[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 44 (Wednesday, March 19, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H2100-H2101]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    VACCINE INJURY COMPENSATION FUND

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker and my colleagues, these are the 
faces of children who have been vaccinated with childhood vaccines that 
contain a

[[Page H2101]]

substance called thimerosal. Thousands and thousands and thousands, 
probably millions of children, but thousands of children have been 
adversely affected by the thimerosal, which is 50 percent mercury; and 
these are the faces of children who were normal one day, and after 
receiving several shots in one day that contained mercury, they very 
rapidly deteriorated to where they could not talk, they could not look 
one in the eye, they would flap their arms and run around screaming, 
and they had chronic constipation and diarrhea alternatively.
  These parents of these children and thousands more like them have had 
a similar experience to my daughter and my grandson. He received nine 
shots in one day, seven of which contained mercury. He got 40 times the 
amount of mercury that is tolerable in an adult in 1 day, and within 2 
days he was autistic. A very normal child like these were normal 
children. He was a very happy child, a very talkative child, and he 
went into silence. When we started getting him out of it finally, he 
could not talk clearly. He had to have all kinds of speech therapy. He 
ran around on his toes, flapping his arms, banging his head against the 
wall like all of these children did. And scientists that we have had 
before our committee and doctors from throughout the world who are very 
competent have said that in large part that was caused because by the 
mercury that was injected into these children from the preservative 
called thimerasol which was in almost all of the children's 
vaccinations until just the last 2 or 3 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 that they do not have an adverse reaction.
  The reason I am bringing this up and I am coming down here every 
night is because there is 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 what is called the Vaccine Injury 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 very adversarial, and it was only a 3-year period within which 
people had to file. That 3-year period passed before many of these 
people knew that they could try to 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 has been an attempt last fall and 
again this year they are going to attempt to stop those class action 
lawsuits which would leave these parents out in the cold with no 
recourse. They are mortgaging their homes. They are going bankrupt. 
They have no place to go. There is a fund set up to help them, but they 
cannot get into the fund because that statute has run out and they 
cannot even go to court to file a class action lawsuit if this language 
that is in the Senate bill right now is passed into law; and that 
simply is wrong. We created that fund so those people, those children, 
could be compensated.
  I want to read a letter of a former colleague of ours, Dick Chrysler, 
who was 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 a very aggressive child who 
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 behaviors such as seizures 
with severe breakdowns and explosive behaviors which have caused injury 
to our other children from broken bones to stitches have become 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 treatments we can do to help our son's autism improve and 
therefore our family's life as well, it has cost us more than we could 
ever have imagined. Treatments, which have helped but are not covered 
by any insurance, have amounted to thousands of dollars, and this 
expense has no end in sight.''

                              {time}  1715

  Remember, there is a fund out there that they cannot get into. They 
cannot 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 thousands of children inflicted 
with this dreadful disease. It affects every person in the world, since 
ultimately this epidemic is like a chain reaction.
  They go on to say 10 to 20 years from now when these are not just 
little children, who is going to take care of them, especially when we 
die? This is something that my colleagues and I have to deal with, and 
we have to deal with it quickly.

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