gutsy legislators periodically have attempted to establish an “objective and non-conflicted office,” the sole purpose of which would be “to address, investigate, and head off potential vaccine safety problems.” Thus far, these efforts have gone nowhere, but even a cursory look at the agencies’ capture by industry confirms that it is time to stop allowing the fox to guard the henhouse.
Self-Interested Experts
There are many reasons why the public needs and deserves an independent vaccine safety organization.
One of the most significant criticisms has to do with the FDA’s and CDC’s business-as-usual reliance on external experts with financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies or products that they are evaluating. Little has changed since a congressional Committee on Government Reform outlined this problem nearly two decades ago.
The Reform Committee examined the doings of the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which determines whether new vaccines should be licensed, and the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which recommends vaccines for inclusion in the childhood vaccine schedule.
The congressional committee noted that FDA and CDC advisory committee members and chairpersons own stock in the vaccine companies under consideration, and some even own patents for vaccines. The CDC “grants conflict of interest waivers to every member of their advisory committee a year at a time and allows full participation in the discussions leading up to a vote by every member,” even if a member has a financial stake in the decision.
The Reform Committee also discussed the example of the FDA’s vote to approve the ill-fated rotavirus vaccine. Ten of the 15 VRBPAC members were either absent or were excluded from the vote, whereas five “temporary” members parachuted in to join the remaining five in voting to license the vaccine. Moreover, “three out of the five [permanent] members … who voted for the rotavirus vaccine had conflicts of interest that were waived.”
Overall, the congressional review sketched a portrait of an “old boys network” of experts and advisers who “rotate between the CDC and FDA, at times serving simultaneously.” In one case, after finding that an expert had served continuously for 16 years, the chairman asked, “With over 700,000 physicians in this country, how can one person be so indispensable that they stay on a committee for 16 years?”
A 2009 report determined that CDC continued to display ‘a systemic lack of [ethics] oversight.’
Despite Stern Rebukes, CDC and FDA Don’t Fix the Problems
Unfortunately, there are no grounds for assuming that the two agencies have fixed these rampant conflict-of-interest problems. A 2009 report by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at the Department of Health and Human Services determined that the CDC continued to display “a systemic lack of [ethics] oversight.”
Virtually all (97 percent) of the individuals sitting on CDC advisory committees, including ACIP, omitted relevant financial disclosure information from their required ethics form, and CDC rarely complied with the requirement to “identify and resolve all conflicts of interest…before permitting [those individuals] to participate in committee meetings.”
Although the OIG sternly rebuked the CDC to do its job in obtaining complete financial disclosures, the CDC balked at “fully implementing” the recommendation, describing it as “impractical.”
In 2014, a Drexel University researcher examined 15 years’ worth of conflicts of interest at the FDA, framing them as a significant “health policy problem” driven by both financial ties and “selection” mechanisms (that is, committee members who are “predisposed to favor pharmaceutical companies”).
A 2015 article in The BMJ illustrates the ongoing magnitude of the problem, showing how drug and device companies paid roughly $3.7 billion to U.S. physicians and teaching hospitals over just one half-year period. As the article incisively states, “Financial conflicts of interest in medicine are not beneficial, despite strained attempts to justify them and to make a virtue of self-interest.”
Not Serious About Serious Adverse Events
Although the FDA and CDC claim to take vaccine safety seriously, another favorite tactic is to downplay actual and potential vaccine risks. This is particularly apparent when the two agencies denigrate the very surveillance system that they co-administer. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) carries out spontaneous surveillance, meaning that “no active effort is made to search for, identify, and collect information, but rather information is passively received from those who choose to voluntarily report their experience.” Because of these features, FDA and CDC authors readily admit that their system has “inherent limitations,” and Harvard researchers agree, noting that VAERS is subject to “incomplete recognition of potential adverse events, administrative barriers to reporting, and incomplete case documentation.” The VAERS capture rate of as little as 1 percent of actual vaccine-related adverse events “preclude[s] or delay[s] the identification of ‘problem’ vaccines”—“potentially endangering the health of the public.”
Even with the massive underreporting, VAERS receives approximately 30,000 reports annually, up to 4,500 of which the CDC characterizes as serious—meaning that “the adverse event resulted in permanent disability, hospitalization, life-threatening illness, or death.” Lest the public worry about these thousands of reported injuries, the CDC has a ready answer. The agency asserts (without the slightest hint of irony) that “while these problems happen after vaccination, they are rarely caused by the vaccine.” Both the CDC and FDA shore up this oddly unconcerned attitude by regularly publishing boilerplate agency-authored VAERS analyses that declare “no new or unexpected [adverse events] patterns.”
Circumvention and Circumlocution
“Cozy corporate alliances” and an emphasis on public-private partnerships tilt the CDC’s and FDA’s actions in favor of industry in numerous ways. For example, the CDC and vaccine manufacturers co-fund a variety of “sock-puppet mouthpieces” disguised as independent nonprofits; these front groups make it possible for the CDC to circumvent lobbying restrictions and support a compulsory vaccination agenda.
World Mercury Project has described numerous other examples of bias and wrongdoing at both agencies. The CDC, for example, has
Resolutely and repeatedly denied any association between vaccine ingredients such as thimerosal and pervasive development disorders—and even shredded unflattering data.
Worked to conceal unwanted outcomes caused by the highly profitable varicella vaccine.
Aggressively recommended flu shots in pregnant women without a sound research basis for doing so, while making light of serious influenza vaccine injuries in the general population.
Allowed studies to be conducted and published without legally required ethics clearances.
Ignored whistleblowers and blocked them from testifying about vaccine injuries.
Sent top executives through the revolving door to work with industry.
Meanwhile, the FDA has
Refused to give “any serious consideration to the abundant and mushrooming evidence of thimerosal’s profound toxicity.”
Relied on “outdated information, unwarranted assumptions, and errors” and published misleading safety studies to allow unsafe levels of aluminum to remain in childhood vaccines.
Ignored advice from within its own ranks to pay closer attention to vaccine safety so as to avoid “a situation of unforeseen and unpredictable vaccine outcomes.”
Permitted vaccine manufacturers to use phony placebos to conceal vaccine risks.
Enough Is Enough
Two million to 4 million individuals suffer “serious, disabling, or fatal injury” associated with prescription drugs each year (including an estimated 128,000 deaths), but these incidents tend to remain outside the public eye.
Even with the opioid epidemic, it took over a decade for the media to begin reporting the story and even longer (until 2017) for the government to declare the epidemic a national health emergency.
It is unconscionable that vaccines with doubtful safety data continue to be rushed onto the market while the ensuing injuries and deaths remain in the shadows. With the FDA and CDC having repeatedly demonstrated their prioritization of industry profits over public safety, the time is past due for creating an independent agency that takes vaccine safety seriously.
A former program director at the National Institutes of Health wrote a couple of years ago about the role of vaccines in creating a powerful medical establishment—supported by drug-profit-hungry businessmen and philanthropists. In that author’s words, “improved public health is possible only by switching the current corruptive and abusive culture of ‘who you know’ to a culture of ‘what you know.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-u-s-needs-an-independent-vaccine-safety-organization_2538525.html
Vaccine Injury Payouts: Consumers on the Hook for over $3.8 Billion as Vaccine Makers Rake in Profits ~ World Mercury Team Project
TIMEMarch 23, 2018
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) that went into effect in 1988 stipulated that vaccine manufacturers cannot be held liable for injuries or deaths that occur from use of their vaccines which are recommended for every child in America by the Centers for Disease Control. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) or “vaccine court” created with this Act is not a court at all but actually a consumer-funded government claims program that uses special masters, employees of Health and Human Services (HHS), rather than judges to make decisions on compensation to victims.
The vaccine manufacturers are defended by government-funded, Department of Justice lawyers. The petitioners on the other hand, while suffering from and paying for their or their child’s injuries, become embroiled in a litigious system where cases, according to the U.S. Government Accounting Office, are known to drag on for years.
Vaccine makers are in a win-win position that no other industry in America enjoys. While profits go to vaccine companies, the monetary amounts awarded to the vaccine-injured from “vaccine court” are paid for by consumers. As vaccine makers aren’t held accountable for unsafe products intended for children, there’s no incentive for them to ensure the vaccines they manufacture are safe.
If the numbers from VAERS and HHS are correct – only 1% of vaccine injuries are reported and only 1/3 of the petitions are compensated – then up to 99% of vaccine injuries go unreported…
The total awards distributed to vaccine injury victims are updated monthly by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). World Mercury Project will be sharing these updates with our followers.
Since 1988, over 19,178 petitions have been filed to HHS. Over that 30-year time period, 17,079 petitions have been adjudicated, with 5,928 of those determined to be compensable (approximately 30%), while 11,151 were dismissed. Total compensation paid for by consumers over the life of the program is over $3.8 billion. This amount does not cover the cost of the program itself, nor for the HHS and DOJ employees who defend the vaccine products.
As astronomical as the monetary awards are, they’re even more alarming considering HHS claims that only an estimated 1% of vaccine injuries are even reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). If the numbers from VAERS and HHS are correct – only 1% of vaccine injuries are reported and only 1/3 of the petitions are compensated – then up to 99% of vaccine injuries go unreported and the families of the vast majority of people injured by vaccines are picking up the costs, once again, for vaccine maker’s flawed products.
By the World Mercury Project Team. Visit worldmercuryproject.org for more information.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
