Dan Burton: “one of the things that's made the United States and the world healthier than at any period of the world has been…”

“one of the things that's made the United States and the world healthier than at any period of the world has been vaccinations. Vaccinations have stopped so many dreaded diseases from killing hundreds of thousands, millions of people, it's not even funny. But while vaccines have saved so many lives, there have also been some shortcomings in vaccines. When I was chairman of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, I held hearings on autism; and we have gone from 1 in 10,000 children who are autistic to 1 in 150. We have an absolute epidemic of autism in this country, and hundreds of thousands of families have been affected and they have nowhere to turn. Because of that, we passed in the 1980s what was called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund, and it was supposed to take care of families and people who were injured by vaccines and had nowhere to turn. Well, that was supposed to be a nonconfrontational system. But unfortunately, there has been nobody, up until recently, who has been paid out of the vaccine compensation fund. And one of the reasons is because Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration have said that the mercury in vaccines, 50 percent of it is a preservative called thimerosal. The mercury in vaccines did not cause autism, and there have been a lot of studies that have come out saying the mercury in the vaccines was not a root cause of the autism crisis that we have in this country.”