Again, I feel like a broken record: All Saturn/Neptune, all the time.

But just as we pass through the final phase of the opposition from Saturn to Neptune, the link between childhood vaccines and autism goes to court today.

Autism is the fastest growing childhood disease, with one in 150 children being diagnosed with some form of autism, and many suspect that a mercury-based preservative in childhood vaccines could be the culprit. (click chart to enlarge)

Although some reports claim that this additive was phased out in the US in 1999, further research reveals that although the CDC recommended a ban that year on thimerosal, the culprit additive, an outright ban was never issued. Iowa became the first state to ban thimerosal in 2004.

Skeptics say that cases are rising because of better diagnosis and services: parents and teachers as well as doctors are able to better diagnose autism than 20 years ago. That argument doesn’t hold water. In California alone, an epidemiological study confirmed that the number of autism cases in that state rose 273% between 1987 and 1998. In a piece for Salon.com, Robert F. Kennedy wrote on the efforts by Big Pharma to cover up the dangers of thimerosal, the mercury-based additive:

In 1977, a Russian study found that adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to American children still suffered brain damage years later. Russia banned thimerosal from children’s vaccines 20 years ago, and Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since followed suit.

“You couldn’t even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe,” says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky. “It’s just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage.”

Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage — and even death — in both animals and humans. In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering it to 22 patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected — a fact Lilly didn’t bother to report in its study declaring thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims about thimerosal’s safety “did not check with ours.” Half the dogs Pittman injected with thimerosal-based vaccines became sick, leading researchers there to declare the preservative “unsatisfactory as a serum intended for use on dogs.”

In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to mount. During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it “poison.” In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly’s own studies discerned that thimerosal was “toxic to tissue cells” in concentrations as low as one part per million — 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as “nontoxic” and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants.

Neptune rules over the domain of vaccines as well as mysteries and the unknown, and in the opposition with Saturn we have seen the exposure of many mysteries, scandals and the exposure of things which have remained hidden. It is perfectly fitting that the issue of autism and its potential link to the medical establishment be exposed now. Let us hope that some useful information comes out of it.