A plea for action...

As I suggested two weeks ago, the latest move by Senator Frist to push through legislation indemnifying Eli Lilly and other pharmaceutical campaign contributors might in all actuality be worse than the provision tacked onto the Homeland Security Legislation last fall, but removed in January, at the behest of my own Maine Senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. Well, it is in fact worse. Much worse.

The language tacked onto the Homeland Security Bill originated from Senator Frist's earlier failed attempt to modify the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: That last-minute provision asserted that the mercury-based vaccine preservative Thimerosal, which had been concluded to be an adulterant by various courts, was instead a vaccine ingredient, and thus all potential injuries sustained by mercury in vaccines had to first go through the NVICP. The problem with this was that vaccine law crafted in the mid-1980s which established the NVICP was not clear as to whether claims which were no longer able to be submitted to the Vaccine Court, due to a three year statute of limitations, could then be addressed in civil court. This was particularly relevant, as the "lag-time" between first symptoms and diagnosis of many neurological disorders, including autism, PDD and ADD/ADHD is more than three years. So families were concerned, particularly as new studies might come out implicating mercury in neurological conditions, that they would be closed out of both the Vaccine as well as civil courts.
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