‘Parents’ Magazine Deceives about Infant Excretion of Mercury from Vaccines

An article published on March 15, 2023, on the website of the digital magazine Parents claims to provide “proof” that vaccines do not cause autism, but instead the article simply deceives parents about the science.

The article is riddled with deceptive statements, but perhaps the most illustrative example is how, to support the claim that vaccines do not cause autism, Parents argues that the mercury in vaccines cannot possibly cause autism because “Babies excrete thimerosal rapidly”.

Thimerosal is the name of the mercury-based preservative formerly used in numerous childhood vaccines. It is about half ethylmercury by weight. Although still used in multi-dose vials of influenza vaccines, it was phased out of other childhood vaccines around the turn of the century. According to Parents, this decision was made “out of an abundance of caution.”

Parents withholds the fact that this ostensible precautionary measure was taken after it became known that the routine childhood vaccine schedule recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was exposing infants to cumulative levels of mercury in excess of the government’s own safety guidelines.

Thus, Parents’ account of why the decision was made to phase out the use of thimerosal in most vaccines serves to whitewash the extraordinary malfeasance of the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Far from being a story about how these agencies took a precautionary step to protect children’s health, the truth is that they sought to increase the number of vaccines children receive throughout the late 1980s and 1990s without ever bothering to consider the potential harms from the known neurotoxin contained in those products.

The conclusion to be drawn from that episode of history is not, as Parents would have us believe, that we can trust these government agencies to take precautions in the best interests of our children’s health; the conclusion is rather that these agencies have proven themselves to be criminally reckless and completely unworthy of our trust.

Coming to its claim that “Babies excrete thimerosal rapidly”, Parents magazine outright lies about the science by stating that “Research published in the journal Pediatrics in 2008 showed that babies excrete thimerosal too quickly for it to build up to dangerous amounts.” According to Parents, the researchers “found that infants expel thimerosal about 10 times faster than fish mercury­—so rapidly that it can’t accumulate in the body between vaccine doses.”

By “fish mercury”, Parents means the form of mercury called methylmercury.

Parents quotes the lead author of the study, Michael Pichichero, saying:

This study helps to debunk a crucial basis of the autism-vaccines theory, which held that babies were getting so many thimerosal-containing shots that the chemical would build up in the bloodstream and eventually cross over to the brain, where it could theoretically impact development. . . . But thimerosal leaves babies’ bodies way too quickly for that to happen, which just adds more proof that this theory is extremely unlikely.

Contrary to this characterization by both Parents and Pichichero, however, the 2008 Pediatrics study did not demonstrate that the mercury from vaccines is rapidly eliminated from infants’ bodies. Nor did the study show that mercury from vaccines does not accumulate in the brain.

In fact, Pichicehero et al. acknowledged in the study that animal data indicated that, “similar to methyl mercury, ethyl mercury readily transports to all tissues”; they also acknowledged that “relatively little is known about the pharmacokinetics of ethyl mercury, particularly when administered intramuscularly.”

“Pharmacokinetics” is the study of bodily absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of a substance. Since so little is known about the toxicity of injected ethylmercury, the government’s regulatory system has made assumptions about it based on comparisons with ingested methylmercury.

The authors of the Pediatrics study measured ethylmercury in the blood of infants before and at a single point in time point after vaccination and found “low levels”, which they interpreted as suggesting “relatively low risk for toxicity from this exposure.”

However, the conclusion that ethylmercury represents a low risk of toxicity to infants does not logically follow from the finding of “low levels” of ethylmercury in the blood after vaccination.

The authors admit that, while “blood levels have been shown to be a predictor of toxicity for methyl mercury exposure”, the “importance of blood levels of ethyl mercury for assessing toxicity is unknown”. Their study “was not designed to assess the toxicity of thimerosal”.

Parents’ characterization of the study as having shown that the mercury from vaccines is rapidly eliminated from infants’ bodies is categorically false. The study absolutely did not demonstrate that.

In fact, the study authors explicitly acknowledged that their measurements “are unable to determine the fate of the mercury after it leaves the blood”, which is a crucial point.

Pichichero et al. stated that their findings are in accordance with a 2005 study of infant rhesus macaques, which likewise found that ethylmercury is more readily eliminated from the blood than methylmercury, but they curiously omitted the fact that this earlier study had additionally shown that ethylmercury is more persistent in the brain.

In fact, the 2005 study, which was published in Environmental Health Perspectives and has been described by FDA researchers as “the most relevant study on which to base a comparative assessment of infant mercury exposure or risk from thimerosal [ethylmercury] relative to MeHg [methylmercury]”, concluded that the government’s use of methylmercury toxicology as a reference for risk assessment from thimerosal exposure is scientifically invalid and that the use of mercury in vaccines represents a significant cause for concern.

Indeed, the authors expressed the concern that the mercury from vaccines that accumulates in the brain has been “associated with a significant increase in the number of microglia in the brain” and that “‘an active neuroinflammatory process’ has been demonstrated in brains of autistic patients, including a marked activation of microglia.”

So why has Pichichero told the media that his study “helps to debunk” the idea that mercury from vaccines enters and accumulates in the brain when he knows that the mercury from vaccines is more persistent in the brain than methylmercury? Why is he lying?

And why does Parents tell the public that the study by Pichichero et al. proves that the mercury from vaccines is rapidly eliminated from infants’ bodies when the authors of that study explicitly acknowledged the limitation that their study did not determine the fate of the mercury? Why is Parents magazine lying to parents this way?

We can only speculate as to the reasons, but it’s notable that Pichichero et al. were funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) under the directorship of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Naturally, the government funds researchers who are willing to produce the desired results. In this case, the desired conclusion was that the “low levels” of mercury detected in the blood of infants “suggest relatively low risk of toxicity”, even though this is a non sequitur fallacy.

That conclusion does not follow logically from the premise because it matters where the mercury goes. Obviously, if the mercury leaves the blood only to accumulate in the brain, that hardly suggests a low risk of toxicity.

A conclusion that does follow from how both the study’s lead author and Parents magazine outright lie to parents about the scientific evidence is that there are professional propagandists who masquerade as scientists or as journalists. The aim of the article’s author, Lauren Gelman, is transparently not to educate parents about the risks of vaccinations but to advocate public vaccine policy.

It’s also important to realize that, when the media lie to parents this way about vaccine safety, they are simply following the CDC’s example.

To briefly address a few other deceptions in the Parents article, it opens with the claim that the idea that vaccines might cause autism originated in the late 1990s with the concern about mercury along with the study we’ve all heard so much about that was published in The Lancet in 1998 and later retracted.

However, that claim is demonstrably false; concerns about vaccines causing autism long predate the Lancet study.

It was not Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his coauthors who came up with the idea of a possible link between vaccines and autism. In fact, they merely relayed how parents or doctors of some of the children included in the study had observed a temporal association between receipt of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and developmental regression.

That this temporal association exists is hardly controversial: in fact, the author of the Parents article argues that this is purely coincidental by remarking, “Researchers suspect that parents may mistakenly associate the MMR vaccine with autism because signs of autism often first appear around 12 to 15 months, which is also when the vaccine is first administered.”

To prove that parents’ concern about vaccines causing autism long predates the 1998 study, it is sufficient to point out how the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1991 published a review acknowledging that longstanding parental concern and finding “no evidence” to support a causal relationship between the diphtheria, tetanus, and whole-cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine and autism—which was an unsurprising finding given the fact, as the IOM also observed, that no studies had been done to test that hypothesis.

Parents argues that mercury in vaccines can’t have been causing autism since the rate of autism in the childhood population has continued to increase since thimerosal was phased out around the turn of the century, but this argument overlooks how the CDC also began recommending flu shots to pregnant women and infants as young as six months while also increasing the number of vaccines containing another known neurotoxin, aluminum.

Regarding vaccination during pregnancy, Parents asserts, “Many studies—including one published in August 2020 in the Annals of Internal Medicine—have confirmed that getting the flu shot while pregnant isn’t related to an increased risk of autism spectrum disorders in the fetus.”

In fact, that study acknowledged that “research studies suggest that pandemic influenza during pregnancy may increase risks for stillbirth and preterm birth”, and it cited a 2017 study in JAMA Pediatrics by Ousseny Zerbo et al. that “reported an increased risk in ASD [autism spectrum disorder] in the offspring of women who received influenza vaccination during the first trimester”.

The only other relevant study mentioned was published in The BMJ in 2015. It found no association between flu shots during pregnancy and autism, but among the limitations of its methodology were limited follow-up for autism diagnosis, limited statistical precision due to a much smaller study population, and an inability to analyze data specific to the critical developmental period of the first trimester of pregnancy.

Thus, when Parents says that “many studies” have “confirmed” that there is no increased risk of autism in the children of women who received a flu shot during pregnancy, what it really means that of the three studies that have been done, only one found an association—a “20% increased risk associated with vaccine exposure in the first trimester”, as summarized in the Annals paper.

The increased risk of autism found by Zerbo et al. indicated four additional cases of autism for every 1,000 women vaccinated during pregnancy.

The authors of the Annals study mention how the statistical significance of that association between influenza vaccination and autism “vanished” after the authors of the JAMA Pediatrics study “corrected” for ostensible “confounding”.

Other researchers, however, have criticized Zerbo et al. for the method they used to supposedly “correct” the data since the method assumed that various risk factors are competing hypotheses rather than factors possibly contributing to the increased risk of autism associated with influenza vaccination during pregnancy.

Additionally, the authors of the Annals study looked specifically at a pandemic flu shot used in Europe called Pandemrix and explicitly cautioned against generalizing their findings to the pandemic influenza vaccines used in the US and to seasonal flu shots.

The Pandemrix vaccine, incidentally, was associated with an increased risk of narcolepsy, a neurological disorder affecting the brain’s ability to control sleep-wake cycles, resulting in uncontrollable daytime sleepiness. The biological mechanism explaining this adverse event is that the antigen component of the vaccine closely resembles hypocretin, a protein produced in the brain’s hypothalamus that regulates the sleep-wake cycle. Thus, the hypothesis is that, in certain individuals, the vaccine caused an autoimmune reaction resulting in narcolepsy.

The Parents article contains the statement, “In 2004, the World Health Organization and Institute of Medicine concluded no link between autism rates and thimerosal exposure after examining the health records of hundreds of thousands of children.”

That statement makes it sound as though the WHO and IOM conducted a joint study of their own, which is untrue. Rather, the IOM conducted a review of existing literature, which the WHO was not involved with.

Setting aside those more trivial errors, Parents withholds from its readers the fact that the IOM’s 2004 Immunization Safety Review rather acknowledged that “the hypothesis that exposure to thimerosal-containing vaccines could be associated with neurodevelopmental disorders” is “biologically plausible” and that the evidence was “inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between thimerosal exposures from childhood vaccines and the neurodevelopmental disorders of autism, ADHD, and speech or language delay.” (Emphasis added.)

Moreover, the IOM acknowledged that ethylmercury is a “known neurotoxin” that “accumulates in the brain” and “can injure the nervous system.”

After making that deceptive claim about the IOM review, in the same paragraph, Parents immediately adds, “What’s more, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found no link between thimerosal and autism in nine different studies between 2003 and 2012.”

But as already noted, Parents conceals how the CDC was responsible for infants being exposed to cumulative levels of mercury in excess of the government’s own safety guidelines, and the magazine treats the CDC as a credible authority rather than a corrupt agency with a proven track record of untrustworthiness and blatant biases. Obviously, since it is responsible for its routine childhood vaccine schedule becoming “standard of care” in pediatric practices across the country, the CDC has a huge incentive to accept findings that favor its policies while ignoring findings that do not align with its policy goal of achieving high vaccine uptake.

Instructively, not one of those nine CDC studies was actually designed to test the hypothesis that vaccines administered according to the CDC’s schedule can contribute to the development of autism in genetically susceptible children.

The fact that existing research was not designed to test that hypothesis was acknowledged by the IOM in a 2012 review titled Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality.

In sum, while Parents magazine purports to offer scientific “proof” to support its headline claim that “Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism”, it instead dishes out more of the usual deceitful propaganda intended to persuade parents to unquestioningly comply with the CDC’s recommendations. As ever, what the government and media say science says about vaccines and what science actually tells us are two completely different things.