Congress mandated the FDA and other health agencies under its purview to establish levels of heavy metals in pharmaceutical agents in the 1997 FDA Modernization Act. The FDA and CDC were then obliged to study the issue of Thimerosal toxicity. Their troubling findings were discussed at a meeting in June 2000 at the Simpsonwood Resort in Norcross, Georgia. The transcript of this meeting, obtained by SafeMinds under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is available here.

Comments as reported by the Detroit news have been distilled into a short form here along with other pertinent highlights of this landmark meeting.

During this time period, the CDC continued to do their epidemiological studies on Thimerosal toxicity from vaccines in children. Their first analysis (and from all indications the most accurate of their efforts) obtained by SafeMinds under the Freedom of Information Act must have been, as documented in the Simpsonwood transcript, terribly disturbing to them. It showed a 2.48% increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders in children who had received the mercury laced vaccines (see graph 3 at the top of page 15 of the above report).

Following their initial review, the CDC revised the data by including younger infants (not yet diagnosed) and pulled in data that knowingly and dramatically under reported autism rates (due to a poorly designed database) and used these "new" calculations in the second and third drafts of this report. Internal e-mails from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, obtained by SafeMinds under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), appear to confirm this suspicion.

The addition of this knowingly flawed data allowed for a revised, and inaccurately lower, rate of neurodevelopmental disorders/injury secondary to Thimerosal/vaccine exposure.