The following is a transcript of Robert F. Kennedy’s speech for the Green Our Vaccines Rally in Washington, DC, June 4th, 2008. This speech, posted on the Generation Rescue website is reprinted with permission.
Thank you very much. I’m so happy to see all of you out here today, finally telling the truth to this congress which needs to hear the truth for the first time, and as Boyd Haley says, the press isn’t telling it to them. You know, the one exception is UPI, that has done a great job, and we need to give them an applause for what they’ve done, ‘cause they’re the only media outlet that is telling the truth on this issue.
I didn’t want to get involved in this issue, I got dragged into this issue because the truth became undeniable to me—and I was working on mercury issues from an environmental standpoint: coal burning power plants, which discharged an enormous amount of mercury, and about eight years ago, the EPA said that in nineteen states, because of mercury discharge from power plants, it is now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish in the state. In forty-nine states, at least some of the fish are unsafe to eat because of mercury. In fact, the only state where all the fish are still safe to eat is Wyoming—Dick Cheney’s home state, where the republican-controlled legislature has refused to appropriate the money to test the fish.In all the other states, at least some, most, or all the fish are unsafe to eat. Every state on the Atlantic coast has fish advisories; every state in the Gulf coast now has fish advisories; if you eat tuna fish, the FDA will warn you not to eat too much of it; swordfish, all these fish, and why?
Because it causes neurological injury in children.
So the government scientists are acknowledging that even tiny, infinitesimal amounts of mercury—parts per billion—will cause
profound neurological injury in children. And I was working on these issues, and mothers started coming up to me and said, “You know, the biggest exposure is not coming from power plants, or old mining claims, or old mining claims, as you might think. It’s coming from our own vaccines.” And they asked me to work on it, and to just look into it. And they were not hysterical people. They were scientists, they were doctors, they were psychiatrists, they were pharmacists, they were people that had their feet on the ground. They had attended the conferences, they had read the scientific literature, they had calmly and deliberately gone through this, and they had reached a conclusion. And the conclusion was that the vaccines were destroying the health, were making the sickest generation of American children in the history of our country. And I started looking into it, and somebody provided me with the Simpsonwood memo, which I then published in Rolling Stone.
Simpsonwood was the transcripts of a secret meeting that was held between CDC and seventy-five representatives of the vaccine industry, in which they reviewed a report that CDC had ordered, the Stratton study of the hundred-thousand children in the United States Vaccine Safety Database. And when they looked at it themselves, they said, “It is
impossible—” this is a quote, “It is impossible to massage this data to make the signal go away. There is no denying that there is a connection between and Thimerosal in the vaccines. And they said—this is what they said, I didn’t say this, this is their own scientists, their own conclusion of the best doctors, the top people at CDC, the top people in the pharmaceutical industry.
And, you know, when they had this meeting, they had it not in Atlanta, which was the headquarters of the CDC, but at Simpsonwood, at a private conference center, because they believed that that would make them able to insulate themselves from a court request under the Freedom of Information law, and they would not have to disclose the transcripts of these meetings to the public. Somebody transcribed the meetings, and we were able to get a hold of it.
You have them talking about the Verstratten study and saying there’s a clear link not just with autism but with a whole range of neurological disorders: speech delay, language delay. All kind of learning disorders: ADD; hyperactivity disorder and the injection of these vaccines [sic]. And they could tell because, as you know, vaccine protocols were dramatically increased.
When I was a little boy, we only got three
vaccines. But my children, five of my six children, got twenty-two vaccines. Beginning in 1989—that’s the Thimerosal generation. That’s the vaccine generation, and it’s the sickest generation in the history of this country. And I looked at these, I read, and I was astonished, because I have worked on environmental issues for twenty-five years, and I know what “captive agency phenomena” is. It’s the dynamic by which the regulatory agencies become captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate. And there’s all kinds of mechanisms that encourage that, or provoke that, or promote that to happen.
But I was shocked, because I know many of these people in CDC, and I know the people in the FDA, and I know that when they entered those agencies, they entered with a good heart, intending to do the right thing. But something had corrupted them. They got sucked into a vortex because they made decisions that were wrong, and instead of admitting it to the public, they covered it up to protect themselves. And it was very clear, and then I got a hold of the correspondence between the doctors and between CDC, rebuking each other and saying, “Why didn’t we look at this? Why didn’t somebody do a mass loading before we did these, approved these protocols with twenty-two vaccines to these children? Why didn’t we do this?” Rebuking themselves, rebuking each other. And then, the Simpsonwood transcripts, after the first, maybe two hours in which they’re talking about the undeniability of the connection between autism and Thimerosal; the impossibility of massaging the data further in order to try and eliminate those
signals. That’s what they spend the first two hours.
The rest of the meeting they spend talking about, “How do we hide this?” from the press, from the public, and from what they call the “predatory bar,” all the lawyers out there who may represent people who were injured by their negligence. And the end of that meeting, they make a few decisions. One is, for Stratton, the man who designed, who constructed the study, is hired the next day by GlaxoSmithKline and shipped off to Switzerland. And six months later, he sends in a redesigned study that includes cohorts that are—predictably—who are too young to have been diagnosed as autistic.
So he loads the study down, the data down, and they tell the public that they’ve lost all the original data. This is what CDC says to this day, that it does not know what happened to the original data in the Verstratton study. And they publish this other study that is a corrupt and crooked what we call “tobacco science,” done by a bunch of “biostitutes, of crooked scientists who are trying to fool the American public.
Then Kathleen Stratton, of CDC and IOM,says, “What we need is, we need some studies that will disprove the link.” So, they work with the vaccine industry to gin up these four phony European studies that are done by vaccine industry employees, funded by the vaccine industry, and published in the American Academy of Pediatrics magazine, which receives eighty percent of its revenue from the vaccine industry. And none of these scientists disclose any of their myriad conflicts, which conventional ethics
rules require them to do. It’s not disclosed.
And these studies—and you know, I’ve made a profession of reading phony science, of junk science, of “tobacco science,” because I see it every day. I’ve sued over four-hundred polluters, and this how they defend themselves. They hire these phony scientists, “tobacco scientists,” they produce these phony reports—so I know how to read them. So I did something that not a single member—you see the press here, and all there?—not a single member of this press corps, I can guarantee you, has ever read any of those studies. It has not happened. What they read was the CDC’s description of those studies, which has nothing to do with what’s in the studies. And you need to read these studies—and I’m talking to you guys, and you
need to read them critically, and that woman, I called that woman who wrote that TIME magazine article, and I called the editor of The Washington Post when they said, you know, “Well, this is the newest mythology, they’ve removed the Thimerisal from the vaccines and autism rates have not gone down.”
How many times have you read that repeated by these people from the press? That is an industry talking point that the industry knows is a lie—everybody knows that’s a lie. The amount of Thimerisal today in the flu vaccines is about sixty percent of what they claim to have removed from all the other pediatric vaccines. So, I looked at these, I read these studies, and I saw studies that weren’t even good—that wasn’t even high-quality fraud. It is low—these are low quality fraud, the worst—I mean, anybody, you don’t even need a scientist to advise you and tell you where the fraud is. And I’ll tell you what they—I’ll just tell you what one of them, the big one that they all rely on, the Danish study, where they said, okay, in 1992, Denmark banned Thimerisal. And after that, autism rates continued to climb. Therefore, there is no association between autism and Thimerosal. That’s the study.
What they didn’t tell you is that in 1992, Denmark was concerned about the connection between Thimerisal and autism, and about this huge rise in autism, and it began for the first time requiring registering autism as a reported illness in Denmark. So all the people who had autistic children suddenly had to register them for the first time. Plus, in Copenhagen, they founded a new clinic to treat autistic kids, which gave people a huge financial incentive and health incentive to register their children. So it’s the registry that went up, not the incidents of autism that went up. But they didn’t say that in the study. They never mention the Copenhagen clinic. They never mention the change in the rules in Denmark.
They just show you the graphs, of Thimerisal is banned here, and autism continues to go up. Well, the reason the autism rates rose was because—was an artifact of their data collection processes. It had nothing to do with the reality on the ground of the occurrence of autism. So, and you’ve heard all of their other studies, and you know, they all have this guy Paul Offit. You guys know him? And he is the poster child for the term “biostitute.” This a man who has made himself the spokesperson for the vaccine industry. He portrays himself as an independent scientist, he does not disclose the millions of dollars of transactions.
Let me just close up by saying this, that—and I started out by saying this—that, you know, they, these people, one of the worst crimes that they’ve done—and, you know, I’ve talked to The New York Times, and I said, you know, “You guys had Judith Miller, you know, talking for a year about the Iraq War, and saying how what a great thing it is and covering up the truth from the government spokespeople.” And I said, “There’s no difference what you’re doing, and then you had to come out and apologize,” and the Times publically apologized for that. And I said, “You’re going to have to apologize for this someday, for what you’ve done here. Because what you’ve done here, that war’s going to cost us three trillion dollars, but the treatment of these children, and cost to our society, from what you have done, from what you are doing to this generation of children, is going to far exceed the cost of the Iraq War.” And somebody is going to have to come to terms with that, and ultimately, the American press has completely let down our democracy.
And one of the things you see repeated again and again, is that these are, that the women, you know, who claim that their children—and I’ve gotten now hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of letters, and that’s not hyperbole, that’s not exaggeration, from women who had the exact same experience. They bring a perfectly normal two-year old, who’s exceeded all of their milestones, to the doctor to get—who they trust—to get their pediatric flu shots, their MMR vaccines at the age of two.
They get that shot, the child goes into seizure, develops a fever that night, and over the next three months loses her or his ability to speak, to interact with his brothers and sisters, engages in stereotypical behavior—head-banging screaming, biting—and lose all capacity for social interaction. And they’ve lost this child, and they watch it happen, and it’s happened thousands and thousands of times, and you hear that story once or twice, and you say, “Well, maybe it’s an anomaly,” but you hear it a hundred times, and you have to say, “We’ve got to start looking at this.” And nobody—the CDC had said, “No, we’re not going to look at it. We’re going to cut off all funds to anybody that wants to look at it.”
Why isn’t the press asking that question? Why aren’t they asking CDC, “Why don’t you study the Amish, like UPI did? You know, why don’t you study these home-schooled kids?” Thirty-thousand studied by the UPI and no autism in that group. They studied all the Amish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There’s only—there should be a hundred and thirty autistic kids. There are four. And three of them were adopted after receiving their vaccines, and the fourth one lived downwind of a coal-burning power plant. So we know what the truth is, and what we’ve got to stop doing is blaming the mothers, which is what they’ve done.
These are not hysterical women. These are people I—you know, I have a child who has allergies, life-threatening anaphylactic allergies, and asthma. My wife knows better than any doctor. She can put her hands on that boy and she knows what’s wrong with him. She knows if his chest is tightening up, she knows exactly what allergen triggered his allergy. She knows what’s gone wrong with that child, and these mothers know what made their child sick.
Anyway, keep fighting, and ultimately we’ll get these people to move, too. You’ve got to not just show up here, this is a really important rally, you’ve got to contact your congresspeople and make sure they understand this issue and that they’re going to operate, and let’s not let them go one more day without some legislation banning this stuff and getting it out.