RFK Jr. Slams The Guardian for False Claims About Thimerosal in Vaccines
Kennedy cited peer-reviewed studies and the actual labels on vaccines to counter The Guardian’s “pharma-financed” claims that thimerosal is safe and has been removed from childhood vaccines.
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS Secretary
Editor’s note: In a post on X, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called out inaccuracies in an article by The Guardian on the use of thimerosal, an adjuvant containing mercury in flu vaccines. Below is the full, unaltered text of Kennedy’s post.
In conformance with the pharma-financed mainstream media’s mantric ritual of dutifully parroting the propaganda tropes spoon-fed them by vaccine makers and their captive regulators, @guardian on Friday pronounced thimerosal, the ethylmercury-based vaccine preservative, “safe.”
Opining under the headline, “CDC vaccine panel to review ingredient RFK Jr has targeted for removal,” The Guardian authoritatively assures: “The preservative has been deemed safe.”
The Guardian did not bother to cite any peer-reviewed study.
Journalists don’t seem to read those anymore. Instead, it referenced a fact check website operated by the Pharma-funded American Academy of Pediatrics. @AmerAcadPeds likewise cites no peer-reviewed study to support this claim or its equally terse assertion that “Thimerosal has been removed from all routine childhood vaccines.”
This is another treadworn lie of the vaccine industry. There are high bolus doses of mercury in flu shots, which CDC recommends to pregnant women in any trimester of pregnancy and as a routine vaccine for children at six months and in every year of life.
Between conception and age 18, a compliant American child today could get a cumulative load of as much as 500 mcg of ethylmercury from multidose flu shots—nearly double of what they were once getting from all the childhood vaccines put together.
Now let’s look at The Guardian claim that thimerosal is safe.
A quick search at the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed and PubChem websites nets thousands of studies on search terms such as: mercury neurotoxicity, mercury and development, and mercury and brain, and hundreds that identify thimerosal as a potent neurotoxin, carcinogen, mutagen, and endocrine disruptor. There has never been a study that proves thimerosal safe.
In early 2001, Director of the FDA Office of Vaccine Research and Review, the late William Egan, admitted under oath before Congress that thimerosal’s safety had never been studied in human beings. [“Mr. Burton. ‘When was that? That was done in 1929. Let’s follow up on that. In 1929, they tested this on 27 people that were dying of meningitis. All of those people died of meningitis, so they said there was no correlation between their death and the mercury in the vaccines. That is the only test that’s ever been done on thimerosal that I know of. Can you think of any other?’ Mr. Egan. ‘No, in people, no. Except for accidental exposures over time.’”]
I leave it to the reader to speculate as to why CDC has not performed such studies in the intervening 24 years as it dosed hundreds of millions of American children and pregnant moms with mercury-laden flu shots. Furthermore, CDC has no existing guidelines for safe exposure to ethylmercury.
But let’s put all that peer-reviewed science aside and just look at what the government and the vaccine industry say about thimerosal. Thimerosal’s label advises against its use during pregnancy, pointing out that thimerosal has never been shown to be safe and that it causes mutations in mammals.
Thimerosal’s material safety data sheet (MSDS) acknowledges that thimerosal is “toxic,” has “Nervous System and Reproductive Effects,” and is “mutagenic in mammalian cells,” and that exposure to mercury in thimerosal “in utero and in children can cause mild to severe mental retardation and mild to severe motor coordination impairment.”
The MSDS lists a grim inventory of dozens of other devastating injuries from thimerosal exposure.
In 2001, the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) revised its thimerosal toxicity statement, warning that thimerosal is “toxic by ingestion and inhalation.”
The California EPA recognizes thimerosal as a reproductive toxicant in the clearest possible language: “Thimerosal dissociates in the body to ethyl mercury. The evidence for its reproductive toxicity includes severe mental retardation or malformations in human offspring who were poisoned when their mothers were exposed to ethyl mercury or thimerosal while pregnant, studies in animals demonstrating developmental toxicity after exposure to either ethyl mercury or thimerosal, and data showing interconversion to other forms of mercury that also clearly cause reproductive toxicity. The US EPA, the authoritative body relied on when mercury and mercury compounds were listed under California’s Proposition 65, currently identifies mercury and mercury compounds as causing reproductive toxicity.”
The amount of ethylmercury in a flu shot is 25,000 times EPA’s safety level for drinking water. Federal and state laws provide that whenever expired thimerosal vaccines are disposed of, they constitute a hazardous waste.
In 1998, FDA banned thimerosal in all over-the-counter products, ending its use in creams, eye medicine, and disinfectants like mercurochrome. It’s ironic that CDC still recommends its injection into babies.
A 2000 study by the National Research Council found that prenatal and infant mercury exposures cause multiple impacts to basic brain development by disrupting the division and migration of neuronal cells.
#ad: Your diet isn’t perfect—and that’s okay.
Global Healing’s Organic Multivitamin is here to help you fill the gaps with over 30 essential vitamins and minerals your body needs to feel its best.
There are no coatings, no fillers—just clean, high-quality nutrients your body can actually use. It’s a simple, effective way to support your daily health and give your body the care it deserves.
Experience the difference you can actually feel. Use code VFOX at checkout for 10% off your order.
DISCLOSURE: This is an affiliate link. I may earn a commission if you make a purchase here, at no additional cost to you.
According to a National Toxicology Program PowerPoint presentation entitled “Comparative Toxicity of Ethyl and Methyl Mercury”: “Ethylmercury is a neurotoxin. Infants may be more susceptible than adults. Ethylmercury exposure from vaccines (added to dietary exposures to methylmercury) probably caused neurotoxic responses (likely subtle) in some children.”
A 2005 NIH study commissioned by FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) and performed by the National Toxicity Program (NTP) obliterated the industry claim that the ethylmercury in vaccines is less toxic than the heavily regulated methylmercury in fish, finding that the ethylmercury in thimerosal crosses the blood-brain barrier, lodges in the brain, and metabolizes into the most toxic form of mercury at double the rate of methylmercury. A subsequent study found that this highly toxic mercury remains in the brain for over 27 years.
A 2000 study in Neurotoxicology by Dr. William Slikker Jr., former head of the FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research, directly foretold the results of a 2005 NIH-funded study, reporting that “Thimerosal (sodium ethylmercurithiosalicylate) crosses the blood-brain and placental barriers and results in appreciable mercury content in tissues including brain.”
A 2017 NIH/CDC study links miscarriage to flu vaccines, particularly in the first trimester. Pregnant women vaccinated in the 2010/2011 and 2011/2012 flu seasons had two times greater odds of having a miscarriage within 28 days of receiving the vaccine.
In women who had received the H1N1 vaccine in the previous flu season, the odds of having a miscarriage within 28 days were 7.7 times greater than in women who did not receive a flu shot during their pregnancy.
These results are all the more significant when considering the fact that 7 of the 13 authors on the study had potential conflicts of interest such as having received research support from GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, Pfizer, Merck, Novartis, Novavax, and other Big Pharma companies. One author, Frank DeStefano, was head of CDC’s immunization Safety Branch.
It’s noteworthy that these authors chose not to differentiate outcomes between thimerosal-containing flu shots and those that did not contain thimerosal. Around half the flu shots available at that time contained thimerosal.
On October 1, 2001, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences Immunization Safety Review Committee (ISR) issued a report concluding that the link between thimerosal and the rise of neurological injuries in children, including autism, is “biologically plausible,” and recommended the termination of all thimerosal-preserved vaccines.
An entire bibliography of pharmacokinetic studies by independent scientists, prestigious universities, and prominent research institutes published in high-gravitas journals, attest to thimerosal’s powerful neurotoxicity, and show that mercury tends to accumulate (and remain for considerable periods of time, years to decades) in the brains of primates and other animals after injection of thimerosal-containing vaccines.
It’s worth noting just one of these, a well-known Russian study from 1977 led by Dr. N.D. Mukhtarova, found that the majority of adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those currently given to American children in vaccines were still suffering neurological injury and neuropathology several years after the exposure. These symptoms included decreased vision, hearing, memory, vertigo, and pain and numbness in the hands and feet. [“A total of 25 persons exposed to multiple effects of low ethyl-mercuric-chloride concentrations were subjected to a clinical examination in dynamics 1 ½ and 3 years after exposure to the compound. In investigations, clinico-physiological (EEG, Asschner-Dagnini reflexes, etc) and biochemical (catecholamines, sugar, mercury, DDT, DDE in the urine, etc) methods were employed. The pathology of the nervous system presented certain peculiarities by comparison with early period. In evidence were changes in the simpatico-adrenal system function, vascular lesions of the brain after the type of transient derangements of the cerebral circulation in the vertebro-basilar basin and angiosperms, diffuse changes in the nervous system with predominant involvement of the hypothalamic cerebral structures and in some cases psychiatric disturbances were on record. (p. 4–7).”]
The Guardian is blind and scientifically baseless repetition of empty industry assurances about thimerosal safety is yet another proof that journalists, and particularly science journalists, have now devolved into obsequious stenographers for Big Pharma.
Donate to Children’s Health Defense
