Sacred Spark is also the inspiring story of Rev. Sykes' work with the United Methodist Church to pass the first global resolution advocating the elimination of mercury from medicine. As such, Rev. Sykes helps her church ignite a social justice movement on par with historical faith-based campaigns against child labor and slavery.
Sacred Spark is pragmatic and compassionate, calling for putting the well-being of children first. Parents and physicians demanding safer vaccines will find clarity to support their informed choices, as well as inspiration and guidance to become advocates for children.
Rev. Sykes weaves into a seamless whole several strands of fast-paced and engrossing narrative: her family’s horror in witnessing their happy toddler slip into autism; her victories in appropriate and landmark biomedical treatments for her son; her attempts to find precious allies against a corrupt and protected industry; the success of empowered parents to enact state bans on mercury and to approach Attorneys General across the country, and her own family’s lawsuit defeat on a procedural technicality against a pharmaceutical company.
Readers are taken behind the scenes – from the Simpsonwood United Methodist Retreat Center in Norcross, Georgia, (where a closed-door meeting between government officials and pharmaceutical companies was convened one week before congressional investigations into conflicts of interest between the two began in 2000) – to the floor of the Institute of Medicine meetings in Boston and Washington, DC, where Rev. Sykes passionately challenges committee members to abandon their blind trust in how vaccines are manufactured and approved and embrace instead the clarity of medical ethics that would put children first.
In stark contrast to the stubborn failure of the federal government to act on behalf of the nation’s children, Rev. Sykes brings her cause to The United Methodist Church and her denomination responds with the strength and support of its 11.5 million members in a global resolution advocating the elimination of mercury in medicine.
Cited extensively throughout the book are scientific studies supporting mercury’s causal role in autism, as well as the internal transcripts from the IOM and Simpsonwood meetings and government emails (available through the Freedom of Information Act).
Sacred Spark seeks to answer, as well as raise, such questions as: How does a parent or practitioner initiate the reforms necessary to protect minds from mercury? Why do the Hippocratic Oath and the Right of Informed Consent apply to all parts of medicine, especially vaccination? How do we counter the argument that a mercury-containing vaccine is better than no vaccine at all, as global dissemination of mercury-containing vaccines to the Developing World continues? Why do the public and media believe mercury is out of vaccines when there has never been an official recall or ban and more has been added with flu shots?