Page 31 - Spring2018

The Ongoing Thimerosal

Travesty Needs to End

By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

himerosal is the infamous mercury-containing pre-

servative in use, to this day, in some vaccines and
Talso in dozens of other pharmaceutical products

approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
1-3
Public health agencies, government regulators and medi-

cal trade groups have repeatedly declared thimerosal to
be safe, but the published peer-reviewed science argues
4,5
that nothing could be further from the truth. For anyone
who bothers to investigate thimerosal’s appalling record,

there is a vast, still accumulating and compelling body of
research that contradicts the public health establishment’s

deceptive safety claims.
Thimerosal is almost 50 percent ethylmercury by weight. Ethylmer-
cury is an organic mercury compound with toxicity mechanisms similar to
methylmercury (the hazardous type of mercury in seafood). The danger
6
posed by both types of mercury was evident in earlier eras when fungicides
containing either ethyl- or methylmercury poisoned farmers, sometimes on
a large scale, from the 1950s through the 1970s. Of the two compounds,
7,8
the ethylmercury in vaccines is far more toxic to and persistent in the brain,
where it has a propensity to accumulate as inorganic mercury, 9,10 with an
estimated half-life of as long as twenty-seven years. 11

SPRING 2018 Wise Traditions 29