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    Mr. Burton. First of all, I'll start with you, Dr. Dankner. 
Your daughter--whom I see sitting over there and is a lovely 
young lady--acquired her autistic condition--was this from 
birth?
    Dr. Dankner. No. She had the typical description that has 
been more commonly described of showing behaviors that became 
more and more obvious from about 14 to 18 months of age.
    Mr. Burton. When she was 14 months or thereabouts, did she 
receive any shots?
    Dr. Dankner. She received the normal vaccine schedule of 
immunizations as recommended by the American Academic of 
Pediatrics and the----
    Mr. Burton. What shots were those?
    Dr. Dankner. She received her MMR at about 15\1/2\ months 
of age.
    Mr. Burton. And when did she manifest or change?
    Dr. Dankner. She was manifesting subtle changes before 
that. It was obvious to us; we just did not know what to 
attribute it to at that time or what the issues were. We used 
to joke that compared to our older son, she seemed to be on an 
``independent study program.''
    Mr. Burton. Did she receive any other shots when you 
started seeing the manifestation of autism?
    Dr. Dankner. She had received her previous shots at about 6 
months of age.
    Mr. Burton. And had she received any others close to the 
time she started developing autism?
    Dr. Dankner. Not at that time, no.
    Mr. Burton. There were no other shots?
    Dr. Dankner. No, because at 12 months, essentially, you 
just get your PPD to screen for tuberculosis, which in 
California is potentially prevalent.
    Mr. Burton. When she started manifesting these signs, did 
she get worse after the MMR shot, or did it have any effect at 
all?
    Dr. Dankner. We did not notice any difference in her 
behavior; in fact, she got her second dose of MMR at about 5 
years of age, and there was definitively no change in her 
behavior after that. She pretty much continued on in her mode 
of autistic behavior that required, in our opinion, a 
definitive educational approach to address her needs.
    Mr. Burton. Thank you, Doctor.
    Mr. Bono, when did your child start manifesting signs of 
autism?
    Mr. Bono. Within about 30 days of the MMR.
    Mr. Burton. So when did----
    Mr. Bono. Quite honestly, when my wife had said, ``Don't 
you see?'' I think mothers have a much keener sense of 
behaviors with their infants.
    Mr. Burton. I understand, but what I am trying to find out 
is she received the MMR shot, and you and your wife started 
noticing a change----
    Mr. Bono. Indeed; exactly.
    Mr. Burton [continuing]. In 30 days, you said?
    Mr. Bono. Well, within hours of the shot, we went home, and 
there was no sleeping that night, and he had rashes on his 
body----
    Mr. Burton. And it got progressively worse?
    Mr. Bono [continuing]. And over the next week, there were 
gastrointestinal problems, and finally, full blown behaviors 
that were odd.
    Mr. Burton. And how old was your child when that started?
    Mr. Bono. I think it was right at 16 months.
    Mr. Burton. Sixteen months.
    Ms. Smith, when did your child start manifesting a change 
in behavior?
    Ms. Smith. Well, at 16 months when they received the host 
of multiple vaccines, including the----
    Mr. Burton. Which were what? What were all those shots?
    Ms. Smith. The DPT, the Hib--it was their fourth DPT, their 
fourth Hib, their third hepatitis B, and their first MMR on 
that day--they came home, they slept for 24 hours, most of that 
time, did not eat a whole lot, long periods of sleep, had over 
100-degree temperatures in spite of giving them Tylenol before 
the vaccine and during the entire 24 hours.
    After that time, I figured, well, Jacob is sick again, 
because he was just kind of out of it and did not seem real 
interested in much----
    Mr. Burton. But this was at about 16 months----
    Ms. Smith. Right, right.
    Mr. Burton [continuing]. That you started seeing the 
manifest change in the child with autism.
    Ms. Smith. Right. And when we did go to the pediatrician, 
they just passed it off as his asserting his independence.
    Mr. Burton. OK.
    Ms. Reynolds.
    Ms. Reynolds. Liam got his shot on June 27, 1997. That is 
when he got his MMR and his Hib. That was the day before he 
turned 17 months old. A week later, I went to visit my parents 
in Maryville, TN for July 4th, and we started seeing some very 
strange, different behaviors showing up then. He would not come 
when we called his name. He was doing weird pattern movements 
up against the wall--but it was within a week.
    Mr. Burton. So it was right after he received the MMR shot.
    Ms. Reynolds. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Burton. OK.
    Mr. Smythe.
    Mr. Smythe. At about 20 months, our son--I included in the 
record his vaccine schedule and my other children's, and 
interestingly, he was given hepatitis B the day he was born and 
then received the other two shots, one of them 30 days later, 
and another about 8 months later. He received 12 vaccines in 
the first 6 months, as the record shows, as compared to our 
other children who did not, in fact, receive the hepatitis B 
until a year after he received his third shot.
    Mr. Burton. When did he start----
    Mr. Smythe. Right after the MMR, at 20 months.
    Mr. Burton. At 20 months, right after the MMR.
    So you four people right here are all in concert that right 
after the MMR shot, you started seeing the manifest change in 
your children. Is that correct?
    Ms. Smith. Yes.
    Mr. Smythe. Yes.
    Ms. Reynolds. Yes.
    Mr. Bono. Yes.
    Mr. Burton. And your child, Mr. Curtis?
    Mr. Curtis. I guess I have to be the dissenting opinion on 
this end of the table. I do not really remember the specific 
day of Morgan's MMR shots or any of his immunizations. He did 
not really exhibit any behaviors--it was not anything that he 
did--it was what he never did. It was the fact that he never 
talked. And again, as I mentioned, it was a very gradual 
process. I think his idiosyncratic behaviors of lining up his 
toys and the self-stimulatory behavior, the flapping of the 
hands, the spinning, all really started after he was 2 years 
old. It seemed like once we had a word for it, then it almost 
got worse.
    We have thought about this a lot, because this is a very 
common theory. You read about it on the net, and you talk with 
other parents, and my wife and I have both discussed it at 
length, and we really do not see any correlation between the 
time of his immunizations and the onset of any specific or more 
intense behaviors.
    Mr. Burton. OK. My last question, then, would be did you 
notice shortly after his birth, as he was progressing, some 
problems then?
    Mr. Curtis. I think, yes. The reason I say ``I think'' is 
because we wanted to believe that he was a late talker, a late 
developer. The only thing we noticed was that he was not 
speaking and that he did not seem to react to the things that 
we did with him--but otherwise, he was a very normal, happy 
baby. He played, he interacted, he made lots of noises. He just 
never formed words and almost did not seem to react to our 
speech.
    For a long time, we were very concerned about his hearing, 
that maybe he did not hear properly. In fact, when his hearing 
was tested, in the first test, they said he was deaf, and once 
they did the brainstem test that was conclusive, it turned out 
that his hearing was absolutely fine; it was just that he was 
not reacting to sound or voice.
    Mr. Burton. Thank you, Mr. Curtis, very much.
    I want to yield--go ahead.
    Mr. Smythe. I am sorry. I also noticed that my son was 
given the DPT vaccines the same day he was given the MMR. So he 
got six vaccines on the same day.
    Ms. Smith. So did mine.
    Mr. Smythe. Yours did, also? OK.
    Mr. Burton. Thank you.
    Mr. Waxman.
    Mr. Waxman. It takes a lot of courage for all of you to be 
here, and I want you to know how much I appreciate it, 
especially when you are talking about something personal and 
painful. And, I know you are here to try to help us understand 
what you are going through so that we can try to find out about 
autism, and so that we can spare others from going through what 
you are going through.
    There is legislation--this committee does not have 
legislative authority; it has the ability to hold hearings and 
get information. But the committee that has legislative 
jurisdiction, which I am also on, is the Commerce Committee, 
and there, we have a bill, H.R. 3301, which incorporates 
legislation by Congressman Greenwood, Congressman Bilirakis. 
Both Mr. Burton and I are on that bill, and it would do a lot 
to research more about the prevalence and ways to deal with 
autism. I hope that will give us some of these answers that we 
so desperately want.
    Dr. Dankner, you are in a unique position. You are the 
father of an autistic child, and you are also a pediatrician 
and an expert on infectious diseases. But your testimony, is 
that you do not think there is sound evidence linking autism to 
the MMR vaccine. How can you say that when the other parents 
have given us evidence that, in their view, their children 
developed autism after the vaccine? Isn't that sound evidence? 
As a scientist, how do you think we should consider it, and 
what do we need to prove that there is a connection, if there 
is one?
    Dr. Dankner. One thing is that I am not here to invalidate 
the testimony of the other individuals. I know that from their 
heart, they feel that these events occurred in relation to a 
specific time and place, and it would be wrong for me to make a 
challenge to anyone on this panel. This is a personal issue for 
a number of these individuals.
    However, as a clinical scientist, when we do research--I 
take care of HIV-infected children--it is important to identify 
causal events so that we do not do, as I mentioned, harm on 
either side of the fence of any of these issues. And I think it 
is important that if this committee or the scientific world 
feels that there is not enough evidence to generate a causal 
link between vaccinations and autism or any other disorder, 
those studies need to be done and that people then should look 
at those studies in a critical view, with appropriate peer 
review, and all individuals who are purporting one position 
versus another should be able to stand under the light of 
appropriate peer review to ensure that the scientific 
information is collected appropriately, analyzed appropriately, 
and discussed in an open forum and not in closed sessions, to 
ensure that the best information is provided to everyone so 
that, again, best decisions can be made by individuals.
    I would like to bring a personal perspective as an 
infectious disease doctor. Unlike the other panel members, I 
have been on the other side of the fence and have seen children 
who have been harmed by vaccine-preventable diseases. I live 
close to the border, where the vaccination rate in Mexico is 
not the same as in the United States. I have seen children who 
have developed congenital rubella, a lifelong disabling 
condition. I have seen children die of measles during a measles 
epidemic in San Diego 10 years ago, even with the pretty 
reasonable vaccine rates for a highly transmissible disease. I 
have seen children suffer from pertussis, hospitalized at 
significant rates.
    That position puts me in a position of being cautious about 
making any links, because if the vaccine rates fall in the 
United States, I can almost guarantee from my own personal 
experience that there will be individuals who will suffer on 
the other side of the fence, and those are the individuals that 
this committee usually does not hear about.
    Mr. Waxman. I am not a scientist. I studied science at 
different levels of my education, and when I studied science, I 
was told that there is a scientific method to try to get 
answers, and the scientific method sometimes took a theory or a 
hypothesis and then tested it, and you had trials and control 
groups, and you tried to find out whether that theory is 
correct or not. Sometimes, theories turn out to be widely 
believed, but then they are discarded. We all studied the fact 
that in the past, people did not know about hygiene in 
connection with hospitals, which used to be among the most 
dangerous places to be because of the lack of hygiene.
    But you are a scientist--the others on this panel are 
parents--but from a scientific method, are you saying the 
theory is absolutely incorrect, or are you saying that we just 
do not know enough to say that it is correct?
    Dr. Dankner. There are other people who will testify today 
who I think can probably better answer that. I was asked to 
come on the panel both as a parent and as a scientist.
    My reading of what has been correlated to date does not 
appear to indicate a causal link. I think that debate has not 
been settled and probably needs to be, so that we do not 
continue to move down avenues that may be less productive in 
terms of the resources that are necessary to identify other 
potential links to autism, what the needs are in the community, 
which I can tell you are great----
    Mr. Waxman. Let me interrupt you because my time is up. Are 
you saying to us, in other words, that we should not be alarmed 
about vaccinations and have parents refrain from having their 
kids vaccinated because of this theory, which, at this point, 
you do not think has gone through a scientific evaluation to be 
established as scientific fact?
    Dr. Dankner. I think an alarmist view is always of concern. 
I am a cautious individual, and I think we just need to be 
cautious in how we approach this issue.
    Mr. Burton. Thank you, Mr. Waxman.
    Dr. Dankner, I hope that you will have the ability to stay 
and hear some of the other scientists' positions just for your 
own information.
    Dr. Dankner. I planned on it.
    Mr. Burton. Thank you very much.
    Mrs. Morella.
    Mrs. Morella. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    I am very moved by the testimony that I have heard and read 
today. You are indeed the heroes, and we see you as role 
models, and your children are very fortunate to have you as 
parents. So thank you for being here.
    I think the only question I want to ask is to Mr. Bono. 
When you said that you had to travel 12 hours for a 5-minute 
treatment--I do not know enough about the background to know 
what that treatment is, why you have to travel 12 hours for it, 
and how you found out about it.
    Mr. Bono. I have to travel 12 hours, but that is deceiving, 
and first let me apologize. It is 6 hours up and 6 hours back 
in 1 day, so it is 12 hours.
    Mrs. Morella. It is significant.
    Mr. Bono. I have to travel because the treatment is not 
recognized as helping my son, and it is not approved. It is 
secretin, and they call it a slow push, or an infusion of 
sorts. We found that going up about every 28 days is a real 
good cycle for Jackson. Without it, he will not have a normal 
bowel movement; he will have acidic diarrhea, and he will not 
digest food properly, he will have unexplained rashes.
    Mrs. Morella. Who advised you that this would help him in 
that area? Is there another doctor who made the suggestion?
    Mr. Bono. At the press conference, one of the doctors said 
that the parents have really been the ones in the forefront of 
finding treatment options for their children, and this was a 
parent, too. Her name is Victoria Beck, and she serendipitously 
discovered secretin working for her child as the result of an 
endoscopy.
    Laura and I had always thought there was some connection 
between the gut and the brain that needed to be bridged, and 
when we heard about Victoria's experience, we were rather 
fascinated, and we began to read about it, and that is how we 
arrived at that treatment.
    Mrs. Morella. Dr. Dankner, I just want to briefly ask you--
it is your daughter who is autistic, but in general, as I 
mentioned in my opening statement, there is a prevalence among 
males with regard to autism--are there some unique challenges 
that you face with a female rather than a male with autism?
    Dr. Dankner. Oh, yes, and those challenges are becoming 
more apparent now that she has achieved puberty. Luckily, she 
responds very well to sequenced pictures. One of the social 
stories that was provided to her through her school at my 
wife's insistence--and I have to admit that she has taken the 
forefront on this--is how to deal with menstruation. If you 
allow our daughter to do her own thing, she gets into a 
pattern, and that pattern becomes very difficult to break. And 
we have several holes in our wall for which we could probably 
pay a drywall person a pretty sum of money to repair when she 
gets mad at things, she will kick holes here and there. 
Luckily, we are having a room addition put on very soon, so 
that will take care of the last patch jobs that we did. That is 
one issue that came up.
    Another issue that my wife and I feel very concerned about 
is the risk for her to be sexually abused as she gets older 
because of her inability to really indicate or express 
interactions with other individuals, as a number of the other 
panel discussants talked about with older children. Our 
daughter comes home from school, and you can ask her how her 
day went, and she will say ``Fine,'' but you will not be able 
to--unless we are given a set of things that went on at school, 
she is not there to carry on small talk; that is not a major 
impetus in her life. She will interact with us because she has 
needs, and she will seek us out for those, but if left to her 
own devices, she will stay in her garage room, watch her TV, 
whatever video she finds the most appealing that day, and she 
loves to play with the reverse and replay buttons on a regular 
basis.
    So, yes, I think there are some special challenges, but I 
think there are challenges for males growing up with autism 
also. There are things that they are going to have to face as 
they get older, and as they get older, I think the challenges 
become different. And I think all of the parents have to deal 
with the issue of what is going to happen to their children as 
they get older, who is going to take care of them when the 
parents are beyond an age when they can no longer take care of 
these children.
    Mrs. Morella. The toll on parents is immeasurable, 
obviously. Thank you.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Burton. Thank you, Mrs. Morella.
    Mr. Turner, do you have any questions?
    Mr. Turner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Doctor, I just have one question for you, and I know this 
hearing centers on the problem of autism. The chairman has had 
personal experience with it in his family, and I know that he 
has also had some experience with a granddaughter with the 
hepatitis B vaccine.
    I just wonder--is there any reason to question the age at 
which some of these vaccines are administered? I have always 
had the feeling that the younger the child, the more fragile, 
and therefore, the negative impact, if it be there, the 
potential is certainly greater when those vaccines are 
administered at an early age.
    I have, of course, had particular interest in the hepatitis 
B vaccine which is administered, I think, in most States now at 
birth, routinely. In fact, I was in the home of a family in my 
district this weekend who have a 2-year-old child who is 
severely disabled, and basically, this family spends most of 
their waking hours tending to the child, and they strongly 
suspect that the problem is the result of a hepatitis B 
vaccination. That is administered at birth, and I have been 
told that there is really no logical argument for trying to 
vaccinate a newborn, because the threat of hepatitis B does not 
exist at that early an age, but it might be a more appropriate 
vaccine for later in childhood or approaching the teenage 
years.
    Is there any reason to question the timing of some of these 
vaccines? One of our witnesses today talked about the large 
number of vaccines administered at one time.
    Dr. Dankner. Again, I was not called to the panel, I think, 
to give a long explanation of vaccine policy. There are lots of 
other individuals who have been involved in those policymaking 
decisions over the years. But I can give you my perspective 
once again from the diseases that we see in these age groups.
    Albeit hepatitis B is an uncommon disease process that 
children may or may not get exposed to, the more likely 
exposure is going to occur when they reach sexual debut, as we 
call it, when they can easily be exposed to hepatitis B from a 
partner. That is one of the major concerns, and hepatitis B is 
a major cause of chronic liver disease in the United States and 
has reached a rate where vaccination would definitely have an 
impact on that disease in terms of its prevention.
    The reason for giving some vaccines earlier is just to 
ensure that the vaccination gets performed. Rubella is a 
perfect example. When congenital rubella was identified in the 
United States, Australia and Europe as a devastating disease 
linked definitively to the acquisition of rubella by mothers 
who were previously uninfected, with no previous immunity to 
rubella, the approach was taken differently by different 
nations. If you look at the United States, they focused on 
giving the rubella vaccine early in life so that you would 
eliminate the pool of individuals who were exposing adults to 
rubella, whereas England took the approach of trying to 
vaccinate adolescent females primarily, because they were the, 
``at-risk population'' who could transmit rubella to their 
unborn fetus. The experience in England was that it took them a 
lot longer to eliminate congenital rubella from their 
population, and the experience in the United States was an 
enormous success, because even though you had women who were 
susceptible to rubella, they were not being exposed, and as 
those children who got the rubella vaccine early in life aged 
up into their childbearing years, they were no longer at risk 
of developing congenital rubella. The result is that the United 
States sees probably about two, four, five cases of congenital 
rubella a year, and most of those are from individuals who have 
either not received vaccination or come from a foreign country 
where the vaccine rates are much lower.
    Additionally, the hemophilus influenza B vaccine, the vast 
majority of H-flu meningitis that we see occurred in children 
less than 24 months of age. If you wait until they are 2 years 
of age to give the vaccine, you have missed the peak period. We 
used to see at our Children's Hospital in San Diego 60 to 70 
cases of hemophilus influenza meningitis per year. That is a 
pretty devastating disease for most of the children. We see 
essentially one case about every 2 or 3 years now, and the last 
case we saw was in a mother who had her fourth child and just 
did not get to the doctor to get the H-flu vaccine.
    I think that if you want to ask about the policies, you 
will need to talk to the policymakers for their conclusions. I 
can only give you my viewpoint from the standpoint of how I see 
infectious disease and the impact that I have seen in our local 
community, and the diseases that I no longer see, which some 
doctors in practice now may never see again, I think to the 
advantage of those particular children who are not suffering 
from those particular diseases.
    To be fair to the other panel participants, I recognize 
that I am a physician and I bring certain issues to the table, 
but I think the other individuals also have a lot to say that 
needs to be heard, and I do not want to monopolize everyone's 
time.
    Mr. Turner. I appreciate your comments. I guess the only 
point I was trying to make, and perhaps the witnesses on our 
second panel will help us with it, is that there are obviously 
good public policy reasons to have the vaccines given, but at a 
minimum, if the timing of those vaccines could be later in life 
for children, it seems that at least we owe the public that 
information, because particularly in the case of hepatitis B, 
if the threat of hepatitis B only occurs at the time when the 
child has the potential of becoming sexually active, it does 
not make a lot of sense to have a public policy that says we 
administer it on the second day of life; and if there is a 
risk, I as a parent certainly would not want that vaccine 
administered to my child at that point in time. People need to 
have that information.
    Thank you so much, Doctor.
    Mr. Burton. The gentleman's time has expired.
    Mr. Turner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Burton. Thank you very much, Mr. Turner.
    Mr. LaTourette.
    Mr. LaTourette. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. 
Waxman.
    I want to thank each of you for sharing your families' 
experiences with us today. Ms. Smith, my wife and I are the 
parents of 8-year-old twins, and we always said that if the 
twins had been first, they would have been last, because 
raising twins is enough of a challenge all by itself.
    I was not going to talk about what my friend from Texas was 
talking about, but it always amazed me--and I am not smart 
enough to know the connection between vaccines and what brings 
you here today--but it always amazed me that after these 
vaccines, you would bring your baby home, and he would turn 
bright red and have a horrible fever, and they would say, 
``Well, you just have to hang on for a little while, and 
everything is going to be OK,'' and this was a drug which was 
going to prevent some horrible childhood disease in the future. 
But why they were being exposed to these vaccines within the 
first couple days of being born, or even the first few months 
of being born, is something that I do think we need to get a 
handle on.
    But Ms. Smith, I want to talk to you about a portion of 
your testimony, and Ms. Reynolds also, because if I understand 
it, you may be following similar paths. That is, you have had 
Jacob screened and tested for the presence of heavy metals and 
fungi and other foreign substances within his system, and he is 
currently undergoing some nutritional therapy and so on. I 
wonder if you could share those experiences with us. And I 
think it was you, Ms. Smith, who wrote that the results of that 
screening were shocking and that it was amazing--was it you who 
had Dr. Stephanie Cave----
    Ms. Smith. Yes. We both----
    Mr. LaTourette. You both had Dr. Stephanie Cave.
    Ms. Smith. Right.
    Mr. LaTourette. OK. Then, maybe one at a time or in tandem, 
you could tell us a little bit about Dr. Cave's work and what 
about the results of these screenings was shocking, and what 
sorts of things now Liam and Jacob are going through that give 
you hope and point in the direction that this is a biomedical 
condition rather than a neurological condition.
    Ms. Smith. In my case, it is clearly not a genetic issue, 
considering that they are identical. The other reason I do not 
feel that it was a neurological disorder that he was born with 
is because his descent into autism happened so rapidly. He was 
completely with me, and he descended into autism so rapidly, 
and to me, that is not a neurological disorder that he had at 
birth.
    Also, I feel that it was not a neurological disorder that 
he was born with because when he was 2\1/2\, we had several 
professionals recommend that we put him on medications. I do 
not know what medications they said, such as Ritalin--I never 
pursued that avenue, because I felt like medicating a 2\1/2\ 
child was simply not good enough when I did not know what his 
body was already doing.
    I went to see Dr. Cave, and she ran blood and urine tests 
and took stool samples to see what deficiencies he had, the 
areas that he was lacking in, his amino acids and so on. We 
found that he had 10 food allergies. Because he had been on 
repeated antibiotics, he had extremely high--out of 23 fungal 
and yeast infections, he was high in 20. He was chromium, zinc, 
magnesium and copper deficient. He was B5-deficient. So, 
basically, what we did was we immediately started taking out 
what was bad and putting back what was good and taking him off 
the foods that he was allergic to. And within 5 days, my son, 
who had only a couple of words in his language and was very 
lost, said a full, appropriate sentence and started speaking 
again.
    So the rapid improvement also shows me that this was not a 
neurological disorder in his case.
    Mr. LaTourette. OK. And Ms. Reynolds, is Liam also 
undergoing similar therapy?
    Ms. Reynolds. Yes, he is. When he was diagnosed in May 
1998, we put him on a strict, gluten-free, casein-free diet 
that Dr. Cave prescribed, where he was not allowed to eat any 
of the substances, because his body was taking those things and 
actually manufacturing morphine, which was what was making him 
just sit and stare and not respond appropriately to things.
    Since that time, he has undergone an MRI, EEGs, all the 
normal things that they run on autistic children, and those all 
point to normal things. But when you start doing blood work and 
stool work and urinalysis, and they measured for toxic metals 
in his hair, she suggested that we give him a medication that 
would help pull out the heavy metals that he had been exposed 
to, and my husband and I were so gun-shy at this point from 
dealing with doctors that we pulled out the PDR and read 
through it, and we were, like, ``I do not know, this sounds a 
little weird to me; I do not think we are going to try this.'' 
And we took Liam to an environmental toxicologist who did some 
blood work and told us that the shape of Liam's blood--he had 
stippled cells that would be the same as a plant worker who had 
had serious toxic heavy metal exposure and that our son's blood 
cells were malformed as a result of heavy metal exposure that 
he had received.
    We have given him this medication several times. We were 
able in December to get a good urine sample, which is a little 
challenging around our house, and we were finally able to test 
that. The normal range--and I am probably going to mess this 
up--but the normal range for anything to show up in their 
bodies is between zero and six, and his lead and mercury had 
reduced down to normal ranges, but his levels of tin were 
completely off the charts. They were not even measurable. They 
were up around 250.
    Mr. LaTourette. Did you say tin?
    Ms. Reynolds. Tin.
    Mr. LaTourette. If I could just beg the chairman's 
indulgence, is he likewise receiving, aside from the medication 
that you are talking about, a nutritional program?
    Ms. Reynolds. He receives a number of nutritional 
supplements every day. He is on an antifungal medication, 
because we have been dealing with a yeast infection that just 
will not go away for 3 years, that makes him just a real mess. 
He is just a walking biological nightmare. And he looks as 
healthy as a horse. He has great skin, he has great teeth and 
cheeks. He is a beautiful, beautiful little boy, but if you 
take it down to the cellular and the molecular level, you can 
see that this child is a total mess.
    Mr. LaTourette. Thank you very much.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Ms. Reynolds. You are welcome.
    Mr. Burton. Thank you very much, Mr. LaTourette.
    Ms. Biggert, did you have any questions?
    Ms. Biggert. No questions, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Burton. Well, let me thank this panel. I just want to 
say to the four of you who have experienced this change right 
after the MMR shot that my daughter is sitting back there, and 
I and my daughter experienced exactly the same things that you 
did, and I believe what you are saying, and we are going to 
pursue that as diligently as possible, because I cannot believe 
that it is just a coincidence that the shot is given, and 
within a very short time--he got nine shots in 1 day, the MMR 
and DPAT, HIB and oral polio--and within a matter of just a few 
days, instead of being the normal child that we played with and 
talked to and everything else, he was running around, banging 
his head against the wall and flailing his arms.
    When people tell me that that was a genetic problem, I am 
telling you they are just nuts. That is not the way it was.
    With that, I want to thank this panel very much. We will 
now go to our next panel.
    Thank you very much.

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Note/Warning:

Autistic people have fought the inclusion of ABA in therapy for us since before Autism Speaks, and other non-Autistic-led autism organizations, started lobbying legislation to get it covered by insurances and Medicaid. 

ABA is a myth originally sold to parents that it would keep their Autistic child out of an institution. Today, parents are told that with early intervention therapy their child will either be less Autistic or no longer Autistic by elementary school, and can be mainstreamed in typical education classes. ABA is very expensive to pay out of pocket. Essentially, Autism Speaks has justified the big price tag up front will offset the overall burden on resources for an Autistic’s lifetime. The recommendation for this therapy is 40 hours a week for children and toddlers.

The original study that showed the success rate of ABA to be at 50% has never been replicated. In fact, the study of ABA by United States Department of Defense was denounced as a failure. Not just once, but multiple times. Simply stated: ABA doesn’t work. In study after repeated study: ABA (conversion therapy) doesn’t work. 

What more recent studies do show: Autistics who experienced ABA therapy are at high risk to develop PTSD and other lifelong trauma-related conditions. Historically, the autism organizations promoting ABA as a cure or solution have silenced Autistic advocates’ opposition. ABA is also known as gay conversion therapy.

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[Note: Autism is NOT a disease, but a neurodevelopmental difference and disability.]

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Fact: Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism.

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