Meeting an autism ‘et al.’

Dan Olmsted's person of the year: Lyn Redwood.

Talk about clueless. Back when I was first getting into the autism issue, I was invited to dinner in Washington with some people I have since come to know well and respect highly, including Jim Moody, Mark Blaxill, Laura Bono and Lyn Redwood. Sallie Bernard was also coming but her plane from Colorado was a bit late, and I remember telling Lyn how excited I was to meet Sallie because she was the Bernard of Bernard et al., which had set the whole thimerosal debate on fire.  It was a brilliant piece of detective work by citizen scientists. It was then that Lyn unassumingly mentioned that she was an et al. (and others), a co-author of this foundational document.

When it comes to key moments in the autism struggle, Lyn Redwood has been there from the start, not pushing her way forward but, by dint of hard work and smart thinking, ending up in the middle of the most important battles. David Kirby’s Evidence of Harm tells the first few years of that story well, of course, but over the ensuing years I’ve come to see it for myself. In my mind’s eye I see her at a rally at the Capitol on a hot, miserably humid day, speaking with great feeling and introducing her son Will, who, if I recall correctly, reminded everyone of what his mother had helped establish – that putting mercury in children on purpose is stupid.

There was the environmental symposium in Bethesda, Md., that Lyn and Laura engineered and emceed that drew top guns from the NIH. And the one at the IOM a couple of years later where Lyn spoke so eloquently. There are the Defeat Autism Now conferences she coordinates and the SafeMinds board she belongs to.
And, of course, there’s the small matter of the billion dollars from the Combating Autism Act now in the hands of the IACC – the federal government’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (at least one of those Cs should stand for clueless). Lyn has fought tooth and nail for more attention to environmental factors and – duck, here comes trouble! – facing up to the possible role of vaccine and vaccine mercury (aka thimerosal) in the autism epidemic. In a transparent bit of obfuscation, the committee managed to reverse its own decision to look into vaccines, deciding belatedly that because it recommended and approved them it had a conflict of interest in deciding whether they were safe (now you tell us!). In other words, the feds are still trying to ignore the issue Lyn helped put on the table, and she’s still at the table, calling them on it.
As Katie Wright put it: “Lyn Redwood and Lee Grossman are the sole IACC autism advocacy representatives. Lee and Lynn are the only ASD organizational representatives of the nearly two million American families living with autism. When hostile IACC committee members like Dr.Yvette Janvier dismiss a mere discussion of our children’s suffering as ‘offensive’ it has been Redwood who has urged the committee to come to grips with the fact that autism is frequently a multi-system disease with profoundly disabling co-morbid disorders. Redwood has continually advocated for research into regression, adjuvants, adverse vaccine reactions as well as GI disease and dietary interventions studies that would be relatively inexpensive and lead to a better quality of life for so many of our children. Lyn Redwood is a parent, a pediatric nurse and has been an autism advocate longer than anyone in that room.”

This led to an incident that momentarily showed the government autism bureaucracy’s true colors, and they weren’t pretty to look at. At an IACC meeting in October, a note passed between NIH officials Dr. Story Landis and Dr. Matt State and ended up on the floor, from whence it was retrieved. It read in part:

“I wonder if Lyn Redwood is pushing autism as a multi-symptom disorder in order to feed into vaccine injury awards.”

Oh, just great. Here is just about the only person who has the ear of the U.S. government to tell the truth about autism, and these people think it’s all about vaccine injury awards! This embarrassment left Landis so red-faced she resigned from the panel, and Tom Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health, subsequently apologized publicly to Lyn.
In truth, the U.S. government has a lot to apologize for, starting with the fact that it ignored the implications of Bernard et al. and left mercury in flu shots rather than banning it from medicine, effectively giving the okay for tens of millions around the world to get thimerosal-containing Hep B, Hib and DPT shots. This is in all likelihood inducing an iatrogenic (doctor-induced) catastrophe of epic proportions, and Lyn Redwood – a nurse – has been trying to tell the medical profession to ‘just please stop’ for a long time now.

In fact, it’s Lyn’s persistence – polite, passionate and delivered with a Georgian inflection that makes it as palatable as possible – that is most remarkable. When it comes to standing up for affected children and families on the IACC, and trying to make sure our taxpayer money doesn’t go down the drain, there’s really no “et al.” at all – just Lyn Redwood.
We could be doing a lot worse.