The Agora Cosmopolitan, a.k.a. The Canadian, has a piece up about the flu vaccine that gets pretty much everything about them wrong. It’s no surprise, mind you, considering the article is copied wholesale, verbatim, in its entirety, from a crank website that it links at the bottom of the page as the “internet site reference”. Lazy beggars. They begin:
Thimerosal is a widely used vaccine preservative that is present in the majority of flu shots and other vaccines. Thimerosal is 49% mercury by volume, an extremely toxic chemical element that wreaks havoc on the nervous system, neurological function, and overall biological function <1>. Each dose of flu vaccine contains around 25 micrograms of thimerosal, over 250 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s safety limit of exposure.
Wrong, straight out of the gate. Thimerosal is no longer used in pretty well any vaccine but the flu shots, having been removed from the other vaccines in 1997 after long and successful campaigns by the scaremongering tactics of the antivax crowd. The mercury in thimerosal is part of ethyl mercury (C2H5Hg), not methyl mercury (CH3Hg). Ethyl mercury does not bioaccumulate like methyl mercury does, and is not an extremely “toxic” chemical element. Mercury is an element, methyl mercury and ethyl mercury are not. Ethyl mercury does not “wreak havoc on the nervous system”. The EPA cares primarily about methyl mercury and elemental mercury as environmental concerns, leaving ethyl mercury to the FDA due to its harmless nature. If thimerosal is 49% ethyl mercury, then this would be 125 times the EPA’s limit, not 250, if the EPA even considered ethyl mercury the same as methyl mercury, which it rightly does not.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2011/10/23/our-newest-canadian-import-flu-vaccine-scaremongering/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook
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