# Special Order: Autism

3/19/03

Congressman Burton addresses the House floor on vaccinations and autism.
He discusses the class-action lawsuit against the pharmaceutical
companies who use mercury as a preservative in childhood vaccines. He
also discusses the Vaccine Compensation Fund that was established to
provide compensation to the families of children who developed autism as
a result of these vaccinations.

# Full Text

Mr. Burton: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker and my colleagues, these
are the faces of children who have been vaccinated with childhood
vaccines that contain a substance called Thimerosal. Thousands and
thousands, probably millions of children, but thousands of children have
been adversely affected by Thimerosal, which is 50% mercury. And these
are the faces of children who are normal one day and after receiving
several shots in one day that contained mercury, they very rapidly
deteriorated to where they couldn\'t talk, they couldn\'t look you in
the eye, they would flap their arms and run around screaming, and they
had chronic constipation and diarrhea alternatively. And the parents of
these children and thousands more like them have had a similar
experience to my granddaughter \-- or to my daughter and grandson. He
received nine shots in one day, seven of which contained mercury. He got
40 times the amount of mercury that\'s tolerable in an adult in one day
and within two days he was autistic. A very normal child, like these
were normal children. He was a very happy child, very talkative child,
and he went into silence when we started getting him out, he couldn\'t
talk clearly and has had to have all kinds of speech therapy. He ran
around his toes flapping his arms, banging his head against the wall,
like all these children did. And scientists we had before our committee
and doctors throughout the world are very confident that in large part,
that was caused because of the mercury that was injected into these
children from the preservative called Thimerosal, which was in almost
all of the children\'s vaccinations until just the last two or three
years when we had hearings on this and thankfully most of those vaccines
no longer have mercury in them except maybe one which is the flu vaccine
for children. So, Mr. Speaker, if any parents would be watching this, I
would like for them to remember to very quickly and very thoroughly look
at the insert in the vaccination case when their children are vaccinated
and make sure they don\'t have an adverse reaction. The reason I bring
this up and I'm coming down here every night is because there\'s an
attempt by the pharmaceutical companies through members of congress to
eliminate any possibility of lawsuits against them caused by these
vaccinations which had mercury in them. We have the Vaccine Compensation
Fund which was supposed to be a nonadversarial procedure to compensate
these people for damage to their children caused by vaccines but it has
become veried a adversarial and there was a three-year period before the
people had to file. That passed before these people knew they could get
compensation for their child\'s damage. And as a result, they were left
out in the cold. So they filed a class-action lawsuit and there\'s been
an attempt last fall and this year there will be an attempt to stop the
class-action lawsuit, leaving the people out in the cold, bankrupt, and
no place to go. There is a fund set up to help them but they can\'t get
in because the statute has run out and they can\'t go to court to file a
class-action lawsuit that\'s in the senate bill right now and will be
passed into law. That is limply wrong. We created this fund so those
children could be compensated. I want to read to you a letter of a
former colleague of ours, Dick Chrysler, who is a member of this
chamber, who has a grandson who is 6 years old that is autistic. He
received several vaccinations in the 1997-1999 period, many of which
contained the mercury, and here is what his mother said, "he then
continued to regress from being alert and happy and beginning to talk to
total regression and not talking until after age 3 with speech therapy.
He also became very aggressive and did not know how to play or interact
properly with others." That is what happened to my grandson as well.
These and many other much more severe behavior such as seizures with
severe breakdowns of explosive behaviors, causing injury to our other
children and broken bones and stitches have been a part of our life due
to autism. This has made our life incredibly difficult, as one can
imagine. As we have taken this past year and a half focusing on whatever
treatment we can do to help our son\'s autism improve and our family\'s
life as well, it has cost us more than we imagined. Treatments have
helped but aren\'t covered by insurance have amounted to thousands of
dollars and this expense has no end in sight. There is a fund out there
they can\'t get into and they can\'t go to court and yet the vaccines,
they believe, and thousands like them believe and I believe and
scientists and doctors believe it was caused by the mercury in these
vaccines. Autism does not just affect the poor thousand \-- 4,000 of
children inflicted with this dreadful disease but affects every person
in the world because ultimately this epidemic is like a chain reaction.
And they go on to say 20 years from now when these aren\'t just little
children, whose parents are going to take care of them? Especially when
we die. This is something my colleagues and I have to deal with and we
have to deal with it quickly.

The Speaker Pro Tempore: The gentleman\'s time has expired.