1986: The Act (2020) - full transcript
A dramatic forensic examination of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and its consequences.
(ethereal music)
(peeing)
(sighs)
(music plays on radio)
(phone ringing)
(phone ringing)
(music turns off)
- We're gonna have a baby.
(cheerful guitar music)
(camera snaps)
(giggling)
Just when we were about to give up.
(kissing)
(giggling)
(emotional organ music)
(wailing)
(speaking indistinctly)
- You're all right, you're all right.
Yeah, we're gonna go see the doctor.
(bright guitar music)
- He's a happy, healthy,
normal child, typical child
reached all his developmental
milestones on time.
(chattering)
Right before his first
birthday, he was walking,
he was talking, eye contact, interaction,
all that good stuff.
(baby giggling)
He did have symptoms consistent with a
severe adverse reaction
at six months to the DTP, and
it's in the medical records:
Parents voiced questions, concerns
regarding shaking episodes,
entire body trembles.
After he had those
reactions at six months,
he should not have been vaccinated again.
(crickets chirping)
(cheerful guitar music)
(glass clinking)
- Marty asked what we're
gonna do about vaccination.
- (chuckles) That's a no-brainer.
- What do you mean?
- Babies need their shots.
- And what about me?
- What do you mean?
- They vaccinate pregnant women too.
- That doesn't seem right.
- You still think it's a no-brainer.
- He was a bright, precocious baby,
the most precocious of my
three babies, actually,
saying words at seven months,
speaking in full sentences
by the age of two.
My personal reason for doing
this work for the last 36 years
is that my son, my firstborn,
suffered a convulsion, collapse shock,
and state of unconsciousness
within hours of his fourth DPT shot
at two and a half years old.
(atmospheric music)
I didn't understand what
I was witnessing that day.
I didn't understand he was
having a brain inflammation.
He was eventually diagnosed
with multiple learning disabilities,
attention deficit disorder so severe
that he had to be put in a
special education classroom
for 12 years.
When I saw the TV documentary
DPT Vaccine Roulette
in the spring of 1982, I
was absolutely stunned.
I saw descriptions of
pertussis vaccine reactions
that exactly matched the symptoms
that I saw my son suffer that day.
I called the station and I asked
to be put in touch with other parents.
And we co-founded the
organization that's known today
as the National Vaccine
Information Center.
(ambient music)
I wanted to investigate
pertussis and pertussis vaccine.
I was insatiably curious about why
a government policy required
children to get this vaccine,
why this kind of vaccine would
be recommended and mandated.
It never crossed my mind that a vaccine
that was supposed to keep
healthy children healthy
would ever in a million years
be able to brain damage or kill them.
The doctors had been talking to each other
in the medical journals
for more than 50 years
about how pertussis vaccine
could cause brain damage and death,
but they had never bothered
to tell mothers like me
who were trusting that a pediatrician
would never do something to a child
that would hurt that child.
- Why would I need a hepatitis B vaccine?
That's the order.
So I was like, okay, if I do my job,
I get the hepatitis B vaccine,
and got it, and almost lost my life to it.
To cut a long story short,
turned out I had a full-blown
autoimmune disease,
I developed Graves' Disease,
but there was also massive
damage to my nervous system.
I couldn't walk anymore. I
really struggled to talk.
I don't think I slept, I mean
for weeks and weeks and weeks
while I was pregnant.
I'd just read and read and research
and research and research.
- He was taken in for an ear infection,
and he'd been sick for two weeks.
The doctor wrote him the
maximum dosage of penicillin.
As he's getting up out of the chair,
he's says it's time for his vaccinations.
"Are you sure he should
get these vaccinations
"when he's sick and he's
getting penicillin?"
And that was the fatal day.
And after that point, he
begins to regress into autism.
(soft guitar music)
(anxious music)
- That was the fatal day.
- [Fisher] It never crossed my mind.
- [Hazlehurst] After he had
those reactions at six months,
he should not have been vaccinated again.
- [Husband] (chuckling)
That's a no-brainer.
(boy crying)
- A vaccine that was supposed to keep
healthy children healthy
would ever be able to damage or kill them.
(baby crying)
I was insatiably curious.
Insatiably curious.
- I don't think I slept.
I mean, for weeks and weeks
and weeks while I was pregnant,
I'd just read and read and research
and research and research.
(birds calling)
(sprinkler clacking)
(soft piano music)
- No, babe, I don't believe it.
You are getting yourself
all worked up over nothing.
What about polio, for God's sake?
- Legitimately question vaccine safety.
In 2002, when my son was
first diagnosed with autism
and I first heard the theory
that vaccines cause autism,
I didn't believe it.
I had a lot to learn.
(tapping finger)
- We met with congressmen up on the Hill
and said, "This is wrong.
"This vaccine needs to
be taken off the market.
"There needs to be a safer
version of this vaccine.
"Why are these vaccines being mandated?"
- I don't know.
I mean, I think it's
a reasonable question.
What about ...
- Polio?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, you asked me about polio.
You gotta go back a long way
to answer that one, 1955.
To this guy, Dr. Julius Youngner,
co-inventor of the
inactivated polio vaccine.
- Yeah, the one that protected
us when we were kids, right?
- Mm-hm.
- Having met some of the
world's great vaccinologists,
I must say I have great
admiration for Julius Youngner,
who I thought it was a very simple,
sincere and brilliant man.
Youngner had developed
three important technologies
for assuring the safety of
the inactivated polio vaccine.
He began to hear that the Cutter
Laboratories in California
were failing on all of these levels,
and so he went himself to the Cutter Labs
and he was completely shocked
at the shoddy level of production.
And he told Jonas Salk that the Cutter Lab
was absolutely a risk
to paralyze children with their vaccine,
and he called for them to shut it down.
And Youngner wrote a letter
to the Cutter's lab to that
effect, a very strong letter,
Jonas Salk ...
told Youngner, "Yes,
you're absolutely right.
"It's terrible what's
happening in Oakland,
"but you shouldn't send the
letter, because I'm better known
"as the head of the entire operation here.
"I'll send the letter."
- And?
- Salk never sent the letter.
- And Youngner wasn't the only one
worried about that vaccine.
- In particular, Bernice Eddy
at the National Institutes of Health,
who had charge of testing monkeys,
injecting them with the product
of six different laboratories
that had been chosen
to mass produce the Salk-Youngner
inactivated polio vaccine
began to find that very sloppy methods
were resulting in highly
virulent viral particles
in the shots that were being
administered to her monkeys,
and the monkeys were becoming paralyzed
at an extraordinarily high rate.
She sent her data to her superiors,
and her superiors ignore them.
She then took photographs
of the paralyzed monkeys,
terribly wrenching photographs,
and they ignored that as well.
- In fact, over 200,000 American children
were administered a
defective polio vaccine.
Approximately 40,000
children contracted polio,
200 were paralyzed, and 10 died.
It turns out that Cutter knew
that many of them vaccines were defective.
- The manmade polio epidemic.
- And something I never considered?
Vaccinated children can spread polio.
- This caused a polio epidemic
amongst the families and communities
where the children received
a defective vaccine.
- Of those who came in contact
with vaccinated children,
113 were paralyzed, and five died.
- It came as a stunning reversal
of public perception, of media support,
and it caused a profound panic
at the Centers for Disease Control,
at the National Institutes of Health.
Imagine if you are a
polio vaccine developer
or expert at the national academies,
and you get a call at
midnight on April 26, 1955,
and you are summoned to a secret meeting
to decide whether or not
you suspend this miraculous vaccine.
And there was bitter disagreement
about whether or not the vaccine
had caused these injuries,
and they quickly determined it was.
- [Wife] That's when the
White House stepped in.
- They halted all polio
vaccines for several months
and they withdrew the Cutter vaccine
totally from the market.
They also lied.
They had also found that
two other manufacturers
had live polio virus in their vaccines,
but it was decided, apparently
at a very high level,
possibly even by the President himself,
that that should not be
revealed to the public.
- Because?
- Because it was thought
that that would permanently
damage public faith in vaccines,
and it had become very important
for American foreign policy
as well as domestic policy
that people have faith in vaccines.
And we know that from documents
that were declassified
in the last year of the
Obama Administration,
showing that the Central
Intelligence Agency
had decided by 1954 that vaccine programs
could be a way to enhance
American influence
throughout the world
and also to keep up American
technology in bio weapons.
- Wow.
Spooks. (chuckles)
It's a whole new ball game.
See you later, babe.
(soft guitar music)
- The pressure that was put
on these newly created virologist,
vaccinologist superstars
altered their judgment
and caused them to commit what, actually,
some call it a quote,
unquote horrendous crime.
- [Parasidis] 40,000
children contracted polio,
200 were paralyzed, and 10 died.
(birds whistling)
(music playing on radio)
- Good.
The client wants his extension extended
and the transmission on the
truck is acting up, but ...
yep.
- Babe, vaccine injury
is real, always was.
And there's another side:
over 4 billion paid out by
our government for damages.
- Well, protection comes at a cost.
- What about the victims?
- Wait, did you just say
that the government paid out?
(intriguing guitar music)
(cork pops)
(wine pouring)
- Cutter was a real turning point.
It went before a jury,
the Gottsdanker case.
Cutter's argued that injured children
should not be compensated.
Liability would stifle vaccine innovation.
- Not innovation of safer vaccines.
Surely they would be encouraged
by the threat of litigation.
- From a legal perspective,
many of the injured
plaintiffs and their families
had an extremely difficult time
seeking redress through the courts.
- Is anyone surprised?
Apparently vaccines have become
a bargaining chip in U.S. foreign policy.
(gentle guitar music)
- So by this time, there
was also a competition
between the United States,
the Soviet union and its allies
in being the world's most
generous supplier of vaccines.
- This guy doesn't seem like a whack job.
- And the problems with the polio vaccine
didn't end with Cutter.
Check this.
- when Bernice Eddy made a second,
and even more fundamentally
important discovery
in the early 1960s that
all the polio vaccines
were all contaminated with simian viruses,
and that one of those viruses,
called simian virus 40,
was particularly dangerous and virulent
and a very high percentage of the mice
and other laboratory
animals that she injected
with this simian virus 40
rapidly developed tumors.
This indicated to her
that this was an extraordinarily dangerous
cancer-causing virus.
= Between 1955 and '63,
over 98 million Americans
were administered polio vaccines,
widely contaminated with
this cancer-causing virus.
- By the early 1960s,
as the U.S. government
began to identify itself,
not just at home, but abroad
with eradication of all disease,
there was even more pressure
on government agencies
to give good news about vaccines
and about disease eradication programs.
We were going to create the health utopia.
(scoffs)
- A utopia that meant
not troubling Joe Public
with concerns about vaccine safety!
- It had become a national
political priority
to promote vaccines and to
squelch bad news about vaccines,
and that was everywhere, and
it involved every vaccine.
(atmospheric string music)
- Remember the swine flu scare of 1976?
- This virus was the cause of
a pandemic in 1918 and 1919
that resulted in over
half a million deaths
in the United States,
as well as 20 million
deaths around the world.
(chopping)
(wine pouring)
(remote clicks)
(chatter on TV)
(remote clicks)
- Hey!
- Real quick, real quick.
January, 1976, Fort Dix, New Jersey,
Army Private David Lewis reports sick,
ignored medical advice to rest
and ended up dying a few days later.
Cultures from his throat
swab grew a influenza virus
that the CDC had down as
some killer swine flu.
- Yeah, like that Spanish flu
that killed a bunch of
people way back when.
Hey, come on!
- The game is more important?
Like I'm painting the nursery pink or ...
polka dots or something?
- Okay, okay.
- No!
- Okay.
- No!
This is not halftime entertainment!
We've got work to do!
(chopping)
(wine pouring)
After three more cases
popped up at Fort Dix,
the CDC recommended a vaccination program
targeting 95% of the U.S. population.
- [Reporter] That vaccine was called X53A.
- [Interviewer] Was
X53A ever field tested?
- I ...
I can't say. I would have to ...
- [Interviewer] It wasn't.
- The vaccine was rushed to market
with little attention paid to safety,
except for the insurance companies
that were asked to underwrite it.
- And they said no?
- Uh, yeah.
And then the vaccine
makers took the position
that if the government wanted the vaccine,
then they should take on the liability.
- Let me guess. Congress said no.
- Production stopped,
and companies refused to
release vaccine stocks.
Then get this ...
(parade music)
July, 1976, Legionnaires returning home
from their annual conference in Philly
started dropping dead.
It took the CDC six months to
identify the bug responsible.
- Legionnaires' disease.
- Mm-hm. Yeah.
Meanwhile, a nervous public
feared it was the deadly swine flu.
- Within 10 days of the
Legionnaires' outbreak,
Congress succumbed to industry's
demand for indemnification,
and the government assumed
full responsibility
for all injuries that might result
from the swine flu vaccine.
- No liability in a free market,
that just doesn't sound right.
(somber music)
- [Wife] President Ford signed
the Swine Flu Act into law.
- Few things motivate
politicians like a plague.
- The unmistakable subliminal message
from the manufacturers.
- There's something
wrong with this vaccine.
- Experts had determined
that the Fort Dix virus
was not the same as
the killer flu of 1918.
- So the CDC got it wrong?
- Babe, there was no swine flu epidemic.
And other than the four cases at Fort Dix,
there was no swine flu, period.
And that vaccine hurt a lot of people.
By mid-October, 1976, dozens had died
shortly after vaccination,
and many were disabled
by a paralyzing disease.
- Did you know ahead
of time, Dr. Hattwick,
that there had been case reports
of neurological disorders,
neurological illness
apparently associated with the injection
of influenza vaccine.
- Absolutely.
- [Interviewer] You did?
- Yes.
- Did anyone ever come to you and say,
"You know something, fellas,
"there's the possibility
of neurological damage
"if you get into a mass
immunization program"?
- No.
- [Interviewer] No one ever did?
- No.
- Your superiores say
that you never told them
about the possibility of
neurological complications.
- That's nonsense.
I can't believe that they would
say that they did not know
that there were neurological illnesses
associated with influenza vaccination.
That simply is not true.
- By December, the disastrous
swine flu program was pulled.
Benefits?
There was the benefits!
- At least not to the public.
- 532 cases of paralysis, 58 deaths.
- A wave of lawsuits followed.
Thousands of administrative claims
were brought against the U.S. government
via the indemnification program.
- And it cost the taxpayers
over $220 million.
- They knew that fear
was a great motivator.
- And it set a precedent for the industry
to get immunity from product liability.
- So I guess there were winners.
(owl hooting)
(atmospheric string music)
(birds whistling)
- My first case was
the Massachusetts case.
He was born totally normal,
no complications at birth.
He made all of his motor milestones
until after his second DTP shot.
He developed a seizure disorder
after going through a period
of high-pitched screaming.
And the mother described it
as somebody was tearing his skin off.
Dealing with the family
and seeing what they had gone through
and seeing the denial of the doctors,
as a young attorney, just
coming out of law school,
I went after this as my cause.
(gentle music)
- This national publicity about the fact
that DPT vaccine could
cause injury and death
was causing a lot of
anxiety up on Capitol Hill.
The vaccine manufacturers
and the medical trade associations,
like the American Academy of
Pediatrics were panicking.
The argument that the companies made
and the medical trade made was
that government licenses
childhood vaccines.
They recommend for universal
use childhood vaccines
and the states mandate childhood vaccines.
Therefore, the companies and the doctors
should have no liability.
The government should
assume all liability.
And so what this whole
liability protection issue
is as a result of government mandates.
- [Doctor] The doctor knows
that this is mandated by regulation.
- [Interviewer] So he
has no has no choice?
- So he has no choice.
And indeed, the parent has no choice.
- [Reporter] Kids can't go to
school without their shots.
(emotional instrumental music)
(owl hooting)
- Wait a minute.
- What?
- There are legal mandates
for child safety seats,
but nobody argues that the government
should assume the manufacturer's
liability for those.
(soft guitar music)
- Huh.
- The manufacturers had
a more compelling reason.
They were afraid of
going into a courtroom.
And that's the biggest fear
that any product manufacturer
has in this country,
getting caught doing something wrong
and being punished for it.
In the early days of the
litigation, we were able to ...
get a favorable result for ...
I would say pretty much 100% of the people
that we represented.
'Cause they always seem to settle the case
at the same juncture of
litigation of the discovery.
That told me a story as an attorney.
It told me that, if they're
willing to pay on these cases,
there's something that I
still don't know about.
Discovery is where we get access
to all of the documents that they have,
and we can determine for
ourselves what they knew,
when they knew it, and
what they did about it.
- So I guess the real question is,
was the DTP vaccine unavoidably unsafe?
I mean, if the companies
had done their best,
they had a strong case.
- Yeah, but if not ...
if they knew they could make
it safer and chose not to,
then a jury trial would be disastrous.
- True.
I mean, look what's happening
to Monsanto right now.
(grim music)
- [Mike] As we fought for more documents,
they would settle the cases very quickly.
- Most of these lawsuits would be settled
on the courthouse steps by the companies
before they got to a jury trial.
And as a condition of
doing that settlement,
all the court records were
sealed from public view.
So what the manufacturers
knew, when they knew it,
and what they did about
it remained a secret?
- [Mike] That all seemed to have changed
in a New Jersey case.
We were fighting over the documents.
Lederle at the time was contesting that.
They fought tooth and nail
against giving them to us.
We had to go back for three
separate motions to compel.
The judge gave them a
very short time span,
a couple of days to produce the documents.
(ethereal string music)
(paper printing)
(troubling music)
- Wow.
Concerns about brain damage
from the original pertussis
vaccine date back to the 1930s.
Even 50 years later, they
admitted what they knew
about the basic biology
of pertussis was abysmal.
- People would be outraged
if they really knew
how much they don't know about
what vaccines do in the body,
how much they're covering up
about what vaccines do in the body.
- I mean, it's no wonder
they've tried to hide this
from Hugo's law fir.
Internal memo from 1962,
written by Dr. Christensen of Lederle.
- [Wife] It's obvious that
severe neurologic reactions
have occurred in children
after pertussis vaccines,
which have passed toxicity
tests currently in use.
- [Reporter] 42 years had gone
by between the first warning
and the time the US government decided
to commission its first study.
It was done by Dr. Larry Baraff
of the UCLA medical center.
- Because the Food and Drug Administration
was concerned that this
sort of public panic
might spread to the United States,
they wanted to document that
the vaccine was in fact safe
and not associated with
severe consequences.
- After millions of doses
had already been given,
someone finally did a safety study.
Baraff's going to
measure adverse reactions
to 15,000 DTP shots, but only
1,500 doses into the study,
he gets a surprise visit
from Wyeth's Dr. Deitch.
- What ...
What is a Wyeth employee doing
interfering in a government study?
- Deitch's secret report on that meeting:
"Baraff feels that the reaction rate
"for currently marketed DTP
vaccine is unacceptable.
"Far from the expected incidence
"of one in 15,000 immunizations,
"there have been one in
300 generalized seizures
"and two collapse shock.
Serious reaction rate: one in 214 doses.
- [Reporter] The UCLA
study found more reaction
than had ever been seen before.
- So what happened?
- Nothing! Nothing happened!
- [Husband] Babe, something did happen.
At this stage, when an
unacceptably high rate
of serious adverse reactions
had been identified
in the first big safety
study of DTP vaccine,
Baraff presented his alarming findings
to the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA should have immediately
suspended the DTP vaccine.
That would have happened for any regular
pharmaceutical product in this situation.
But something very different happened.
Following the surprising visit
from Wyeth's Dr. Deitch
on September 6th, 1978,
unaccountably, the rate
of seizures in the study
fell from one in 300 doses
of DTP to one in 3,563 doses.
Rates of collapse shock fell similarly.
Babe, the odds of this happening by chance
are greater than 1,000 to one against.
These new results were
used to bolster confidence
in the safety of DTP and reassure doctors
that the benefits of whole
cell pertussis vaccine
far outweigh the risks.
And for what was soon to come,
these results were used
to persuade Congress
that the vaccine makers had
made the pertussis vaccine
just as safe as possible.
- How's the truck? Did
they fix the transmission?
(spans fingers)
Knock on wood car insurance?
sounds like vaccine policy to me.
- Maybe they just couldn't
come up with a safer vaccine.
- [Wife] They actually started to study
whether they could
break the bacteria open.
Do you need the whole cell
or are there certain parts
of the cell that give immunizations?
Conversely, is there part of the cell
that is dangerous and can cause harm?
The makers discovered that,
if they could separate
the bacteria's beneficial
and dangerous parts, they
could make a safer vaccine,
a so-called acellular pertussis vaccine.
- [Husband] So when did they know that?
- 1963.
Eli Lilly had a safer
version of the DTP vaccine.
- [Doctor] Trisolgen is accompanied
by a much lower incidence
of systemic reactions.
that is observed with DPT
containing whole cell pertussis vaccine.
(crickets chirping)
- So why did nothing change?
Why did an ...
avoidably unsafe DTP vaccine
continue to be injected
into millions of children every year?
(birds whistling)
(sprinkler clacking)
(typing)
- The fact is we may have had
a safer shot a long time ago.
(dynamic theme music)
- We have had the capability
to make a safer vaccine.
The manufacturers have chosen
not to for economic reasons.
They want immunity from lawsuits.
They don't want to lose
the third world market
because these vaccines
cost pennies to produce.
- In Japan, they've been using
a safe acellular vaccine since 1981.
- So why not here?
- Vaccine manufacturers met again in 1982.
- Connaught's Dr. Stainer acknowledged
that they could make a
much less toxic product,
but it was gonna cost more.
- Dr. Schuh, Connaught Laboratories,
made the North American manufacturers'
priorities very clear.
- [Dr. Schuh] I would like
to make a short comment
on the issue of compromising
between the price and the purity,
because I'm from a company
that produces vaccines,
so we are of course, very interested.
First of all, with the price.
- The reason they didn't
pursue the safer vaccine
came down to I'd like to
say dollars and cents,
but I can't, I'd like to
say cents, but I can't.
(coin jangling)
I'd have to say less than a
cent per dose to make it safer.
And they were unwilling to
cut into their profit margin.
- So 1963 was the earliest
they knew they could make a safer vaccine?
- No, it wasn't.
Lederle filed a patent
on an acellular vaccine
of toxicity in 1937.
- Are you kidding me?
60 years before the safer
vaccine was actually licensed?
So what did they do with this patent?
(phone ringing)
- [Hugo] I can't answer.
I don't think anybody other than
the folks at Lederle can tell you
what was going on in their evil minds.
They knew they could make it safer,
but they didn't want to spend the money.
What we had at that point
was so damning to them.
It was a path of years and years and years
of deceiving the regulators,
lying to the doctors.
That was what they were running from.
- Okay, well, thank you for your time.
(upbeat guitar music)
(giggling)
- I think your transmissions
working just fine.
- (laughs) I love you!
They were clearly sweating.
Since that documentary,
litigation against Lederle
alone was up over 400%.
What was the corporate
response to Vaccine Roulette?
(shuffling papers)
- Memo to all company employees.
- [Narrator] The present
DTP vaccine is the safest
that medical science can now provide.
There is no evidence
that there is or ever was
a vaccine with fewer severe reactions.
- Liar!
- And then there's this.
(toaster popping)
The Pinto Memo.
- Pinto?
- Yeah, in 1970, Ford Motor
Company introduced the Pinto.
It was a small car with a big problem.
(cars colliding)
(explosion)
- [Hugo] If the car was rear
ended, the bumper assembly
would crash into the gas
tank, and it would explode.
- Ford was accused of causing
up to 900 burn deaths,
because they were unwilling to spend
just $11 per vehicle for a safer gas tank.
- 11 bucks?
(emotional guitar music)
(typing)
This is an internal risk-benefit analysis.
Recall and fix the problem, $137 million.
Leave the car a fire risk and
pay off deaths and injuries,
just short of $50 million.
Board made a business decision.
- [Hugo] And then their memo
ended up in front of a jury.
That's when Ford got sanctioned big time
by punitive damages.
The behavior of the vaccine
manufacturers is identical.
When the judge ordered them
to produce those documents,
(gavel bangs)
it was like almost divine provenance.
They dumped 80 something
boxes of documents on us
one afternoon, just before a weekend.
And I looked at this completely
filled up conference room,
and I reached out and
grabbed a random box,
opened it up, and I pulled out a document.
I found the Pinto Memo for vaccines.
If we kill kids, it's gonna
cost us a half a million bucks.
If we don't kill kids,
it's going to cost us a million bucks.
Here's how much we have
to price our vaccine at.
(emotional guitar music)
- I mean, it does acknowledge
that the public had been kept in the dark
about problems with the vaccine.
Beyond that, it's just
another risk-benefit analysis.
Do we stay in the market
or not? Three options.
- Was the safer vaccine one of them?
- Nope.
Get out of the market altogether;
business as usual but
aggressively hike up the price
to cover legal costs;
or seek liability
protection from Congress.
(scoffs) Get out of the market? Right!
Apparently, to a jury,
that would appear like
an admission of guilt.
Until Hugo's discovery,
the preferred option
was to stay in business
and hike up the price by 6000%.
- That's aggressive.
- But with this, once it got in the hands
of Hugo and his colleagues ...
- [Hugo] They never let us
see the light of a courtroom
once we got this full set
of discovery from them.
- That's when the third option ....
- Federal liability protection.
- That became the industry's lifeline,
which they couldn't leverage
once they'd shown they
could make a safer vaccine.
So they dressed it up as
something very different.
- And they would tell the public,
they would tell the judges,
they would tell their
congressmen and their senators.
- You need to protect us
from vaccine injury lawsuits.
- We can't make it safer,
so you have to do something for us.
- If you don't protect us,
we're gonna leave this country
with no pertussis vaccine.
- One of the biggest intimidation tactics
I've ever seen a company
do in this country.
- A blackmail of Congress.
- Corporate misbehavior,
the profits over people
and profits over safety.
The effects have been devastating
for hundreds and hundreds of thousands,
if not millions, of parents.
(emotional guitar music)
(atmospheric string music)
- Congress decided they were
going to create legislation
that was going to protect
the vaccine supply and contain costs.
They came to us and said,
"You can come to the
table, and you can argue
"for what you think the
children should get,
"but we are going to pass legislation
"to protect the vaccine
supply in this country."
We knew that the companies
had to have a duty to make
vaccines less harmful.
We fought as hard as we could
for six years to try to hold back
three of the most powerful
entities in society:
government, medical trade, and
the pharmaceutical industry
from completely removing all liability
for vaccine injuries and deaths.
- Group called Dissatisfied
Parents Together, DPT.
And they called and they asked me,
"Is there any way that the
Trial Lawyers Association
"would get behind a bill that
is essentially tort reform?
I thought about it for
maybe 18 and a half seconds.
And I said, "It's a good deal.
"It's a good deal because
it's good for the people.
"It's not good for the lawyers,
"It's terrible for the lawyers.
"It's horrible precedent,
but it's necessary
"because we're talking about
brain damaged children."
A dollar today is worth so much more
than a dollar six years down the line.
- It's safe to say that if a tort lawyer
could go after the pharmaceutical industry
the way they should be able
to, for all this damage,
it would be a multi-trillion
dollar settlement.
It would most definitely bankrupt
the entire pharmaceutical industry.
I think it's gonna put our
country under extreme challenge.
- Henry Waxman and his
coauthors on the bill
were determined to get the act passed
despite pushback all the
way up to the White House.
And they weren't alone,
but they weren't cutting it very close.
- With only days to go before
the congressional recess,
The Bill's passage was up in the air,
with the White House declaring plans
to veto the entire omnibus package
due almost exclusively to the provisions
in the National Childhood
Vaccine Injury Act.
- October 20th, 1986, Los Angeles Times.
Waxman made it personal.
- [Waxman] If the
president vetoes the bill,
he will leave these children
to fend for themselves
and leave the country with risks
or shortages or skyrocketing prices.
If he vetoes it, I hope he
has some emergency plans
to start making vaccines himself.
- "Because the manufacturers tell us
"they may very well stop."
- Just like swine flu, same playbook.
- Well, now we know the real reason.
(atmospheric music)
(cameras snapping)
(ambient instrumental music)
- [Moody] With the passage of The Act,
the '90s opened up an entirely
new era for vaccination.
- The National Childhood
Vaccine Injury Act
had three purposes: first to compensate
infants and children who'd
been injured by their vaccines;
second, to give some level
of liability protection to industry;
and third, to make vaccines safer.
- With the act, Congress
guaranteed children
injured by vaccines compensation
that would be swift,
efficient and generous,
while at the same time giving industry
a measure of protection from
traditional tort liability
for vaccines that both
Congress and the courts
have found to be unavoidably unsafe.
- So the threat remained.
I mean, despite the cushion
of the compensation program
between vaccine makers and hostile jury,
the lie that the DTP vaccine
was unavoidably unsafe
hadn't gone away.
- No, not completely.
- Here's the first case,
Manley vs. Health and Human Services.
It went to trial in the
new vaccine court in 1989.
- So not really a court, babe.
- We don't apply the
rules of evidence that ...
directly.
- No judge, no jury,
no right to discovery.
- Our hearings are all
closed to the public.
- A special master
appointed by the defendant,
our government?
- Actually the program got
off to a promising start.
- It was such a relief to be
able to have this program.
We were so shell-shocked and so bruised
from six years of litigation in each case,
when I tried the Manley case,
which was the first case
ever tried in the program,
it worked, it worked.
We had a death case that the
child was diagnosed with SIDS.
And it wasn't wasn't SIDS because
there were certain things:
the child was screaming, crying for hours
before she went to bed,
and she had a high fever,
and the mother put the
child down to bed that night
and the child never woke up.
Within months of filing
it in the vaccine program,
we were done, they were
paid, and it was a slam dunk.
It was a complete slam dunk.
(birds whistling)
- [Wife] Not everybody
was happy about the act.
- Like who?
- Officials at Health and Human
Services, HHS, were furious.
- They opposed the law to the bitter end.
They did not want the National Childhood
Vaccine Injury Act passed
- To compensate children
would have sent the
what CDC and the other
powers that be at the time
viewed was the wrong message:
in fact, vaccines are dangerous.
- The position of the Department
of Health and Human Services
has been that there is not as yet evidence
that such a system is needed.
- They didn't want to have
the children compensated,
because every time a child is compensated,
it means vaccines can do that.
(somber music)
- In fact, Congress rubs
salt in the CDC's wounds
by creating this.
- [Husband] Vaccine injury table.
- A list of recognized vaccine injuries.
Under the new law,
these were entitled to
automatic compensation.
- There will be a presumption of causation
in the absence of a more
biologically plausible explanation
for the child's injury or death.
- Where there was doubt,
Congress wanted those
children to be compensated.
- So if you have a particular vaccine
and the specified injury-
- [Wife] Within a specific time period ...
(slot machine whirring)
- [Husband] Causation is presumed?
- Yeah.
In court, you didn't
have to argue an injury
that was on the table.
The discussion was only about
the level of compensation.
But if your child's injury
was not on the table,
then it was off table.
- Meaning?
- For these particular
vaccine injury claims
the government places the burden of proof,
the burden of causation
on the injured person.
In most instances, this creates
a nearly insurmountable burden
for these injured parties.
- You had guidelines on the table.
We had signs and symptoms
of encephalopathy on there.
- Encephalopathy: any
diffuse disease of the brain
that alters brain function or structure.
- Encephalopathy, brain inflammation,
encephalitis has always been
one of the most serious
complications of vaccination.
Almost all of the vaccines
that are recommended
for children today can cause brain damage.
We had signs and symptoms
of seizures on there,
collapse shock, high-pitched screaming,
which is also known as
the encephalitic cry.
The doctors were furious,
because they wanted complete
liability protection,
and they didn't get it in that law.
- Do you think doctors are
warning patients about the risks?
- No.
- For the first time, doctors
would have to give parents
written information about
vaccine risks and disease risks.
The doctors would have to write down
in the permanent medical record
the vaccine's name, manufacturer's name,
and the lot number of each vaccine given.
Doctors were required to
report vaccine adverse events
to a federal Vaccine Adverse
Event Reporting System.
- What about the vaccine manufacturers?
(gentle guitar music)
- The vaccine manufacturers were furious
that they were not given
complete liability protection.
They did not get protection
on the duty to make a
vaccine less harmful.
- Meaning avoidable injury.
- Yeah.
- [Fisher] We fought to
make sure that that law
did not eliminate all liability.
- And the Congressman who
wrote the bill agreed.
- [Congressman] If an injury
is the result of a bad vaccine
or one inadequately researched,
or warned of that the courts
can still making an award.
- Worst of all for the
program and the government,
injured children started
getting compensated
in large numbers.
- It started out as so successful.
I remember our first year, 92%
of the cases got compensated.
The vaccine program started
to cost a lot of money,
and then bad things started to happen.
(somber music)
- The law, as it was originally passed
was a very different law than it is today.
- In the early '90s in
the wake of the '86 act,
the vaccine schedule
ramped up dramatically,
and there were more and
more vaccine injuries,
and the name given to
that injury was autism.
- [Announcer] Please welcome Mark Blaxill.
(group applauding)
- As the autism toll
passes a million children
and the cost sores to a trillion dollars,
there is a really pernicious
idea that is taking hold
that there is simply no autism epidemic.
The rate of autism in the world
before Kanner and Asperger
first noticed children like
this was effectively zero.
So multiple surveys, all
showing sharp increases
with an inflection point around 1990.
One in 36 ...
measured one way, one in
59 measured another way.
Now one in 33.
(erupting sound)
- How had these cases of autism
been adjudicated in the
compensation program?
- In the early years of the program,
autism was being compensated.
We saw those cases in Alder,
Sorenson, Friedman, Banks.
- Lassiter, Underwood,
encephalopathy autism compensated.
And up through '96, '97,
'98, about 95% of the cases
were table cases,
including dozens and dozens
of regressive encephalopathy
diagnosed as autism.
In the first order, the Judge said,
"We've always compensated
these autism cases
"as table cases."
- Automatically entitled to compensation.
- What we found when we were
able to contact the families
is that about half of the families
where the child had a
diagnosis of seizure disorder
or encephalopathy, the
child also had autism.
It was such a tidal wave,
because it represented
such a threat to the vaccine program
that it would have to compensate
millions of individuals for a lifetime.
(wave crashing)
- From the very beginning,
the program was corrupted
with the intent, the studied
intent of denying children
the compensation Congress intended.
- Of course, there's the obvious way
to avoid paying out compensation;
Just don't tell anybody about the program
in the first place, right?
- The secretary of HHS has mandated
via statute of the program
to conduct public awareness campaigns,
yet they refuse.
If we promote the program,
people will not vaccinate.
- [Woman] Who calls the shots?
- [Protestors] Parents call the shots!
I did not file, because
I didn't have access
to the right information.
I didn't know my rights.
- And then to place a strict limit
on the amount of time
parents had to file a claim.
- Normally a medical injury to a child,
the child has until age 18
or 21 to file their claims,
so setting that at 36
months or three years
was a deliberate effort to
short change these children.
- Like many families,
by the time I had gotten access
to the right information,
we were past the statute of limitations.
(crickets chirping)
(somber music)
(owl hooting)
(birds whistling)
- HHS took a more radical
approach to limiting payouts.
They took the table and simply
deleted serious injuries
that had been entitled to
automatic compensation.
- There was a systematic gutting
of the safety provisions and
the compensation provisions
at the hands of the Department
of Health and Human Services.
(somber music)
(mouse clicking)
- So 1996, the autism
epidemic has taken off.
- Yeah, and the government's
liability with it.
- Mm-hm.
Donna Shalala, Secretary of HHS
and the defendant in vaccine court
took a red pen to the
vaccine injury table.
- Wait, so that's like the
criminal getting to decide
whether or not they committed the crime.
- Mm-hm.
- [Fisher] Oh, we don't
need seizures on there.
We don't need collapse
shock. Take those off.
- [Moody] Take regressive encephalopathy,
take residual seizure
disorder off the table,
thereby making it much harder for a child
to receive compensation,
as Congress found in their investigation.
- The definition of encephalo-
- Encephalopathy.
- Mm-hm.
Was changed to one that
you will never find
in any medical textbook.
- So injured children no longer qualified.
- Mm-mm.
- Congress wanted to make sure
that all of the kids who were injured,
because no product can
be made perfectly safe,
all of the injuries that were unavoidable
would nevertheless get compensation.
- Shalala turned that on its head.
- [Fisher] Where that scientific research
is incomplete or nonexistent,
the secretary believes
it would be inappropriate
and inconsistent with her
statutory responsibility
to revise the table to establish
a presumption that a relationship exists.
- Wait, what exactly?
- She should've done the science first!
- Yeah!
Except that the autism tsunami
was threatening to bankrupt
her entire program.
- Because of CDCs desire
to protect the meme
that vaccines are perfectly safe,
the children were thrown
into the netherworld
of proving off-table causation,
while at the same time CDC denied them
the science necessary to do so.
- But the act required science
to develop a safer vaccine.
I mean, who could argue with that?
- Well, not even you, apparently.
(bright guitar music)
- When Congress passed the Vaccine Act,
they knew that they were
removing from the manufacturers
any incentive to make vaccines safe,
so they took that responsibility
and they put it firmly in the lap
of the Department of
Health and Human Services.
- Congress required a
mandate for safer vaccines,
that the secretary undertake
a variety of research projects
to reduce the amount
of injury to children.
- One of the key requirements of the act
was that HHS monitor vaccine safety
and make a report on it
every two years to Congress.
In 2018, we sued HHS under the
Freedom of Information Law,
and they were unable to produce
a single one of those reports.
- The only way you're really going to know
how much damage vaccines are causing
is to look at people who've
received the vaccines,
people who haven't received the vaccines,
look at vaccinated children
versus unvaccinated children.
- That is done for every other
medical product or device.
In 2009, we actually had $16 million
set aside in the budget for
research to do this study,
and CDC was so angry
at the risk as opposed
to the vaccine program
that at the next meeting
of this research committee,
they brought it up again
in an illegal revote
and took away the money.
The director of this committee,
Tom Insel, head of the National
Institute of Mental Health,
even said in a shocking admission
that we can't do this study
because we have a conflict of interest
that it might help the children
win their cases in vaccine court.
- They won't do it.
They will not compare
the health of children
who are not getting vaccinated
against the health of children
who are receiving all the vaccines
according to the federal schedule.
This is too risky for them ...
because if it turns out that the children
who don't receive vaccines
are much healthier.
the entire program is put into question.
(audience applauding)
- We don't know how many children
are dying or being brain damaged
because we don't have a
reaction reporting system
that will give us those figures.
- [Interviewer] Do you think doctors
are reporting reactions?
- No.
- There's something very wrong here
when we're mandating a vaccine
And we don't even know how many
children are being injured.
- Parents forced HHS to set up a system
to monitor vaccine side effects.
It was called ...
It was, um ...
- The Vaccine Adverse
Events Reporting System
was an attempt to systematize
the capturing of actual
vaccine injury events.
But the system is wildly imperfect
to the point of almost being useless.
Because of a Harvard Pilgrim
healthcare study that was done,
we know two really important things.
The first thing we know
is that less than 1%
of vaccine injuries are actually reported.
Of the people vaccinated,
2.6% had some sort of vaccine injury.
That's not one in a million;
that's 2.6% of the
people who got vaccines.
And so the lead researcher
of Harvard Pilgrim
actually complained
because CDC went silent
after they reported
their results and wrote,
"Unfortunately, the necessary CDC contacts
"were no longer available
"and the CDC consultants
responsible for receiving data
"were no longer responsive
to our multiple requests
"to proceed with testing and evaluation."
- A three-year study produced results
so potentially devastating for the CDC
because the adverse event
rate was so much higher
than anything the CDC could
share with the public.
And so the program was shut down.
(emotional guitar music)
(owl hooting)
(birds whistling)
- Look at this.
And this.
- Well, let's go to the source.
- Parents were reporting regression
of their children into autism,
following MMR vaccination,
but it was a minority of children.
So why some and not others?
In 2000, I shared with CDC scientists
my groups theory that it was
age of MMR vaccine exposure;
the younger you got the vaccine,
the greater the autism risk.
And to their credit, they
went back to Atlanta,
and they tested the hypothesis
that younger age of MMR vaccination
was associated with an
increased risk of autism.
- And found no link.
- There's something I
think you should see.
(dramatic music)
- [Man] My phone rings, and
it's Dr. William Thompson.
- [Dr. Thompson] You and I
don't know each other very well.
You have a son with autism,
and I have great shame now.
The whistleblower from the
CDC, who's going to come out
and say that the CDC had
committed fraud on the MMR study
and that they knew that vaccines
were actually causing autism.
(bright guitar music)
- Two findings were buried
on that fateful day in September, 2002.
The first was what we call
the African American effect.
The second effect was a group of children
who received the MMR vaccination on time
and then regressed into autism.
- [Moody] DeStefano and colleagues
did find a strong signal
of autism causation in these two groups,
which was, of course, unacceptable to CDC.
- Dr. Thompson tried to warn
the Director of the CDC at the time
because he knew he was
publishing fraudulent data.
Not only was he replaced,
in the 2004 Institute of Medicine meeting
by his supervisor, Dr. Frank DeStefano,
who proceeded to show the fraudulent data,
but he was threatened with firing,
and he was told to seek psychiatric help
because of his moment of clarity.
A real whistleblower protected
by whistleblower status
inside the CDC telling us
we're committing scientific fraud in here.
That same pharmaceutical industry
that lies to you all the
time and puts out products
and gets sued and paid
out billions of dollars,
yeah, same thing happens with vaccines,
and we're doing that too.
- After the whistleblower story
broke in August of 2014 ...
Dr. Thompson got cold feet,
and he set about to debunk my results
with a colleague, a
statistician friend of his
from the University of Pennsylvania,
and they reanalyzed the data
that I received from the CDC,
basically to show that my
numbers were an anomaly,
that they were not correct,
and they got exactly the
same result as I did.
They could not make the effect go away.
They chose not to
publish that information.
By withholding that information,
they're doubly committing fraud.
(thunder rumbling)
(crickets chirping)
- They could, at the very
least, delay the MMR.
- What? Admit there's a problem?
(gentle guitar music)
(birds chirping)
- When I started looking at
the science, and it happened
because I sat on the Board
of Health for our county,
and we received a memo
that we were pushing back
our hepatitis B vaccine from
birth to six months of age,
due to concerns about
mercury in the vaccine.
The symptoms of mercury toxicity
were identical to what happened to my son,
the loss of speech, the
loss of eye contact,
the peripheral neuropathy,
the shaking of the hands.
Everything that he went
through was almost identical.
- I first heard about
a possible connection
between vaccine and autism
when I was researching a
story for Elle Magazine.
They wanted me to run
an article about autism,
and I heard about a mom in California.
I knew it was on the increase
and I asked her why she thought that was,
and she said, "Well, many people think
"it's the mercury in the vaccines."
And I kinda dismissed it at the time.
I said, "How could there
be mercury in vaccines?
"And if there is, it must
be such a minuscule amount
"that it couldn't be harmful."
- That's when I started researching
my son's exposure levels
and found out that at two months of age
his exposure levels were 125 times
EPA's allowable exposure levels.
(booming)
(crowd applauding)
- About four months later, the
Homeland Security Bill passed
and in the middle of the night,
someone had slipped a writer
anonymously into that Bill,
basically exonerating Eli
Lilly from any civil liability
in vaccine cases over thimerosal.
And a lot of bells went off in my head,
and I remembered that mom in California.
She wasn't crazy. There
is mercury in vaccines.
Somebody's worried about.
- And one of the first
things we started doing
was filling out Freedom of
Information Act request,
or FOIA requests, on all
of our federal agencies,
the FDA, the CDC, to find out
if they were looking into this
and what they were doing about it.
And one document in particular
was by an FDA employee
who was talking about their
vulnerability on this issue,
behind the scenes, saying
that they had not done
the eighth grade math to add
up these cumulative exposures.
We came across documents where
the CDC national immunization program
was actually doing research on thimerosal.
(ominous music)
On the study, the name Thomas
Verstraeten was listed,
and so I went down to CDC
and asked him about his investigation.
He explained how, when they
first started doing it,
they made some changes
to the entrance criteria
because they were studying vaccines
and they wanted to make sure the children
that they were studying had
actually been vaccinated.
- Hey, hey.
So you realized that by
leaving out the unvaxxed kids,
they totally missed the crucial comparison
between vaxxed versus unvaxxed,
those who got mercury
and those who didn't.
Anyway, all right. Later, babe.
(mysterious music)
(paper shuffling)
- So they had done the crucial vaccinated
versus unvaccinated comparison.
Wait a minute.
- This analysis became
known as generation zero.
- [Wife] So the first runs of their data
contained children who had not received
any exposure at all to thimerasol,
and they were comparing those to children
who had received high exposures.
The relative risk for ADD,
ADHD, speech and language delay,
neurodevelopmental delays in general
and autism were incredibly elevated.
(ambient music)
Based upon the Verstraeten
generation zero study,
just a single dose of thimerosal
containing Hepatitis B vaccine
raised the risk of autism
more than sevenfold.
- In a court of law, anything
above a relative risk of two
applies cause and effect,
so they were really worried about this.
When you get up into the
range of eight, nine, 10,
that's what we saw with tobacco science.
And this was-
- Wait, wait a minute!
- So, clearly, definitely, unequivocally,
you have studied a
vaccinated vs unvaccinated?
- Oh, we have not studied
vaccinated versus unvaccinated.
- She lied!
- Stop there. That was the
meaning of my question.
You've wasted two minutes of my time.
- They brought in the
vaccine manufacturers
and they brought in people
from FDA and NIH and CDC,
and they discussed essentially
how they were going to handle this data.
(delicate guitar music)
- What they had done
was deliberately removed
the unvaccinated controls,
and therefore they brought the risk down.
- You look at your findings,
and you don't like 'em,
and then you go back and
alter your entrance criteria.
You can't do that.
- I saw that one, and my jaw dropped.
- Do not vary the protocol
once you see their results
and don't like the results.
- There was just manipulation
after manipulation
after manipulation.
It was definitely scientific fraud.
- Clear example of scientific fraud.
- Dr. John Clemens from the
World Health Organization
made a comment to the
effect, I'm paraphrasing,
but this is the study that
never should have been done,
because we already knew what
the outcome was gonna be.
And that's a pretty shocking statement
for a scientist to make.
- Some of the people within
these federal agencies
wanted to come clean
with the American public
and let them know what happened.
But then these other
voices of, quote, reason,
the experts from CDC
and some of the people
within the American Academy of Pediatrics,
felt as though that was too dangerous.
They knew that if this came
out to the American public,
that it would decrease their credibility.
So instead, they did everything they could
to hide this concern and put more children
at risk for decades.
- Well, at least they got mercury
out of childhood vaccines, right?
- Little did we know that, as thimerosal
was being phased out of the
early infant vaccine schedule,
that CDC was working
on new recommendations
that pregnant women, infants and children
receive flu vaccines.
The flu vaccines that were available,
over 90% contained thimerosal.
That they would then recommend a vaccine
during these critical
windows of development
that contain mercury was just appalling.
- But Dr. Hooker, surely
flu shots containing mercury
have been tested for
safety in pregnant women.
- No flu shots have been tested
for safety in pregnant women.
- Is there any evidence that
they can harm an unborn child?
- Yes.
- And these vaccines are still recommended
for pregnant women?
- [Dr. Hooker] Yes.
(atmospheric music)
- Don't worry.
(birds whistling)
Then the CDC used taxpayer dollars
to commission a Danish study
of the autism-vaccine link.
- Danish?
Are they even on the same
vaccine schedule we are?
- No!
- The principal conclusion of that paper
was that there was no difference
in the incidence of autism
in those children who
received the MMR vaccine
versus those children who did not.
Now, this was done by
statistical sleight of hand.
The average age of an autism diagnosis
in Denmark at the time was
just over four years old.
The children who were unvaccinated
were followed up to an
average age of five years old,
and that captured that
average age of diagnosis.
However, if you look at those children
who did receive the MMR vaccine,
they were followed up
until they were three
and a half years of age.
They were followed up before
the average age of diagnosis
of autism in Denmark.
So you would expect that,
if you follow up children
for a longer time period,
then they're going to
have a greater likelihood
of having an autism diagnosis.
Fully 50% of the autism cases
in the MMR vaccinated, children
were not accounted for.
They were not followed
up to an adequate age
to diagnose them with autism.
So the study was trumped up.
- [Wife] And there were 22 charges
of wire fraud and money laundering.
- More disturbing information surfaces
regarding a medical researcher there.
Allegations have surfaced
that Poul Thorsen
stole millions of dollars from the agency,
and now his study that
attempted to disprove a link
between vaccines and autism
is being called into question.
- No surprise the State Department
hasn't extradited Thorsen
and put him on the witness stand.
(atmospheric music)
(gentle piano music)
(cawing)
- By 2007, the compensation
program was in crisis.
There were five and a half
thousand kids with autism alone
that had claims filed
against the government.
- And it would have been tens of thousands
had some of those claimants
not been shut out of the court
because of the shortest
statute of limitations
for children that exists in law,
which is three years
from onset of symptoms.
- Families filed in the
compensation program
under two theories:
that the measles, mumps,
rubella vaccine caused autism,
or that thimerosal-containing
vaccines caused autism,
- The government really
entirely couldn't stand that.
That could not stand,
the fact that autism was being
associated with vaccination
in the compensation program.
So what did they do?
- All of the damaged kids
were grouped together
into a combined legal action,
the government against the children.
- Of those 5,000 cases,
they chose six test cases.
Yates was the second test case.
Michelle Cedillo was the first test case.
- [Woman] She's 23 years old now,
and she's still is very ill
and requires a lot of care.
She was born normal and healthy,
and at 15 months old, she
received her MMR vaccination,
and then she regressed seven days later
with a fever and an encephalopathy,
and she became very ill,
lost much of her health
and a lot of your skills.
- Listening to this every day,
listening to the doctors and
the scientists and the parents,
the evidence was so compelling.
It was so much stronger
than the counterarguments
that there was no connection
between the vaccines and
autism, that I was hopeful.
- At least one person
listening to the evidence
at those proceedings was
persuaded to change his mind.
The day that I gave my oral testimony,
I was in the courtroom, and as I spoke,
I could see the other
people in the courtroom,
and I saw a gentleman with
his head in his hands,
and he kept looking down.
The worse it got from Michelle,
the more his head went down.
Later, I was informed
that that was Dr. Andrew Zimmerman.
- Dr. Andrew Zimmerman
is one of the top pediatric
neurologists in the country
in the field of autism.
He was an expert witness
for the government.
He originally wrote an
opinion for the government,
which stated that there
is no scientific basis
to believe that
themerosal-containing vaccines
or the MMR can cause autism.
The government used that opinion
as evidence to deny Michelle
Cedillo compensation.
The government also used
Dr. Zimmermann's opinion
to deny compensation to my son, Yates.
- When it came time for
the Department of Justice
to have their experts, there
was one person missing.
- Special master, I would
like to mention one thing
about an expert who did not
appear here, Dr. Zimmerman.
- They sacked their expert!
- Dr. Zimmerman has given
evidence on this issue,
and it did appear in the Cedillo case.
I just wanted to read briefly
what his views were on these theories.
"There is no scientific basis
"for a connection between
measles, mumps and rubella vaccine
"or mercury intoxication and autism."
- That was not his opinion!
Zimmerman had changed his mind!
- [Zimmerman] The
statement by Mr. Matanoski
regarding my expert opinion
was highly misleading.
- A respected pro-vaccine medical expert
used by the federal government
to debunk the vaccine-autism link
says vaccines can cause autism after all.
- So later in Yates's appeal hearing,
when the judge asked the DOJ lawyers
whether or not vaccines
can cause autism ...
- Sir, we're not even at the stage
where it's medically or
scientifically possible.
- And that wasn't true
just two weeks before!
- Vincent Matanoski and Lynn Ricciardella
signed the concession
agreement in the Poling case,
and it was based upon the opinions
of Dr. Zimmerman and Dr. Kelly.
- A $20 million concession
to just such a probability.
- That the Department of
Justice thought it was ethical
and proper to withhold that evidence
from the Omnibus Autism Proceeding,
from the special masters, from
the Court of Federal Claims,
from the Court of Appeals is unacceptable.
It's an obstruction of justice,
and it's a criminal offense.
- As an Assistant
District Attorney General,
if I did in a court of
law what the United States
Department of Justice
did, I would be disbarred,
and I would be facing criminal charges.
- Matanosky was promoted.
(chopping)
- Hey!
(chopping)
- The key to Zimmerman's change
of mine was a little girl
that he seen at John
Hopkins named Hannah Poling.
(atmospheric music)
She was a healthy toddler,
had a vocabulary of 30 words,
ahead on developmental milestones.
Typical story, at her 18-month checkup,
Hannah received nine vaccines all at once.
Immediately, it was high fever,
rash, inconsolable crying.
She started to lose speech,
stopped responding to her parents.
Eventually, she got a diagnosis of autism
and seizure disorder.
- Coincidence.
That's what they always say.
- But Hannah's wasn't just another story
that could be dismissed by doctors.
Her father, John poling, Dr. John Poling,
is a pediatric neurologist
and at the time was colleagues
with Dr. Zimmerman at Johns Hopkins.
- It happened to one of their own,
and they very intensely
studied this child.
And based upon the advances
in their understanding
of metabolically what happened to her,
they concluded that the
vaccines did cause autism.
- So this guy, Zimmerman,
is the government's expert,
and he was Hannah's doctor?
- Yes.
(somber music)
- What the American people do not realize
is that Hannah Poling's case
was to be the fourth test case
in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding.
- So-
- Rather than losing in public-
- The Department of
Justice secretly conceded
that vaccines can cause autism
and at the same time denied it in court.
- The government avoided
having to defend a case
that they might lose
and that could severely
disrupt the vaccine program.
So I believe it was a strategic
decision to concede that.
- [Wife] In his letter to
the Department of Justice,
Zimmerman describes how
an underlying problem
with the body's energy
factories, mitochondria,
might make a child
susceptible to vaccine injury.
- Mito what?
- Mitochondria.
They're like tiny batteries that power
every cell in the body.
They're abundant in tissues
with high energy demands, like the brain.
Zimmerman proposed that
depleting the vital energy
to brain cells by the
stress of vaccination
might lead to brain
damage in some children.
Lawyers for the Department of Justice,
quoted Zimmerman's theory verbatim
in their concession on Hannah Poling.
- A concession that was clearly
never meant to see the light of day.
- Clearly.
- In order for the government
to concede the Poling case and conceal it,
they can't just write a check
for millions of dollars.
Under federal statute,
they must prepare a confidential report
called a Rule 4(c) report.
The Polings filed a motion
for complete transparency.
The Polings wanted to help other people.
The United States government
absolutely stopped that.
- I leaked a court document,
a sealed court document.
And I would go to jail
to protect my source.
I was astounded by what I was reading.
I mean, it was a concession.
- And here in the leaked
concession, Zimmerman's very words.
- I thought there must be other cases
where the child developed
an encephalopathy
within the prescribed
time after vaccination
and then went on to
develop symptoms of autism,
so I asked HHS about that.
There were about 1,200 cases compensated
for either encephalopathy
or seizure disorders.
And in some of those cases,
the child also developed
symptoms of autism.
- [Woman] We have compensated cases
in which children exhibited
an encephalopathy.
Encephalopathy may be accompanied
by a medical progression
of an array of symptoms,
including autistic behavior,
autism, or seizures.
- The Department of
Health and Human Services
conceited that my
daughter's medical problems,
which are autism,
encephalopathy, seizures,
were brought on by vaccination.
- Yes, vaccines can cause encephalopathy,
encephalopathy can cause autism.
- So the law said, you prove it.
And the parents just did.
So the government made a concession
based on their own expert's opinion.
That is huge.
- The future of the entire
program in the balance.
And the Department of Justice's strategy?
To keep their medical expert
and Hannah Poling out of court,
her concession a secret.
- And they lied barefaced to the judges.
It wasn't enough.
- Well, listen to you!
(fire whooshing)
- Their problem, as I see it, with Hannah,
the government conceded a new
mechanism of vaccine injury,
but they have no idea how
many of the 5,000-plus
autistic kids waiting in the wings
have a similar mechanism,
a mitochondrial disorder.
- The government argues
that this is an extremely rare condition.
I don't believe that at all.
- I started interviewing medical
professionals, researchers
who work with mitochondrial dysfunction.
I discovered that
mitochondrial dysfunction
is much more common in
children with autism
than previously thought,
much more common in general
than previously thought.
- Richard Kelly, who ran the lab, he says
that up to half the children
who regress into autism
have mitochondrial dysfunction.
- Yates also has the same
mitochondrial disorder.
- So ...
the Department of Justice
had written a blank check.
- And they faced a public
relations nightmare.
Parents have claimed for years
that vaccines caused their kid's autism.
And despite public admissions,
the government now point blank denies it!
(knife clacks)
- It doesn't get any more mainstream
than the guy that the federal
government used to use
as their expert witness agreeing
with all the crazy parents.
(intriguing music)
- Babe.
Babe.
It seems like our friends
at the Department of Justice
still had one card left to play.
(grumbling)
(coffee maker gurgling)
Here.
- Somehow, over subsequent decisions,
the theory by which that child,
Hannah Poling, was
compensated was changed.
It went from an underlying
mitochondrial susceptibility
for a child that couldn't handle
the stress of vaccination.
- An off-table injury.
- Yeah.
- It became an MMR, post-MMR table injury,
which is a very different proposition.
- Hannah would have been the index case,
would have been the first
of an entire category,
dozens, hundreds, thousands of cases
that would be compensated.
- Okay, I'm sorry. Hang on.
Just so I'm clear, look.
Here, in the original concession,
and here, and here, and here,
four consecutive court documents,
all of them stating that Hannah's
was an off-table injury.
But then, all of a sudden
it's an on-table injury.
Not a new one, not one that
sets a legal precedent.
No, it's just regular
old vaccine brain damage,
and our Justice Department just did that.
(sighs)
- In the final decision
that awarded damages
to the Poling child,
there was no mention of
mitochondrial disease,
there was no mention of
mitochondrial susceptibility,
there was no mention of anything
related to what was in
the leaked document.
- Right at the time that
they awarded the $20 million.
- Yeah, and the Polings wanted
all of this made public.
- But the government said no.
- When does this become
extortion of vulnerable parents?
- For the masters to misrepresent
the Poling decision itself
as an off-table case and
therefore not precedent,
it is a devastating blow to
a whole category of cases
that are similar to Hannah Poling's.
- Some of us ...
brought other cases with children
who had diagnosed mitochondrial disorders,
picking up on and using the very theory
that the government had endorsed
in their leaked document.
- The cases were denied.
- I brought an argument
that because the government
had conceded that theory,
it should be barred from
saying vaccines can't do that.
- Motion denied.
- We raised that on appeal at
least once, and it was denied.
(ambient music)
This entire theory doesn't exist.
It was effectively eradicated
as if we were in a George
Orwellian type of environment
where the government controls the facts.
- It seems to me that the special masters
must have known what was going on.
- Collusion?
- Meanwhile, the test cases
and the thousands of other children
waiting in the Omnibus proceeding
were deliberately denied compensation.
- I was stunned and terribly disappointed
at the outcome of the
Omnibus Autism Proceeding.
And it was then that I realized
that something had gone
terribly, terribly awry.
- The kids are just doomed.
They're participating in a
program they just can't win,
and that's one of the things
that just breaks my heart
is that, knowing what we know now,
the children in the autism
proceeding never had a chance.
- I am utterly persuaded that,
had a jury heard the evidence
presented in the Omnibus
Autism Proceeding,
that jury unquestionably
would have decided
for the plaintiffs.
(emotional guitar music)
- Hooray, yay, now we've all lost!
We've lost in the kangaroo vaccine court.
We can now go to state and federal courts.
- A jury, regular court,
a judge, discovery,
everything that the vaccine
makers fought so hard to avoid,
scrutiny of what could, or
what should, have been avoided.
- It was one sentence in the Vaccine Act
was kind of the poison pill.
It said, if the vaccination
is unavoidably unsafe,
you cannot sue the
pharmaceutical industry.
- Yeah.
But now they get to see the
evidence, Hugo's discovery.
Don't they?
(ominous music)
- [Wife] On April 1st, 1992,
at the age of six and a half months,
Hannah Bruesewitz received her
third wholesale DTP vaccine.
- She had a cold at the time,
and in advance of her going in
Robbie called the physician to make sure
it was okay for her to bring her in.
And they said, "Fine, bring her in.
"We'll get this thing done."
So she did so.
And basically a couple
of hours afterwards,
she started to seize.
- Up until that day, everything
seemed absolutely fine.
Hannah had excellent health.
She was hitting all of her milestones.
- Timing wise, it happened two hours after
she had received the shots.
- 15 minutes after I'd put
her down for the night,
she screamed out.
I could tell that her lips
were starting to turn blue,
and I panicked at that time,
and I immediately called 911..
- From that day forward,
it was pretty evident that she
was having some difficulties,
and the frequency in which
she was having seizures
was pretty constant.
We were in and out of hospitals
for the next 18 months or so.
- As she was more and
more difficult to control,
we noticed that she was
losing some of her skills,
be it crawling, sitting, walking.
- I actually found out
about the vaccine injury
compensation program through the internet,
certainly not from any
physicians that we dealt with.
The day after I found out
was the last day that
we could file a claim.
What we ended up filing ultimately
was for the residual seizure
disorder that Hannah had.
(somber music)
- Donna Shalala, the Secretary of HHS
and the defendant in Hannah's case,
amended the vaccine injury table
midway through Hannah's case,
coincidentally removing seizure disorder.
- But Hannah's story
is so straightforward,
a perfectly healthy child suffers
a seizure on the very day.
- Within two hours.
- Within two hours being vaccinated
with a vaccine that causes seizures.
She's left permanently severely disabled,
and there is nothing else
that can explain those events.
- Except for more coincidence.
- So Hannah lost. Did they appeal?
- Her Lawyer, John Fabry,
filed a civil product
liability case in March of '07.
He argued that Hannah's
injury was avoidable.
Wyeth knew they could
have made a safer vaccine.
- And they've known this for years.
- Yeah.
- Fabry showed that Wyeth's
decision came down to money,
but it didn't matter.
- (sighs) What do you
mean, it didn't matter?
- Well the court ruled
that it was all irrelevant
because the act preempted-
- Prevented.
- Prevented the manufacturer's liability.
So they were free to ignore the fact
that they could make a safer vaccine.
- But it didn't.
- Hold on, 'cause Fabry went further.
He showed that Wyeth
deliberately prevented Hannah
from receiving a safer DTP vaccine.
Some batches of the DTP
vaccine were known as hot lots,
and they frequently
caused severe reaction.
- [Hugo] Batches or
production lots of the vaccine
were shipped out in bulk
and therefore they ended
up in the same places.
So if a vaccine lot
were hot and dangerous,
the adverse effects would occur
in the same place, at the same town,
same clinics in a geographical cluster.
- So for example, between
August of '78 and March of '79,
eight children in Tennessee died
shortly after receiving
the same DTP hot lot.
- [Hugo] Geographical clustering
of severe adverse events
could help rapidly identify
dangerous hot lots of vaccine,
preventing further harm,
even death to infants.
- Okay. So ...
Wyeth has a totally different strategy.
In August of 1979, Dr. Bernstein
came up with a strategy
for avoiding liability and for disguising
and masking the dangerous of the vaccine
that they were selling
at Wyeth Laboratories.
He chose a corporate fix,
and that was to shotgun
all of these doses across
the entire country,
across their entire distribution network.
Instead of sending one lot into Tennessee,
they would send smaller
amounts all over the country.
They would never be able
to detect a cluster,
because there'd be an isolated death
in maybe eight different states.
Deliberately dispersing
the dangerous vaccine
would allow them to escape the blame
and the financial liability for injury
and for the deaths that occurred.
Avoidable harm became inevitable.
- And this is relevant because?
- Because Hannah's was
potentially a hot lot.
- I called VAERS, and
they were able to tell me
about many side effects that some children
have had from the same lot.
I was appalled to hear that
a couple of children had died
and various other side effects,
but yet they were still giving out
this lot number of vaccine.
- In fact, her physician
had mentioned in court that,
had she known about the hot
lot element to the shot,
she never would have
given Hannah that shot.
- Hannah lost in district court.
- Did they appeal?
- Yes.
(emotional guitar music)
- But the appeal court
judges didn't seem to care
about Wyeth's deception, and they argued,
not unreasonably I suppose,
that lot sizes varied,
and until the size of the lot was known,
the true rate of reactions
couldn't be calculated.
- No. This completely misses the point.
Look, in order to do the calculation,
you would have to be alerted
to a potential hot lot in the first place.
Otherwise why bother doing the analysis?
- Okay.
- But since Wyeth deliberately
prevented the hot lot alarm
going off by dispersing the
vaccine, it wouldn't happen.
- Good point. But sadly,
none of it mattered.
The judges claimed to interpret
the intent of Congress.
- Wait, so the judges
decided it didn't matter.
- The vaccine act preempts design defects,
premised on the notion
that the manufacturers
could have made a safer vaccine.
(strikes piano keys)
- No, it doesn't.
Look, I read this whole
thing start to finish!
- Babe.
- It expressively leaves that matter
up to the judges to decide.
- Well, it seems that the judges
were really, really rooting
for the manufacturers.
- Even a single company
withdrawing from the market,
the litigation difficulties
that vaccine makers face,
concerns about vaccine shortages
and the return of
vaccine-preventable diseases.
- Blah, blah, blah. It just gets worse.
- Manufacturer's shall not be liable
for injuries caused by side
effects that are unavoidable,
except when the manufacturer
engages in conduct
that would subject it to punitive damages
under the vaccine act.
- The side effects were avoidable.
And by concealing hot lots,
Wyeth had engaged in contact
that would make it subject
to punitive damages.
- But Hannah lost.
- That leaves only one option.
(ominous music)
(curious percussive music)
- What was at stake in Bruesewitz
was compensation for a
generation of injured children
while at the same time
industry facing bankruptcy
from crippling tort litigation.
- Okay, okay, let's just ...
Let's just go back a minute.
What was he understanding?
What was everybody's
understanding of the act
when it was passed?
(curious music)
- Okay.
Congressman Waxman ...
(camera snaps)
He agreed that design defect litigation
was permitted under the act,
and he wrote the darn thing!
- Dennis Ross, Department of Treasury,
you know, the guys who
have to pay for it ...
in his congressional testimony,
he stressed the option
of filing a tort claim in regular court
if the plaintiffs found
the compensation program unsatisfactory.
- Here's the key. 1987.
Robert Johnson, President of Lederle,
urged Congress to make
major revisions to the act
to prevent his company's
liability in the tort system.
- And Williams, David Williams,
Connaught Laboratories,
predicts a devastating number of claims.
against U.S. manufacturers.
Get this.
On the basis that there were
other safer DTP vaccines.
They all knew that if the act passed,
injured kids would get their day in court.
- And then Wyeth pulled the same stunt
that it used back in 1986.
- [Wyeth] If we are liable,
we face a crushing wave
of tort litigation and bankruptcy.
There'll be no vaccines.
- A lot of people have the impression
that it's just a dog and pony show.
What can somebody tell me in half an hour
that's gonna make a difference?
- And they gestured towards me
and said that if these losers,
5,000 losers from vaccine court
were allowed access to
state and federal court,
that in essence, it would be a threat
to the nation's health and public welfare.
- Persuasive counsel
can make the difference.
- In 2011, writing for the
majority on the Supreme Court,
Justice Scalia found that injured children
have no right to bring a
claim for vaccine injury
for a defectively designed vaccine
to any court in the country.
- That majority opinion
was absolutely outrageous.
- The court's decision
has granted an immunity
to drug manufacturers not
afforded to any other industry.
- As the mother of a
vaccine injured child.
I found the Bruesewitz
its decision appalling.
- Our legal journey is over.
The final verdict has been rendered,
yet our daughter's
condition remains the same.
- [Barbara] Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg
and Sonia Sotomayor, they got it right.
- Vaccine manufacturers
have long been subject
to a legal duty rooted in basic principles
of products liability law
to improve the design of their vaccines
in light of advances in
science and technology.
Until today, that duty was enforceable
through a traditional
state law tort action
for defective design.
In holding that the National Childhood
Vaccine Injury Act of 1986
preempts all designed defects claims,
the Supreme Court imposes its
own bare policy preference
over the considered judgment of Congress.
Its decision leaves ...
(overlapping speech)
Because nothing in the text, structure,
or legislative history of the vaccine act
remotely suggests that Congress
intended such a result,
I dissent.
(somber music)
- And when that happened,
essentially the pharmaceutical
industry got a free pass.
- I think that poses a
grave risk to us all.
- I caused part of this.
I'm part of the reason for this.
I will tell you today, I
regret that to my soul.
(atmospheric string music)
(birds whistling)
- Adults, home-schoolers,
medical exemptions.
There after everyone!
Could it get any worse?
- Or better, depending
on your perspective.
- I think one of the poorly
understood dimensions
of the vaccine injury act
was that it transformed
the vaccine industry
in a corporate sense,
in a competitive sense,
and in a profitability sense,
- The vaccine industry at
the beginning of the 1980s
was a $270 million industry.
Today, it's $52 billion industry.
The WHO says that it will be
a $100 billion industry by 2025.
And all of that is
because of the gold rush
that was ignited when they passed VICA.
(somber guitar music)
- The way to determine whether a product
creates money for a firm
is to look at the stock market reaction.
Before the legislation, the
market reaction was zero.
After the legislation, the market reacted
very positively to the
licensing of a vaccine.
They started making a lot of money.
- What you have with this high-tech,
high-profit, patent-protected,
high-growth business
with mandated markets and no liability,
you have this profit machine.
But they're eager to add new vaccines,
to get new mandates, to expand the scope,
to globalize, to take these wonderful,
beautifully profitable
products and add to the list.
And their challenge, honestly, is growth,
because if they can't grow,
they're dead in the water.
(leaves rustling)
- Looks like they've
done pretty well so far.
- [Wife] Up from 24 vaccine
doses by age 18 in 86 to 72 now?
(emotional piano music)
- With this desire for growth,
you see these companies
filling up their R&D pipelines,
and they have dozens and
dozens by some counts
in the hundreds of vaccines
in the development pipeline.
The approval pipeline is the constraint.
The government agencies
that influence the policy
are the gatekeepers to the wealth
creation opportunity for these companies.
- The only stumbling block
to profitability is the regulator.
- The pharmaceutical industry
has captured the agencies
that are supposed to protect
Americans from dangerous drugs.
HHS, NIH, CDC, FDA have
all becomes sock puppets
for the industry that they're
supposed to be regulating.
- [Narrator] People think
the FDA is protecting them.
It isn't.
The FDA protects the big drug companies.
- You have the watchdogs, the
regulators, the investors,
everybody that surrounds the supply chain
of these new vaccines has
skin in the game, too,
and has a vested interest
in their success.
- One of the greatest
problems with de-litigation
is that it promotes riskier products.
A person is more likely to
experience a vaccine injury
than an injury from the disease
that the vaccine is supposed to protect.
- The only thing standing
between that greedy corporation
and that vulnerable little
child today are the parents,
and that's why we're seeing this.
drive by the pharmaceutical industry
in every state and all over the world
to eliminate vaccine exemptions
so that they will have
direct access to that market
in this country of 74 million children
without interference from their parents.
- Why don't we see any
of this on the news?
- [Boy] If they had
known there was a vaccine
to help protect me when I was 11 or 12.
Maybe my parents just didn't know.
- Right, mom?
Dad?
- [Narrator] What will you say?
Don't wait. Talk to your
child's doctor today.
- The pharmaceutical industry
was able to use its influence over FDA
to get FDA to waive the rule
that once prohibited
pharmaceutical companies
from doing direct-to-consumer
advertising of their products.
That loophole's given the
pharmaceutical industry
extraordinary control
over the American media.
The pharmaceutical
companies typically spend
around $9 billion a year on media buys.
- That box in your house is really
just a pharma advertising machine
that has some entertainment
to keep you attached while they feed you
this mantra that you
cannot live without pharma.
- The people that might be in place
to shine a light on
some of the corruption,
on some of the injury, on some
of the conflict of interest
that is endemic in the industry,
those people are running their programs
based on pharmaceutical ads.
- You can't report on American television
without making sure it's okay with pharma.
- [Woman] They control the present.
And who controls the present ...
controls the past.
(ominous music)
- Many of you are having
to switch over. right now
from Facebook to YouTube
or to our website,
because for some reason Facebook
is not letting our feed go live.
- Okay, leading us off is a controversy
surrounding Robert DeNiro.
The legendary actor,
responding to accusations of censorship
after he canceled the
premiere of a documentary
at his Tribeca Film Festival.
- I'm not 100% sure
that was the right thing to do ultimately.
- When that happened in Tribeca,
I think that it was really
a change of the age.
Not only did they censor the
film because they didn't ...
They had sponsors that didn't like it.
They censored a film
that the founding figure,
Robert DeNiro, came out and
supported three days earlier
and said, "I have an autistic child."
I mean, he put it all on the line,
and that didn't even stop them.
Robert DeNiro didn't even matter.
It was a really sad moment.
I think film changed that day.
That censorship at Tribeca
became the biggest,
media story in the world.
Twitter had just started this
new thing called Periscope,
where you could broadcast live
in a video on your cell phone.
We just immediately had this
body of live experience.
And then at the same time
that's happening, Facebook,
we find out that Facebook's
going to try and compete
with Periscope, and they're
gonna have a live video app.
And so then Paula's got two
cameras going in every interview
and we've got two cameras
going everywhere we go,
and our numbers are growing
by the tens of thousands,
people all around the world
watching what we were doing.
And we quickly designed a
weekly talk show on Facebook.
Let's step out onto the high wire.
We wanted the vaccine issue
to be in the mouths of the people.
It's the only way we were
ever gonna change this,
because the politicians
were already bought.
- Congress has been purchased
by the pharmaceutical companies.
This is an industry that
spends more on lobbying
than any other industry, double
the next largest lobbyist,
which is the oil and gas industry.
(fire crackling)
- I didn't think they
were going to go after
our First Amendment rights.
I figured they were smarter than that,
that they would know that that would start
a civil war if you did that.
But sure enough, we watched Adam Schiff
suddenly writes a letter
to Facebook and Instagram
and Twitter, saying you need
to stop these anti-vaxxers.
This politician thinks we
shouldn't have free speech.
(atmospheric string music)
(emotional guitar music)
- Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
has been an experiment in tort reform.
- I think it's been a highly
successful experiment.
- The 1986 compensation
program has been a success
for the tiny minority of
those who are injured.
- It was put in place for reasons
at the time that seemed plausible.
- [Rolf] One was to protect
the pharmaceutical industry.
That has succeeded beyond
the pharmaceutical industry's
wildest dreams.
The other was to protect
and compensate children.
That has absolutely failed miserably.
- The 1986 act is one of the most-
- Disastrous.
- Catastrophic pieces of public
policy ever put in place.
- Absolutely disasters.
- We have seen this enormous perversion
of the original intent.
- What has been done is tragic.
- The most protected industry
in the history of our country,
wreaking havoc on a
generation of children.
- The vaccine industry is the
only industry in the world
where the federal government
has had to take on
financial responsibility to dole out money
to injured people from that product!
- [Hazlehurst] If there is no liability,
there is no incentive for safety.
(dynamic theme music)
- Also gave into the gun
manufacturers, absolute immunity.
Imagine if I stood here and said
we give immunity to drug companies,
(curious music)
- [Hazlehurst] I think
the vaccine act of 1986
is the cause of the autism epidemic.
- I don't see how you can outright dismiss
10,000 virtually identical stories
from all of these mother
who saw what happened
to their child and just
say that never happened.
That's not science. That's misogyny.
(intriguing music)
- I guess most of you think that we know
what our vaccines are doing.
We don't. We don't.
- [Christopher Gill] Pertussis is back
because we didn't completely understand
how our immune defenses
against whooping cough worked.
We layered assumptions upon assumptions.
We may have made some crucial errors.
- Vaccines are very safe.
If someone gets sick after vaccination,
it is usually either a coincidence.
- That's what they always say.
- [Peter Aaby] The DTP
vaccine may kill more children
from other causes than it saves
from diptheria, tetanus, or pertussis.
- It's done more harm than good,
- [Reporter] The UCLA
study found more reaction
than had ever been seen before.
(baby wheezing)
- [Husband] What is Wyeth employee doing
interfering in a government study?
- [Wife] What really happened?
- [Fisher] It was the summer of 1982.
And I was concerned there was a link
between pertussis vaccine
and infant deaths classified as SIDS,
so I called a senior investigator
on the UCLA DPT safety study.
And he said to me,
"You're on the right track. Keep on going.
"But if you tell anyone I
said that, I will deny it."
- What really happened, Dr. Baraff?
(somber music)
Did anyone even consider these things
before they handed the industry
a get out of jail free card?
- It's gone rogue.
- Is this even a safe place
to have babies anymore?
(emotional string music)
(car beeping)
(dour guitar music)
(chattering)
- [Speaker] So please
welcome Barbara Loe Fisher.
(crowd cheering)
- We hold them in wonder just
moments after they're born.
We love them in a way we never
thought we could love anyone.
And they love and trust us
in a way that no one else ever will.
And there is no power on
earth greater than that love.
(crowd cheering)
We are here today to witness,
the suffering of children
who have no voice and have no choice
except the voice and choice that we,
their mothers and fathers, give to them.
(crowd cheering)
Many of us who made the
pilgrimage to be here
know the pain of watching a healthy child
die or regress after vaccination.
November 14, 1986 was an historic day.
We had been fighting for so long
to protect the act from industry greed
and government overreach
that we never saw the betrayal coming.
(crowd cheering)
We did not know that
the very same lawmakers
sponsoring the act were already working
behind the scenes to dismantle it.
(crowd cheering)
Today the National
Childhood Vaccine Injury Act
looks nothing ...
nothing like the one signed
into law in November 1986.
The biggest public health
emergency in America today
is not 1,200 cases of measles.
It is the one being covered up
by the government
agencies working overtime
with industry, medical
trade, and mainstream media
to distract, deceive, stonewall,
and restrict the freedom of Americans
to take back control of their health.
(crowd cheering)
If we do not get up off our knees,
tomorrow, we will not
be able to get on a bus,
a train or plane,
enter a store or sports arena,
obtain a driver's license or passport,
file our taxes or function in society
without getting every
vaccine that industry creates
and the government orders us to get.
(crowd cheering)
(inspiring orchestral music)
When the state considers
one of us to be expendable,
then we are all considered expendable.
We will not be silent.
We will not go away.
(crowd cheering)
We will never give up!
(crowd cheering)
We are the daughters and sons of liberty!
(crowd cheering)
And our mission continues.
No forced vaccination! Not in America!
(crowd cheering)
(screaming)
- [Doctor] It's a boy.
(gentle guitar music)
(chattering)
- Well, I looked at data and information.
I have performed the study
that the CDC did not want to perform.
I have compared health outcomes
in vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
The health outcomes that we studied
included developmental delays, asthma,
ear infection, and
gastrointestinal issues.
I studied approximately 2,000 children,
of whom 31% were unvaccinated
by one year of age,
and I compare those with the remaining 69%
who had been vaccinated.
It clearly demonstrates
that vaccinated children
had worse health outcomes
compared to unvaccinated children.
The children that got the most vaccines
and got vaccinated earlier
were at the greatest risk
for all of these adverse health outcomes.
And this demands further study.
(emotional guitar music)
- [Reporter] The Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention
is confirming the first case
of human-to-human transmission
in the United States of
the novel coronavirus.
They do still believe
that the immediate risk
to the American public is low.
- For the world at large,
normalcy only returns
when we've largely vaccinated
the entire global population,
There will be some risk
and indemnification needed.
- I never thought I'd
see anything like this.
It's a science fiction nightmare.
It's Kafkaesque. It's Orwellian.
There are not enough words
that you can throw at it
to capture the horror of what's happening.
This is a bomb that is being
dropped on our society,
on human civilization, on our economy,
on our culture, on our democracy,
on everything that we value,
by the vaccine industry.
(peeing)
(sighs)
(music plays on radio)
(phone ringing)
(phone ringing)
(music turns off)
- We're gonna have a baby.
(cheerful guitar music)
(camera snaps)
(giggling)
Just when we were about to give up.
(kissing)
(giggling)
(emotional organ music)
(wailing)
(speaking indistinctly)
- You're all right, you're all right.
Yeah, we're gonna go see the doctor.
(bright guitar music)
- He's a happy, healthy,
normal child, typical child
reached all his developmental
milestones on time.
(chattering)
Right before his first
birthday, he was walking,
he was talking, eye contact, interaction,
all that good stuff.
(baby giggling)
He did have symptoms consistent with a
severe adverse reaction
at six months to the DTP, and
it's in the medical records:
Parents voiced questions, concerns
regarding shaking episodes,
entire body trembles.
After he had those
reactions at six months,
he should not have been vaccinated again.
(crickets chirping)
(cheerful guitar music)
(glass clinking)
- Marty asked what we're
gonna do about vaccination.
- (chuckles) That's a no-brainer.
- What do you mean?
- Babies need their shots.
- And what about me?
- What do you mean?
- They vaccinate pregnant women too.
- That doesn't seem right.
- You still think it's a no-brainer.
- He was a bright, precocious baby,
the most precocious of my
three babies, actually,
saying words at seven months,
speaking in full sentences
by the age of two.
My personal reason for doing
this work for the last 36 years
is that my son, my firstborn,
suffered a convulsion, collapse shock,
and state of unconsciousness
within hours of his fourth DPT shot
at two and a half years old.
(atmospheric music)
I didn't understand what
I was witnessing that day.
I didn't understand he was
having a brain inflammation.
He was eventually diagnosed
with multiple learning disabilities,
attention deficit disorder so severe
that he had to be put in a
special education classroom
for 12 years.
When I saw the TV documentary
DPT Vaccine Roulette
in the spring of 1982, I
was absolutely stunned.
I saw descriptions of
pertussis vaccine reactions
that exactly matched the symptoms
that I saw my son suffer that day.
I called the station and I asked
to be put in touch with other parents.
And we co-founded the
organization that's known today
as the National Vaccine
Information Center.
(ambient music)
I wanted to investigate
pertussis and pertussis vaccine.
I was insatiably curious about why
a government policy required
children to get this vaccine,
why this kind of vaccine would
be recommended and mandated.
It never crossed my mind that a vaccine
that was supposed to keep
healthy children healthy
would ever in a million years
be able to brain damage or kill them.
The doctors had been talking to each other
in the medical journals
for more than 50 years
about how pertussis vaccine
could cause brain damage and death,
but they had never bothered
to tell mothers like me
who were trusting that a pediatrician
would never do something to a child
that would hurt that child.
- Why would I need a hepatitis B vaccine?
That's the order.
So I was like, okay, if I do my job,
I get the hepatitis B vaccine,
and got it, and almost lost my life to it.
To cut a long story short,
turned out I had a full-blown
autoimmune disease,
I developed Graves' Disease,
but there was also massive
damage to my nervous system.
I couldn't walk anymore. I
really struggled to talk.
I don't think I slept, I mean
for weeks and weeks and weeks
while I was pregnant.
I'd just read and read and research
and research and research.
- He was taken in for an ear infection,
and he'd been sick for two weeks.
The doctor wrote him the
maximum dosage of penicillin.
As he's getting up out of the chair,
he's says it's time for his vaccinations.
"Are you sure he should
get these vaccinations
"when he's sick and he's
getting penicillin?"
And that was the fatal day.
And after that point, he
begins to regress into autism.
(soft guitar music)
(anxious music)
- That was the fatal day.
- [Fisher] It never crossed my mind.
- [Hazlehurst] After he had
those reactions at six months,
he should not have been vaccinated again.
- [Husband] (chuckling)
That's a no-brainer.
(boy crying)
- A vaccine that was supposed to keep
healthy children healthy
would ever be able to damage or kill them.
(baby crying)
I was insatiably curious.
Insatiably curious.
- I don't think I slept.
I mean, for weeks and weeks
and weeks while I was pregnant,
I'd just read and read and research
and research and research.
(birds calling)
(sprinkler clacking)
(soft piano music)
- No, babe, I don't believe it.
You are getting yourself
all worked up over nothing.
What about polio, for God's sake?
- Legitimately question vaccine safety.
In 2002, when my son was
first diagnosed with autism
and I first heard the theory
that vaccines cause autism,
I didn't believe it.
I had a lot to learn.
(tapping finger)
- We met with congressmen up on the Hill
and said, "This is wrong.
"This vaccine needs to
be taken off the market.
"There needs to be a safer
version of this vaccine.
"Why are these vaccines being mandated?"
- I don't know.
I mean, I think it's
a reasonable question.
What about ...
- Polio?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, you asked me about polio.
You gotta go back a long way
to answer that one, 1955.
To this guy, Dr. Julius Youngner,
co-inventor of the
inactivated polio vaccine.
- Yeah, the one that protected
us when we were kids, right?
- Mm-hm.
- Having met some of the
world's great vaccinologists,
I must say I have great
admiration for Julius Youngner,
who I thought it was a very simple,
sincere and brilliant man.
Youngner had developed
three important technologies
for assuring the safety of
the inactivated polio vaccine.
He began to hear that the Cutter
Laboratories in California
were failing on all of these levels,
and so he went himself to the Cutter Labs
and he was completely shocked
at the shoddy level of production.
And he told Jonas Salk that the Cutter Lab
was absolutely a risk
to paralyze children with their vaccine,
and he called for them to shut it down.
And Youngner wrote a letter
to the Cutter's lab to that
effect, a very strong letter,
Jonas Salk ...
told Youngner, "Yes,
you're absolutely right.
"It's terrible what's
happening in Oakland,
"but you shouldn't send the
letter, because I'm better known
"as the head of the entire operation here.
"I'll send the letter."
- And?
- Salk never sent the letter.
- And Youngner wasn't the only one
worried about that vaccine.
- In particular, Bernice Eddy
at the National Institutes of Health,
who had charge of testing monkeys,
injecting them with the product
of six different laboratories
that had been chosen
to mass produce the Salk-Youngner
inactivated polio vaccine
began to find that very sloppy methods
were resulting in highly
virulent viral particles
in the shots that were being
administered to her monkeys,
and the monkeys were becoming paralyzed
at an extraordinarily high rate.
She sent her data to her superiors,
and her superiors ignore them.
She then took photographs
of the paralyzed monkeys,
terribly wrenching photographs,
and they ignored that as well.
- In fact, over 200,000 American children
were administered a
defective polio vaccine.
Approximately 40,000
children contracted polio,
200 were paralyzed, and 10 died.
It turns out that Cutter knew
that many of them vaccines were defective.
- The manmade polio epidemic.
- And something I never considered?
Vaccinated children can spread polio.
- This caused a polio epidemic
amongst the families and communities
where the children received
a defective vaccine.
- Of those who came in contact
with vaccinated children,
113 were paralyzed, and five died.
- It came as a stunning reversal
of public perception, of media support,
and it caused a profound panic
at the Centers for Disease Control,
at the National Institutes of Health.
Imagine if you are a
polio vaccine developer
or expert at the national academies,
and you get a call at
midnight on April 26, 1955,
and you are summoned to a secret meeting
to decide whether or not
you suspend this miraculous vaccine.
And there was bitter disagreement
about whether or not the vaccine
had caused these injuries,
and they quickly determined it was.
- [Wife] That's when the
White House stepped in.
- They halted all polio
vaccines for several months
and they withdrew the Cutter vaccine
totally from the market.
They also lied.
They had also found that
two other manufacturers
had live polio virus in their vaccines,
but it was decided, apparently
at a very high level,
possibly even by the President himself,
that that should not be
revealed to the public.
- Because?
- Because it was thought
that that would permanently
damage public faith in vaccines,
and it had become very important
for American foreign policy
as well as domestic policy
that people have faith in vaccines.
And we know that from documents
that were declassified
in the last year of the
Obama Administration,
showing that the Central
Intelligence Agency
had decided by 1954 that vaccine programs
could be a way to enhance
American influence
throughout the world
and also to keep up American
technology in bio weapons.
- Wow.
Spooks. (chuckles)
It's a whole new ball game.
See you later, babe.
(soft guitar music)
- The pressure that was put
on these newly created virologist,
vaccinologist superstars
altered their judgment
and caused them to commit what, actually,
some call it a quote,
unquote horrendous crime.
- [Parasidis] 40,000
children contracted polio,
200 were paralyzed, and 10 died.
(birds whistling)
(music playing on radio)
- Good.
The client wants his extension extended
and the transmission on the
truck is acting up, but ...
yep.
- Babe, vaccine injury
is real, always was.
And there's another side:
over 4 billion paid out by
our government for damages.
- Well, protection comes at a cost.
- What about the victims?
- Wait, did you just say
that the government paid out?
(intriguing guitar music)
(cork pops)
(wine pouring)
- Cutter was a real turning point.
It went before a jury,
the Gottsdanker case.
Cutter's argued that injured children
should not be compensated.
Liability would stifle vaccine innovation.
- Not innovation of safer vaccines.
Surely they would be encouraged
by the threat of litigation.
- From a legal perspective,
many of the injured
plaintiffs and their families
had an extremely difficult time
seeking redress through the courts.
- Is anyone surprised?
Apparently vaccines have become
a bargaining chip in U.S. foreign policy.
(gentle guitar music)
- So by this time, there
was also a competition
between the United States,
the Soviet union and its allies
in being the world's most
generous supplier of vaccines.
- This guy doesn't seem like a whack job.
- And the problems with the polio vaccine
didn't end with Cutter.
Check this.
- when Bernice Eddy made a second,
and even more fundamentally
important discovery
in the early 1960s that
all the polio vaccines
were all contaminated with simian viruses,
and that one of those viruses,
called simian virus 40,
was particularly dangerous and virulent
and a very high percentage of the mice
and other laboratory
animals that she injected
with this simian virus 40
rapidly developed tumors.
This indicated to her
that this was an extraordinarily dangerous
cancer-causing virus.
= Between 1955 and '63,
over 98 million Americans
were administered polio vaccines,
widely contaminated with
this cancer-causing virus.
- By the early 1960s,
as the U.S. government
began to identify itself,
not just at home, but abroad
with eradication of all disease,
there was even more pressure
on government agencies
to give good news about vaccines
and about disease eradication programs.
We were going to create the health utopia.
(scoffs)
- A utopia that meant
not troubling Joe Public
with concerns about vaccine safety!
- It had become a national
political priority
to promote vaccines and to
squelch bad news about vaccines,
and that was everywhere, and
it involved every vaccine.
(atmospheric string music)
- Remember the swine flu scare of 1976?
- This virus was the cause of
a pandemic in 1918 and 1919
that resulted in over
half a million deaths
in the United States,
as well as 20 million
deaths around the world.
(chopping)
(wine pouring)
(remote clicks)
(chatter on TV)
(remote clicks)
- Hey!
- Real quick, real quick.
January, 1976, Fort Dix, New Jersey,
Army Private David Lewis reports sick,
ignored medical advice to rest
and ended up dying a few days later.
Cultures from his throat
swab grew a influenza virus
that the CDC had down as
some killer swine flu.
- Yeah, like that Spanish flu
that killed a bunch of
people way back when.
Hey, come on!
- The game is more important?
Like I'm painting the nursery pink or ...
polka dots or something?
- Okay, okay.
- No!
- Okay.
- No!
This is not halftime entertainment!
We've got work to do!
(chopping)
(wine pouring)
After three more cases
popped up at Fort Dix,
the CDC recommended a vaccination program
targeting 95% of the U.S. population.
- [Reporter] That vaccine was called X53A.
- [Interviewer] Was
X53A ever field tested?
- I ...
I can't say. I would have to ...
- [Interviewer] It wasn't.
- The vaccine was rushed to market
with little attention paid to safety,
except for the insurance companies
that were asked to underwrite it.
- And they said no?
- Uh, yeah.
And then the vaccine
makers took the position
that if the government wanted the vaccine,
then they should take on the liability.
- Let me guess. Congress said no.
- Production stopped,
and companies refused to
release vaccine stocks.
Then get this ...
(parade music)
July, 1976, Legionnaires returning home
from their annual conference in Philly
started dropping dead.
It took the CDC six months to
identify the bug responsible.
- Legionnaires' disease.
- Mm-hm. Yeah.
Meanwhile, a nervous public
feared it was the deadly swine flu.
- Within 10 days of the
Legionnaires' outbreak,
Congress succumbed to industry's
demand for indemnification,
and the government assumed
full responsibility
for all injuries that might result
from the swine flu vaccine.
- No liability in a free market,
that just doesn't sound right.
(somber music)
- [Wife] President Ford signed
the Swine Flu Act into law.
- Few things motivate
politicians like a plague.
- The unmistakable subliminal message
from the manufacturers.
- There's something
wrong with this vaccine.
- Experts had determined
that the Fort Dix virus
was not the same as
the killer flu of 1918.
- So the CDC got it wrong?
- Babe, there was no swine flu epidemic.
And other than the four cases at Fort Dix,
there was no swine flu, period.
And that vaccine hurt a lot of people.
By mid-October, 1976, dozens had died
shortly after vaccination,
and many were disabled
by a paralyzing disease.
- Did you know ahead
of time, Dr. Hattwick,
that there had been case reports
of neurological disorders,
neurological illness
apparently associated with the injection
of influenza vaccine.
- Absolutely.
- [Interviewer] You did?
- Yes.
- Did anyone ever come to you and say,
"You know something, fellas,
"there's the possibility
of neurological damage
"if you get into a mass
immunization program"?
- No.
- [Interviewer] No one ever did?
- No.
- Your superiores say
that you never told them
about the possibility of
neurological complications.
- That's nonsense.
I can't believe that they would
say that they did not know
that there were neurological illnesses
associated with influenza vaccination.
That simply is not true.
- By December, the disastrous
swine flu program was pulled.
Benefits?
There was the benefits!
- At least not to the public.
- 532 cases of paralysis, 58 deaths.
- A wave of lawsuits followed.
Thousands of administrative claims
were brought against the U.S. government
via the indemnification program.
- And it cost the taxpayers
over $220 million.
- They knew that fear
was a great motivator.
- And it set a precedent for the industry
to get immunity from product liability.
- So I guess there were winners.
(owl hooting)
(atmospheric string music)
(birds whistling)
- My first case was
the Massachusetts case.
He was born totally normal,
no complications at birth.
He made all of his motor milestones
until after his second DTP shot.
He developed a seizure disorder
after going through a period
of high-pitched screaming.
And the mother described it
as somebody was tearing his skin off.
Dealing with the family
and seeing what they had gone through
and seeing the denial of the doctors,
as a young attorney, just
coming out of law school,
I went after this as my cause.
(gentle music)
- This national publicity about the fact
that DPT vaccine could
cause injury and death
was causing a lot of
anxiety up on Capitol Hill.
The vaccine manufacturers
and the medical trade associations,
like the American Academy of
Pediatrics were panicking.
The argument that the companies made
and the medical trade made was
that government licenses
childhood vaccines.
They recommend for universal
use childhood vaccines
and the states mandate childhood vaccines.
Therefore, the companies and the doctors
should have no liability.
The government should
assume all liability.
And so what this whole
liability protection issue
is as a result of government mandates.
- [Doctor] The doctor knows
that this is mandated by regulation.
- [Interviewer] So he
has no has no choice?
- So he has no choice.
And indeed, the parent has no choice.
- [Reporter] Kids can't go to
school without their shots.
(emotional instrumental music)
(owl hooting)
- Wait a minute.
- What?
- There are legal mandates
for child safety seats,
but nobody argues that the government
should assume the manufacturer's
liability for those.
(soft guitar music)
- Huh.
- The manufacturers had
a more compelling reason.
They were afraid of
going into a courtroom.
And that's the biggest fear
that any product manufacturer
has in this country,
getting caught doing something wrong
and being punished for it.
In the early days of the
litigation, we were able to ...
get a favorable result for ...
I would say pretty much 100% of the people
that we represented.
'Cause they always seem to settle the case
at the same juncture of
litigation of the discovery.
That told me a story as an attorney.
It told me that, if they're
willing to pay on these cases,
there's something that I
still don't know about.
Discovery is where we get access
to all of the documents that they have,
and we can determine for
ourselves what they knew,
when they knew it, and
what they did about it.
- So I guess the real question is,
was the DTP vaccine unavoidably unsafe?
I mean, if the companies
had done their best,
they had a strong case.
- Yeah, but if not ...
if they knew they could make
it safer and chose not to,
then a jury trial would be disastrous.
- True.
I mean, look what's happening
to Monsanto right now.
(grim music)
- [Mike] As we fought for more documents,
they would settle the cases very quickly.
- Most of these lawsuits would be settled
on the courthouse steps by the companies
before they got to a jury trial.
And as a condition of
doing that settlement,
all the court records were
sealed from public view.
So what the manufacturers
knew, when they knew it,
and what they did about
it remained a secret?
- [Mike] That all seemed to have changed
in a New Jersey case.
We were fighting over the documents.
Lederle at the time was contesting that.
They fought tooth and nail
against giving them to us.
We had to go back for three
separate motions to compel.
The judge gave them a
very short time span,
a couple of days to produce the documents.
(ethereal string music)
(paper printing)
(troubling music)
- Wow.
Concerns about brain damage
from the original pertussis
vaccine date back to the 1930s.
Even 50 years later, they
admitted what they knew
about the basic biology
of pertussis was abysmal.
- People would be outraged
if they really knew
how much they don't know about
what vaccines do in the body,
how much they're covering up
about what vaccines do in the body.
- I mean, it's no wonder
they've tried to hide this
from Hugo's law fir.
Internal memo from 1962,
written by Dr. Christensen of Lederle.
- [Wife] It's obvious that
severe neurologic reactions
have occurred in children
after pertussis vaccines,
which have passed toxicity
tests currently in use.
- [Reporter] 42 years had gone
by between the first warning
and the time the US government decided
to commission its first study.
It was done by Dr. Larry Baraff
of the UCLA medical center.
- Because the Food and Drug Administration
was concerned that this
sort of public panic
might spread to the United States,
they wanted to document that
the vaccine was in fact safe
and not associated with
severe consequences.
- After millions of doses
had already been given,
someone finally did a safety study.
Baraff's going to
measure adverse reactions
to 15,000 DTP shots, but only
1,500 doses into the study,
he gets a surprise visit
from Wyeth's Dr. Deitch.
- What ...
What is a Wyeth employee doing
interfering in a government study?
- Deitch's secret report on that meeting:
"Baraff feels that the reaction rate
"for currently marketed DTP
vaccine is unacceptable.
"Far from the expected incidence
"of one in 15,000 immunizations,
"there have been one in
300 generalized seizures
"and two collapse shock.
Serious reaction rate: one in 214 doses.
- [Reporter] The UCLA
study found more reaction
than had ever been seen before.
- So what happened?
- Nothing! Nothing happened!
- [Husband] Babe, something did happen.
At this stage, when an
unacceptably high rate
of serious adverse reactions
had been identified
in the first big safety
study of DTP vaccine,
Baraff presented his alarming findings
to the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA should have immediately
suspended the DTP vaccine.
That would have happened for any regular
pharmaceutical product in this situation.
But something very different happened.
Following the surprising visit
from Wyeth's Dr. Deitch
on September 6th, 1978,
unaccountably, the rate
of seizures in the study
fell from one in 300 doses
of DTP to one in 3,563 doses.
Rates of collapse shock fell similarly.
Babe, the odds of this happening by chance
are greater than 1,000 to one against.
These new results were
used to bolster confidence
in the safety of DTP and reassure doctors
that the benefits of whole
cell pertussis vaccine
far outweigh the risks.
And for what was soon to come,
these results were used
to persuade Congress
that the vaccine makers had
made the pertussis vaccine
just as safe as possible.
- How's the truck? Did
they fix the transmission?
(spans fingers)
Knock on wood car insurance?
sounds like vaccine policy to me.
- Maybe they just couldn't
come up with a safer vaccine.
- [Wife] They actually started to study
whether they could
break the bacteria open.
Do you need the whole cell
or are there certain parts
of the cell that give immunizations?
Conversely, is there part of the cell
that is dangerous and can cause harm?
The makers discovered that,
if they could separate
the bacteria's beneficial
and dangerous parts, they
could make a safer vaccine,
a so-called acellular pertussis vaccine.
- [Husband] So when did they know that?
- 1963.
Eli Lilly had a safer
version of the DTP vaccine.
- [Doctor] Trisolgen is accompanied
by a much lower incidence
of systemic reactions.
that is observed with DPT
containing whole cell pertussis vaccine.
(crickets chirping)
- So why did nothing change?
Why did an ...
avoidably unsafe DTP vaccine
continue to be injected
into millions of children every year?
(birds whistling)
(sprinkler clacking)
(typing)
- The fact is we may have had
a safer shot a long time ago.
(dynamic theme music)
- We have had the capability
to make a safer vaccine.
The manufacturers have chosen
not to for economic reasons.
They want immunity from lawsuits.
They don't want to lose
the third world market
because these vaccines
cost pennies to produce.
- In Japan, they've been using
a safe acellular vaccine since 1981.
- So why not here?
- Vaccine manufacturers met again in 1982.
- Connaught's Dr. Stainer acknowledged
that they could make a
much less toxic product,
but it was gonna cost more.
- Dr. Schuh, Connaught Laboratories,
made the North American manufacturers'
priorities very clear.
- [Dr. Schuh] I would like
to make a short comment
on the issue of compromising
between the price and the purity,
because I'm from a company
that produces vaccines,
so we are of course, very interested.
First of all, with the price.
- The reason they didn't
pursue the safer vaccine
came down to I'd like to
say dollars and cents,
but I can't, I'd like to
say cents, but I can't.
(coin jangling)
I'd have to say less than a
cent per dose to make it safer.
And they were unwilling to
cut into their profit margin.
- So 1963 was the earliest
they knew they could make a safer vaccine?
- No, it wasn't.
Lederle filed a patent
on an acellular vaccine
of toxicity in 1937.
- Are you kidding me?
60 years before the safer
vaccine was actually licensed?
So what did they do with this patent?
(phone ringing)
- [Hugo] I can't answer.
I don't think anybody other than
the folks at Lederle can tell you
what was going on in their evil minds.
They knew they could make it safer,
but they didn't want to spend the money.
What we had at that point
was so damning to them.
It was a path of years and years and years
of deceiving the regulators,
lying to the doctors.
That was what they were running from.
- Okay, well, thank you for your time.
(upbeat guitar music)
(giggling)
- I think your transmissions
working just fine.
- (laughs) I love you!
They were clearly sweating.
Since that documentary,
litigation against Lederle
alone was up over 400%.
What was the corporate
response to Vaccine Roulette?
(shuffling papers)
- Memo to all company employees.
- [Narrator] The present
DTP vaccine is the safest
that medical science can now provide.
There is no evidence
that there is or ever was
a vaccine with fewer severe reactions.
- Liar!
- And then there's this.
(toaster popping)
The Pinto Memo.
- Pinto?
- Yeah, in 1970, Ford Motor
Company introduced the Pinto.
It was a small car with a big problem.
(cars colliding)
(explosion)
- [Hugo] If the car was rear
ended, the bumper assembly
would crash into the gas
tank, and it would explode.
- Ford was accused of causing
up to 900 burn deaths,
because they were unwilling to spend
just $11 per vehicle for a safer gas tank.
- 11 bucks?
(emotional guitar music)
(typing)
This is an internal risk-benefit analysis.
Recall and fix the problem, $137 million.
Leave the car a fire risk and
pay off deaths and injuries,
just short of $50 million.
Board made a business decision.
- [Hugo] And then their memo
ended up in front of a jury.
That's when Ford got sanctioned big time
by punitive damages.
The behavior of the vaccine
manufacturers is identical.
When the judge ordered them
to produce those documents,
(gavel bangs)
it was like almost divine provenance.
They dumped 80 something
boxes of documents on us
one afternoon, just before a weekend.
And I looked at this completely
filled up conference room,
and I reached out and
grabbed a random box,
opened it up, and I pulled out a document.
I found the Pinto Memo for vaccines.
If we kill kids, it's gonna
cost us a half a million bucks.
If we don't kill kids,
it's going to cost us a million bucks.
Here's how much we have
to price our vaccine at.
(emotional guitar music)
- I mean, it does acknowledge
that the public had been kept in the dark
about problems with the vaccine.
Beyond that, it's just
another risk-benefit analysis.
Do we stay in the market
or not? Three options.
- Was the safer vaccine one of them?
- Nope.
Get out of the market altogether;
business as usual but
aggressively hike up the price
to cover legal costs;
or seek liability
protection from Congress.
(scoffs) Get out of the market? Right!
Apparently, to a jury,
that would appear like
an admission of guilt.
Until Hugo's discovery,
the preferred option
was to stay in business
and hike up the price by 6000%.
- That's aggressive.
- But with this, once it got in the hands
of Hugo and his colleagues ...
- [Hugo] They never let us
see the light of a courtroom
once we got this full set
of discovery from them.
- That's when the third option ....
- Federal liability protection.
- That became the industry's lifeline,
which they couldn't leverage
once they'd shown they
could make a safer vaccine.
So they dressed it up as
something very different.
- And they would tell the public,
they would tell the judges,
they would tell their
congressmen and their senators.
- You need to protect us
from vaccine injury lawsuits.
- We can't make it safer,
so you have to do something for us.
- If you don't protect us,
we're gonna leave this country
with no pertussis vaccine.
- One of the biggest intimidation tactics
I've ever seen a company
do in this country.
- A blackmail of Congress.
- Corporate misbehavior,
the profits over people
and profits over safety.
The effects have been devastating
for hundreds and hundreds of thousands,
if not millions, of parents.
(emotional guitar music)
(atmospheric string music)
- Congress decided they were
going to create legislation
that was going to protect
the vaccine supply and contain costs.
They came to us and said,
"You can come to the
table, and you can argue
"for what you think the
children should get,
"but we are going to pass legislation
"to protect the vaccine
supply in this country."
We knew that the companies
had to have a duty to make
vaccines less harmful.
We fought as hard as we could
for six years to try to hold back
three of the most powerful
entities in society:
government, medical trade, and
the pharmaceutical industry
from completely removing all liability
for vaccine injuries and deaths.
- Group called Dissatisfied
Parents Together, DPT.
And they called and they asked me,
"Is there any way that the
Trial Lawyers Association
"would get behind a bill that
is essentially tort reform?
I thought about it for
maybe 18 and a half seconds.
And I said, "It's a good deal.
"It's a good deal because
it's good for the people.
"It's not good for the lawyers,
"It's terrible for the lawyers.
"It's horrible precedent,
but it's necessary
"because we're talking about
brain damaged children."
A dollar today is worth so much more
than a dollar six years down the line.
- It's safe to say that if a tort lawyer
could go after the pharmaceutical industry
the way they should be able
to, for all this damage,
it would be a multi-trillion
dollar settlement.
It would most definitely bankrupt
the entire pharmaceutical industry.
I think it's gonna put our
country under extreme challenge.
- Henry Waxman and his
coauthors on the bill
were determined to get the act passed
despite pushback all the
way up to the White House.
And they weren't alone,
but they weren't cutting it very close.
- With only days to go before
the congressional recess,
The Bill's passage was up in the air,
with the White House declaring plans
to veto the entire omnibus package
due almost exclusively to the provisions
in the National Childhood
Vaccine Injury Act.
- October 20th, 1986, Los Angeles Times.
Waxman made it personal.
- [Waxman] If the
president vetoes the bill,
he will leave these children
to fend for themselves
and leave the country with risks
or shortages or skyrocketing prices.
If he vetoes it, I hope he
has some emergency plans
to start making vaccines himself.
- "Because the manufacturers tell us
"they may very well stop."
- Just like swine flu, same playbook.
- Well, now we know the real reason.
(atmospheric music)
(cameras snapping)
(ambient instrumental music)
- [Moody] With the passage of The Act,
the '90s opened up an entirely
new era for vaccination.
- The National Childhood
Vaccine Injury Act
had three purposes: first to compensate
infants and children who'd
been injured by their vaccines;
second, to give some level
of liability protection to industry;
and third, to make vaccines safer.
- With the act, Congress
guaranteed children
injured by vaccines compensation
that would be swift,
efficient and generous,
while at the same time giving industry
a measure of protection from
traditional tort liability
for vaccines that both
Congress and the courts
have found to be unavoidably unsafe.
- So the threat remained.
I mean, despite the cushion
of the compensation program
between vaccine makers and hostile jury,
the lie that the DTP vaccine
was unavoidably unsafe
hadn't gone away.
- No, not completely.
- Here's the first case,
Manley vs. Health and Human Services.
It went to trial in the
new vaccine court in 1989.
- So not really a court, babe.
- We don't apply the
rules of evidence that ...
directly.
- No judge, no jury,
no right to discovery.
- Our hearings are all
closed to the public.
- A special master
appointed by the defendant,
our government?
- Actually the program got
off to a promising start.
- It was such a relief to be
able to have this program.
We were so shell-shocked and so bruised
from six years of litigation in each case,
when I tried the Manley case,
which was the first case
ever tried in the program,
it worked, it worked.
We had a death case that the
child was diagnosed with SIDS.
And it wasn't wasn't SIDS because
there were certain things:
the child was screaming, crying for hours
before she went to bed,
and she had a high fever,
and the mother put the
child down to bed that night
and the child never woke up.
Within months of filing
it in the vaccine program,
we were done, they were
paid, and it was a slam dunk.
It was a complete slam dunk.
(birds whistling)
- [Wife] Not everybody
was happy about the act.
- Like who?
- Officials at Health and Human
Services, HHS, were furious.
- They opposed the law to the bitter end.
They did not want the National Childhood
Vaccine Injury Act passed
- To compensate children
would have sent the
what CDC and the other
powers that be at the time
viewed was the wrong message:
in fact, vaccines are dangerous.
- The position of the Department
of Health and Human Services
has been that there is not as yet evidence
that such a system is needed.
- They didn't want to have
the children compensated,
because every time a child is compensated,
it means vaccines can do that.
(somber music)
- In fact, Congress rubs
salt in the CDC's wounds
by creating this.
- [Husband] Vaccine injury table.
- A list of recognized vaccine injuries.
Under the new law,
these were entitled to
automatic compensation.
- There will be a presumption of causation
in the absence of a more
biologically plausible explanation
for the child's injury or death.
- Where there was doubt,
Congress wanted those
children to be compensated.
- So if you have a particular vaccine
and the specified injury-
- [Wife] Within a specific time period ...
(slot machine whirring)
- [Husband] Causation is presumed?
- Yeah.
In court, you didn't
have to argue an injury
that was on the table.
The discussion was only about
the level of compensation.
But if your child's injury
was not on the table,
then it was off table.
- Meaning?
- For these particular
vaccine injury claims
the government places the burden of proof,
the burden of causation
on the injured person.
In most instances, this creates
a nearly insurmountable burden
for these injured parties.
- You had guidelines on the table.
We had signs and symptoms
of encephalopathy on there.
- Encephalopathy: any
diffuse disease of the brain
that alters brain function or structure.
- Encephalopathy, brain inflammation,
encephalitis has always been
one of the most serious
complications of vaccination.
Almost all of the vaccines
that are recommended
for children today can cause brain damage.
We had signs and symptoms
of seizures on there,
collapse shock, high-pitched screaming,
which is also known as
the encephalitic cry.
The doctors were furious,
because they wanted complete
liability protection,
and they didn't get it in that law.
- Do you think doctors are
warning patients about the risks?
- No.
- For the first time, doctors
would have to give parents
written information about
vaccine risks and disease risks.
The doctors would have to write down
in the permanent medical record
the vaccine's name, manufacturer's name,
and the lot number of each vaccine given.
Doctors were required to
report vaccine adverse events
to a federal Vaccine Adverse
Event Reporting System.
- What about the vaccine manufacturers?
(gentle guitar music)
- The vaccine manufacturers were furious
that they were not given
complete liability protection.
They did not get protection
on the duty to make a
vaccine less harmful.
- Meaning avoidable injury.
- Yeah.
- [Fisher] We fought to
make sure that that law
did not eliminate all liability.
- And the Congressman who
wrote the bill agreed.
- [Congressman] If an injury
is the result of a bad vaccine
or one inadequately researched,
or warned of that the courts
can still making an award.
- Worst of all for the
program and the government,
injured children started
getting compensated
in large numbers.
- It started out as so successful.
I remember our first year, 92%
of the cases got compensated.
The vaccine program started
to cost a lot of money,
and then bad things started to happen.
(somber music)
- The law, as it was originally passed
was a very different law than it is today.
- In the early '90s in
the wake of the '86 act,
the vaccine schedule
ramped up dramatically,
and there were more and
more vaccine injuries,
and the name given to
that injury was autism.
- [Announcer] Please welcome Mark Blaxill.
(group applauding)
- As the autism toll
passes a million children
and the cost sores to a trillion dollars,
there is a really pernicious
idea that is taking hold
that there is simply no autism epidemic.
The rate of autism in the world
before Kanner and Asperger
first noticed children like
this was effectively zero.
So multiple surveys, all
showing sharp increases
with an inflection point around 1990.
One in 36 ...
measured one way, one in
59 measured another way.
Now one in 33.
(erupting sound)
- How had these cases of autism
been adjudicated in the
compensation program?
- In the early years of the program,
autism was being compensated.
We saw those cases in Alder,
Sorenson, Friedman, Banks.
- Lassiter, Underwood,
encephalopathy autism compensated.
And up through '96, '97,
'98, about 95% of the cases
were table cases,
including dozens and dozens
of regressive encephalopathy
diagnosed as autism.
In the first order, the Judge said,
"We've always compensated
these autism cases
"as table cases."
- Automatically entitled to compensation.
- What we found when we were
able to contact the families
is that about half of the families
where the child had a
diagnosis of seizure disorder
or encephalopathy, the
child also had autism.
It was such a tidal wave,
because it represented
such a threat to the vaccine program
that it would have to compensate
millions of individuals for a lifetime.
(wave crashing)
- From the very beginning,
the program was corrupted
with the intent, the studied
intent of denying children
the compensation Congress intended.
- Of course, there's the obvious way
to avoid paying out compensation;
Just don't tell anybody about the program
in the first place, right?
- The secretary of HHS has mandated
via statute of the program
to conduct public awareness campaigns,
yet they refuse.
If we promote the program,
people will not vaccinate.
- [Woman] Who calls the shots?
- [Protestors] Parents call the shots!
I did not file, because
I didn't have access
to the right information.
I didn't know my rights.
- And then to place a strict limit
on the amount of time
parents had to file a claim.
- Normally a medical injury to a child,
the child has until age 18
or 21 to file their claims,
so setting that at 36
months or three years
was a deliberate effort to
short change these children.
- Like many families,
by the time I had gotten access
to the right information,
we were past the statute of limitations.
(crickets chirping)
(somber music)
(owl hooting)
(birds whistling)
- HHS took a more radical
approach to limiting payouts.
They took the table and simply
deleted serious injuries
that had been entitled to
automatic compensation.
- There was a systematic gutting
of the safety provisions and
the compensation provisions
at the hands of the Department
of Health and Human Services.
(somber music)
(mouse clicking)
- So 1996, the autism
epidemic has taken off.
- Yeah, and the government's
liability with it.
- Mm-hm.
Donna Shalala, Secretary of HHS
and the defendant in vaccine court
took a red pen to the
vaccine injury table.
- Wait, so that's like the
criminal getting to decide
whether or not they committed the crime.
- Mm-hm.
- [Fisher] Oh, we don't
need seizures on there.
We don't need collapse
shock. Take those off.
- [Moody] Take regressive encephalopathy,
take residual seizure
disorder off the table,
thereby making it much harder for a child
to receive compensation,
as Congress found in their investigation.
- The definition of encephalo-
- Encephalopathy.
- Mm-hm.
Was changed to one that
you will never find
in any medical textbook.
- So injured children no longer qualified.
- Mm-mm.
- Congress wanted to make sure
that all of the kids who were injured,
because no product can
be made perfectly safe,
all of the injuries that were unavoidable
would nevertheless get compensation.
- Shalala turned that on its head.
- [Fisher] Where that scientific research
is incomplete or nonexistent,
the secretary believes
it would be inappropriate
and inconsistent with her
statutory responsibility
to revise the table to establish
a presumption that a relationship exists.
- Wait, what exactly?
- She should've done the science first!
- Yeah!
Except that the autism tsunami
was threatening to bankrupt
her entire program.
- Because of CDCs desire
to protect the meme
that vaccines are perfectly safe,
the children were thrown
into the netherworld
of proving off-table causation,
while at the same time CDC denied them
the science necessary to do so.
- But the act required science
to develop a safer vaccine.
I mean, who could argue with that?
- Well, not even you, apparently.
(bright guitar music)
- When Congress passed the Vaccine Act,
they knew that they were
removing from the manufacturers
any incentive to make vaccines safe,
so they took that responsibility
and they put it firmly in the lap
of the Department of
Health and Human Services.
- Congress required a
mandate for safer vaccines,
that the secretary undertake
a variety of research projects
to reduce the amount
of injury to children.
- One of the key requirements of the act
was that HHS monitor vaccine safety
and make a report on it
every two years to Congress.
In 2018, we sued HHS under the
Freedom of Information Law,
and they were unable to produce
a single one of those reports.
- The only way you're really going to know
how much damage vaccines are causing
is to look at people who've
received the vaccines,
people who haven't received the vaccines,
look at vaccinated children
versus unvaccinated children.
- That is done for every other
medical product or device.
In 2009, we actually had $16 million
set aside in the budget for
research to do this study,
and CDC was so angry
at the risk as opposed
to the vaccine program
that at the next meeting
of this research committee,
they brought it up again
in an illegal revote
and took away the money.
The director of this committee,
Tom Insel, head of the National
Institute of Mental Health,
even said in a shocking admission
that we can't do this study
because we have a conflict of interest
that it might help the children
win their cases in vaccine court.
- They won't do it.
They will not compare
the health of children
who are not getting vaccinated
against the health of children
who are receiving all the vaccines
according to the federal schedule.
This is too risky for them ...
because if it turns out that the children
who don't receive vaccines
are much healthier.
the entire program is put into question.
(audience applauding)
- We don't know how many children
are dying or being brain damaged
because we don't have a
reaction reporting system
that will give us those figures.
- [Interviewer] Do you think doctors
are reporting reactions?
- No.
- There's something very wrong here
when we're mandating a vaccine
And we don't even know how many
children are being injured.
- Parents forced HHS to set up a system
to monitor vaccine side effects.
It was called ...
It was, um ...
- The Vaccine Adverse
Events Reporting System
was an attempt to systematize
the capturing of actual
vaccine injury events.
But the system is wildly imperfect
to the point of almost being useless.
Because of a Harvard Pilgrim
healthcare study that was done,
we know two really important things.
The first thing we know
is that less than 1%
of vaccine injuries are actually reported.
Of the people vaccinated,
2.6% had some sort of vaccine injury.
That's not one in a million;
that's 2.6% of the
people who got vaccines.
And so the lead researcher
of Harvard Pilgrim
actually complained
because CDC went silent
after they reported
their results and wrote,
"Unfortunately, the necessary CDC contacts
"were no longer available
"and the CDC consultants
responsible for receiving data
"were no longer responsive
to our multiple requests
"to proceed with testing and evaluation."
- A three-year study produced results
so potentially devastating for the CDC
because the adverse event
rate was so much higher
than anything the CDC could
share with the public.
And so the program was shut down.
(emotional guitar music)
(owl hooting)
(birds whistling)
- Look at this.
And this.
- Well, let's go to the source.
- Parents were reporting regression
of their children into autism,
following MMR vaccination,
but it was a minority of children.
So why some and not others?
In 2000, I shared with CDC scientists
my groups theory that it was
age of MMR vaccine exposure;
the younger you got the vaccine,
the greater the autism risk.
And to their credit, they
went back to Atlanta,
and they tested the hypothesis
that younger age of MMR vaccination
was associated with an
increased risk of autism.
- And found no link.
- There's something I
think you should see.
(dramatic music)
- [Man] My phone rings, and
it's Dr. William Thompson.
- [Dr. Thompson] You and I
don't know each other very well.
You have a son with autism,
and I have great shame now.
The whistleblower from the
CDC, who's going to come out
and say that the CDC had
committed fraud on the MMR study
and that they knew that vaccines
were actually causing autism.
(bright guitar music)
- Two findings were buried
on that fateful day in September, 2002.
The first was what we call
the African American effect.
The second effect was a group of children
who received the MMR vaccination on time
and then regressed into autism.
- [Moody] DeStefano and colleagues
did find a strong signal
of autism causation in these two groups,
which was, of course, unacceptable to CDC.
- Dr. Thompson tried to warn
the Director of the CDC at the time
because he knew he was
publishing fraudulent data.
Not only was he replaced,
in the 2004 Institute of Medicine meeting
by his supervisor, Dr. Frank DeStefano,
who proceeded to show the fraudulent data,
but he was threatened with firing,
and he was told to seek psychiatric help
because of his moment of clarity.
A real whistleblower protected
by whistleblower status
inside the CDC telling us
we're committing scientific fraud in here.
That same pharmaceutical industry
that lies to you all the
time and puts out products
and gets sued and paid
out billions of dollars,
yeah, same thing happens with vaccines,
and we're doing that too.
- After the whistleblower story
broke in August of 2014 ...
Dr. Thompson got cold feet,
and he set about to debunk my results
with a colleague, a
statistician friend of his
from the University of Pennsylvania,
and they reanalyzed the data
that I received from the CDC,
basically to show that my
numbers were an anomaly,
that they were not correct,
and they got exactly the
same result as I did.
They could not make the effect go away.
They chose not to
publish that information.
By withholding that information,
they're doubly committing fraud.
(thunder rumbling)
(crickets chirping)
- They could, at the very
least, delay the MMR.
- What? Admit there's a problem?
(gentle guitar music)
(birds chirping)
- When I started looking at
the science, and it happened
because I sat on the Board
of Health for our county,
and we received a memo
that we were pushing back
our hepatitis B vaccine from
birth to six months of age,
due to concerns about
mercury in the vaccine.
The symptoms of mercury toxicity
were identical to what happened to my son,
the loss of speech, the
loss of eye contact,
the peripheral neuropathy,
the shaking of the hands.
Everything that he went
through was almost identical.
- I first heard about
a possible connection
between vaccine and autism
when I was researching a
story for Elle Magazine.
They wanted me to run
an article about autism,
and I heard about a mom in California.
I knew it was on the increase
and I asked her why she thought that was,
and she said, "Well, many people think
"it's the mercury in the vaccines."
And I kinda dismissed it at the time.
I said, "How could there
be mercury in vaccines?
"And if there is, it must
be such a minuscule amount
"that it couldn't be harmful."
- That's when I started researching
my son's exposure levels
and found out that at two months of age
his exposure levels were 125 times
EPA's allowable exposure levels.
(booming)
(crowd applauding)
- About four months later, the
Homeland Security Bill passed
and in the middle of the night,
someone had slipped a writer
anonymously into that Bill,
basically exonerating Eli
Lilly from any civil liability
in vaccine cases over thimerosal.
And a lot of bells went off in my head,
and I remembered that mom in California.
She wasn't crazy. There
is mercury in vaccines.
Somebody's worried about.
- And one of the first
things we started doing
was filling out Freedom of
Information Act request,
or FOIA requests, on all
of our federal agencies,
the FDA, the CDC, to find out
if they were looking into this
and what they were doing about it.
And one document in particular
was by an FDA employee
who was talking about their
vulnerability on this issue,
behind the scenes, saying
that they had not done
the eighth grade math to add
up these cumulative exposures.
We came across documents where
the CDC national immunization program
was actually doing research on thimerosal.
(ominous music)
On the study, the name Thomas
Verstraeten was listed,
and so I went down to CDC
and asked him about his investigation.
He explained how, when they
first started doing it,
they made some changes
to the entrance criteria
because they were studying vaccines
and they wanted to make sure the children
that they were studying had
actually been vaccinated.
- Hey, hey.
So you realized that by
leaving out the unvaxxed kids,
they totally missed the crucial comparison
between vaxxed versus unvaxxed,
those who got mercury
and those who didn't.
Anyway, all right. Later, babe.
(mysterious music)
(paper shuffling)
- So they had done the crucial vaccinated
versus unvaccinated comparison.
Wait a minute.
- This analysis became
known as generation zero.
- [Wife] So the first runs of their data
contained children who had not received
any exposure at all to thimerasol,
and they were comparing those to children
who had received high exposures.
The relative risk for ADD,
ADHD, speech and language delay,
neurodevelopmental delays in general
and autism were incredibly elevated.
(ambient music)
Based upon the Verstraeten
generation zero study,
just a single dose of thimerosal
containing Hepatitis B vaccine
raised the risk of autism
more than sevenfold.
- In a court of law, anything
above a relative risk of two
applies cause and effect,
so they were really worried about this.
When you get up into the
range of eight, nine, 10,
that's what we saw with tobacco science.
And this was-
- Wait, wait a minute!
- So, clearly, definitely, unequivocally,
you have studied a
vaccinated vs unvaccinated?
- Oh, we have not studied
vaccinated versus unvaccinated.
- She lied!
- Stop there. That was the
meaning of my question.
You've wasted two minutes of my time.
- They brought in the
vaccine manufacturers
and they brought in people
from FDA and NIH and CDC,
and they discussed essentially
how they were going to handle this data.
(delicate guitar music)
- What they had done
was deliberately removed
the unvaccinated controls,
and therefore they brought the risk down.
- You look at your findings,
and you don't like 'em,
and then you go back and
alter your entrance criteria.
You can't do that.
- I saw that one, and my jaw dropped.
- Do not vary the protocol
once you see their results
and don't like the results.
- There was just manipulation
after manipulation
after manipulation.
It was definitely scientific fraud.
- Clear example of scientific fraud.
- Dr. John Clemens from the
World Health Organization
made a comment to the
effect, I'm paraphrasing,
but this is the study that
never should have been done,
because we already knew what
the outcome was gonna be.
And that's a pretty shocking statement
for a scientist to make.
- Some of the people within
these federal agencies
wanted to come clean
with the American public
and let them know what happened.
But then these other
voices of, quote, reason,
the experts from CDC
and some of the people
within the American Academy of Pediatrics,
felt as though that was too dangerous.
They knew that if this came
out to the American public,
that it would decrease their credibility.
So instead, they did everything they could
to hide this concern and put more children
at risk for decades.
- Well, at least they got mercury
out of childhood vaccines, right?
- Little did we know that, as thimerosal
was being phased out of the
early infant vaccine schedule,
that CDC was working
on new recommendations
that pregnant women, infants and children
receive flu vaccines.
The flu vaccines that were available,
over 90% contained thimerosal.
That they would then recommend a vaccine
during these critical
windows of development
that contain mercury was just appalling.
- But Dr. Hooker, surely
flu shots containing mercury
have been tested for
safety in pregnant women.
- No flu shots have been tested
for safety in pregnant women.
- Is there any evidence that
they can harm an unborn child?
- Yes.
- And these vaccines are still recommended
for pregnant women?
- [Dr. Hooker] Yes.
(atmospheric music)
- Don't worry.
(birds whistling)
Then the CDC used taxpayer dollars
to commission a Danish study
of the autism-vaccine link.
- Danish?
Are they even on the same
vaccine schedule we are?
- No!
- The principal conclusion of that paper
was that there was no difference
in the incidence of autism
in those children who
received the MMR vaccine
versus those children who did not.
Now, this was done by
statistical sleight of hand.
The average age of an autism diagnosis
in Denmark at the time was
just over four years old.
The children who were unvaccinated
were followed up to an
average age of five years old,
and that captured that
average age of diagnosis.
However, if you look at those children
who did receive the MMR vaccine,
they were followed up
until they were three
and a half years of age.
They were followed up before
the average age of diagnosis
of autism in Denmark.
So you would expect that,
if you follow up children
for a longer time period,
then they're going to
have a greater likelihood
of having an autism diagnosis.
Fully 50% of the autism cases
in the MMR vaccinated, children
were not accounted for.
They were not followed
up to an adequate age
to diagnose them with autism.
So the study was trumped up.
- [Wife] And there were 22 charges
of wire fraud and money laundering.
- More disturbing information surfaces
regarding a medical researcher there.
Allegations have surfaced
that Poul Thorsen
stole millions of dollars from the agency,
and now his study that
attempted to disprove a link
between vaccines and autism
is being called into question.
- No surprise the State Department
hasn't extradited Thorsen
and put him on the witness stand.
(atmospheric music)
(gentle piano music)
(cawing)
- By 2007, the compensation
program was in crisis.
There were five and a half
thousand kids with autism alone
that had claims filed
against the government.
- And it would have been tens of thousands
had some of those claimants
not been shut out of the court
because of the shortest
statute of limitations
for children that exists in law,
which is three years
from onset of symptoms.
- Families filed in the
compensation program
under two theories:
that the measles, mumps,
rubella vaccine caused autism,
or that thimerosal-containing
vaccines caused autism,
- The government really
entirely couldn't stand that.
That could not stand,
the fact that autism was being
associated with vaccination
in the compensation program.
So what did they do?
- All of the damaged kids
were grouped together
into a combined legal action,
the government against the children.
- Of those 5,000 cases,
they chose six test cases.
Yates was the second test case.
Michelle Cedillo was the first test case.
- [Woman] She's 23 years old now,
and she's still is very ill
and requires a lot of care.
She was born normal and healthy,
and at 15 months old, she
received her MMR vaccination,
and then she regressed seven days later
with a fever and an encephalopathy,
and she became very ill,
lost much of her health
and a lot of your skills.
- Listening to this every day,
listening to the doctors and
the scientists and the parents,
the evidence was so compelling.
It was so much stronger
than the counterarguments
that there was no connection
between the vaccines and
autism, that I was hopeful.
- At least one person
listening to the evidence
at those proceedings was
persuaded to change his mind.
The day that I gave my oral testimony,
I was in the courtroom, and as I spoke,
I could see the other
people in the courtroom,
and I saw a gentleman with
his head in his hands,
and he kept looking down.
The worse it got from Michelle,
the more his head went down.
Later, I was informed
that that was Dr. Andrew Zimmerman.
- Dr. Andrew Zimmerman
is one of the top pediatric
neurologists in the country
in the field of autism.
He was an expert witness
for the government.
He originally wrote an
opinion for the government,
which stated that there
is no scientific basis
to believe that
themerosal-containing vaccines
or the MMR can cause autism.
The government used that opinion
as evidence to deny Michelle
Cedillo compensation.
The government also used
Dr. Zimmermann's opinion
to deny compensation to my son, Yates.
- When it came time for
the Department of Justice
to have their experts, there
was one person missing.
- Special master, I would
like to mention one thing
about an expert who did not
appear here, Dr. Zimmerman.
- They sacked their expert!
- Dr. Zimmerman has given
evidence on this issue,
and it did appear in the Cedillo case.
I just wanted to read briefly
what his views were on these theories.
"There is no scientific basis
"for a connection between
measles, mumps and rubella vaccine
"or mercury intoxication and autism."
- That was not his opinion!
Zimmerman had changed his mind!
- [Zimmerman] The
statement by Mr. Matanoski
regarding my expert opinion
was highly misleading.
- A respected pro-vaccine medical expert
used by the federal government
to debunk the vaccine-autism link
says vaccines can cause autism after all.
- So later in Yates's appeal hearing,
when the judge asked the DOJ lawyers
whether or not vaccines
can cause autism ...
- Sir, we're not even at the stage
where it's medically or
scientifically possible.
- And that wasn't true
just two weeks before!
- Vincent Matanoski and Lynn Ricciardella
signed the concession
agreement in the Poling case,
and it was based upon the opinions
of Dr. Zimmerman and Dr. Kelly.
- A $20 million concession
to just such a probability.
- That the Department of
Justice thought it was ethical
and proper to withhold that evidence
from the Omnibus Autism Proceeding,
from the special masters, from
the Court of Federal Claims,
from the Court of Appeals is unacceptable.
It's an obstruction of justice,
and it's a criminal offense.
- As an Assistant
District Attorney General,
if I did in a court of
law what the United States
Department of Justice
did, I would be disbarred,
and I would be facing criminal charges.
- Matanosky was promoted.
(chopping)
- Hey!
(chopping)
- The key to Zimmerman's change
of mine was a little girl
that he seen at John
Hopkins named Hannah Poling.
(atmospheric music)
She was a healthy toddler,
had a vocabulary of 30 words,
ahead on developmental milestones.
Typical story, at her 18-month checkup,
Hannah received nine vaccines all at once.
Immediately, it was high fever,
rash, inconsolable crying.
She started to lose speech,
stopped responding to her parents.
Eventually, she got a diagnosis of autism
and seizure disorder.
- Coincidence.
That's what they always say.
- But Hannah's wasn't just another story
that could be dismissed by doctors.
Her father, John poling, Dr. John Poling,
is a pediatric neurologist
and at the time was colleagues
with Dr. Zimmerman at Johns Hopkins.
- It happened to one of their own,
and they very intensely
studied this child.
And based upon the advances
in their understanding
of metabolically what happened to her,
they concluded that the
vaccines did cause autism.
- So this guy, Zimmerman,
is the government's expert,
and he was Hannah's doctor?
- Yes.
(somber music)
- What the American people do not realize
is that Hannah Poling's case
was to be the fourth test case
in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding.
- So-
- Rather than losing in public-
- The Department of
Justice secretly conceded
that vaccines can cause autism
and at the same time denied it in court.
- The government avoided
having to defend a case
that they might lose
and that could severely
disrupt the vaccine program.
So I believe it was a strategic
decision to concede that.
- [Wife] In his letter to
the Department of Justice,
Zimmerman describes how
an underlying problem
with the body's energy
factories, mitochondria,
might make a child
susceptible to vaccine injury.
- Mito what?
- Mitochondria.
They're like tiny batteries that power
every cell in the body.
They're abundant in tissues
with high energy demands, like the brain.
Zimmerman proposed that
depleting the vital energy
to brain cells by the
stress of vaccination
might lead to brain
damage in some children.
Lawyers for the Department of Justice,
quoted Zimmerman's theory verbatim
in their concession on Hannah Poling.
- A concession that was clearly
never meant to see the light of day.
- Clearly.
- In order for the government
to concede the Poling case and conceal it,
they can't just write a check
for millions of dollars.
Under federal statute,
they must prepare a confidential report
called a Rule 4(c) report.
The Polings filed a motion
for complete transparency.
The Polings wanted to help other people.
The United States government
absolutely stopped that.
- I leaked a court document,
a sealed court document.
And I would go to jail
to protect my source.
I was astounded by what I was reading.
I mean, it was a concession.
- And here in the leaked
concession, Zimmerman's very words.
- I thought there must be other cases
where the child developed
an encephalopathy
within the prescribed
time after vaccination
and then went on to
develop symptoms of autism,
so I asked HHS about that.
There were about 1,200 cases compensated
for either encephalopathy
or seizure disorders.
And in some of those cases,
the child also developed
symptoms of autism.
- [Woman] We have compensated cases
in which children exhibited
an encephalopathy.
Encephalopathy may be accompanied
by a medical progression
of an array of symptoms,
including autistic behavior,
autism, or seizures.
- The Department of
Health and Human Services
conceited that my
daughter's medical problems,
which are autism,
encephalopathy, seizures,
were brought on by vaccination.
- Yes, vaccines can cause encephalopathy,
encephalopathy can cause autism.
- So the law said, you prove it.
And the parents just did.
So the government made a concession
based on their own expert's opinion.
That is huge.
- The future of the entire
program in the balance.
And the Department of Justice's strategy?
To keep their medical expert
and Hannah Poling out of court,
her concession a secret.
- And they lied barefaced to the judges.
It wasn't enough.
- Well, listen to you!
(fire whooshing)
- Their problem, as I see it, with Hannah,
the government conceded a new
mechanism of vaccine injury,
but they have no idea how
many of the 5,000-plus
autistic kids waiting in the wings
have a similar mechanism,
a mitochondrial disorder.
- The government argues
that this is an extremely rare condition.
I don't believe that at all.
- I started interviewing medical
professionals, researchers
who work with mitochondrial dysfunction.
I discovered that
mitochondrial dysfunction
is much more common in
children with autism
than previously thought,
much more common in general
than previously thought.
- Richard Kelly, who ran the lab, he says
that up to half the children
who regress into autism
have mitochondrial dysfunction.
- Yates also has the same
mitochondrial disorder.
- So ...
the Department of Justice
had written a blank check.
- And they faced a public
relations nightmare.
Parents have claimed for years
that vaccines caused their kid's autism.
And despite public admissions,
the government now point blank denies it!
(knife clacks)
- It doesn't get any more mainstream
than the guy that the federal
government used to use
as their expert witness agreeing
with all the crazy parents.
(intriguing music)
- Babe.
Babe.
It seems like our friends
at the Department of Justice
still had one card left to play.
(grumbling)
(coffee maker gurgling)
Here.
- Somehow, over subsequent decisions,
the theory by which that child,
Hannah Poling, was
compensated was changed.
It went from an underlying
mitochondrial susceptibility
for a child that couldn't handle
the stress of vaccination.
- An off-table injury.
- Yeah.
- It became an MMR, post-MMR table injury,
which is a very different proposition.
- Hannah would have been the index case,
would have been the first
of an entire category,
dozens, hundreds, thousands of cases
that would be compensated.
- Okay, I'm sorry. Hang on.
Just so I'm clear, look.
Here, in the original concession,
and here, and here, and here,
four consecutive court documents,
all of them stating that Hannah's
was an off-table injury.
But then, all of a sudden
it's an on-table injury.
Not a new one, not one that
sets a legal precedent.
No, it's just regular
old vaccine brain damage,
and our Justice Department just did that.
(sighs)
- In the final decision
that awarded damages
to the Poling child,
there was no mention of
mitochondrial disease,
there was no mention of
mitochondrial susceptibility,
there was no mention of anything
related to what was in
the leaked document.
- Right at the time that
they awarded the $20 million.
- Yeah, and the Polings wanted
all of this made public.
- But the government said no.
- When does this become
extortion of vulnerable parents?
- For the masters to misrepresent
the Poling decision itself
as an off-table case and
therefore not precedent,
it is a devastating blow to
a whole category of cases
that are similar to Hannah Poling's.
- Some of us ...
brought other cases with children
who had diagnosed mitochondrial disorders,
picking up on and using the very theory
that the government had endorsed
in their leaked document.
- The cases were denied.
- I brought an argument
that because the government
had conceded that theory,
it should be barred from
saying vaccines can't do that.
- Motion denied.
- We raised that on appeal at
least once, and it was denied.
(ambient music)
This entire theory doesn't exist.
It was effectively eradicated
as if we were in a George
Orwellian type of environment
where the government controls the facts.
- It seems to me that the special masters
must have known what was going on.
- Collusion?
- Meanwhile, the test cases
and the thousands of other children
waiting in the Omnibus proceeding
were deliberately denied compensation.
- I was stunned and terribly disappointed
at the outcome of the
Omnibus Autism Proceeding.
And it was then that I realized
that something had gone
terribly, terribly awry.
- The kids are just doomed.
They're participating in a
program they just can't win,
and that's one of the things
that just breaks my heart
is that, knowing what we know now,
the children in the autism
proceeding never had a chance.
- I am utterly persuaded that,
had a jury heard the evidence
presented in the Omnibus
Autism Proceeding,
that jury unquestionably
would have decided
for the plaintiffs.
(emotional guitar music)
- Hooray, yay, now we've all lost!
We've lost in the kangaroo vaccine court.
We can now go to state and federal courts.
- A jury, regular court,
a judge, discovery,
everything that the vaccine
makers fought so hard to avoid,
scrutiny of what could, or
what should, have been avoided.
- It was one sentence in the Vaccine Act
was kind of the poison pill.
It said, if the vaccination
is unavoidably unsafe,
you cannot sue the
pharmaceutical industry.
- Yeah.
But now they get to see the
evidence, Hugo's discovery.
Don't they?
(ominous music)
- [Wife] On April 1st, 1992,
at the age of six and a half months,
Hannah Bruesewitz received her
third wholesale DTP vaccine.
- She had a cold at the time,
and in advance of her going in
Robbie called the physician to make sure
it was okay for her to bring her in.
And they said, "Fine, bring her in.
"We'll get this thing done."
So she did so.
And basically a couple
of hours afterwards,
she started to seize.
- Up until that day, everything
seemed absolutely fine.
Hannah had excellent health.
She was hitting all of her milestones.
- Timing wise, it happened two hours after
she had received the shots.
- 15 minutes after I'd put
her down for the night,
she screamed out.
I could tell that her lips
were starting to turn blue,
and I panicked at that time,
and I immediately called 911..
- From that day forward,
it was pretty evident that she
was having some difficulties,
and the frequency in which
she was having seizures
was pretty constant.
We were in and out of hospitals
for the next 18 months or so.
- As she was more and
more difficult to control,
we noticed that she was
losing some of her skills,
be it crawling, sitting, walking.
- I actually found out
about the vaccine injury
compensation program through the internet,
certainly not from any
physicians that we dealt with.
The day after I found out
was the last day that
we could file a claim.
What we ended up filing ultimately
was for the residual seizure
disorder that Hannah had.
(somber music)
- Donna Shalala, the Secretary of HHS
and the defendant in Hannah's case,
amended the vaccine injury table
midway through Hannah's case,
coincidentally removing seizure disorder.
- But Hannah's story
is so straightforward,
a perfectly healthy child suffers
a seizure on the very day.
- Within two hours.
- Within two hours being vaccinated
with a vaccine that causes seizures.
She's left permanently severely disabled,
and there is nothing else
that can explain those events.
- Except for more coincidence.
- So Hannah lost. Did they appeal?
- Her Lawyer, John Fabry,
filed a civil product
liability case in March of '07.
He argued that Hannah's
injury was avoidable.
Wyeth knew they could
have made a safer vaccine.
- And they've known this for years.
- Yeah.
- Fabry showed that Wyeth's
decision came down to money,
but it didn't matter.
- (sighs) What do you
mean, it didn't matter?
- Well the court ruled
that it was all irrelevant
because the act preempted-
- Prevented.
- Prevented the manufacturer's liability.
So they were free to ignore the fact
that they could make a safer vaccine.
- But it didn't.
- Hold on, 'cause Fabry went further.
He showed that Wyeth
deliberately prevented Hannah
from receiving a safer DTP vaccine.
Some batches of the DTP
vaccine were known as hot lots,
and they frequently
caused severe reaction.
- [Hugo] Batches or
production lots of the vaccine
were shipped out in bulk
and therefore they ended
up in the same places.
So if a vaccine lot
were hot and dangerous,
the adverse effects would occur
in the same place, at the same town,
same clinics in a geographical cluster.
- So for example, between
August of '78 and March of '79,
eight children in Tennessee died
shortly after receiving
the same DTP hot lot.
- [Hugo] Geographical clustering
of severe adverse events
could help rapidly identify
dangerous hot lots of vaccine,
preventing further harm,
even death to infants.
- Okay. So ...
Wyeth has a totally different strategy.
In August of 1979, Dr. Bernstein
came up with a strategy
for avoiding liability and for disguising
and masking the dangerous of the vaccine
that they were selling
at Wyeth Laboratories.
He chose a corporate fix,
and that was to shotgun
all of these doses across
the entire country,
across their entire distribution network.
Instead of sending one lot into Tennessee,
they would send smaller
amounts all over the country.
They would never be able
to detect a cluster,
because there'd be an isolated death
in maybe eight different states.
Deliberately dispersing
the dangerous vaccine
would allow them to escape the blame
and the financial liability for injury
and for the deaths that occurred.
Avoidable harm became inevitable.
- And this is relevant because?
- Because Hannah's was
potentially a hot lot.
- I called VAERS, and
they were able to tell me
about many side effects that some children
have had from the same lot.
I was appalled to hear that
a couple of children had died
and various other side effects,
but yet they were still giving out
this lot number of vaccine.
- In fact, her physician
had mentioned in court that,
had she known about the hot
lot element to the shot,
she never would have
given Hannah that shot.
- Hannah lost in district court.
- Did they appeal?
- Yes.
(emotional guitar music)
- But the appeal court
judges didn't seem to care
about Wyeth's deception, and they argued,
not unreasonably I suppose,
that lot sizes varied,
and until the size of the lot was known,
the true rate of reactions
couldn't be calculated.
- No. This completely misses the point.
Look, in order to do the calculation,
you would have to be alerted
to a potential hot lot in the first place.
Otherwise why bother doing the analysis?
- Okay.
- But since Wyeth deliberately
prevented the hot lot alarm
going off by dispersing the
vaccine, it wouldn't happen.
- Good point. But sadly,
none of it mattered.
The judges claimed to interpret
the intent of Congress.
- Wait, so the judges
decided it didn't matter.
- The vaccine act preempts design defects,
premised on the notion
that the manufacturers
could have made a safer vaccine.
(strikes piano keys)
- No, it doesn't.
Look, I read this whole
thing start to finish!
- Babe.
- It expressively leaves that matter
up to the judges to decide.
- Well, it seems that the judges
were really, really rooting
for the manufacturers.
- Even a single company
withdrawing from the market,
the litigation difficulties
that vaccine makers face,
concerns about vaccine shortages
and the return of
vaccine-preventable diseases.
- Blah, blah, blah. It just gets worse.
- Manufacturer's shall not be liable
for injuries caused by side
effects that are unavoidable,
except when the manufacturer
engages in conduct
that would subject it to punitive damages
under the vaccine act.
- The side effects were avoidable.
And by concealing hot lots,
Wyeth had engaged in contact
that would make it subject
to punitive damages.
- But Hannah lost.
- That leaves only one option.
(ominous music)
(curious percussive music)
- What was at stake in Bruesewitz
was compensation for a
generation of injured children
while at the same time
industry facing bankruptcy
from crippling tort litigation.
- Okay, okay, let's just ...
Let's just go back a minute.
What was he understanding?
What was everybody's
understanding of the act
when it was passed?
(curious music)
- Okay.
Congressman Waxman ...
(camera snaps)
He agreed that design defect litigation
was permitted under the act,
and he wrote the darn thing!
- Dennis Ross, Department of Treasury,
you know, the guys who
have to pay for it ...
in his congressional testimony,
he stressed the option
of filing a tort claim in regular court
if the plaintiffs found
the compensation program unsatisfactory.
- Here's the key. 1987.
Robert Johnson, President of Lederle,
urged Congress to make
major revisions to the act
to prevent his company's
liability in the tort system.
- And Williams, David Williams,
Connaught Laboratories,
predicts a devastating number of claims.
against U.S. manufacturers.
Get this.
On the basis that there were
other safer DTP vaccines.
They all knew that if the act passed,
injured kids would get their day in court.
- And then Wyeth pulled the same stunt
that it used back in 1986.
- [Wyeth] If we are liable,
we face a crushing wave
of tort litigation and bankruptcy.
There'll be no vaccines.
- A lot of people have the impression
that it's just a dog and pony show.
What can somebody tell me in half an hour
that's gonna make a difference?
- And they gestured towards me
and said that if these losers,
5,000 losers from vaccine court
were allowed access to
state and federal court,
that in essence, it would be a threat
to the nation's health and public welfare.
- Persuasive counsel
can make the difference.
- In 2011, writing for the
majority on the Supreme Court,
Justice Scalia found that injured children
have no right to bring a
claim for vaccine injury
for a defectively designed vaccine
to any court in the country.
- That majority opinion
was absolutely outrageous.
- The court's decision
has granted an immunity
to drug manufacturers not
afforded to any other industry.
- As the mother of a
vaccine injured child.
I found the Bruesewitz
its decision appalling.
- Our legal journey is over.
The final verdict has been rendered,
yet our daughter's
condition remains the same.
- [Barbara] Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg
and Sonia Sotomayor, they got it right.
- Vaccine manufacturers
have long been subject
to a legal duty rooted in basic principles
of products liability law
to improve the design of their vaccines
in light of advances in
science and technology.
Until today, that duty was enforceable
through a traditional
state law tort action
for defective design.
In holding that the National Childhood
Vaccine Injury Act of 1986
preempts all designed defects claims,
the Supreme Court imposes its
own bare policy preference
over the considered judgment of Congress.
Its decision leaves ...
(overlapping speech)
Because nothing in the text, structure,
or legislative history of the vaccine act
remotely suggests that Congress
intended such a result,
I dissent.
(somber music)
- And when that happened,
essentially the pharmaceutical
industry got a free pass.
- I think that poses a
grave risk to us all.
- I caused part of this.
I'm part of the reason for this.
I will tell you today, I
regret that to my soul.
(atmospheric string music)
(birds whistling)
- Adults, home-schoolers,
medical exemptions.
There after everyone!
Could it get any worse?
- Or better, depending
on your perspective.
- I think one of the poorly
understood dimensions
of the vaccine injury act
was that it transformed
the vaccine industry
in a corporate sense,
in a competitive sense,
and in a profitability sense,
- The vaccine industry at
the beginning of the 1980s
was a $270 million industry.
Today, it's $52 billion industry.
The WHO says that it will be
a $100 billion industry by 2025.
And all of that is
because of the gold rush
that was ignited when they passed VICA.
(somber guitar music)
- The way to determine whether a product
creates money for a firm
is to look at the stock market reaction.
Before the legislation, the
market reaction was zero.
After the legislation, the market reacted
very positively to the
licensing of a vaccine.
They started making a lot of money.
- What you have with this high-tech,
high-profit, patent-protected,
high-growth business
with mandated markets and no liability,
you have this profit machine.
But they're eager to add new vaccines,
to get new mandates, to expand the scope,
to globalize, to take these wonderful,
beautifully profitable
products and add to the list.
And their challenge, honestly, is growth,
because if they can't grow,
they're dead in the water.
(leaves rustling)
- Looks like they've
done pretty well so far.
- [Wife] Up from 24 vaccine
doses by age 18 in 86 to 72 now?
(emotional piano music)
- With this desire for growth,
you see these companies
filling up their R&D pipelines,
and they have dozens and
dozens by some counts
in the hundreds of vaccines
in the development pipeline.
The approval pipeline is the constraint.
The government agencies
that influence the policy
are the gatekeepers to the wealth
creation opportunity for these companies.
- The only stumbling block
to profitability is the regulator.
- The pharmaceutical industry
has captured the agencies
that are supposed to protect
Americans from dangerous drugs.
HHS, NIH, CDC, FDA have
all becomes sock puppets
for the industry that they're
supposed to be regulating.
- [Narrator] People think
the FDA is protecting them.
It isn't.
The FDA protects the big drug companies.
- You have the watchdogs, the
regulators, the investors,
everybody that surrounds the supply chain
of these new vaccines has
skin in the game, too,
and has a vested interest
in their success.
- One of the greatest
problems with de-litigation
is that it promotes riskier products.
A person is more likely to
experience a vaccine injury
than an injury from the disease
that the vaccine is supposed to protect.
- The only thing standing
between that greedy corporation
and that vulnerable little
child today are the parents,
and that's why we're seeing this.
drive by the pharmaceutical industry
in every state and all over the world
to eliminate vaccine exemptions
so that they will have
direct access to that market
in this country of 74 million children
without interference from their parents.
- Why don't we see any
of this on the news?
- [Boy] If they had
known there was a vaccine
to help protect me when I was 11 or 12.
Maybe my parents just didn't know.
- Right, mom?
Dad?
- [Narrator] What will you say?
Don't wait. Talk to your
child's doctor today.
- The pharmaceutical industry
was able to use its influence over FDA
to get FDA to waive the rule
that once prohibited
pharmaceutical companies
from doing direct-to-consumer
advertising of their products.
That loophole's given the
pharmaceutical industry
extraordinary control
over the American media.
The pharmaceutical
companies typically spend
around $9 billion a year on media buys.
- That box in your house is really
just a pharma advertising machine
that has some entertainment
to keep you attached while they feed you
this mantra that you
cannot live without pharma.
- The people that might be in place
to shine a light on
some of the corruption,
on some of the injury, on some
of the conflict of interest
that is endemic in the industry,
those people are running their programs
based on pharmaceutical ads.
- You can't report on American television
without making sure it's okay with pharma.
- [Woman] They control the present.
And who controls the present ...
controls the past.
(ominous music)
- Many of you are having
to switch over. right now
from Facebook to YouTube
or to our website,
because for some reason Facebook
is not letting our feed go live.
- Okay, leading us off is a controversy
surrounding Robert DeNiro.
The legendary actor,
responding to accusations of censorship
after he canceled the
premiere of a documentary
at his Tribeca Film Festival.
- I'm not 100% sure
that was the right thing to do ultimately.
- When that happened in Tribeca,
I think that it was really
a change of the age.
Not only did they censor the
film because they didn't ...
They had sponsors that didn't like it.
They censored a film
that the founding figure,
Robert DeNiro, came out and
supported three days earlier
and said, "I have an autistic child."
I mean, he put it all on the line,
and that didn't even stop them.
Robert DeNiro didn't even matter.
It was a really sad moment.
I think film changed that day.
That censorship at Tribeca
became the biggest,
media story in the world.
Twitter had just started this
new thing called Periscope,
where you could broadcast live
in a video on your cell phone.
We just immediately had this
body of live experience.
And then at the same time
that's happening, Facebook,
we find out that Facebook's
going to try and compete
with Periscope, and they're
gonna have a live video app.
And so then Paula's got two
cameras going in every interview
and we've got two cameras
going everywhere we go,
and our numbers are growing
by the tens of thousands,
people all around the world
watching what we were doing.
And we quickly designed a
weekly talk show on Facebook.
Let's step out onto the high wire.
We wanted the vaccine issue
to be in the mouths of the people.
It's the only way we were
ever gonna change this,
because the politicians
were already bought.
- Congress has been purchased
by the pharmaceutical companies.
This is an industry that
spends more on lobbying
than any other industry, double
the next largest lobbyist,
which is the oil and gas industry.
(fire crackling)
- I didn't think they
were going to go after
our First Amendment rights.
I figured they were smarter than that,
that they would know that that would start
a civil war if you did that.
But sure enough, we watched Adam Schiff
suddenly writes a letter
to Facebook and Instagram
and Twitter, saying you need
to stop these anti-vaxxers.
This politician thinks we
shouldn't have free speech.
(atmospheric string music)
(emotional guitar music)
- Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
has been an experiment in tort reform.
- I think it's been a highly
successful experiment.
- The 1986 compensation
program has been a success
for the tiny minority of
those who are injured.
- It was put in place for reasons
at the time that seemed plausible.
- [Rolf] One was to protect
the pharmaceutical industry.
That has succeeded beyond
the pharmaceutical industry's
wildest dreams.
The other was to protect
and compensate children.
That has absolutely failed miserably.
- The 1986 act is one of the most-
- Disastrous.
- Catastrophic pieces of public
policy ever put in place.
- Absolutely disasters.
- We have seen this enormous perversion
of the original intent.
- What has been done is tragic.
- The most protected industry
in the history of our country,
wreaking havoc on a
generation of children.
- The vaccine industry is the
only industry in the world
where the federal government
has had to take on
financial responsibility to dole out money
to injured people from that product!
- [Hazlehurst] If there is no liability,
there is no incentive for safety.
(dynamic theme music)
- Also gave into the gun
manufacturers, absolute immunity.
Imagine if I stood here and said
we give immunity to drug companies,
(curious music)
- [Hazlehurst] I think
the vaccine act of 1986
is the cause of the autism epidemic.
- I don't see how you can outright dismiss
10,000 virtually identical stories
from all of these mother
who saw what happened
to their child and just
say that never happened.
That's not science. That's misogyny.
(intriguing music)
- I guess most of you think that we know
what our vaccines are doing.
We don't. We don't.
- [Christopher Gill] Pertussis is back
because we didn't completely understand
how our immune defenses
against whooping cough worked.
We layered assumptions upon assumptions.
We may have made some crucial errors.
- Vaccines are very safe.
If someone gets sick after vaccination,
it is usually either a coincidence.
- That's what they always say.
- [Peter Aaby] The DTP
vaccine may kill more children
from other causes than it saves
from diptheria, tetanus, or pertussis.
- It's done more harm than good,
- [Reporter] The UCLA
study found more reaction
than had ever been seen before.
(baby wheezing)
- [Husband] What is Wyeth employee doing
interfering in a government study?
- [Wife] What really happened?
- [Fisher] It was the summer of 1982.
And I was concerned there was a link
between pertussis vaccine
and infant deaths classified as SIDS,
so I called a senior investigator
on the UCLA DPT safety study.
And he said to me,
"You're on the right track. Keep on going.
"But if you tell anyone I
said that, I will deny it."
- What really happened, Dr. Baraff?
(somber music)
Did anyone even consider these things
before they handed the industry
a get out of jail free card?
- It's gone rogue.
- Is this even a safe place
to have babies anymore?
(emotional string music)
(car beeping)
(dour guitar music)
(chattering)
- [Speaker] So please
welcome Barbara Loe Fisher.
(crowd cheering)
- We hold them in wonder just
moments after they're born.
We love them in a way we never
thought we could love anyone.
And they love and trust us
in a way that no one else ever will.
And there is no power on
earth greater than that love.
(crowd cheering)
We are here today to witness,
the suffering of children
who have no voice and have no choice
except the voice and choice that we,
their mothers and fathers, give to them.
(crowd cheering)
Many of us who made the
pilgrimage to be here
know the pain of watching a healthy child
die or regress after vaccination.
November 14, 1986 was an historic day.
We had been fighting for so long
to protect the act from industry greed
and government overreach
that we never saw the betrayal coming.
(crowd cheering)
We did not know that
the very same lawmakers
sponsoring the act were already working
behind the scenes to dismantle it.
(crowd cheering)
Today the National
Childhood Vaccine Injury Act
looks nothing ...
nothing like the one signed
into law in November 1986.
The biggest public health
emergency in America today
is not 1,200 cases of measles.
It is the one being covered up
by the government
agencies working overtime
with industry, medical
trade, and mainstream media
to distract, deceive, stonewall,
and restrict the freedom of Americans
to take back control of their health.
(crowd cheering)
If we do not get up off our knees,
tomorrow, we will not
be able to get on a bus,
a train or plane,
enter a store or sports arena,
obtain a driver's license or passport,
file our taxes or function in society
without getting every
vaccine that industry creates
and the government orders us to get.
(crowd cheering)
(inspiring orchestral music)
When the state considers
one of us to be expendable,
then we are all considered expendable.
We will not be silent.
We will not go away.
(crowd cheering)
We will never give up!
(crowd cheering)
We are the daughters and sons of liberty!
(crowd cheering)
And our mission continues.
No forced vaccination! Not in America!
(crowd cheering)
(screaming)
- [Doctor] It's a boy.
(gentle guitar music)
(chattering)
- Well, I looked at data and information.
I have performed the study
that the CDC did not want to perform.
I have compared health outcomes
in vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
The health outcomes that we studied
included developmental delays, asthma,
ear infection, and
gastrointestinal issues.
I studied approximately 2,000 children,
of whom 31% were unvaccinated
by one year of age,
and I compare those with the remaining 69%
who had been vaccinated.
It clearly demonstrates
that vaccinated children
had worse health outcomes
compared to unvaccinated children.
The children that got the most vaccines
and got vaccinated earlier
were at the greatest risk
for all of these adverse health outcomes.
And this demands further study.
(emotional guitar music)
- [Reporter] The Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention
is confirming the first case
of human-to-human transmission
in the United States of
the novel coronavirus.
They do still believe
that the immediate risk
to the American public is low.
- For the world at large,
normalcy only returns
when we've largely vaccinated
the entire global population,
There will be some risk
and indemnification needed.
- I never thought I'd
see anything like this.
It's a science fiction nightmare.
It's Kafkaesque. It's Orwellian.
There are not enough words
that you can throw at it
to capture the horror of what's happening.
This is a bomb that is being
dropped on our society,
on human civilization, on our economy,
on our culture, on our democracy,
on everything that we value,
by the vaccine industry.