President Bush Should Remove Mercury From Vaccines, Say Parent Advocacy Groups

VIENNA, Va. -- Two national parent organizations are calling on President Bush to issue an Executive Order to compel drug companies to remove mercury preservatives from vaccines in order to protect developing fetuses, infants and children from potential immune and brain system damage.

Unlocking Autism (UA), a national, non-profit autism awareness organization,

and the non-profit National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), the largest and

oldest vaccine safety organization in the U.S., are asking the President to

enforce a 1999 directive to drug companies by the Food and Drug Administration

(FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to remove mercury from all

vaccines.

Mercury is a known neurotoxin and drug companies removed mercury

preservatives from over-the-counter products in the early 1990s but the FDA

has not enforced its 1999 directive regarding vaccines. While mercury has been

reduced in many childhood vaccines, some flu vaccines given to pregnant women

and infants still contain so much mercury that a person would have to weigh

500 pounds to safely get a flu vaccination according to EPA standards.

During the fall presidential campaign, Unlocking Autism asked both

presidential candidates if they supported removal of mercury from all

childhood vaccines. President Bush said "yes" in writing but since the

election has refused to take action despite repeated requests from parents.

"The drug companies have had six years to stop injecting mercury into our

children's bodies and that is long enough. Giving mercury to kids on purpose

is stupid. If the FDA won't make them get it out then nobody but the President

can make them do it. We need the President to step up to the plate and protect

our children and the unborn from harm," says Shelley Reynolds, Unlocking

Autism (UA) president.

Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center

(NVIC), says, "The precautionary principle should prevail here: when in doubt,

get it out. Whenever there is a safer product available, the more risky

product should be removed from the market. This is like deja vu for those of

us who watched the FDA fail to properly regulate the drug industry after the

less reactive DTaP vaccine was licensed for babies in 1996. The FDA refused to

recall the more toxic DPT vaccine and so it was injected into American babies

for six more years, just like mercury has been injected into babies for six

more years after the FDA told the drug companies to get it out of vaccines."

Unlocking Autism, the National Vaccine Information Center and other parent

groups, who are concerned that the dramatic rise in autism and other

neurodevelopmental delays in children in the past few decades is in part due

to the use of multiple mercury-containing vaccines, are making ads and public

service announcements available to parents in every state which ask President

Bush to issue an Executive Order to get mercury out of vaccines. State and

federal legislators are also being made aware of the request.

Source: National Vaccine Information Center