Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Oct. 10, 2024 - RFK Jr. The Defender

45:53

Vaccines During Pregnancy with Lyn Redwood

Join Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he interviews Lyn Redwood, a leading voice in the vaccine safety movement. Learn about the science and policies that have fueled their quest for answers. Uncover the shocking truths, personal struggles, and the urgent calls for change that have marked their decades-long pursuit of safer healthcare.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hey everybody, welcome today to a special edition of my podcast.
	My guest today is somebody who has been a partner of mine for almost 20 years and one of the most extraordinary people that I've met in my life.
	Lynn Redwood, who's a nurse practitioner, Lynn RN, MSN, those are the letters behind her name.
	But I asked her to come on to talk about a really important issue that a lot of mothers have asked me about, which is the safety of vaccines during pregnancy.
	And we're going to talk about that.
	I wanted to start by introducing Lynn by her bona fide, as a lot of you know, that I got dragged into.
	The vaccine space and the public health space back in 2005 when a lot of mothers started showing up at my speeches and then confronting me afterward and they turned out that they were all the mothers of intellectually disabled children who believed that their children were vaccine injured.
	And Lynn, little did I know because I didn't know her at that time, I was the one who coordinated that stalking crusade by all of these warrior moms of me.
	Co-founded the World Mercury Project with Lynn in 2014 and then Children's Health Defense, and she served as president of Children's Health Defense for nearly a decade and is now president emeritus.
	But let me just go through some of her bona fides so that you know that she's speaking with authority.
	She has an extraordinary...
	Curriculum Vitae.
	She is a nurse practitioner with over 20 years experience in pediatrics and family medicine.
	She served as a public health official in the state of Georgia.
	She was on the county's Board of Health for 18 years, and she was a member of her local city council.
	Which recognized her as Person of the Year for her dedication and service to her community.
	In that role as a public health official, she ordered the vaccination of thousands and thousands of people over the years and believed very strongly in vaccines, their efficacy and safety, which she was taught about in her medical school, nursing school.
	And throughout the ortho or the consensus, the public health consensus, she became involved in vaccine safety research directly and advocacy in 1999 when she calculated that her son had received she became involved in vaccine safety research directly and advocacy in 1999 when she calculated that her son had received 125 times the EPA federal safety guidelines for safe mercury exposure
	He had been a perfectly healthy child prior to his vaccine.
	She co-authored a landmark paper, Autism.
	A novel form of mercury toxicity in 2000, linking the symptoms of autism with excessive exposure to mercury.
	She testified before the Government Reform Committee on Mercury in Medicine.
	She's testified innumerable times in front of congressional committees, including the Subcommittee of Human Rights and Wellness.
	The Truth Revealed hearings in 2004 Ms.
	Redwood continued her advocacy through numerous research publications in high-gravitas journals like Neurotoxicology, Molecular Psychiatry, and Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy, and in the Journal of Medical Genetics and in the Journal of Medical Hypothesis.
	She participated in And formally reviewed the Institute of Medicine, that's the National Academy of Science, so she's a reviewer for the National Academy of Science, their 2008 report on autism and the environment, challenges for opportunity and research.
	Ms.
	Redwood was appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to the National Institute of Health Interagency Autism Coordinated Committee, where she served from 2007 to 2014 as the public member.
	She was also appointed to as an inaugural integration panel member by the Department of Defense to its Autism Spectrum Disorder Research Program.
	When that program was formed in 2007, the Defense Department, to its credit, did much better research on autism and vaccines than any other government agency.
	She served there for three years.
	In 2010, she was again awarded Person of the Year, this time by Spectrum Magazine.
	And she was the recipient of the National Autism Association's Believe Award in 2013.
	Ms.
	Redwood co-founded Safe Minds in 2000 and served as Executive Director and Director of Research until 2016.
	And she co-founded the National Autism Association in 2003 and continues to serve there as a director emeritus.
	She has been on multiple national news and television outlets including Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer, ABC Nightly News with Richard Besser, Montel Williams Show, She has been featured in stories in U.S. News& World Report, Wired Magazine, New York Times Magazine.
	And she is prominently featured in the award-winning book by David Kirby, Evidence of Harm.
	And those are just a few of her credentials.
	Lynn, before we get into the subject that I really wanted to talk to you about today, which is vaccines during pregnancy, Explain what your kind of genesis was, your evolution was on this issue.
	Yeah, Bobby, I didn't know.
	And I feel guilt today.
	I don't know that I would be here talking with you today had it not been for my son being injured, which was my wake-up call.
	I had no idea mercury was even in vaccines.
	I had no idea about the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program that was passed in 1986.
	My son was born in 1994.
	So it was a huge shock to me to find out that...
	Mercury was even in vaccines.
	And to go on this journey, I was so naive because, I'm sorry, I was so naive because I thought that our federal agencies would want to know about this.
	They were telling parents that the mercury exposures were small, there was no evidence of harm, no worry, no need for getting your child tested, and that was the example.
	And let me just interrupt you for a second because you actually received a notice Yes.
	On the government, because you were a public health official in Georgia, and you received a notice.
	What happened?
	That was the only way I found out about it, Bobbi.
	And it was just a notice saying that out of precaution, they were delaying the birth dose of hepatitis B because of concerns about mercury exposure.
	But again, the exposure were low.
	There was no evidence of harm, no need for testing.
	And I knew how toxic mercury was.
	So, you know, and whenever you say there's no need for testing, how do you know?
	So those were red flags to me.
	So I looked at my son's vaccine records, and lo and behold, all of the ones that could have contained thimerosal did.
	He had very high exposure.
	Yeah, you say thimerosal, all of your son's vaccine had contained thimerosal.
	It was just luck of the draw.
	Thimerosal is a preservative and an adjuvant, as we later learned, that is 50% mercury by weight.
	Okay, go ahead.
	EPA's allowable exposure for mercury is 0.1 microgram per kilogram per day.
	So when I looked at my son's vaccines, he had received all laterly vaccines.
	They predominantly used thimerosal.
	If he had received GlaxoSmithKline or another manufacturer, he would have not had these exposure levels.
	So I want parents to understand that as well.
	It wasn't in all vaccines, but at two months of age, he weighed five kilos.
	His allowable exposure was 0.5 micrograms and he received 62.5.
	So it's 125 times his EPA allowable exposure.
	And, you know, I immediately went searching because my husband and I knew something had happened to him to cause his regression.
	And this was, you know, four and a half years after he had been diagnosed, after he was born.
	So, you know, this was the only thing that we could really say, wow, I wonder if this might have been a problem.
	He was too old at the time to be tested for mercury by a blood test, but I had a lock of his baby hair from his baby book.
	But I sent off to a toxicology lab to have tested, and two things came back very abnormal with regards to metals.
	One was mercury, five times allowable exposure, according to EPA, and the same for aluminum.
	So at the time, mercury was much more toxic, and what It seemed to fit the pattern best in terms of what happened to him with his regression, loss of speech, loss of eye contact, which all of those symptoms down to a biochemical level were found in the mercury literature.
	Let me add something here because you introduced me years later to Boyd Haley, Dr.
	Boyd Haley.
	Who at that time was the world's primary authority on mercury toxicity.
	He was the chair of the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky.
	And he had done these extraordinary experiments where he had put a droplet of mercury into a petri dish filled with neuronal tissue, in other words brain tissue, And the mercury had immediately killed about 50% of the neuronal cells.
	And then he took a drop of aluminum and put that into a petri dish of neuronal tissue.
	And it killed, I believe, as I recall, about 15%.
	So it was much less toxic, but horrendously toxic still.
	And then he did something next, which was to put mercury and aluminum together And 100% of the neuronal tissue died.
	And his conclusion was, and he proved this again and again in later experiments, that mercury and aluminum behaved synergistically with each other and amplified each other's toxicity enormously when they were in combination.
	And unfortunately, what you later found was the vaccines contained both mercury and aluminum.
	So go ahead.
	Yeah, no, correct, Bobbi.
	And it was really disturbing to me that when we went to our federal agencies and shared this information with them, I thought they would immediately act.
	We also filed a petition with FDA to recall all remaining bimerosal-containing vaccines, and they refused to do it.
	And to this day, even though we're told mercury is completely out of vaccines, It's still in infant vaccines given with flu vaccine, multi-dose vials to pregnant women, infants and children, despite the fact that the Institute of Medicine in 2001 recommended that those sensitive populations not receive any exposure to mercury from vaccines.
	And by the way, the multi-dose vials are cheaper and they are the most, like in suburban areas like where I've lived, I always check the mercury in the vaccines and my kids did not receive them in their later vaccines because I was asking questions after 2005.
	And the suburban clinics where I was bringing my kids were using the more expensive vaccines that were the single dose vials that did not contain mercury.
	But the poorer clinics in the United States in urban areas and rural areas around the country where people aren't asking those questions, where they're buying the cheapest products available, those are the people who are continuing to get mercury.
	So we are, you know, we're systematically destroying the brains of poor kids in this country.
	Yeah, and funny, you know, in our state, Bobby, the vaccines, because I asked that question, I wanted to know what we were giving, and we were getting our vaccines through the Vaccine for Children's program, and they were using Infrax, which was SmithKline Beecham that did not use Fimerosal.
	So I think it just varies in terms of You know, what the provider is buying.
	And the multi-dose files, especially with flu vaccine, because they would never state a preference for the primary self-free products.
	They're one of the most ones that have been widely distributed because of the cost.
	So it is really tragic.
	And I feel certain that in areas that's still the case.
	But I wanted to also, you know, you asked me about the vaccines during pregnancy, Bobby.
	Let me just finish the story.
	So, Mercury, partly as the result of your being the Paul Revere of this subject and testifying before Congress, etc., the Institute of Medicine, which is the National Academy of Sciences, Recommended the removal of mercury from vaccines, I believe, you know, as early as 1999, that first recommendation, and the companies began removing it.
	They ultimately removed it from most childhood vaccines by 2003.
	But the vaccines still contain high levels of aluminum, and the number of vaccines containing aluminum has steadily increased since then.
	And just talk a little bit about the dangers of aluminum and the studies that have been done by what we call the two Chris's.
	Talk about those.
	Let me also share about maternal immune activation because those actually fit together.
	Because what aluminum is doing is it's used as an adjuvant in the vaccines, the same way mercury was, although mercury was never licensed as an adjuvant.
	And it increases the immune response.
	So whatever the antigen is in the vaccine, which is the disease that they're trying to prevent, The antigen is the viral particle of measles or mumps or rubella or polio or whatever.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And so they tie it to that to increase the body's immune response.
	Because infants generally don't have a very robust immune response.
	So they wanted to magnify that.
	That way they could get higher antibody levels.
	So they use aluminum.
	Even though I had a pharmaceutical insider tell me 30 years ago, Bobby, that he had counseled the pharmaceutical companies to get aluminum out of vaccines and that it was dangerous as well as mercury.
	And there are other things like calcium phosphate that can be used that are much safer.
	And so we really don't need to rely on aluminum anymore.
	The levels, as you said, have continued to increase up to close to 5,000 micrograms of aluminum that children are receiving now through their vaccines.
	We do know that aluminum crosses the blood-brain barrier, accumulates in the brain.
	When they've looked at autopsy brain tissue of children with autism, they found some of the highest levels of aluminum ever documented, as high as what we've seen in adults with Alzheimer's.
	They also, and this is really interesting, Bobby, because it's not what you would think.
	When they looked at the exposure levels when they were doing animal studies, and they looked at like 20 micrograms, 30 micrograms, 40 micrograms, you would think the higher exposure levels would have resulted in more disposition throughout the body.
	And it was actually the opposite.
	Because the higher doses, the body responded and created like these granulomas that walled it off so it wasn't distributed throughout the body.
	It stayed right there where it had been injected.
	Whereas the smaller doses of 20 micrograms given repeatedly are much more dangerous, which is exactly what we're doing when we constantly repeat boosters and things that contain aluminum.
	It activates the immune system and we see a lot of the hallmarks with aluminum toxicity and mercury toxicity that you see in the brains when we looked at autopsy brain tissues of children with autism.
	And what they see oftentimes, Bobby, is this overgrowth and this dysregulation of the neurons.
	And they have determined that there's something happening during prenatal and early postnatal development that is probably causing that.
	So there are two scientists who have looked at mercury in the brains, the impacts of mercury on brains in adults and children.
	One is Chris Axley at Keene University, formerly at Keene University in England, and he has actually looked at cadavers and examined the brains of adults with Alzheimer's and children with autism.
	The highest known levels ever found in human beings.
	We're found in children with autism and adults with Alzheimer's, and they're very, very similar.
	And then Chris Shaw also has done similar work up in Vancouver.
	So, okay, continue your story.
	So yeah, and that's got to stop, Bobby.
	And when you look at the abnormalities that we see that are the hallmarks of autism, there are things that are happening prenatal and postnatal.
	And what we found out about giving flu vaccines, there was an article I picked up.
	I was traveling actually from an NIH meeting and a copy of Scientific American Mind caught my attention because it had an article whether insanity was infectious.
	And so I thought, well, that's going to be a good read.
	So I jumped on the plane and started pouring through it.
	And they were looking at a study in schizophrenia, and it was published by a guy, I think his name was Alan Brown at Columbia.
	And he had gone back and collected blood spots from mothers who had children diagnosed with schizophrenia.
	There were 168 mothers.
	And one of the things that he found is an abnormality in those blood spots was that they had antibodies to flu.
	And so then the question was, is there any way that this flu infection could have caused their schizophrenia?
	There was another researcher out in California at the time.
	His name was Paul Patterson.
	And he had done a study in 2003 in mice where he exposed mice to influenza.
	And the mice, they became more shy when he looked at them behaviorally.
	They wouldn't explore their boundaries.
	They had I think we're good to go.
	And so, you know, he was postulating whether or not this could be causing neuronal damage and some of these long-term health outcomes that we're seeing in our children today.
	And he published that study and he continued along this line of research and he ended up taking, instead of exposing the mice to flu, he took a fragment of of viral RNA from influenza and he injected that and he looked at the mice and then he did the neuropathology and he found the exact same findings.
	And this has been replicated where they determined that it's not the infection itself that was causing the damage.
	It was the mother's immune activation and that immune activation creates cytokines and those cytokines are transmitted We're good to go.
	So when babies are born, Bobby, they're not like animals where they're walking and talking immediately.
	Those neurons have to migrate to different areas of the brain.
	They grow those areas of the brain.
	There's all of these developmental processes that are going on, especially in early pregnancy and the first few months of life.
	And when you impact...
	That growth of the neurons and how they develop synapses in these other areas of the brain, it's very difficult to ever overcome those injuries.
	And at the time in this article, when I was going through it, there was a picture of a person getting a flu vaccine.
	And they had underneath it that, you know, this is a dangerous proposition to be giving pregnant women flu vaccines, knowing that it's the immune response and not the virus itself.
	And Paul Patterson is quoted in that study that he called CDC and spoke with them, and that he knew for a fact that CDC was not aware of this and that they weren't really taking it seriously.
	And he said, you know, the fact that we don't know how often this immune activation occurs, even if it's happening in 1% of women and you're vaccinating the entire population, that's hundreds of thousands of children.
	That have been affected by this.
	And this started back in 2001, Bobby, right at the time that they were removing thimerosal from vaccines is when they made the recommendation that all pregnant women receive flu vaccines during any trimester of pregnancy.
	When they looked at those blood spots, it was women in the first trimester who evidently were exposed to flu, where there was a seven times risk for the development of schizophrenia.
	And, you know, it was lower later in pregnancy.
	But also, I have to tell you, I looked back and found out that during that same period of time, these women were born, let's see, it was 1959 to 1968.
	They were also, there was a recommendation briefly in place for women to also get flu vaccines back then, which was really shocking to me because I've not really known CDC to do away with the program.
	Let me just talk about one of the implications of this.
	Mercury was mainly removed from most vaccines, except for flu vaccines, in 2003 when the stocks ran out.
	The recommendation came in 1999.
	But the companies had three years of inventory, and they were not required to destroy the inventory.
	The National Academy of Science and CDC allowed them to continue to give mercury for almost four years after the National Academy of Sciences had recommended it be removed.
	But the industry and the CDC Have long said, look, we removed mercury from vaccines in 2003, and you were blaming that for autism.
	And autism has continued to increase since 2003.
	Therefore, it could not be the vaccines.
	What they didn't tell you is that the same year, That they removed it from the vaccines, they mandated or recommended pregnant women get flu vaccines, which one, contain mercury, but number two, you're now giving pregnant women a viral particle that is also associated with severe brain damage during their pregnancy, and they recommend it during every trimester of pregnancy.
	Oh, you could be giving this to fetuses when they're at the beginning of their formation, when they're particularly vulnerable.
	And the autism levels increased, but of course, you know, there were two separate causes going on, and they took one out and they substituted a new one, which may be even more potent.
	Yeah, it's very disturbing, Bobbi.
	I'm not saying this is the only cause, but it's something that we could change policies right now and make a huge difference.
	And they're just not looking.
	It's as though this science never existed, and it's just gotten stronger and stronger and stronger over the years with this maternal immune activation.
	They've done this with primates, and they've been able to replicate All of the behavioral abnormalities that we see in schizophrenia and autism.
	So it's just, it's horrific that they're not really following the science the way they should be.
	And they're actually doubling down because back until recently, there was really only one vaccine recommended during pregnancy, which is the flu vaccine.
	And now CDC, in the last year or two, Is recommending four different vaccines, including, I think, the COVID vaccine.
	Yeah, absolutely, Bobby.
	I think it was in 2012 or 2014, they started recommending DTAP, diphtheria tetanus and acellular pertussis.
	And the reason they're doing this too, Bobby, is because now we're at a point where...
	Mothers today did not have the benefit, like our generation did, of actually having these viruses and creating a very robust immune system.
	And it was developed the way it was supposed to have developed.
	It wasn't artificially injected.
	It came in through our mucosa, our lungs, you know, and our bodies dealt with it.
	And now because pregnant women don't have immunity to like measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, all these things, they're having to constantly give boosters.
	So they're boosting this during pregnancy.
	And the only outcome they're looking at is whether or not when that baby's born, did they have antibody levels.
	So that's their metrics for success.
	We have no long-term safety studies regarding giving vaccines during pregnancy.
	And pregnancy has always been a time where you do everything you can to avoid any unnecessary exposures.
	We know this from thalidomide and what happened.
	You know, I just remember being so careful when I was pregnant.
	Freaked out one time because I ate a yogurt that had aspartame in it, you know?
	So it's appalling to me that our federal agencies are not being as cautious With our pregnant women, as they used to be.
	I think it's 2014, they recommended DTaP, and then they recommended COVID vaccines.
	And, you know, who knows with the mRNA vaccines what's happening there.
	If the mother's running a fever, has any type of response, you can pretty much predict that that's going to be going into the fetal brain as well.
	And then most recently, RSV, respiratory syncytial virus, they're getting that during pregnancy as well.
	So that's four vaccines that we're getting during pregnancy, and we have no long-term safety data.
	And I'm really, really concerned about what's going to happen to those children neurologically if we don't stop that policy, those policies.
	This is a huge mass human experiment on the entire U.S. population.
	76 million children who are getting these vaccines, you know, in pregnancy and we're potentially just destroying them because, as you just pointed, let me simplify this for people.
	We know that immune activation Vaccines can devastate brain development if you over-activate the immune system of a pregnant woman.
	We know that vaccines are designed to over-activate the immune system of a pregnant woman.
	We have no safety data on this at all.
	Nobody is looking about these impacts on the brain damage in children Of mothers who have received vaccines during pregnancy, they simply do not do those studies.
	They're just not done.
	Nobody is looking at it.
	The only metric for success is, are you producing antibodies?
	And of course they're going to because their immune systems are over-activated.
	And that actually may be killing the brains of this entire generation of American children.
	I wouldn't say killing, Bobby.
	I would say it's altering.
	It's dramatically altering their brains.
	And depending on the timing, the amount of maternal immune activation and the sensitivity, we're going to see a broad swath of adverse neurological outcomes from that.
	When you look at schizophrenia, it typically doesn't even manifest until adolescence, early adulthood.
	It's impossible to really gauge when you see these children starting to have symptoms of schizophrenia.
	When you look back at an exposure that was, you know, 15 years earlier.
	That's why when they detected this from the blood spots, it was so shocking.
	And they've done this.
	They've actually identified the cytokines, interleukin-6, interleukin-8.
	And they've done models where they've injected those into rhesus macaques.
	And I think this was the most recent one in 2014.
	And they were able to basically create an animal model for autism and schizophrenia by altering the maternal, by exposing these pregnant primates to these maternal activation.
	And that's just like, okay, we've created autism now.
	We know how to make it.
	So why aren't we working To stop those things that we know cause this maternal activation.
	And instead, we're just continuing to add more and more and more.
	We really are infected with insanity, I think, right now.
	Yeah, and the, you know, I want you just to, you know, we know that CDC knows this is happening.
	And one of the reasons we know is one of the leaders of the Immunization Safety Division is Frank DiStefano.
	And Frank DiStefano has a child with autism and called you and said, how do I chelate the mercury out of this baby?
	And you told him and he was worried Because the way that you chelate it out is by using DMSA and other chemicals that bind to the mercury and then you urinate it out.
	It takes it out of the blood and out of the organs, but you urinate it out and it comes out in your feces.
	And Frank DeStefano was worried about having so much mercury in his diapers And the baby's diapers that they would be hazardous waste and what's a safe way to dispose of that.
	So he knew.
	Well, he actually, it's funny, Bobby, I became their mercury expert.
	So Frank had actually forwarded me an email from one of the school systems saying we have children in our special ed program that are chelating and they're dumping all these metals.
	Is there any special handling that we need to do?
	And so he sent it to me and I said, well, I need to know how much, you know, because we do have guidelines for what's considered a hazardous waste.
	So if it's over this level, then absolutely it has to be disposed of as a hazardous waste.
	So it was sort of, you know, humorous to me that I was sort of becoming their mercury expert for fielding questions that they were sent about chelation therapy.
	But yeah, Bobby, it's...
	It's really sad when you know, you know, I was so naive.
	I really thought that they would take immediate action and that they would stop these exposures, especially with mercury.
	It wasn't necessary.
	It didn't need to be there at all.
	And I've just been, I have to say, continually disappointed.
	When I served...
	On the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, you know, and I was a minority.
	I was one of like, what, four public members against all of these, you know, directors of the institutes.
	And I worked really hard.
	Yeah, I just know that it was a hard battle for me to convince them that we needed to look at vaccines.
	And, you know, I would go out on these lists and tell parents, please come, please speak at public comment, and they would show up with their children telling their stories of vaccine injury.
	I mean, there was like Our meetings were going over, so they ended up sort of cutting that out.
	But I was able to finally get a vote passed that put $11 million in the budget to study vaccines.
	And it was just like, thank you.
	And one month later, Tom Insel, the director, came back in without it even being on the agenda and said, you know, the optics of this is awkward because there's 5,000 cases right now in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
	They're suing HHS. NIH is under HHS. So potentially we could be providing science that could be used against the agency.
	And then re-voted, and it was all the federal members, except for one, asked that it be, you know, voted it off.
	And it was just like, oh my gosh, I really thought this was about getting answers, you know?
	And it wasn't at all.
	So let me just summarize that, what happened, so that people understand it.
	You finally succeeded in getting the NIH to commit $11 million Your little committee had some authority to direct some money, and you said, let's direct a small amount of this money, a mere $11 million, to studying whether vaccines are causing autism.
	The director of the program, Tom Insel, comes in after this vote, after the study was already approved by the committee, comes back at the next meeting, It wasn't even on the agenda, and he said we've got to kill that study because if we find out vaccines are causing autism, there are 5,000 cases of people who are suing the agency, and we don't want to help them with their lawsuit by telling them the truth.
	And they killed the study.
	And Tom Insel's brother is the inventor and owner of the patent Of one of the vaccines.
	Which one?
	The Haemophilus influenza B vaccine.
	The Hib vaccine.
	And that vaccine also contains aluminum, correct?
	I'm sure.
	I would need to go look, Bobby, but I'm like 95% certain that it is.
	Is that a live virus vaccine?
	No.
	Only measles, mumps, rubella, varicella are live viral vaccines.
	All right.
	So...
	There was a lot of self-interest and self-dealing here, and this is the government covering up an impact because they don't want to get a black eye.
	They won't study it.
	They won't look at environmental factors.
	Everything is genetics.
	When I was part of that committee, Bobby, we created sort of the first strategic plan for autism research that coordinated the research among the eight agencies that do autism research.
	So we were recommending the areas where the research needed to be focused.
	And so we really played a big role.
	And I have to tell you that the lion's share of that funding went to genetics.
	And we've been looking for Better diagnosis.
	It's not changed diagnostic criteria.
	It's not better recognition.
	These are things the industry says, but study after study has shown that the autism epidemic is real.
	We know that genes do not cause epidemic.
	They can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin.
	And that's just basic fundamental science.
	And yet they will not study environmental effects because they're scared that some big shot will get his axe scored, that it's the food industry, it's the ag industry, it's the chemical industry, and most of all, it's the pharmaceutical industry.
	And the purpose of these agencies now is to protect the commercial and mercantile interests of those industries rather than the health of the American people.
	So they literally kill studies That may look at environmental factors.
	And Bobby, they kill them in so many other ways.
	If somebody publishes a study and they're getting any funding from government, it's pulled if it's negative.
	They'll lose their appointments at the universities.
	Safe Minds, we funded like $1.5 million in research when I was with Safe Minds during our tenure.
	And there were researchers that we funded who came back with findings that were detrimental with regard to vaccines that refused to publish the findings.
	And it ended up we had to change our research protocols where we would own the data.
	You know, if we had funded the data, if they decided not to publish it, then we could own the data.
	But It's just horrendous.
	They also own the journals, Bobby.
	Even if a study makes it through, like one of Andy Wakefield's study about the loss of infant reflexes just after hepatitis B vaccine.
	These are critical reflexes, like RASP and SUCK. It was published in Neurotoxicology.
	A month later, it's pulled.
	I was good friends with the woman who was the editor of that journal, Joan Cramner.
	I called Joan Cramner going, what's going on?
	She referred me to somebody who was over the entire journal, which was Elsevier.
	And they told me that that was not an appropriate study for the journal.
	Which, I mean, they're full of models of doing private models.
	So it was just so bizarre, Bobby.
	And the other thing that I've witnessed, you know, when my son was diagnosed, one in every 500 children had autism.
	There was a group of autism organizations, Cure Autism Now at the time, and parents who ran this full-page ad.
	By the way, that was already an epidemic.
	One in 500.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	And this full page ad said, what if one out of every 500 children today was abducted?
	It would be a national crisis.
	It would be a national emergency.
	We'd be sending out everybody to look for them.
	And it's happened and nobody's really doing anything.
	And what I witnessed over the years is that we had the Combating Autism Act.
	That was what funded the creation of this committee, the Interagency Autism Act.
	And that was changed to like the Autism Cares Act.
	We had to feed autism now and that became offensive because autism is now looked at as though, you know, Somebody's a little quirky or different and they're, you know, especially individuals with Asperger's, they're brilliant.
	They're absolutely wonderful people.
	And we don't want to alter that.
	But there's another end of that spectrum where these children that I know that are in their 20s and 30s now and they're still in diapers and they're wearing helmets and they're banging their heads and they're nonverbal.
	And it's just horrific.
	And it's now where autism has become accepted.
	It's the new normal for our country.
	I was walking through the airport and they have these quiet rooms for families of children with autism.
	It's...
	I don't think unless you were born like in our generation that you really, really recognize how different it is, how different the health is of our children today.
	One out of every two children, Bobby, and this was published maybe 10 years ago from the National Institute of Mental Health, had been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder.
	That's 50%.
	And the main one was anxiety.
	And of those, something like 30%, it was severe enough that it interfered with their everyday life.
	That's just not normal.
	It is not normal.
	And I really want to see that changed.
	And I'm so thankful that you have continued on this path to be such a crusader for the health of our children.
	Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
	Your family's like, you know, mine's hero.
	Back years ago, my son needed B12 injections and I went to the pharmacy and I got some and I pulled out the package insert and read the whole thing, which I do now.
	And it said that it contained aluminum and that repeated exposures could result in aluminum toxicity.
	So why is that information not on our vaccine information sheets that every parent is given before they agree to vaccination?
	Thimerosal is considered a Proposition 65 that you have to be notified if you're exposed to it.
	They tried to get it off.
	Why don't we have Prop 65 warnings on our vaccines when they contain these products?
	There's just, you know, some things that I'm wondering whether or not we could do those now and make some changes immediately.
	We can do that and a lot more.
	We just need good science and that means we need good government.
	I think we've got good science already.
	We just need to follow it.
	Yeah, and where's the best place for people to get more information, Lynn?
	I would say children's health defense.
	That's what I would say, too.
	All right.
	Thank you, Bob.
	Thank you, Anne.

▲