Response to Comments by J.R. Mann
DAVID A. GEIER AND MARK R. GEIER
MedCon, Inc. and The Genetic Centers of America, Silver Spring, Maryland 20905
We thank Mann for his insightful comments concerning our manuscript (1). Mann suggests we should have analyzed the same periods following immunizations with and without thimerosal. We have done this in a subsequent analysis, and we still found statistically significantly increased relative risks for neurodevelopmental disorders following thimerosal-containing vaccines in comparison to thimerosal-free vaccines based upon analysis of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) (2).
Mann suggested that by focusing on thimerosal containing DTaP we may have missed the effects of other thimerosal-containing vaccines on neurodevelopmental disorders. Subsequently, we analyzed the United States’ Department of Education (USDEA) datasets, where we were able to evaluate the complete mercury burden from all thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines in each birth cohort examined (2, 3). Our analyses have shown close significant dose-response relationships between increasing mercury burdens per birth cohort and increasing prevalence of neurodevelopmental disorders per birth cohort (2, 3). We generated dose-response curves from VAERS for increasing dose of mercury from thimerosal-containing DTaP vaccines in comparison to thimerosal-free DTaP vaccines, and found that the slopes from our VAERS and USDEA dose-response neurodevelopmental disorder analyses were similar (2, 3).