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Sharyl Attkisson 🕵️‍♂️💼🥋@SharylAttkisson · Sep 2, 2026

2008 was an interesting year for vaccines. That's the year the formerly-sealed case of Hannah Poling leaked to the…

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Summary

In 2008, the U.S. government secretly settled a vaccine-autism case with the Poling family for millions while publicly denying any vaccine-autism link, and fired its own expert witness Dr. Andrew Zimmerman when he concluded vaccines could cause autism. Around the same time, Merck discontinued individual vaccine doses in the U.S. after parents began choosing to separate shots rather than use the combined MMR vaccine.

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  1. #1

    2008 was an interesting year for vaccines. That's the year the formerly-sealed case of Hannah Poling leaked to the public. (I later reported on the case for CBS News. I'll link to that in this thread.) In Hannahs' case, the govt. (which represents vaccine makers in court, believe it or not) conceded that Hannah's vaccines caused her autism. Mind you, the govt. and head of CDC were denying this in public. We didn't know it at the time, but the govt's own top expert witness in vaccine-autism cases, pediatric neurologist Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, had shocked the govt. by telling them (DOJ lawyers) that vaccines can cause autism, after all. But instead of helping kids and revealing the truth, the DOJ fired Dr. Zimmermand as an expert witness and misrepresented his opinion in court thereafter. Anyhow, the govt. secretly paid the Poling family a multi million dollar settlement, but then had the case sealed so no other parents would find out. Public health officials continued to tell other parents they were imagining things. Meantime, many experts said that separating multi vaccines into individual doses is inherently safer. Some parents were opting to get their kids Measles and Mumps vaccines separately, for example, rather than giving them the combo Measles, Mumps, Rubella shot. How did the maker of MMR, Merck respond? Merck stopped making the individual shots in the U.S. All around 2008.

  2. #2

    Here's a link to the print version of my CBS story on Hannah Poling: cbsnews.com/news/family-to…