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Somali Parents’ Rational Concerns About Vaccine Safety
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Original Message
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[link to worldmercuryproject.org (secure)]
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
A note from the World Mercury Project Team:
In June of this year, at the invitation of the Rochester Minnesota Post-Bulletin, World Mercury Project Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. submitted the following article for publication. The newspaper had invited Mr. Kennedy to submit an editorial after he complained about inaccuracies in the paper’s reports on the Somali measles outbreak.
While initially agreeing to publish the article, Post-Bulletin executive editor Jay Furst ultimately declined to run the piece. The paper made the decision in late September following almost four months of revisions, discussions and email exchanges with Mr. Kennedy. Furst explained that after five months of trying, the publication had been unable to find any public health official or pro-vaccine advocate willing to write a rebuttal or refute the facts outlined by Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Furst explained that Minnesota public health officials shown the article had made a generalized complaint that it was inaccurate, but that they refused to be specific about their claims or to provide citations. None of the many public health officials and vaccine advocates contacted by the newspaper were willing to go on record or to provide a rebuttal editorial. Nevertheless, Mr. Furst explained that because of the controversial nature of this issue, the editors felt that they could not run the article without a companion rebuttal piece.
Once again, public debate regarding the safety of the $46 billion vaccine industry has been muzzled. Mr. Kennedy says that Mr. Furst was genial, diligent, and professional in all their interactions, and genuinely apologetic about the outcome. According to a Minnesota Department of Health press release, the state’s measles outbreak was over by the end of August with 79 confirmed measles cases and no reported deaths or disabilities.
This winter, Minneapolis area health officials reported 76 measles cases among Somali-Americans. Mainstream media outlets, most recently, John Oliver in a 28 minute rant, vilified Somali-Americans for low vaccine rates and blamed Andrew Wakefield, MD and the so-called “anti-vaccine movement” for misleading Somalis about vaccine safety. Like most other journalists, Oliver never explained the story behind this story; the children of Minneapolis’s Somalis suffer the highest known rate of severe autism in the world—one in 32, according to University of Minnesota researchers.
Many Somalis believe that their children’s injuries are related to vaccines. “My perfectly healthy son started having seizures within minutes after his 18-month vaccines,” Abdulkadir Osman Hassan told me in June “and the seizures have never stopped.” Hassan’s boy, now 14, is severely autistic. “I quickly determined I was not alone.”
Somali parents had already started a support group and were sharing with each other the terrible reactions their children were having to vaccines. “We don’t have a word for autism in the Somali language,” explains Hassan, who has an Associate’s Degree in Childhood Development. “We never saw it in our country. We never heard of it. The adults in our community don’t have it, only our children.”
[snip]
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