Flu Vaccine

Questions about the shot

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"I was getting funding when nobody else was," Dr. Boyd Haley tells me over the phone from his office in Kentucky. "Then I started reporting the dangers of mercury, and it dried up. Fast. People I bump into on the sidewalks around here will say, 'You're doing the right thing, bringing this to the public.' They just can't jeopardize their jobs by supporting me openly."

Who is Boyd Haley, and why should we listen to him? He is one of the world's top biochemists and an expert on mercury toxicity. He earned a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale in the '70s, has been a permanent member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Biomedical Services since 1985, and until his recent retirement was professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Kentucky. He has lectured and published extensively, and has been the recipient of generous research grant funding over many years. He was an NIH favourite.

But his work has become problematic for vaccine proponents. With the vaccine controversy heating up again around the push to get our flu shots, and with reader mail I'd received dismissing the thimerosal-autism connection, I was interested in his perspective.

I introduce myself, and jump right in by asking him about the swine flu shot. "Over half of health care workers don't want to take the swine flu vaccine," he says, "often because they know it contains thimerosal. According to the EPA and the National Academy of Sciences, close to 10 percent of American women have mercury body levels high enough to make their offspring susceptible to neurological damage. Mercury affects every system of the body. Nothing suppresses the immune system better than thimerosal."

"But isn't there a very real danger with the swine flu?" I ask.

"There have been about 1000 US swine flu deaths according to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control]. How does this, compared with 36 000 annual flu deaths, mesh with declaring a national emergency? It's difficult to take the CDC seriously when they totally ignore the input of toxicologists. It's become all about politics and money. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, who advised Dr. Sanjay Gupta to get his swine flu shot even though he'd just recovered from the swine flu, is neither a doctor nor a scientist. How much sense does that make?"

Haley says he respects Dr. Gupta, who has publicly stated that the vast majority of children who develop flu symptoms will have a few miserable days and nothing more. What Haley has just told me also fits with last week's CBS report that the swine flu isn't nearly as prevalent as we'd initially been told. "The vast majority of cases [of swine flu test results] were negative for H1N1 as well as seasonal flu," the report states, meaning that many who were told they likely had the swine flu probably didn't have it after all. All of which makes perfect sense when we consider that there are over 200 known pathogens that can cause flu-like illness, and that in up to two-thirds of flu-like illness, no cause at all can be found.

So what can those who have become anxious about either the flu or the flu shot do? "There is one thing that will inhibit the flu virus from penetrating cells," Haley says. "A natural compound called glutathione. Glutathione is something found in very low levels in the immune compromised and in those with neurological damage such as autism. It is necessary for mercury removal, and low levels are an indication of oxidative stress. When someone with low levels gets infected with a virus, they'll get very ill. Thimerosal ironically knocks glutathione down better than anything I know."

Glutathione is a powerful antioxidant and detoxifier. We can help keep it at optimal levels by eating diets rich in high quality proteins and essential fats such as ALA (alpha lipoic acid), and for those concerned about virus or thimerosal exposure, it can be boosted with a number of over-the-counter natural health products.

Many young children will be getting the flu shot, which contains thimerosal, so I ask the burning question: is the thimerosal-autism connection the long-discredited myth I'm usually told it is? "Quite the opposite," he says. "There's a plethora of information coming out that powerfully supports the connection. NeuroToxicology recently published research that compared vaccinated primates with unvaccinated controls. It showed that the severity of autism is strongly linked to the body burden of toxic metals. Those who say there's nothing to the mercury-autism connection will often cite two studies done in Denmark. These are fraudulent studies. Neither the Danes nor the Swedes have put thimerosal back in their vaccines. I've found no good science that's disproved the thimerosal-autism connection, none. And if it's so easy to disprove, why have they for so long refused to do the studies that would compare vaccinated with unvaccinated groups?"

Though I know I already have far more information than I'll possibly be able to use, I keep asking my questions, and he keeps answering; the rest will come next week. V

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Flu Vaccine

Questions about the shot

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