She found a job as a legal secretary working for a lawyer called Bruce Bothwell, ten years her senior. Within two weeks they had begun a relationship and by 1990 — Bothwell was now 27 — they had married. Two years after that, Bothwell’s first child, William Fisk Douglas Bothwell II, was born. Tragedy, it seemed, was behind her.
Like all American children, Fisk was given a cocktail of 24 vaccines in the first two years of his life. Many of them, including his four DTP shots, three hepatitis B shots and four Hib shots (haemophilus influenzae type-B), contained Thimerosal. Like most parents at the time, however, Bothwell had no idea what Thimerosal was — or that she could use a relatively inexpensive skin patch to test her son’s sensitivity to mercury.
By the time Bothwell was pregnant with her second child, Katrina, it was clear that there was something wrong with Fisk. He was obsessed with letters and numbers; he couldn’t look people in the eye; he threw violent tantrums; and he was terrified of the vacuum cleaner. As time went on, Fisk grew worse, to the point where Bothwell became reluctant to take him out in public or share her concerns with other mothers. He had no spontaneous conversation; his co-ordination was terrible; and he became engrossed in bizarre mantras and rituals.
Her husband refused to accept that there was anything wrong. “I was in denial,” Bruce, now 49 and a typical father figure in his brown cords and lumberjack shirt, admits. “Part of me still is.” Bruce’s mother was even less understanding and still, to this day, struggles to accept any talk of the A-word. This lack of understanding by grandparents is, according to doctors, normal. They are, after all, part of the generation who believed Bruno Bettelheim, the now-discredited Austrian psychologist who blamed autism on a lack of love and support at home: parental refrigeration, he called it.
Eventually, in 1994, the Bothwells decided to consult a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) about Fisk. Then came the news they had been dreading: Fisk, then nearly three, was autistic.
Tragically, the Bothwells’ luck didn’t get much better. Katrina, although less troubled than Fisk, was also a problem child. At two years old, she too was found to be autistic. At about the same time, Bothwell had her third and final child, Jillian. She turned out to be a normal, healthy little girl.
By the end of the decade, Bothwell became aware of the international controversy over MMR and the claims that it could cause autism. As a precaution, she refused to give Katrina her booster MMR jab. Jillian, meanwhile, was given no MMR at all. Bothwell also held back giving other vaccines to Jillian, who, to this day, has shown no signs of her siblings’ autism.
Then, out of the blue, Bothwell’s old boss called and said he had something she needed to see. Andy Waters had left Los Angeles to set up his own law firm, Waters & Kraus, in Dallas. But he had kept in touch over the years and knew that Frisk and Katrina had autism. The document Waters wanted to show Bothwell was a report called Autism: A Novel Form of Mercury Poisoning. It claimed that children were being exposed to unsafe levels of mercury because of an ingredient called Thimerosal used in vaccines. “She was the first person I thought of when I saw it,” Waters says. He went on to ask Bothwell to help him open a new Los Angeles office. She agreed, but on the condition that Waters take on the Thimerosal case. Within a few months he had filed the first Thimerosal lawsuit in civil court.
Another 300 or so claims followed, with Bothwell appearing as a plaintiff in one of them. More than 2,000 other claims also soon made their way to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Programme. For Eli Lilly and the other drug manufacturers, Thimerosal was turning into a public relations nightmare and a multibillion-dollar legal headache. The company argued that it was the victim of a legal loophole: American law protects vaccine manufacturers from being sued. It does not, however, provide similar protection for the makers of vaccine ingredients.
“That programme was developed because the US was losing vaccine manufacturers at an alarming rate, in great part due to liability issues,” says Sagebiel, the Eli Lilly spokesman, adding that the likes of Waters are “abusing a loophole” with their lawsuits.
The issue became highly politicised last year when a clause was inserted into the Homeland Security Bill giving drug companies immunity from legal action over Thimerosal. But the clause was repealed amid accusations of cronyism, with Congress agreeing to come up with a compromise by this summer. Eli Lilly has already offered to increase the statute of limitation on Thimerosal cases from three to six years, but only if the cases are heard through the vaccine injury programme, not in civil court.
Waters, however, says he is convinced that nothing much will happen until next year when the vaccine injury programme holds a hearing on the “probable causation” of autism. “There will be an election three or four months away, and this will be a significant issue,” he says. And if a link between Thimerosal and autism is found? “People will freak out. They’ll be asking what all this means and how many kids have been involved. There will be such a groundswell of public opinion on the issue, because it will become apparent that we have poisoned a generation or two of our children. At this point the Republicans will probably jump on the bandwagon and say, ’yeah, we need compensation’.” His guess is that if the link is proven, each family could be awarded a few hundred thousand dollars to ease their suffering.
Back in Long Beach, Bruce Bothwell says he was left speechless when he heard about the Homeland Security Bill. “I have never been so angry with my government,” he says. “The fact that it could disenfranchise, in such a fashion, disabled children . . .” He trails off.
Both the Bothwells agree that, despite their campaigning, they hope the vaccine injury committee finds no evidence linking Thimerosal to autism: otherwise, Fisk and Katrina’s conditions were avoidable. At this point, Fisk, looking like any American 11-year-old in jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap, blusters into the room.
His behaviour, Bothwell explains, has been much improved by applied behaviour analysis, an intensive (and hugely expensive) therapy programme overseen by UCLA. Still, Fisk makes eye contact as though he is trying to force together the polar opposites of a magnet. He is able to explain, however, that he likes to be called Will, not Fisk, because it’s easier to say. “Will’s okay, but not Willy, that’s not okay with Mom,” he says in a short staccato burst.
“We’ve been so lucky that he’s responded as well as he has,” says Bothwell, after Fisk has left the room to play on his GameBoy. “But is it enough?” As well as the UCLA therapy, Fisk is on a course of chelating agents and supplements to try to reduce the toxic heavy metals, including mercury, that have been found inside him. Dramatic results are not expected, however, given Fisk’s age. “I don’t know if he’ll be able to turn up to a job every day, balance a chequebook, pay his rent and get married,” confides Bothwell.
“As a parent, you want to tell your children, ‘you can do anything, you can be anything’. But with Will, we can’t do that. He can’t see someone else’s point of view. He doesn’t get sarcasm. He’s still bullied a lot, and those bullies end up moving into the workplace. But I think we’ve done all we can do.”
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