Presentation for CDC advisers appears to cite nonexistent study to support claims about risk of vaccine preservative

A presentation slated to be shared at this week’s meeting of vaccine advisers to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claimed that a study in animals suggested that use of the vaccine preservative thimerosal can have “long-term consequences in the brain.”

But the study doesn’t appear to exist.

Lyn Redwood, a former leader of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group that lists US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a founder, is scheduled to give the presentation Thursday at a meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

The slides, posted online Tuesday, cite a 2008 study in the journal Neurotoxicology by “Berman RF, et al,” called “Low-level neonatal thimerosal exposure: Long-term consequences in the brain.” The presentation claimed that results from a study in newborn rats suggest long-term “neuroimmune effects” from the vaccine preservative.

The citation appears to refer to Dr. Robert F. Berman, a professor emeritus at the University of California Davis, whose research has focused on brain injury and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Berman did publish a paper with a similar title in 2008, but it was in a different journal and involved different animals. It also came to dramatically different conclusions.

“My study was published in Toxicological Sciences and did not find evidence of thimerosal exposure at vaccine levels in mouse behaviors that we thought were relevant to autism,” Berman said. He was “concerned and displeased” that his research appeared to have been cited in this way in Redwood’s slides.

Redwood’s presentation was taken off the CDC website later Tuesday and replaced with a version that does not include Berman’s citation.

The presentation already was controversial because thimerosal has been a focus of advocates who claim, against evidence, that it may cause autism because it contains a form of mercury. The preservative was taken out of most vaccines about 25 years ago as a precaution, and no evidence of neurodevelopmental effects has been found in multiple studies.

Redwood, though, said in a video posted last month on Children’s Health Defense’s website that she believes thimerosal in pediatric vaccines led to her son’s autism.

The topic was a last-minute addition to the vaccine advisers’ agenda this week, sparking concerns among public health experts that it would raise debunked claims about vaccine safety. It was added after Kennedy dismissed all 17 previous experts on the influential vaccine panel, claiming they had conflicts of interest, and replaced them days later with eight new members.

Those members have raised concerns from the public health world and across the political spectrum, with Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana doctor who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, calling this week for the meeting to be postponed “until the panel is fully staffed with more robust and balanced representation – as required by law – including those with more direct relevant expertise.”

It’s also not the first time a report in Kennedy’s realm has been found to have faulty citations. The initial version of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again report, released last month and focused on children’s health, also cited some studies that don’t exist. An HHS spokesperson called them “minor citation and formatting errors.”

In a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee on Tuesday, Kennedy was questioned by Rep. Raul Ruiz, a Democrat and doctor from California, about the MAHA report errors.

“Why did the report include a citation to sources that don’t even exist?” Ruiz asked. “How does that happen under your leadership?”

Kennedy insisted that “all of the foundational assertions in that report are accurate” and said the mistaken citations “were corrected within 24 hours.”