New Film - Vaccines: Are They Safe and Effective?selfnews Post Dr. Offit appears often on national television as an expert on vaccination. By not inviting any of his many critics, the mainstream media gives the impression that he has none. This false impression leaves the public uninformed on the very real threats posed to childrens health through an overly aggressive vaccine program that now recommends children receive an astounding 48 vaccines by the age of six. Here are some facts: Help us find out why. Details about how you can help are posted below Your donation of $10 to $15,000 will allow us to complete the project. In return, youll receive: Organization mission statement Public Affairs Media, Inc. (501c3) was founded on the premise that if democracy is to succeed, the public must be informed and leadership made accountable through a free press, and that freedom of the press depends on the freedom and duty of the individual journalist to identify, explore, and explain the important issues of the day in a fair, accurate and complete manner. Thus our goal is to inform and educate the public on substantive political, scientific and social issues of national and international importance. About Richard P. Milner Richard P. Milner is an award-winning documentary filmmaker with over thirty years experience in film and television. Milner is the co-founder and executive director of Public Affairs Media, Inc. Recent television projects Milner has produced and/or directed include ABC Network News Good Morning America, This week with George Stephanopoulos, and World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Staff series work has included Crazy for Food (PBS); Navajo Rodeo Cowboys (PBS); Geography in U.S. History (PBS); A Personal Story (TLC); and Science Times (New York Times TV and National Geographic). Milner also originated and co-produced the PBS Frontline documentary on endocrine disrupting chemicals entitled, Fooling with Nature. At NBC-TV, New York, Milner developed story ideas, edited and directed post-production on more than twenty documentary specials for NBC White Paper, NBC Reports and NBC Magazine on health, economics, science, and public affairs with such correspondents as David Brinkley, Marvin Kalb, John Dancy, Lloyd Dobbins, and Edwin Newman. Milners documentaries have won the Christopher Award and the WorldFest Houston Gold Award for Best Continuing News Story. There are currently 14 days left to reach the goal of $12,000; donations now stand at $5,780. Dr. Offit is a pediatrician. That is his training. Conventional medicine claims superiority to other modalities in that it alone is scientifically based. But what about when a scientist disagrees with a doctor on the science that should underlie vaccination? What then? I think we should listen to the scientist. Or at the very least, we should listen to both. Right now, Offit is given the bully pulpit. He is on TV and radio all the time without being questioned. The impression is that journalists have done their homework and found the critics lacking. But that is false. They have not. I have had a career in US film and network TV as a writer-producer-director and previous to that as an editor, for NBC, ABC and PBS. My mom was a doctor. Some of my earliest memories are of going with her to her well baby clinics where she gave vaccines. So when I held a seminar on how print journalists could put legs on their national stories by pitching them to film and TV producers, and one asked me if Id be interested in the link between vaccines and autism, I was interested but VERY skeptical. I told her she was making some very serious allegations about some very credible organizationsindeed about one of the miracles of modern medicineand I wanted to see her basis for them, if any. She produced nothing for me to understand without spending a lot of time reading and consulting Google. So I called a friend that Ive worked with over the years to ask her opinion. She told me the kibosh had been put to the issue by a large study out of Denmark (Madsen). They thought mercury, a well-known neurotoxin, might be causing autism so they removed it from their shots only to find that autism increased. I wanted to satisfy myself that there was no connection so I read the paper. The statistical manipulation was obvious. They counted twice. The first time they counted only children whod been admitted to a hospital with autism, and got very few because most children with autism are not admitted to a hospital. Then after they removed the mercury, they counted again. This time they included the large number of outpatient cases whod been there all along, only making it look like autism had increased when it really hadnt. Denmark, by the way, did not put mercury back in their shots. They kept it out. So apparently I wasnt the only one who didnt believe Madsen. I found the study was commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC. Then I got a document that one of the autism parent groups (Safe Minds) had obtained through a Freedom of Information request. The document was notes of a secret meeting (Simpsonwood) between the CDC, FDA, USPHS, NIH, representatives of WHO, vaccine manufacturers and some medical associations, but no parent groups or vaccine critics. The meeting was illegal because of its secrecy and exclusion of these groups. They discussed an internal CDC statistical study showing a large increased risk of neurological problems from vaccines. The CDC stated they would be re-doing the numbers to arrive at a different outcome and would be commissioning studies to reinforce that perception. Hence Madsen. The numbers from Madsen were later run by independent scientists (Geier) who found the mercury removal had actually reduced new cases of both autism and asthma in Denmark. Today, the CDCs representative and co-author (Poul Thorsen) stands accused of embezzling one million dollars of the study money. Scientists I spoke with told me there are a very large number of studies showing vaccine ingredients are dangerous, principally mercury and aluminum, but also animal DNA particles and viruses, formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, MSG and antibiotics. So, I raised the funds and did an intensive reading of the papers. It took several years. I found the scientists were correct. But as the saying goes, water flows uphill to money. Recently, several pharmaceutical companies paid in the high hundred million to low billion-dollar range to settle fraud charges or pay fines relating to improper drug marketing. They illegally claimed the drugs were good for conditions for which there was no underlying scientific evidence or Food and Drug Agency (FDA) approval. The government grants pharmaceutical companies monopolies on new drugs, new delivery systems or new formulations with other drugs via patent protection. But nowadays few of these are in the pipeline. However, more than 120 new vaccines are. And as the drugs patents expire the pharmaceutical companies are betting on vaccines to be their next billion-dollar, blockbuster sellers. I was curious. Did vaccines do away with small pox and polio? I found that deaths from a host of infectious diseases were virtually eliminated by quarantine, better hygiene and sanitationin some cases over a decade before the introduction of the vaccine. I found that both smallpox and polio vaccines are not very effective, and have a history of actually causing the disease! Moreover, large groups of vaccinated children get the disease anyway. And there are populations of unvaccinated kids who dont have autism. With autism running at 1 in 42 for boys, there should be at least hundreds in these communities, but apparently there arent. And the CDC will not conduct a serious study of vaccinated versus unvaccinated to prove or disprove this. If vaccines are really so safe and effective, why on earth would the CDC not rush to carry out such a study? In 1999, the US Public Health Service and the American Academy of Pediatrics asked vaccine makers to remove mercury from their shots. But today they defend mercury against moves to outlaw it in various state legislatures across the US. And the World Health Organization has announced a preference for vaccines with the pre-1999 doses of mercury. Consequently, all US vaccines for export to other countries contain mercury at these high levels! In addition to the science, I found three books helpful in understanding the history. Vaccination Is Not Immunization by Dr. Tim OShea,Dissolving Illusions by Dr. Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystianyk, and Age of Autism by Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted. All of the books are thoroughly referenced to the published science. Also of interest,Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children, a collection of articles edited by Louise Kuo Habakus and Mary Holland. And Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills by retired neuorosurgeon Dr. Russell Blaylock. Our Daily Meds, by Melody Peterson, On the Take by Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, and The Truth About the Drug Companies, by Marcia Angell are especially illustrative of drug company behavior. The last two authors are former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine. I sent the above to one of my old friends, a science reporter at the Los Angeles Times. After he responded to my initial pitch by saying I was causing measles, and should get the facts. He then responded with a link to a blogger calling himself Orac. I tracked Orac down. His real name is David Gorski. He works as a drug developer for Wayne State University, which has a large contract for same with Sanofli-Aventis, yet claims to have no conflict of interest. I politely asked my friend why hed send me to a blogger as a source, especially a blogger with an attitude making ad hominem attacks in place of logic or evidence, and asked whether he actually ever read scientific literature himself. His response: No, I just thought he put it well. Welcome to my spam basket asshole! Sadly, his response is typical. Most journalists, TV networks, and foundations donating to film projects are intimidated by science, and will not take the time to really investigate. Instead they parrot those who seem to know. Those who are selling the product and have captured the federal health agencies that are supposed to be protecting us. Or they are simply ready to do the bidding of one of the largest donors in public and advertisers in commercial media, the drug companies Contributions will allow me to shoot Dr. Haley with a professional crew and complete the film. Think of it as a vote for informed consent. Richard P Milner, Public Affairs Media, Inc 