The 2000 Simpsonwood CDC conference (officially titled Scientific Review of Vaccine Safety Datalink Information) was a two-day meeting convened in June 2000 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), held at the Simpsonwood Methodist retreat and conference center in Gwinnett County near Norcross, Georgia. The key event at the conference was the presentation of data from the Vaccine Safety Datalink examining the possibility of a link between the mercury compound thimerosol in vaccines and neurological problems in children who had received those vaccines.

A 2005 article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., published by Rolling Stone and Salon.com, focused on the Simpsonwood meeting as part of a conspiracy to withhold or falsify vaccine-safety information. However, Kennedy's article contained numerous major factual errors and, after a number of corrections, was ultimately retracted by Salon.com. Also in attendance were approximately half a dozen public-health organisations and pharmaceutical companies, as well as eleven consultants to the CDC, a rapporteur, and a statistician. The meeting served as a prelude to vaccine policy meetings held by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which sets U.S. vaccine policy for the CDC. The session was also to serve as the initial meeting of the ACIP work group on thimerosal and immunization.

Presentations and supporting documents from the conference were subject to a news embargo until June 21, 2000, at which point they were published by the ACIP. After the conference, researchers carried out a planned second phase to further analyze and clarify the study's preliminary findings. The results of this second analysis were published in 2003.

In the anti-vaccination movement

The June 20, 2005, issue of Rolling Stone contained an article written by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., entitled "Deadly Immunity". The article, which was also published on Salon.com, focused on the Simpsonwood conference, and alleged that government and private industry had colluded to "thwart the Freedom of Information Act" and "withhold" vaccine-safety findings from the public. Kennedy said that the Simpsonwood data linked thimerosal in vaccines to the rise in autism, but that the lead researcher later "reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism."

Salon.com later said that the errors in the article "went far in undermining Kennedy’s exposé",

By the time the final study results discussed at Simpsonwood were published in 2003, the lead researcher, Thomas Verstraeten, had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline.

See also

  • Thiomersal and vaccines

Further reading

  • Conference transcript

Notes

References

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