Sneak terror bill clause saves drugs giant

President George Bush did more than create a new counter-terrorism agency last week. Thanks to a last-minute provision slipped into the National Homeland Security bill he signed into law, he also rescued the giant drug manufacturer Eli Lilly from an avalanche of lawsuits by families who believe their children were poisoned by a mercury-based vaccine preservative.

At a stroke, the company has been exempted from civil litigation over the preservative, called thimerosal, taken off the market three years ago because of widespread scientific fears it might be causing neurological disorders in infants including autism.

To the fury of 1,000 affected families, the exemption has nothing to do with domestic security. It is among the more blatant examples of a growing practice in Washington, introducing so-called "riders" to legislation as a favour to special lobbying interests.

As The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote: "There's a real bad smell here." Eli Lilly is singularly well connected to the Bush White House and the Republican-controlled Congress. It contributed more than any other drug company to the most recent round of political campaigns -- $1.6m (£1m) in all, of which 80 per cent went to Republicans.

Mitch Daniels, the White House budget director, is a former Lilly executive, and the company's chairman, Sidney Taurel, was appointed just a few months ago to President Bush's Homeland Security Advisory Council. George Bush senior, the President's father, was on the Lilly board in the Seventies.

As outrage has grown, nobody has attempted to defend the rider. Eli Lilly and the Republican congressmen who drafted the Homeland Security bill are acting dumb about who exactly was responsible for it. "It's a mystery to us how it got in there," Eli Lilly spokesman Rob Smith said.

Some Republicans had said the litigation exemption should be included in the Homeland Security bill in measures giving drug companies financial incentives to develop vaccines against possible biological attack. The rest of the package fell away, because of opposition from senior Democrats who said it would be a shameless industry giveaway of negligible public benefit.

But the White House is now seeking a federal judgment to seal all court documents on the thimerosal suits, which would bury much of the evidence establishing a link between the preservative and ill-health.

Scientific studies have shown dangerously high levels of mercury in some children injected with thimerosal but remain inconclusive on a possible causal link to autism. Without recourse to the civil courts, litigants will now have to turn to a government-run special "vaccine" court, where compensation, if any, is likely to be far less.