page_title: Cedillo v. Secretary of Health and Human Services
section_title: Opposing arguments
hierarchical_section_title: Cedillo v. Secretary of Health and Human Services / Overview / Opposing arguments
caption_attribution_description: A graph of measurements of Michelle Cedillo's immune system, made using Excel. Data comes from Christine McCusker's expert report.
context_page_description: Michelle Cedillo v. Secretary of Health and Human Services, also known as Cedillo, was a court case involving the family of Michelle Cedillo, an autistic girl whose parents sued the United States government because they believed that her autism was caused by her receipt of both the measles-mumps-and-rubella vaccine and thimerosal-containing vaccines. The case was a part of the Omnibus Autism Proceeding, where petitioners were required to present three test cases for each proposed mechanism by which vaccines had, according to them, caused their children's autism; Cedillo was the first such case for the MMR-and-thimerosal hypothesis.
  The family sought compensation from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, but in order to qualify they were required to prove that it was more likely than not that their children's autism was caused by their vaccines. The scientific community had concluded that vaccines did not cause autism years before the first cases were heard, and concern was therefore expressed that the relatively lax evidentiary standards of the NVICP could lead to compensation being awarded in spite of the compelling scientific evidence to the contrary.
context_section_description: One of the key lines of evidence presented by the Cedillo family was that Michelle was developmentally normal before she received the MMR vaccine. This, they claimed, was evident from videos taken of her when she was 6 to 8 months old. However, Eric Fombonne testified that Michelle "... displayed early signs of autism clearly visibly on family video taken prior to her receiving the MMR vaccine."
  Jeffrey Brent, the past president of the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology, was invited to testify about the potential role of thimerosal-containing vaccines in triggering Michelle's autism. He stated that "there was not a single study indicating that any form of mercury could cause serious neurological symptoms in the dosages that were used in vaccines" and criticized Aposhian's use of in vitro studies and his equating them to what happens in the actual animal, arguing that "the exposure to a cell in a petri dish was far more likely to cause damage than an equivalent dosage in a living system." With regard to specific in vitro studies, Brent argued that the Goth study was flawed because it tested thimerosal on mouse cells, not human cells; because these cells were exposed not to ethylmercury, as the human body would be after receiving a thimerosal-containing vaccine since thimerosal is quickly metabolized to ethylmercury, but to thimerosal itself, and because the cells were exposed to far higher concentrations of thimerosal than could ever occur as a result of the administration of thimerosal-containing vaccines. Brent highlighted similar problems with the Agrawal study, noting that the cells in that study, like those in the Goth study, were exposed to thimerosal, not ethylmercury, and to much higher doses than found in vaccines. He also examined the Bradstreet and Geier study and the Holmes study, noting that "much better studies from other investigators could not replicate the results of either the Holmes study or the Bradstreet/Geier study," citing two other peer-reviewed papers which had concluded that hair mercury levels were not significantly different between study participants with autism and controls, as well as a study which had concluded that children with autism had no chelatable heavy-metal body burden whatsoever. Brent also pointed out that, like another of Bradstreet's studies, the Bradstreet-Geier study had been published in a non-indexed journal, the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, which he described as "very much of a fringe journal with lots of alternative agendas, and it's not even indexed by the National Library of Medicine." Brent concluded by testifying that thimerosal could not have degraded Michelle's immune system to the extent that when she was vaccinated with MMR nine months later, it caused brain damage, saying "That couldn't possibly be the case." In the second set of the proceedings, which pertained to thimerosal alone (as opposed to thimerosal working in conjunction with MMR), Brent testified, with regard to Jordan King and one other child with autism who also served as a test case in this trial, that there was "absolutely no reason to chelate them for any mercury-related reason."
  Many of the plaintiff's experts also relied on the reported detection of measles virus RNA in Michelle's intestinal tissue. This claim was based on results from O'Leary's Unigenetics lab, and was examined by Stephen Bustin, a world-renowned expert on polymerase chain reaction who has authored a number of scientific papers on the subject, as well as a book entitled A-Z of Quantitative PCR. He pointed out that this is based on results from the O'Leary lab, and concluded, based on a 2002 paper by Uhlmann that described their PCR methodology, that this lab contained a lot of contaminating DNA, and that the assays were actually detecting this DNA rather than the RNA which makes up the measles virus. Bustin pointed out that, among other things, O'Leary's Unigenetics lab which published this study neglected to use controls, and also did not discuss contamination. For this reason, Bustin concluded that it was 
caption: A bar graph of Michelle's T cell enumerations, left, the lower limits of the normal range of those parameters, center, and the upper limit, right. While Byers had argued that Michelle's immune system was dysregulated, Christine McCusker demonstrated that when compared to values determined by other researchers for children of Michelle's age, her parameters were within the normal ranges.[37]:2
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