Mamata's veiled warning to Centre on moratorium issue |
| New Delhi, May 4 (PTI): West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday said she will wait for a few days for her demand of a three-year moratorium on loan repayment to be accepted after which she will decide her future course of action. "I will wait for a few days, I hope the issue will be sorted out. In democracy, talks are always good. We will keep talking. I am waiting for last 11 months for the solution," Mamata said after her meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. "During the last 11 months, I have met the Prime Minister ten times and Finance Minister 20 times. I am waiting for a few days, after that I will decide politically what can be done for my state," she said while indicating unhappiness about the lack of proper response to her financial demand. Mamata said she has struggled for the welfare of the people and hoped that she will "ultimately win". When pointed out that there was a problem in granting moratorium on loan repayment, she said, "what is digestable to me is not digestable to the Finance Minister. The food, which is digestable to my people, is digestable to me. Whatever will be done, I will wait for few days." On the future course of action to be taken by her, Mamata said "I will do politically whatever is possible for my state." Asked what was PM's response to her demands, she said he is discussing the issue seriously but added that no solution has been found yet. "We are hoping that it will be sorted out," she said. Justifying her demand for moratorium, Banerjee said such a step has been taken with regard to Punjab. "Between 2000 and 2006, moratorium was given to Punjab. West bengal has suffered for 35 years under the Left Front rule. I have inherited this heavy debt legacy and it is not my creation." Describing the financial condition of the state as "dismal" she said, "We do not have funds left for health, education and developmental works. There is no money for BPL scheme also. This is a genuine demand. Even according to Finance Ministry report, Bengal, Kerala and Punjab are debt ridden states." She said "No other state has suffered like Bengal. Bengal is a special case. We have to pay Rs 22,000 crore as interest on loan repayment on central loan." Bengal has debt of more than Rs 2 lakh crore central loan. On NCTC, she said "we are opposing NCTC. Because there are boundaries for state governments and the Centre. No one should cross the boundaries. NCTC is intervening in the state's boundaries. It would destroy the federal structure. |
Saturday, 5 May 2012
Mamata's veiled warning to Centre on moratorium issue
RTE BREACHED - DELHI GOVT SCHOOLS RELUCTANT TO ADMIT CHILDREN
RTE BREACHED - DELHI GOVT SCHOOLS RELUCTANT TO ADMIT CHILDREN
These 25 complaints regarding denial of admission in Government schools in Jahangirpuri, Delhi-33 written by the students/parents on 2/3 May 2012 are addressed to Advocate Ashok Agarwal . For details, please click the link below:
| S. No. | Name of Child with Address & Phone No. | Class and School in which admission is sought |
| 1. | Chanda R/o. 19/23 Bhaghanand Colony, Bhalswa Jahangirpuri Delhi. M- 9899265805 | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 2. | Khushbu R/o. 320 Kalander Colony, Bhalswa Dairy, Jahangirpuri, Delhi. M- 9868318503 | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 3. | Neeta R/o. Sadhyanand, Jahangirpuri. M- 8826122867 | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 4. | Sanam R/o. 199-C-D Park, Jahangirpuri, Delhi. M- 8447124379 | Class-VII, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 5. | Kripali R/o. 199, Bhalswa Dairy, Jahangirpuri, Delhi. M- 7503505200 | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 6. | Uma R/o. Vinsnakpuri, Bhalswa, Jahangirpuri, Delhi. M- 9540022457 | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 7. | Geeta R/o. Bhalswa Dairy-228, Jahangirpuri, Delhi. M- 7563565200 | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 8. | Khushi R/o. 317, Kalander Colony, Bhalswa, Jahangirpuri, Delhi. M- 8860223395 | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 9. | Saira R/o 193-C-D Park, Jahangirpuri, Delhi. M-9873419692 | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 10. | Bhawna R/o B- Block, H No. 24, Gali No. 24, Bhalswa, Jahangirpuri, Delhi. M- 8750768854 | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 11 | Rukhsar R/o N/38 C-D- Park, Jhuggi No. 127, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 12 | Zakir R/o. N/38 C- D Park, Jhuggi No. 127, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033 | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 13 | Aarti R/o. 101 Sadhyanand Colony, Bhalswa , Delhi. M-9999219350 | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 14 | Shadab R/o. N/38 C-D Park, Jhuggi No. 152 | Class-VIII, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 15 | Rakesh R/o. | Class-IX, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 16 | Kishan R/o. N/38 C- D Park, Jhuggi No. 146. | Class-IX, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 17 | Sahil R/o. N/38 B 263 C-D- Park, Jahangirpuri, Delhi. | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 18 | Deepika R/o. N/38 C-D- Park Jhuggi No. 128. | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 19 | Rubina R/o. K-552, Jahangirpuri. M- 9891173273 | Class-VIII, K- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 20 | Tamanaa R/o. K- 552, Jahangirpuri. M-9891173273 | Class-VIII, K- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 21 | Shobha R/o 1157, K- Block, Jhuggi. M-9871285226 | Class-VI, K- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 22 | Shravan Kumar R/o. B-171, Jahangirpuri, M-9582747274 | Class-VI, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 23 | Radha R/o. A – 1528, Jahangirpuri, M-9278691740 | Class-IX, D- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 24. | Nur Salim R/o. B-881, Jahangirpuri, | C-I, B-Block, MCD, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
| 25 | Rashid R/o. B-496, Jahangirpuri,. | Class-VI, A- Block, Govt. School, Jahangirpuri, Delhi-110033. |
You are receiving this message because you are a member of the community Dalits Media Watch.
A reply to this message will be sent to all members of Dalits Media Watch.
2 attachments — Download all attachments View all images
| | ASHOK 2.jpg 126K View Download |
| | ASHOK 1.jpg 122K View Download |
The Clay Report: Autism an International Crisis.
Autism is National Crisis We Cannot Ignore by Beth Clay, The Clay Report
http://www.theclayreport.com/the-clay-report-blog.html
In August 1999, the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight began looking at why autism spectrum disorders, which had once been considered a rare disease, had increased at epidemic rates. At that time, autism was estimated to affect 1 in 500 American children. On March 30, 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that the prevalence of autism was up 1 in 88 for children born in 2000. For boys where the incidence is higher, 1 in 54 were found to be on the autism spectrum.
If we continue to do nothing to change where things are going, by 2020, when children born this year are evaluated by the CDC, the rate is calculated to be 1 in 22.
Vaccine Injury – the Discussion Just Won't Go Away: Government and most medical professionals will tell the public that the question of a possible relationship between the autism epidemic and vaccines and vaccine ingredients is 'settled science' – that there is no evidence of harm. They want the whole thing to go away. But just like the evidence that thimerosal in vaccines given to infants in the first six months of life causes harm, "it just won't go away". As someone who led the Congressional inquiry, and who has remained informed, I bear witness that the issue is far from settled and that individuals in the public who have not been personally affected and thus investigated the matter are likely not accurately informed.
Thousands of mothers and fathers contacted us and told similar stories –a child born healthy, developing normally, and within hours or days of receiving one or more vaccines (often we heard of 5 vaccines for 9 diseases at one office visit), the child became physically ill. Among other injuries, some developed seizures, some showed signs of encephalopathy and some showed symptoms of mercury poisoning. Their ill health would lead to developmental delays, loss of speech, sleep disturbances, often the development of gastric symptoms to eventually receive a diagnosis of autism.
I spoke personally with hundreds of the thousands of parents who contacted the Committee and shared their stories. As a mother of four children born between 1981 and 1990, the same time frame so many of the children I was hearing about during this inquiry, I thought to myself on more than one occasion 'there but by the Grace of God go I" as my children like most American children had been immunized in compliance with Federal recommendations.
Vaccine policies are sacred to the public health community. To ask valid questions about safety meant we were vehemently attacked and labeled anti-vaccine. Even today, our investigation is attacked by those who feel no one should question vaccine policies even Congress. And contrary to what many say, herd immunity goals have not been threatened. From the outset of the investigation that vaccines are the only medication mandated by a government for American children to receive as a condition of school and day care attendance, and as a condition for families to receive food stamps and most other federal assistance packages, our inquiry was focused on insuring that vaccines were as safe as possible, so that herd immunity could be preserved and as few children as possible would become collateral damage. We were told that vaccine injury was rare, very rare. In 20 years since the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was created more than 1300 children have been compensated for vaccine induced brain injury.
We would learn during the investigation that many of the doctors put forward to the media for interviews actually had direct ties to vaccine manufacturers – through consulting relationships and patents, and they never seem to mention that during their interviews. We would also learn that most of those whom the US Government hired as consultants and advisors on vaccine policy and regulation also had close ties to vaccine manufacturers, financial conflicts of interest that were ignored by federal officials who were supposed to be protecting against such conflict.
1 in 5000 sees Justice: Hannah Poling, the little girl whose case the US Government conceded in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) received 5 vaccines for 9 diseases in July 2000, one month after the now infamous closed door meeting the CDC called at the Simpsonwood Retreat Center in Atlanta. In this meeting, the CDC, FDA officials, their advisors many with ties to the vaccine industry and even vaccine company representatives admitted that the analysis of the CDC's Vaccine Safety Database (VSD) showed a concerning association with exposure to mercury in vaccines and (1) speech and language delays, (2) neurodevelopmental delays in general and (3) tics, all of which are known to occur in children with autism.
Through information uncovered by SafeMinds through the Freedom of Information Act, we learned that the original findings were even worse than what was discussed at the Simpsonwood meeting. The original analysis of the data by Dr. Thomas Verstraeten, now often referred to as Generation Zero data, compared the highest levels of exposure to mercury containing vaccines to those with zero exposure and found the elevated risk of autism for the highest exposure levels at one month ranged from 7.6 to 11.4 times the zero exposure level. This means that a child exposed to thimerosal in their vaccines is 7.6 to 11.4 times more likely to develop autism than one who was not exposed to thimerosal.
Would the rates of 1 in 88 be lower if the CDC had gone public with the Generation Zero Data? I am not one that likes to run through 'what if' scenarios, however, I can only think that so many of the families whose children, like Hannah, were vaccine injured after this June 2000 meeting might be living a different life if the CDC had immediately embraced the findings and aggressively moved to reduce exposure to thimerosal, do as Congressman Burton wanted and conduct a recall of all thimerosal containing vaccines. How would that July 2000 medical visit have gone with Hannah if her parents had been informed of what Verstraeten found before her five injections some containing thimerosal?
Sadly, instead of acting aggressively, the CDC would drag their feet, rework the data at least four times and wait years to publish a paper with data that was so watered down as to be almost inconsequential. I was at the Boston meeting of the Institute of Medicine the morning that Dr. Verstraeten took the podium, took a deep breath and announced that he had just that morning accepted a job with vaccine manufacturer Glaxo Smith Kline in his home country of Belgium. (This can only mean he was negotiating his future employment through critical phases of this research project.) This IOM meeting was the first time his data was to be presented publicly and he had linked his financial future onto the industry wagon before uttering his first word to the IOM. He would successfully extricate himself from the debate, return to Belgium away from the power of subpoena, and continue to collaborate with CDC during the multiple rewrites and efforts to publish. While he said he reluctantly accepted the thimerosal VSD project while on an epidemiology fellowship to the CDC, he has continued publishing papers on vaccine adverse reactions issues in his work with Glaxo.
You may be telling yourself that Verstraeten study does not really matter because 'they got mercury out of vaccines'. Sadly, that is not true. The last of the heavy doses of thimerosal stayed in circulation until they expired in 2003. Since then some vaccines used in very young children continue to contain trace amounts, which according to mercury experts is still enough to cause harm. Pregnant women continue to be given mercury containing flu vaccines. Some vaccines use mercury in the production process and claim it is removed, but there is no real validation or testing to confirm exactly how much mercury remains. So we have never 'gotten the mercury out.'
Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) Monitoring Medical Records: As we would learn, the CDC had been monitoring about 5% of the American populations medical data for a decade, using the medical files from health maintenance organizations (HMOs) like Kaiser Permanente to study topics of interest, such as the thimerosal exposure questions. I will leave my concerns about medical privacy and health freedom for another discussion, but if how the VSD has been used is any indication of what the future holds when everyone's medical records are available for review by the government, then we all have much to be concerned about.
Replication is the hallmark of good science. The Verstraeten study should have been replicated by an independent team. However, the government made it near impossible for years for anyone outside government to access the VSD data and in the interim managed to destroy the actual dataset Dr. Verstraeten used. The inability to have independent verification calls into question the published research.
If the Verstraeten controversy is not enough to shake your confidence in the job the government has done to investigate these issues, the alleged criminal acts by Dr. Poul Thorsen will have you disgusted for sure. Thorsen came to the CDC Division of Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities in 2001 as a visiting scientist. It would appear that he built a strong relationship with CDC staff, and began a relationship that has underwritten his entire career. He successfully promoted the idea of awarding research funds to Denmark to study the relationship between autism and vaccines. He "provided input and guidance for the research to be conducted." Once the funding was secured, Thorsen returned to Denmark to act as principal investigator of the study which our government emphasizes as the basis for denying vaccine induced autism. A conversation just this week with the parent of one of the children whose case was rejected in the Autism Omnibus proceedings stated that the Danish studies (Thorsen) and the study at CDC by Verstraeten are the reasons the government listed in the letter notifying him his case was rejected.
Poul Thorsen was indicted by a federal grand jury on April 13, 2011, on 13 counts of wire fraud and 9 counts of money laundering. The indictment details that through an elaborate scheme of submitting false invoices and forging CDC employee signatures, that Poul Thorsen diverted more than $1 million from the $16 million in CDC grant funds. Amazingly CDC did not uncover the scheme; rather someone in Denmark discovered the discrepancies that lead to the federal investigation. Aarhus University would issue a public statement distancing them from Thorsen by stating that he was no longer as he had violated their dual employment regulations. The Danish government would bring tax evasion charges against him for failing to report income. At the time of the indictment, Derrick L. Jackson, Special Agent in Charge of the Atlanta Region for the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health & Human Services stated, "Stealing research grant money to line his pockets, as Poul Thorsen stands accused of here today, cheats U.S. taxpayers and will simply not be tolerated...HHS/OIG will continue to work closely with our law enforcement partners to bring these criminals to justice."
One year later, Thorsen has not been brought to justice. The arrest warrant was issued a year ago and in November sources tell me that the US Government requested that Dr.Thorsen be extradited to the United States. In the mean time, Thorsen remains a free man employed at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Lillebaelt Hospital, Kolding, Denmark. He continues to collaborate with at least one CDC employee, Dr. Diana Schendel, as a co-author of several research papers published after the indictment. His research team provided a poster session at the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) in early March 2012 in San Diego. It is unclear whether Dr. Thorsen came to the United States himself since his passport is supposed to be flagged by Immigration. I hope that the Danish autism community will reach out to their government and demand that Thorsen be extradited to the United States so he can be prosecuted. Only with that progressing will we learn if he had help in his alleged criminal acts by others in the US, and at the CDC. I do have concerns at how aggressively and effectively those prosecuting Thorsen will be. After all, the Department of Health and Human Services is the lead agency in funding research including Thorsen. They are the parent organization of the CDC, HRSA, NIH, and FDA. HHS Secretary Secretary Sebellius stated in an interview that her staff have reached out to media with a request to stop giving the autism/vaccine injury community air time. It is the same Department of Justice that will prosecute Thorsen which used Thorsen's papers to deny compensation to families with vaccine injured children. All of these issues will need to be addressed and handled with transparency.
All of the studies funded by the CDC in which Thorsen played even a minor role should be removed from any discussion because the data cannot be trusted. If he was willing to falsify invoices, what would he do with the data to keep his client the CDC happy? If one removes the studies in which Thorsen is a co-author from the VICP and IOM decisions, then the entire house of cards of their conclusions come tumbling down. Sadly, government officials will likely not take the high road on this matter and protect the Thorsen studies at all costs.
One of the MMR Doctors Exonerated: While CDC was paying Thorsen, who is now under federal indictment, they vehemently attacked Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues in the United Kingdom for the study they conducted looking at autistic entercolitis subsequent to receiving the MMR vaccine. Last year, the media widely reported that the General Medical Council (GMC) in the United Kingdom suspended the medical licenses of Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his colleague, Dr. John Walker Smith. Brian Deer, the journalist whose behavior chasing Dr. Wakefield around the world which I personally observed could only be described as 'stalker-like' grew even more venomous in his published comments after the GMC ruling. The facts seemed to matter less than the need to slaughter Dr. Wakefield's reputation world-wide to insure he could not work in the medical field anywhere in the world, including Texas where he had moved to continue his research. One can only wonder who has been funding Brian Deer these many years to engage so intensely on this issue. Why also would the British Medical Journal, one of the most widely read medical journals in the world, and a journal that I used to hold in very high regard, would publish an article he wrote without subjecting it to peer review and join with him in an attack of Dr. Wakefield by publishing an editorial?
In addition to his Congressional testimony, I heard Dr. Wakefield present at conferences on numerous occasions. He detailed the scientific process he went through to study the issues presented to him by families with children suffering serious gastric conditions. I found his process thorough and logical. He followed the scientific method so exquisitely that if he had been investigating anything other than a vaccine, he likely would have been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine by his colleagues at the GMC.
GMC Case Overturned: Sadly, far fewer in the main stream media who reported on the GMC ruling covered the ruling in March 2012, in which Dr. John Walker Smith was victorious in his appeal in the courts. The judge in the appeal said that the ethical findings of the General Medical Council were unsupportable based on the evidence and added, "It would be a misfortune if this were to happen again." Where in the world is Matt Lauer now?
Dr. Wakefield has brought a defamation of character case in the United States against individuals who have been most vitriolic in their public accusations that he committed fraud including Brian Deer. What will happen in these legal matters remains to the courts. It will be the first time in which discovery will occur and in which Deer and others will be cross-examined, and not simply allowed to issue statements.
Is the Investment in Autism to Date a Good Use of Tax Payer Funds? A recent news article put forward that $1 billion has been invested in autism research in the last decade. Has it been well spent? If this were a business investment, there would have been an ROI study (return on investment). This has not happened with federal agencies that have been responsible for funding autism research. I believe Congress needs to ask the Government Accounting Office in coordination with autism community, to conduct an ROI study.
Too often I hear from the community experts who monitor what has been funded that too much of the funding is going towards genetics research and too little to environmental factors. And when we look at the handling of the vaccine/autism question through the VSD, the Verstraeten study, the Thorsen/Danish studies and see so much emphasis on epidemiology while ignoring the studies that show through laboratory analysis and through animal studies with mice, rats, and monkeys that injury does occur, one can only ask at what length public health officials in the government will go to protect their policy? The promised chelation study at the NIH never materialized. At what point will the medical community take a stand to protect children from policies in which common sense has been thrown out the window? If these medical personnel would be held liable for their vaccine practices would their actions be different?
Is Hannah's Injury Really Different than the other 5,000? With almost 5,000 cases of vaccine injury linked to the onset of autism filed in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), an Omnibus Proceedings was organized within the program, eventually ruling
against all of the cases except for one - Hannah Poling. As mentioned above, the government conceded that Hannah Poling's vaccine injury was real and that she should be compensated in the VICP.
What the media often miss is that Hannah's case was scheduled to be one of the three test cases in the Omnibus proceedings arguing a link between thimerosal, the mercury preservative, in vaccines and autism. By plucking Hannah's case out of the Omnibus proceeding, the hundreds of other families whose children's injuries are identical or almost identical to Hannah's have been denied justice. The official concession provides that the five vaccinations for nine diseases she received on July 19, 2000, "significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder." Since that time, the government has stated that her mitochondrial disorder is 'rare'. Again, what the government is stating to the public is not entirely accurate. While her mitochondrial disorder may be rare in the general population, there is increasing evidence that between 10 and 20 percent of children who regress into autism may have this same 'rare' mitochondrial disorder. The description of Hannah's health status before and after vaccination mirrored the story of most families.
How Could They Not Know? Keeping in mind that key management staff at the VICP program today have been involved since the program's inception and have personally been required to sign off on cases that the government concedes or where the Special Master rules that compensation is warranted. These same government managers have signed off on the 1300 cases over 20 years in which vaccine induced brain injury was conceded. These same government staff would have signed off on the 21 cases discovered by investigators who published a paper in May 2011 in the Pace Environmental Law Review in which terms "autism or autism-like symptoms" in the court records. These same staff would have been involved in the first series of IOM investigations in which autism originally was brought up in the early 1990s, would testify before Congress, and be involved in the subsequent IOM inquiry. These same government officials involved in the VICP told the world the Hannah Poling concession was the first time the VICP had compensated an individual whose vaccine injury led to the onset of autism. So, we are left asking whether they have been truthful in their statements to the public (and to Congress) and simply do not remember the 21 times autism cases were settled; or whether they have consciously chosen to exclude this admission. If as they claim they have never tracked autism, questioning competence in management is certainly warranted. More than one parent of a vaccine injured child who developed autism has said to me, "They are either lying about what they knew or they are incompetent!"
In addition to the 21 cases mentioned above, when the investigators reached out to 150 of the 1300 families, of the ones that would participate in the study, another 62 cases of confirmed autism in individuals whose vaccine induced brain injury was financially compensated by the government were found. I have a hard time believing today that when these individuals came before the Congress 12 years ago they did not know already that there were cases in the VICP that had been compensated in which the child developed autism as a result of the vaccine induced brain injury. Now that this study has been published, Congress needs to bring these individuals back in and under oath ask them to explain.
VICP is not working as Congress intended: Congress created the VICP to be a compensation program that would be easy to traverse, swift, fair, non adversarial and when there was a close call, to rule in favor of the vaccine injured petitioner. While the immunity given to drug companies and health professionals in the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act has resulted in a massive expansion of our vaccine schedule that parallels the rise in autism; the VICP has become increasingly difficult for families to be compensated when a vaccine injury occurs. Few realize that because the program is 'informal' that the typical rules of the court are not enforced, and this almost always hurts families who have cases in the program. There are many inefficiencies such being unable to refer back to previous cases in which evidence of benefit has been presented. The court remains a David Versus Goliath process that too often David is unsuccessful no matter how solid the case because the government has deep pockets and the upper hand with the court. While we focus on the children injured, in today's VICP, half of those who file cases are adults who have been injured.
Few realize that the package insert explaining the adverse events possible, which the FDA mandates be included with each vaccine, is not accepted as evidence in the VICP. Why, since this is official information approved by the FDA? Few realize that the promise to have full discovery in the autism omnibus proceedings did not occur from either the government or the industry. The industry has never been subjected to full discovery under the VICP. And if we learned anything from VIOXX, we learned that Merck (and likely other companies) do not always tell the FDA everything. A decade later, justice has not been served and Congress has given no attention to VICP in a decade.
It Likely is Not Just Vaccines: Vaccine injury is not the only reason we have an epidemic rise in the rates of autism. However, I have seen plenty of evidence to suggest it is one of the causes. Obesity during pregnancy and older fathers are much less likely to be main reasons for the rise as the government is now touting as the result of recent studies they funded. Sadly, we do not know how prevalent vaccine induced autism is because the government has not done the type of research that is truly needed to answer the questions with scientific rigor. The tens of millions wasted on the denial campaign could have been used to answer the question and help develop evaluation tools to determine who is at risk for vaccine injury.
Few issues have as many implications for society as autism. Families face enormous financial strain in addition to the emotional strains. Communities need to act now to meet the housing, services and educational needs of the 1 in 88. Government does not have endless resources, so working together with the community, agencies and policy makers need to find ways to do more and be better with the resources that are and will be available. Churches and the philanthropic community need to more fully engaged. These 1in 88 born in 2000 will grow up to be adults, and as the families I have come to know whose children are now in their 20s are learning, adult services in this country are woefully inadequate. Even for higher functioning individuals who can live independently, underemployment is a widespread issue.
While the community is gearing up to develop solutions, others simply want to change the definition of autism so the epidemic will go away. The DSM-V working group which includes government officials as well as Poul Thorsen have been busy trying to change the definition of autism in the DSM-V. (DSM is the manual used to define mental health related conditions, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual – V for fifth edition.) The suggested changes will not reduce the number of children affected; it will only restrict families from receiving early intervention and educational services and muddle future CDC study outcomes.
Whether or not your family is directly affected by autism, you are needed in the autism community. In the first 40 years I was on the planet, I met exactly 1 individual diagnosed with autism, a little boy at church whom my daughter occasionally babysat as a teenager. My life is truly enriched by coming to know the thousands of families I have met in the last dozen years and their children. While I have and continue to consult with the autism community, I also feel I have a moral obligation to be engaged in looking for ways to improve the lives of families living with autism and to help reduce the incidence of a child developing an autism spectrum disorder through a vaccine induced brain injury, or other environmental factor.
There is much research that is needed to look at these issues and organizations that are both open minded to the outcomes and capable of crafting well written grant applications and following through with credible research are urgently needed to enter into this field. Government agencies with research dollars cannot fund what is not submitted.
More work is needed to develop and evaluate currently used treatments to determine if/how/when they are effective and to assure safety, especially when used in combination with other therapies. This includes new drugs as well as drugs being used off label. It also includes nutritional supplements, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and alternative therapies such as acupuncture, massage, energy therapies and homeopathy as well as behavioral therapies and biofeedback assistive devices such as the BAUD. Much work is needed on the simplest things such as food tolerances and sensory issues.
In the 2008 Presidential election cycle both Senator John McCain and President Barrack Obama stated their belief that there was a connection between vaccine injury and autism. Both have been essentially silent in these last four years. Senator McCain could be calling hearings and investigating, but he has chosen not to. We have no evidence that President Obama has taken any direct action on that issues, but those who work in his Administration have been part of the problem, not part of the solution.
I have no doubt that history will not look kindly at how the government has handled this issue. They will include this decades long vaccine experiment in the same discussion as the Post Nuremberg medical research atrocities such as the syphilis research in Tuskegee, the STD research in Guatemala, the high oxygen experiments on newborns which led to blindness and the Cincinnati radiation experiments. A century from now the medical community will be appalled that toxic ingredients such as mercury and aluminum were injected into babies within hours of birth and that it would be the medical establishment that would fight to keep mercury in medicines injected to infants and pregnant women. Future generations of doctors will rail in medical journals against the government authorities that protected policy at the detriment to so many children. At the end of the day, whether the epidemic rise in autism rates is not related to vaccine injury, there is still an national and international crisis. And what are we going to do to help stem the rising tide of the epidemic? Will you be part of the solution?
http://www.theclayreport.com/the-clay-report-blog.html
In August 1999, the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight began looking at why autism spectrum disorders, which had once been considered a rare disease, had increased at epidemic rates. At that time, autism was estimated to affect 1 in 500 American children. On March 30, 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that the prevalence of autism was up 1 in 88 for children born in 2000. For boys where the incidence is higher, 1 in 54 were found to be on the autism spectrum.
If we continue to do nothing to change where things are going, by 2020, when children born this year are evaluated by the CDC, the rate is calculated to be 1 in 22.
Vaccine Injury – the Discussion Just Won't Go Away: Government and most medical professionals will tell the public that the question of a possible relationship between the autism epidemic and vaccines and vaccine ingredients is 'settled science' – that there is no evidence of harm. They want the whole thing to go away. But just like the evidence that thimerosal in vaccines given to infants in the first six months of life causes harm, "it just won't go away". As someone who led the Congressional inquiry, and who has remained informed, I bear witness that the issue is far from settled and that individuals in the public who have not been personally affected and thus investigated the matter are likely not accurately informed.
Thousands of mothers and fathers contacted us and told similar stories –a child born healthy, developing normally, and within hours or days of receiving one or more vaccines (often we heard of 5 vaccines for 9 diseases at one office visit), the child became physically ill. Among other injuries, some developed seizures, some showed signs of encephalopathy and some showed symptoms of mercury poisoning. Their ill health would lead to developmental delays, loss of speech, sleep disturbances, often the development of gastric symptoms to eventually receive a diagnosis of autism.
I spoke personally with hundreds of the thousands of parents who contacted the Committee and shared their stories. As a mother of four children born between 1981 and 1990, the same time frame so many of the children I was hearing about during this inquiry, I thought to myself on more than one occasion 'there but by the Grace of God go I" as my children like most American children had been immunized in compliance with Federal recommendations.
Vaccine policies are sacred to the public health community. To ask valid questions about safety meant we were vehemently attacked and labeled anti-vaccine. Even today, our investigation is attacked by those who feel no one should question vaccine policies even Congress. And contrary to what many say, herd immunity goals have not been threatened. From the outset of the investigation that vaccines are the only medication mandated by a government for American children to receive as a condition of school and day care attendance, and as a condition for families to receive food stamps and most other federal assistance packages, our inquiry was focused on insuring that vaccines were as safe as possible, so that herd immunity could be preserved and as few children as possible would become collateral damage. We were told that vaccine injury was rare, very rare. In 20 years since the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was created more than 1300 children have been compensated for vaccine induced brain injury.
We would learn during the investigation that many of the doctors put forward to the media for interviews actually had direct ties to vaccine manufacturers – through consulting relationships and patents, and they never seem to mention that during their interviews. We would also learn that most of those whom the US Government hired as consultants and advisors on vaccine policy and regulation also had close ties to vaccine manufacturers, financial conflicts of interest that were ignored by federal officials who were supposed to be protecting against such conflict.
1 in 5000 sees Justice: Hannah Poling, the little girl whose case the US Government conceded in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) received 5 vaccines for 9 diseases in July 2000, one month after the now infamous closed door meeting the CDC called at the Simpsonwood Retreat Center in Atlanta. In this meeting, the CDC, FDA officials, their advisors many with ties to the vaccine industry and even vaccine company representatives admitted that the analysis of the CDC's Vaccine Safety Database (VSD) showed a concerning association with exposure to mercury in vaccines and (1) speech and language delays, (2) neurodevelopmental delays in general and (3) tics, all of which are known to occur in children with autism.
Through information uncovered by SafeMinds through the Freedom of Information Act, we learned that the original findings were even worse than what was discussed at the Simpsonwood meeting. The original analysis of the data by Dr. Thomas Verstraeten, now often referred to as Generation Zero data, compared the highest levels of exposure to mercury containing vaccines to those with zero exposure and found the elevated risk of autism for the highest exposure levels at one month ranged from 7.6 to 11.4 times the zero exposure level. This means that a child exposed to thimerosal in their vaccines is 7.6 to 11.4 times more likely to develop autism than one who was not exposed to thimerosal.
Would the rates of 1 in 88 be lower if the CDC had gone public with the Generation Zero Data? I am not one that likes to run through 'what if' scenarios, however, I can only think that so many of the families whose children, like Hannah, were vaccine injured after this June 2000 meeting might be living a different life if the CDC had immediately embraced the findings and aggressively moved to reduce exposure to thimerosal, do as Congressman Burton wanted and conduct a recall of all thimerosal containing vaccines. How would that July 2000 medical visit have gone with Hannah if her parents had been informed of what Verstraeten found before her five injections some containing thimerosal?
Sadly, instead of acting aggressively, the CDC would drag their feet, rework the data at least four times and wait years to publish a paper with data that was so watered down as to be almost inconsequential. I was at the Boston meeting of the Institute of Medicine the morning that Dr. Verstraeten took the podium, took a deep breath and announced that he had just that morning accepted a job with vaccine manufacturer Glaxo Smith Kline in his home country of Belgium. (This can only mean he was negotiating his future employment through critical phases of this research project.) This IOM meeting was the first time his data was to be presented publicly and he had linked his financial future onto the industry wagon before uttering his first word to the IOM. He would successfully extricate himself from the debate, return to Belgium away from the power of subpoena, and continue to collaborate with CDC during the multiple rewrites and efforts to publish. While he said he reluctantly accepted the thimerosal VSD project while on an epidemiology fellowship to the CDC, he has continued publishing papers on vaccine adverse reactions issues in his work with Glaxo.
You may be telling yourself that Verstraeten study does not really matter because 'they got mercury out of vaccines'. Sadly, that is not true. The last of the heavy doses of thimerosal stayed in circulation until they expired in 2003. Since then some vaccines used in very young children continue to contain trace amounts, which according to mercury experts is still enough to cause harm. Pregnant women continue to be given mercury containing flu vaccines. Some vaccines use mercury in the production process and claim it is removed, but there is no real validation or testing to confirm exactly how much mercury remains. So we have never 'gotten the mercury out.'
Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) Monitoring Medical Records: As we would learn, the CDC had been monitoring about 5% of the American populations medical data for a decade, using the medical files from health maintenance organizations (HMOs) like Kaiser Permanente to study topics of interest, such as the thimerosal exposure questions. I will leave my concerns about medical privacy and health freedom for another discussion, but if how the VSD has been used is any indication of what the future holds when everyone's medical records are available for review by the government, then we all have much to be concerned about.
Replication is the hallmark of good science. The Verstraeten study should have been replicated by an independent team. However, the government made it near impossible for years for anyone outside government to access the VSD data and in the interim managed to destroy the actual dataset Dr. Verstraeten used. The inability to have independent verification calls into question the published research.
If the Verstraeten controversy is not enough to shake your confidence in the job the government has done to investigate these issues, the alleged criminal acts by Dr. Poul Thorsen will have you disgusted for sure. Thorsen came to the CDC Division of Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities in 2001 as a visiting scientist. It would appear that he built a strong relationship with CDC staff, and began a relationship that has underwritten his entire career. He successfully promoted the idea of awarding research funds to Denmark to study the relationship between autism and vaccines. He "provided input and guidance for the research to be conducted." Once the funding was secured, Thorsen returned to Denmark to act as principal investigator of the study which our government emphasizes as the basis for denying vaccine induced autism. A conversation just this week with the parent of one of the children whose case was rejected in the Autism Omnibus proceedings stated that the Danish studies (Thorsen) and the study at CDC by Verstraeten are the reasons the government listed in the letter notifying him his case was rejected.
Poul Thorsen was indicted by a federal grand jury on April 13, 2011, on 13 counts of wire fraud and 9 counts of money laundering. The indictment details that through an elaborate scheme of submitting false invoices and forging CDC employee signatures, that Poul Thorsen diverted more than $1 million from the $16 million in CDC grant funds. Amazingly CDC did not uncover the scheme; rather someone in Denmark discovered the discrepancies that lead to the federal investigation. Aarhus University would issue a public statement distancing them from Thorsen by stating that he was no longer as he had violated their dual employment regulations. The Danish government would bring tax evasion charges against him for failing to report income. At the time of the indictment, Derrick L. Jackson, Special Agent in Charge of the Atlanta Region for the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health & Human Services stated, "Stealing research grant money to line his pockets, as Poul Thorsen stands accused of here today, cheats U.S. taxpayers and will simply not be tolerated...HHS/OIG will continue to work closely with our law enforcement partners to bring these criminals to justice."
One year later, Thorsen has not been brought to justice. The arrest warrant was issued a year ago and in November sources tell me that the US Government requested that Dr.Thorsen be extradited to the United States. In the mean time, Thorsen remains a free man employed at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Lillebaelt Hospital, Kolding, Denmark. He continues to collaborate with at least one CDC employee, Dr. Diana Schendel, as a co-author of several research papers published after the indictment. His research team provided a poster session at the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) in early March 2012 in San Diego. It is unclear whether Dr. Thorsen came to the United States himself since his passport is supposed to be flagged by Immigration. I hope that the Danish autism community will reach out to their government and demand that Thorsen be extradited to the United States so he can be prosecuted. Only with that progressing will we learn if he had help in his alleged criminal acts by others in the US, and at the CDC. I do have concerns at how aggressively and effectively those prosecuting Thorsen will be. After all, the Department of Health and Human Services is the lead agency in funding research including Thorsen. They are the parent organization of the CDC, HRSA, NIH, and FDA. HHS Secretary Secretary Sebellius stated in an interview that her staff have reached out to media with a request to stop giving the autism/vaccine injury community air time. It is the same Department of Justice that will prosecute Thorsen which used Thorsen's papers to deny compensation to families with vaccine injured children. All of these issues will need to be addressed and handled with transparency.
All of the studies funded by the CDC in which Thorsen played even a minor role should be removed from any discussion because the data cannot be trusted. If he was willing to falsify invoices, what would he do with the data to keep his client the CDC happy? If one removes the studies in which Thorsen is a co-author from the VICP and IOM decisions, then the entire house of cards of their conclusions come tumbling down. Sadly, government officials will likely not take the high road on this matter and protect the Thorsen studies at all costs.
One of the MMR Doctors Exonerated: While CDC was paying Thorsen, who is now under federal indictment, they vehemently attacked Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues in the United Kingdom for the study they conducted looking at autistic entercolitis subsequent to receiving the MMR vaccine. Last year, the media widely reported that the General Medical Council (GMC) in the United Kingdom suspended the medical licenses of Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his colleague, Dr. John Walker Smith. Brian Deer, the journalist whose behavior chasing Dr. Wakefield around the world which I personally observed could only be described as 'stalker-like' grew even more venomous in his published comments after the GMC ruling. The facts seemed to matter less than the need to slaughter Dr. Wakefield's reputation world-wide to insure he could not work in the medical field anywhere in the world, including Texas where he had moved to continue his research. One can only wonder who has been funding Brian Deer these many years to engage so intensely on this issue. Why also would the British Medical Journal, one of the most widely read medical journals in the world, and a journal that I used to hold in very high regard, would publish an article he wrote without subjecting it to peer review and join with him in an attack of Dr. Wakefield by publishing an editorial?
In addition to his Congressional testimony, I heard Dr. Wakefield present at conferences on numerous occasions. He detailed the scientific process he went through to study the issues presented to him by families with children suffering serious gastric conditions. I found his process thorough and logical. He followed the scientific method so exquisitely that if he had been investigating anything other than a vaccine, he likely would have been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine by his colleagues at the GMC.
GMC Case Overturned: Sadly, far fewer in the main stream media who reported on the GMC ruling covered the ruling in March 2012, in which Dr. John Walker Smith was victorious in his appeal in the courts. The judge in the appeal said that the ethical findings of the General Medical Council were unsupportable based on the evidence and added, "It would be a misfortune if this were to happen again." Where in the world is Matt Lauer now?
Dr. Wakefield has brought a defamation of character case in the United States against individuals who have been most vitriolic in their public accusations that he committed fraud including Brian Deer. What will happen in these legal matters remains to the courts. It will be the first time in which discovery will occur and in which Deer and others will be cross-examined, and not simply allowed to issue statements.
Is the Investment in Autism to Date a Good Use of Tax Payer Funds? A recent news article put forward that $1 billion has been invested in autism research in the last decade. Has it been well spent? If this were a business investment, there would have been an ROI study (return on investment). This has not happened with federal agencies that have been responsible for funding autism research. I believe Congress needs to ask the Government Accounting Office in coordination with autism community, to conduct an ROI study.
Too often I hear from the community experts who monitor what has been funded that too much of the funding is going towards genetics research and too little to environmental factors. And when we look at the handling of the vaccine/autism question through the VSD, the Verstraeten study, the Thorsen/Danish studies and see so much emphasis on epidemiology while ignoring the studies that show through laboratory analysis and through animal studies with mice, rats, and monkeys that injury does occur, one can only ask at what length public health officials in the government will go to protect their policy? The promised chelation study at the NIH never materialized. At what point will the medical community take a stand to protect children from policies in which common sense has been thrown out the window? If these medical personnel would be held liable for their vaccine practices would their actions be different?
Is Hannah's Injury Really Different than the other 5,000? With almost 5,000 cases of vaccine injury linked to the onset of autism filed in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), an Omnibus Proceedings was organized within the program, eventually ruling
against all of the cases except for one - Hannah Poling. As mentioned above, the government conceded that Hannah Poling's vaccine injury was real and that she should be compensated in the VICP.
What the media often miss is that Hannah's case was scheduled to be one of the three test cases in the Omnibus proceedings arguing a link between thimerosal, the mercury preservative, in vaccines and autism. By plucking Hannah's case out of the Omnibus proceeding, the hundreds of other families whose children's injuries are identical or almost identical to Hannah's have been denied justice. The official concession provides that the five vaccinations for nine diseases she received on July 19, 2000, "significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder." Since that time, the government has stated that her mitochondrial disorder is 'rare'. Again, what the government is stating to the public is not entirely accurate. While her mitochondrial disorder may be rare in the general population, there is increasing evidence that between 10 and 20 percent of children who regress into autism may have this same 'rare' mitochondrial disorder. The description of Hannah's health status before and after vaccination mirrored the story of most families.
How Could They Not Know? Keeping in mind that key management staff at the VICP program today have been involved since the program's inception and have personally been required to sign off on cases that the government concedes or where the Special Master rules that compensation is warranted. These same government managers have signed off on the 1300 cases over 20 years in which vaccine induced brain injury was conceded. These same government staff would have signed off on the 21 cases discovered by investigators who published a paper in May 2011 in the Pace Environmental Law Review in which terms "autism or autism-like symptoms" in the court records. These same staff would have been involved in the first series of IOM investigations in which autism originally was brought up in the early 1990s, would testify before Congress, and be involved in the subsequent IOM inquiry. These same government officials involved in the VICP told the world the Hannah Poling concession was the first time the VICP had compensated an individual whose vaccine injury led to the onset of autism. So, we are left asking whether they have been truthful in their statements to the public (and to Congress) and simply do not remember the 21 times autism cases were settled; or whether they have consciously chosen to exclude this admission. If as they claim they have never tracked autism, questioning competence in management is certainly warranted. More than one parent of a vaccine injured child who developed autism has said to me, "They are either lying about what they knew or they are incompetent!"
In addition to the 21 cases mentioned above, when the investigators reached out to 150 of the 1300 families, of the ones that would participate in the study, another 62 cases of confirmed autism in individuals whose vaccine induced brain injury was financially compensated by the government were found. I have a hard time believing today that when these individuals came before the Congress 12 years ago they did not know already that there were cases in the VICP that had been compensated in which the child developed autism as a result of the vaccine induced brain injury. Now that this study has been published, Congress needs to bring these individuals back in and under oath ask them to explain.
VICP is not working as Congress intended: Congress created the VICP to be a compensation program that would be easy to traverse, swift, fair, non adversarial and when there was a close call, to rule in favor of the vaccine injured petitioner. While the immunity given to drug companies and health professionals in the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act has resulted in a massive expansion of our vaccine schedule that parallels the rise in autism; the VICP has become increasingly difficult for families to be compensated when a vaccine injury occurs. Few realize that because the program is 'informal' that the typical rules of the court are not enforced, and this almost always hurts families who have cases in the program. There are many inefficiencies such being unable to refer back to previous cases in which evidence of benefit has been presented. The court remains a David Versus Goliath process that too often David is unsuccessful no matter how solid the case because the government has deep pockets and the upper hand with the court. While we focus on the children injured, in today's VICP, half of those who file cases are adults who have been injured.
Few realize that the package insert explaining the adverse events possible, which the FDA mandates be included with each vaccine, is not accepted as evidence in the VICP. Why, since this is official information approved by the FDA? Few realize that the promise to have full discovery in the autism omnibus proceedings did not occur from either the government or the industry. The industry has never been subjected to full discovery under the VICP. And if we learned anything from VIOXX, we learned that Merck (and likely other companies) do not always tell the FDA everything. A decade later, justice has not been served and Congress has given no attention to VICP in a decade.
It Likely is Not Just Vaccines: Vaccine injury is not the only reason we have an epidemic rise in the rates of autism. However, I have seen plenty of evidence to suggest it is one of the causes. Obesity during pregnancy and older fathers are much less likely to be main reasons for the rise as the government is now touting as the result of recent studies they funded. Sadly, we do not know how prevalent vaccine induced autism is because the government has not done the type of research that is truly needed to answer the questions with scientific rigor. The tens of millions wasted on the denial campaign could have been used to answer the question and help develop evaluation tools to determine who is at risk for vaccine injury.
Few issues have as many implications for society as autism. Families face enormous financial strain in addition to the emotional strains. Communities need to act now to meet the housing, services and educational needs of the 1 in 88. Government does not have endless resources, so working together with the community, agencies and policy makers need to find ways to do more and be better with the resources that are and will be available. Churches and the philanthropic community need to more fully engaged. These 1in 88 born in 2000 will grow up to be adults, and as the families I have come to know whose children are now in their 20s are learning, adult services in this country are woefully inadequate. Even for higher functioning individuals who can live independently, underemployment is a widespread issue.
While the community is gearing up to develop solutions, others simply want to change the definition of autism so the epidemic will go away. The DSM-V working group which includes government officials as well as Poul Thorsen have been busy trying to change the definition of autism in the DSM-V. (DSM is the manual used to define mental health related conditions, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual – V for fifth edition.) The suggested changes will not reduce the number of children affected; it will only restrict families from receiving early intervention and educational services and muddle future CDC study outcomes.
Whether or not your family is directly affected by autism, you are needed in the autism community. In the first 40 years I was on the planet, I met exactly 1 individual diagnosed with autism, a little boy at church whom my daughter occasionally babysat as a teenager. My life is truly enriched by coming to know the thousands of families I have met in the last dozen years and their children. While I have and continue to consult with the autism community, I also feel I have a moral obligation to be engaged in looking for ways to improve the lives of families living with autism and to help reduce the incidence of a child developing an autism spectrum disorder through a vaccine induced brain injury, or other environmental factor.
There is much research that is needed to look at these issues and organizations that are both open minded to the outcomes and capable of crafting well written grant applications and following through with credible research are urgently needed to enter into this field. Government agencies with research dollars cannot fund what is not submitted.
More work is needed to develop and evaluate currently used treatments to determine if/how/when they are effective and to assure safety, especially when used in combination with other therapies. This includes new drugs as well as drugs being used off label. It also includes nutritional supplements, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and alternative therapies such as acupuncture, massage, energy therapies and homeopathy as well as behavioral therapies and biofeedback assistive devices such as the BAUD. Much work is needed on the simplest things such as food tolerances and sensory issues.
In the 2008 Presidential election cycle both Senator John McCain and President Barrack Obama stated their belief that there was a connection between vaccine injury and autism. Both have been essentially silent in these last four years. Senator McCain could be calling hearings and investigating, but he has chosen not to. We have no evidence that President Obama has taken any direct action on that issues, but those who work in his Administration have been part of the problem, not part of the solution.
I have no doubt that history will not look kindly at how the government has handled this issue. They will include this decades long vaccine experiment in the same discussion as the Post Nuremberg medical research atrocities such as the syphilis research in Tuskegee, the STD research in Guatemala, the high oxygen experiments on newborns which led to blindness and the Cincinnati radiation experiments. A century from now the medical community will be appalled that toxic ingredients such as mercury and aluminum were injected into babies within hours of birth and that it would be the medical establishment that would fight to keep mercury in medicines injected to infants and pregnant women. Future generations of doctors will rail in medical journals against the government authorities that protected policy at the detriment to so many children. At the end of the day, whether the epidemic rise in autism rates is not related to vaccine injury, there is still an national and international crisis. And what are we going to do to help stem the rising tide of the epidemic? Will you be part of the solution?
==================================================================
MOKSH: (Monitoring Knowledge & Social Health)
An International Network of Eminent Scientists Questioning
the Science Behind "Science"
1st Floor, N-3/409, IRC Village,
Nayapalli, Bhubaneswar - 15
Odisha, India
Phone: +91-9337102146
Disclaimer: Views expressed in my mails are my own and may not represent that of the organisation.
==============================
Devon DB: The Crisis of Student Debt in America
The Crisis of Student Debt in America
By Devon DB
Global Research, May 3, 2012
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30660
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way. ~ Charles Dickens
We are in a time of crisis, a time of austerity, a time the where poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer at a faster pace than at any other time in recent US history. We have gone from having a well-functioning economy to a real unemployment rate of 14.5% [1]. During all of this, the situation has greatly affected college students, who are taking on massive debt just to further their education. With student debt at over $1 trillion, an examination is underway of how we have gotten into this scenario and how we can get our way out of it.
The situation began in 1964 when Lyndon B. Johnson established a task force to examine the role of federal government in student aid, headed by John W. Gardener. The taskforce firmly believed that cost shouldn't be a barrier in attaining a college education and to this end they concerned themselves with how lack of funds contributed to students being unable to attend college. Gardener
focused on a study which revealed that one out of six students who took the National Merit Scholarship test in high school did not attend college. Of the students who did not attend college and who had families who could contribute only $300 or less to their education, about 75 percent of the men and 55 percent of the women indicated that they would have attended college if they had had more money available. [2] (emphasis added)
Upon seeing this information, Johnson was shocked as he viewed the situation as a loss in human capital. This drove him to sign the the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 1965 into law. The bill included the recommendations put forth by the Gardener taskforce that the federal government should aid student in their journey to attain a higher education by providing loans, remedial classes, and grants to college-aspiring students as well as special programs and projects for low-income students who have an interest in attending college. This allowed for low-income and middle-class students who have an opportunity to go to college.
There was an uphill battle, though, as the American Bank Association was against the loan guarantee provision. The ABA was mainly concerned about possible government encroachment in their business, arguing that "the federal government could not replicate the working relationships that locally-owned financial institutions had with state and private non-profit guarantee programs" and "the federal government would end up taking over the industry because there would be little incentive for the state and private non-profit agencies to establish their own programs." [3] To solve this problem, the Johnson administration met with the ABA and worked to "[assure] the bankers the loans would pay them back handsomely over time because they were investing in young people who would become their best customers in the future," [4] as well as telling the banks that the government would be the ultimate loan guarantor if there was no one else available. Thus, with the banks placated, the bill could be passed.
There were several reauthorizations of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, but one of the most important reauthorizations was in 1972. In the 1972 bill, there were several new programs created, yet one of the most important ones was the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant which sends "a payment directly from the federal government to undergraduate students based on their financial need," yet this act also "tied institutional aid to the number of students receiving federal student aid at the given institution." [5] Tying institutional aid in this manner only served to increase costs. According to the Bennett hypothesis, first proposed in the 1980s by Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, colleges absorb federal student aid by increasing tuition costs. (This was proven in a paper done by two economics professors at the University of Oregon. [6]) While these increases in tuition were not seen in the 1970s, they began to be felt substantially during the 1980s, thus causing students to increase their debt levels. However there was another factor involved that led to student debt increase: President Ronald Reagan.
During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, he launched a massive attack on federal student aid. Reagan's budget included a proposal that would
cut deeply into the two major student assistance programs, the Pell grants and the Guaranteed Student Loans, to reduce sharply or eliminate a series of categorical programs in higher education, and to eliminate a group of social or economic programs which either directly or indirectly affect higher education. With rare exception, every college campus would be affected by the proposed cuts beginning in academic year 1981-82. [7] (emphasis added)
In cutting these student assistance programs, Reagan went against the spirit of the 1965 Higher Educational Opportunity Act, in which the main goal was to ensure that a college education was both accessible and affordable. In addition to this, he was effectively targeting low-income and middle class people who needed that assistance in order to afford a college education. Congress attempted to enact amendments to the Higher Education bill that would allow for both programs to continue until 1985 and expanded programs such as Guaranteed Student Loans to middle-class families.
Yet, there were complaints from the Reagan administration, specifically Secretary of Education Terrence Bell, that the expanding such programs "had the potential for eroding the traditional roles of the student and the family in the financing of educational costs" [8] and that the Guaranteed Student Loans program was actually an entitlement program as its costs couldn't be constricted without Congressional approval. Rather than actually allow students greater access to education, the Reagan administration was able to pass a plan that would gut federal student aid assistance by cutting the amount of aid per Pell Grant from $1,900 to $1,750, limiting Guaranteed Student Loans to remaining need, and eliminating the in-school interest subsidy and the subsidy to lenders on Parent Loans.
This decrease in federal aid only served to disenfranchise millions of potential college students from attaining an education. Student debt also increased. A survey done by the College Scholarship Service and National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators showed that "those students at public institutions who borrow will graduate with an average debt of $6,685, while their counterparts at private colleges and universities will assume $8,950 in debt on average."
This decrease in aid hit minority students quite hard as in 1987 there was a seven percent decline in college enrollment for Native Americans and eleven percent for blacks. Many minority groups depended on grants and scholarships to go to college, but now their only option was to borrow money or just not go at all. This would have a major ripple effect as "Many studies have shown that one of the most important factors influencing the decision to go to college is parental educational level" and that "If today's minority high school graduates choose not to participate in further education, out of concern for loan burdens or for other reasons, their children may not be as likely to go to college as the next generation of white and Asian students." [9] This would only serve to further increase educational- and with it economic- disparities between races.
The situation did not get any better in the next decade as the median student loan debt more than doubled in a 10 year period, increasing from $4,000 in 1990 to about $11,000 in 1999. [10] It was to become even worse with the passing of the Higher Education Amendments of 1998, which stated that student loans could no longer be forgiven under bankruptcy. Thus, if one found themselves in bankruptcy, but had student loans, they would be in debt bondage until the loans were paid. In such a situation, the only possible out is to default on one's student loans, however, that would not only worsen your credit but your entire financial life can potentially be destroyed as if you default
Your entire loan balance will be due in full, immediately.
Collection fees can be added to your outstanding balance.
Up to 15% of your paychecks can be taken.
Your Social Security, disability income, and state and federal tax refunds can be seized.
You will lose eligibility for federal aid, including Pell grants.
You will lose deferment or forbearance options.
Outstanding fees and unpaid interest can be capitalized (added) onto your principal balance. [11]
Thus, by the very circumstances, a situation of 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' is created and students are put into de facto debt slavery.
This brings us to our current situation where student debt nationwide is over $1 trillion. Student debt can potentially turn into a major problem by threatening economic growth due to the fact that people are defaulting on their student loans as they cannot find jobs. A recent article came out from the Associated Press which stated that 53% of college graduates are either unemployed or underemployed and that when "underemployment [is taken] into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade." [12] This is an even further economic threat when one realizes that the current level of student is unsustainable and that there will be major ripple effects on the economy when this house of cards comes crashing down.
In order to deal with the situation, there are some in Washington who favor rewriting bankruptcy laws as to allow for a return for student debt to be cleared in bankruptcy, however, this would only apply to private student loans, thus the student would still be on the hook for any federal loans owed. Yet, allowing federal loans to be absolved in bankruptcy is quite a thorny issue as taxpayers would have to pick up the tab. Once again, just as in 1965, the American Bankers Association is against such a proposal "saying it would tempt students to rack up big debt that they won't repay [and that] 'The bankruptcy system would be opened to abuse.'" [13] It will be interesting to see whether or not the government can once again placate the banks.
The only way to get out of this mess is forgiving loans. There is already some support in Congress as bill H.R. 4170 also known as The Student Loan Forgiveness Act is currently being proposed. The bill would fully forgive the loans of those who have been making payment for the past decade or will be able to do so in the coming years. It also "caps interest rates on federal student loans at 3.4 percent and enables existing borrowers to break free from crushing fees by converting many private loans into federal loans." Such a bill would free students from debt slavery and "would give Americans greater purchasing power, helping to jumpstart our economy and create jobs." [14]
This is what needs to be done in order to aid getting our economy back on track. If the government can spend over $1 trillion on wars and billions to bailout corrupt banks, hopefully they can spare a couple billion to bailout America's college graduates.
The alternative is to have the student debt bubble explode in our faces and the economy slump into even more dire straits and banks tighten up the flow of credit.
America now has a choice before it concerning its young people: they can either set them free, aiding in economic regrowth or risk shattering the economic recovery and mantain their children in the shackles of debt slavery.
Notes
1: Portal Seven, Unemployment Rate U-6, http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp
2 TG Research and Analytical Services, Higher Education Opportunity Act, http://www.tgslc.org/pdf/hea_history.pdf (November 2005)
3: Ibid
4: Ibid
5: Thomas R. Wolanin, "Federal Policy Making in Higher Education," American Association of University Professors 61:4 (1975), 309
6: Larry D. Singell, Jr., Joe A. Stone, "For Whom the Pell Tolls: The Response of University Tuition to Federal Grants-in-Aid," University of Oregon, September 2005 (http://web.archive.org/web/20081011160038/http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~lsingell/Pell_Bennett.pdf )
7: Alfred D. Sumberg, "The Reagan Budget: Attacks on Student Assistance," American Association of University Professors 67:2 (1981), 102
8: Sumberg, 103
9: Kathryn Mohrman, "Unintended Consequences of Federal Aid Student Policies," The Brookings Review 5:4 (1987) 24, 26
10: Department of Education, Student Loans Overview: Fiscal Year 2012 Budget Request. http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget12/justifications/s-loansoverview.pdf, pg 19
11: American Student Assistance, Default Consequences, http://www.asa.org/in-default/consequences/default.aspx
12: Hope Yen, "Half of recent college grads underemployed or jobless, analysis says," Associated Press, April 23, 2012 (http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2012/04/half_of_recent_college_grads_u.html )
13: Josh Mitchell, "Trying to Shed Student Debt," Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2012 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303978104577364120264435092.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_5 )
14: Hansen Clarke, "Trillion Dollar Crisis: The Case for Student Loan Forgiveness," Huffington Post, April, 25, 2012 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-hansen-clarke/student-loan-forgiveness_b_1454241.html )
By Devon DB
Global Research, May 3, 2012
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30660
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way. ~ Charles Dickens
We are in a time of crisis, a time of austerity, a time the where poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer at a faster pace than at any other time in recent US history. We have gone from having a well-functioning economy to a real unemployment rate of 14.5% [1]. During all of this, the situation has greatly affected college students, who are taking on massive debt just to further their education. With student debt at over $1 trillion, an examination is underway of how we have gotten into this scenario and how we can get our way out of it.
The situation began in 1964 when Lyndon B. Johnson established a task force to examine the role of federal government in student aid, headed by John W. Gardener. The taskforce firmly believed that cost shouldn't be a barrier in attaining a college education and to this end they concerned themselves with how lack of funds contributed to students being unable to attend college. Gardener
focused on a study which revealed that one out of six students who took the National Merit Scholarship test in high school did not attend college. Of the students who did not attend college and who had families who could contribute only $300 or less to their education, about 75 percent of the men and 55 percent of the women indicated that they would have attended college if they had had more money available. [2] (emphasis added)
Upon seeing this information, Johnson was shocked as he viewed the situation as a loss in human capital. This drove him to sign the the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 1965 into law. The bill included the recommendations put forth by the Gardener taskforce that the federal government should aid student in their journey to attain a higher education by providing loans, remedial classes, and grants to college-aspiring students as well as special programs and projects for low-income students who have an interest in attending college. This allowed for low-income and middle-class students who have an opportunity to go to college.
There was an uphill battle, though, as the American Bank Association was against the loan guarantee provision. The ABA was mainly concerned about possible government encroachment in their business, arguing that "the federal government could not replicate the working relationships that locally-owned financial institutions had with state and private non-profit guarantee programs" and "the federal government would end up taking over the industry because there would be little incentive for the state and private non-profit agencies to establish their own programs." [3] To solve this problem, the Johnson administration met with the ABA and worked to "[assure] the bankers the loans would pay them back handsomely over time because they were investing in young people who would become their best customers in the future," [4] as well as telling the banks that the government would be the ultimate loan guarantor if there was no one else available. Thus, with the banks placated, the bill could be passed.
There were several reauthorizations of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, but one of the most important reauthorizations was in 1972. In the 1972 bill, there were several new programs created, yet one of the most important ones was the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant which sends "a payment directly from the federal government to undergraduate students based on their financial need," yet this act also "tied institutional aid to the number of students receiving federal student aid at the given institution." [5] Tying institutional aid in this manner only served to increase costs. According to the Bennett hypothesis, first proposed in the 1980s by Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, colleges absorb federal student aid by increasing tuition costs. (This was proven in a paper done by two economics professors at the University of Oregon. [6]) While these increases in tuition were not seen in the 1970s, they began to be felt substantially during the 1980s, thus causing students to increase their debt levels. However there was another factor involved that led to student debt increase: President Ronald Reagan.
During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, he launched a massive attack on federal student aid. Reagan's budget included a proposal that would
cut deeply into the two major student assistance programs, the Pell grants and the Guaranteed Student Loans, to reduce sharply or eliminate a series of categorical programs in higher education, and to eliminate a group of social or economic programs which either directly or indirectly affect higher education. With rare exception, every college campus would be affected by the proposed cuts beginning in academic year 1981-82. [7] (emphasis added)
In cutting these student assistance programs, Reagan went against the spirit of the 1965 Higher Educational Opportunity Act, in which the main goal was to ensure that a college education was both accessible and affordable. In addition to this, he was effectively targeting low-income and middle class people who needed that assistance in order to afford a college education. Congress attempted to enact amendments to the Higher Education bill that would allow for both programs to continue until 1985 and expanded programs such as Guaranteed Student Loans to middle-class families.
Yet, there were complaints from the Reagan administration, specifically Secretary of Education Terrence Bell, that the expanding such programs "had the potential for eroding the traditional roles of the student and the family in the financing of educational costs" [8] and that the Guaranteed Student Loans program was actually an entitlement program as its costs couldn't be constricted without Congressional approval. Rather than actually allow students greater access to education, the Reagan administration was able to pass a plan that would gut federal student aid assistance by cutting the amount of aid per Pell Grant from $1,900 to $1,750, limiting Guaranteed Student Loans to remaining need, and eliminating the in-school interest subsidy and the subsidy to lenders on Parent Loans.
This decrease in federal aid only served to disenfranchise millions of potential college students from attaining an education. Student debt also increased. A survey done by the College Scholarship Service and National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators showed that "those students at public institutions who borrow will graduate with an average debt of $6,685, while their counterparts at private colleges and universities will assume $8,950 in debt on average."
This decrease in aid hit minority students quite hard as in 1987 there was a seven percent decline in college enrollment for Native Americans and eleven percent for blacks. Many minority groups depended on grants and scholarships to go to college, but now their only option was to borrow money or just not go at all. This would have a major ripple effect as "Many studies have shown that one of the most important factors influencing the decision to go to college is parental educational level" and that "If today's minority high school graduates choose not to participate in further education, out of concern for loan burdens or for other reasons, their children may not be as likely to go to college as the next generation of white and Asian students." [9] This would only serve to further increase educational- and with it economic- disparities between races.
The situation did not get any better in the next decade as the median student loan debt more than doubled in a 10 year period, increasing from $4,000 in 1990 to about $11,000 in 1999. [10] It was to become even worse with the passing of the Higher Education Amendments of 1998, which stated that student loans could no longer be forgiven under bankruptcy. Thus, if one found themselves in bankruptcy, but had student loans, they would be in debt bondage until the loans were paid. In such a situation, the only possible out is to default on one's student loans, however, that would not only worsen your credit but your entire financial life can potentially be destroyed as if you default
Your entire loan balance will be due in full, immediately.
Collection fees can be added to your outstanding balance.
Up to 15% of your paychecks can be taken.
Your Social Security, disability income, and state and federal tax refunds can be seized.
You will lose eligibility for federal aid, including Pell grants.
You will lose deferment or forbearance options.
Outstanding fees and unpaid interest can be capitalized (added) onto your principal balance. [11]
Thus, by the very circumstances, a situation of 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' is created and students are put into de facto debt slavery.
This brings us to our current situation where student debt nationwide is over $1 trillion. Student debt can potentially turn into a major problem by threatening economic growth due to the fact that people are defaulting on their student loans as they cannot find jobs. A recent article came out from the Associated Press which stated that 53% of college graduates are either unemployed or underemployed and that when "underemployment [is taken] into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade." [12] This is an even further economic threat when one realizes that the current level of student is unsustainable and that there will be major ripple effects on the economy when this house of cards comes crashing down.
In order to deal with the situation, there are some in Washington who favor rewriting bankruptcy laws as to allow for a return for student debt to be cleared in bankruptcy, however, this would only apply to private student loans, thus the student would still be on the hook for any federal loans owed. Yet, allowing federal loans to be absolved in bankruptcy is quite a thorny issue as taxpayers would have to pick up the tab. Once again, just as in 1965, the American Bankers Association is against such a proposal "saying it would tempt students to rack up big debt that they won't repay [and that] 'The bankruptcy system would be opened to abuse.'" [13] It will be interesting to see whether or not the government can once again placate the banks.
The only way to get out of this mess is forgiving loans. There is already some support in Congress as bill H.R. 4170 also known as The Student Loan Forgiveness Act is currently being proposed. The bill would fully forgive the loans of those who have been making payment for the past decade or will be able to do so in the coming years. It also "caps interest rates on federal student loans at 3.4 percent and enables existing borrowers to break free from crushing fees by converting many private loans into federal loans." Such a bill would free students from debt slavery and "would give Americans greater purchasing power, helping to jumpstart our economy and create jobs." [14]
This is what needs to be done in order to aid getting our economy back on track. If the government can spend over $1 trillion on wars and billions to bailout corrupt banks, hopefully they can spare a couple billion to bailout America's college graduates.
The alternative is to have the student debt bubble explode in our faces and the economy slump into even more dire straits and banks tighten up the flow of credit.
America now has a choice before it concerning its young people: they can either set them free, aiding in economic regrowth or risk shattering the economic recovery and mantain their children in the shackles of debt slavery.
Notes
1: Portal Seven, Unemployment Rate U-6, http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp
2 TG Research and Analytical Services, Higher Education Opportunity Act, http://www.tgslc.org/pdf/hea_history.pdf (November 2005)
3: Ibid
4: Ibid
5: Thomas R. Wolanin, "Federal Policy Making in Higher Education," American Association of University Professors 61:4 (1975), 309
6: Larry D. Singell, Jr., Joe A. Stone, "For Whom the Pell Tolls: The Response of University Tuition to Federal Grants-in-Aid," University of Oregon, September 2005 (http://web.archive.org/web/20081011160038/http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~lsingell/Pell_Bennett.pdf )
7: Alfred D. Sumberg, "The Reagan Budget: Attacks on Student Assistance," American Association of University Professors 67:2 (1981), 102
8: Sumberg, 103
9: Kathryn Mohrman, "Unintended Consequences of Federal Aid Student Policies," The Brookings Review 5:4 (1987) 24, 26
10: Department of Education, Student Loans Overview: Fiscal Year 2012 Budget Request. http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget12/justifications/s-loansoverview.pdf, pg 19
11: American Student Assistance, Default Consequences, http://www.asa.org/in-default/consequences/default.aspx
12: Hope Yen, "Half of recent college grads underemployed or jobless, analysis says," Associated Press, April 23, 2012 (http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2012/04/half_of_recent_college_grads_u.html )
13: Josh Mitchell, "Trying to Shed Student Debt," Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2012 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303978104577364120264435092.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_5 )
14: Hansen Clarke, "Trillion Dollar Crisis: The Case for Student Loan Forgiveness," Huffington Post, April, 25, 2012 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-hansen-clarke/student-loan-forgiveness_b_1454241.html )
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)