Comments on: Vaccine-Autism Link Ruled Out By Court

Judges Find No Evidence Of Autism Risk From Vaccines In Three Cases Brought By Parents

[garbosmed]

Rational1, please for the love of all that is scientific, do not quote vaccine patent-holder Paul Offit to me. I''m sure we could go through those twenty studies and find a great deal to argue about, but I think we can agree that his millions of dollars in vaccine profits renders him a dubious source at best, as it does Children''s Hospital of Philadelphia (and, for that matter, vaccine patent-holder Vanderbilt University and their pharma mouthpiece). Offit is making himself a laughingstock with his 10000 vaccines spiel. Even his idol, the esteemed Merck scientist Maurice Hilleman, who invented the MMR, was willing to recognize the potential dangers in vaccines. It was he who wrote the internal Merck document detailing the high levels of mercury that babies were being dosed with in the 90s, he who detailed the contamination of polio vaccine with simian virus SV-40 that causes cancer in lab rats, and he who said that eventually we would have to come up with a way to vaccinate without excipients because of their potential toxicity. He knew the dangers and was willing to address them. Why is everyone else so afraid to admit them?

[garbosmed]

Um, my kid IS vaccinated. His titers for mumps and measles are double reference range, and for rubella the titers are more than 4x reference range -- 7 years after the fact, after only one dose instead of the usual two. He was also vaccinated for Chicken Pox. He has zero antibodies for it. So maybe he is one of those "immunocompromised" people you so vociferously defend. But I would never in a million years presume to demand that everyone else at his school be vaccinated against their wishes. I have seen too many people suffer the consequences of one size fits all vaccine policy. Anyone who tells you all vaccines are safe and effective and good for everyone is selling something.

[emmaholly]

All of my family including me have had all of our vaccines so I don''t believe the mothers who said that their children got autism from the vaccines. Sorry but I just don''t buy it my whole family is fine including me so we all will continue to get our vaccines on time. To the moms out their don''t make your business our other moms business okay? Other moms happen to have had a positive out come. Not all are created equal. Sorry your children got autism from the MMR vaccine.

[redhoffer]

Vaccines only work if most people in a group are vaccinated. That means that if my vaccinated children are placed in an environment where less than half of the other kids received their vaccines, they could actually acquire a disease they were vaccinated against. I know that is confusing, but that''s how it works. For vaccinations to work as intended all the kids (or alomst all) need to get vaccines or those diseases can start to run wild again and even vaccinated people can be infected.
Vaccines are safe, your little "germ factory" kid that has not been vaccinated is a risk to society and themselves. Keep them at home if you don''t want them vaccinated. The Fact is that Vaccines Do Not cause Autism. Go get a kickback from Jenny McCarthy yourself.

[sandy19731]

rational1:
Thanks for doing the "heavy lifting" on this one. Without scientists willing to speak out where they will be heard by lay people, we are lost.

[rational_1]

One has to wonder, what''''s a British psychiatrist doing co-authoring a Japanese study on autism epidemiology?
Posted by Garbosmed at 04:54 PM : Feb 12, 2009

First of all it''s not at all unusual for scientists to collaborate world-wide and publish with those on other continents. I''ve done so. Wait, maybe that makes me a conspirator...

Secondly, if you''re impugning this guy''s character you might want to read this little story about Andrew Wakefield who started this MMR/vcaccine controversy. Talk about shady...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article4837798.ece

[hermitdave]

Surely no one is stupid enough to believe the common man can get a fair trial against big drugs in a capitalist country. Remember the Judge belongs to the same country club as the drug company attorneys.

[rational_1]

Well, I don''''t want my kids being put at risk because some hack gets kickbacks from pharma to say vaccines are safe. So I guess that makes us even. By the way, most states do require vaccines for school admission. And if vaccines are so great, and your kids are vaccinated, what are you worried about?
Posted by Garbosmed at 05:25 PM : Feb 12, 2009

Well if your kid gets measles he happens to have about a 1 in a thousand chance of dying. If he happens to come in contact with someone who is immunocompromised (eg., transplant patient), that person''s chance of dying is much much higher because he came into contact with your little germ factory. Don''t think this won''t happen - there was a spike in measles-related disease and deaths in England after Wakefield''s now-discredited paper linking MMR to autism led to a decrease in vaccinations. So a decision to not vaccinate your kid isn''t done in a vacuum - it could very well involve those other than in your family.

[rational_1]

Yes, but the Japan study you cite is deeply flawed for purposes of our discussion. In fact, the Uribe strain of measles that was used in the Japanese vaccine was never used here in the U.S. So for them to suggest that withdrawing MMR would have no impact on OUR autism rates is incorrect based on their own data. They are two different vaccines.
Posted by Garbosmed at 04:48 PM : Feb 12, 2009

It''s STILL a negative finding and one of many. Go to the Pubmed web site and type in ''vaccine autism review''. There are a bunch of papers that review the literature.
Below is the concluding paragraph of a paper by Gerber and Offit in Clinical Infectious Diseases that was just published. They wrote ''Twenty epidemiologic studies have shown that neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism. These studies have been performed in several countries by many different investigators who have employed a multitude of epidemiologic and statistical methods. The large size of the studied populations has afforded a level of statistical power sufficient to detect even rare associations. These studies, in concert with the biological implausibility that vaccines overwhelm a child%u2019s immune system, have effectively dismissed the notion that vaccines cause autism. Further studies on the cause or causes of autism should focus on more-promising leads.''

[rational_1]

If there is any hypothesis that someone would feel might end up being injurious to them personally and they withold that information, then independent researchers are going to have spend a lot of time going down wrong roads until they can find the correct path to an answer.
Posted by spiritwalk at 04:55 PM : Feb 12, 2009

But in this case (the putative vaccine/autism link) a number of labs around the world have been testing the same basic hypothesis, independently gathering data to test that hypothesis and then also independently coming to the same conclusions that there is no demonstrated link between vaccines and autism. And for those who think there is a big business conspiracy going on, this would have to be worldwide and involving researchers at universities who aren''t necessarily tied to Big Pharma in any way. Last point - many scientific publications and funding sources (eg. NIH) require disclosure of financial links to your science to minimize the chances of conflict of interest.

[garbosmed]

Well, I don''t want my kids being put at risk because some hack gets kickbacks from pharma to say vaccines are safe. So I guess that makes us even. By the way, most states do require vaccines for school admission. And if vaccines are so great, and your kids are vaccinated, what are you worried about?

[redhoffer]

After all these studies showing again and again that vaccines do not cause autism, I would like the local school districts to again require vaccinations. I don''t want my kids getting some severe yet preventable illness because some hacks feel they don''t have to vaccinate their kids and can recklessly put mine at risk.
Vaccines do not cause autism. Period.
All the good research proves we need to look elsewhere for a cause of autism. Vaccinate your kids or just home school them. That or create some private school where all the unvaccinated kids can go put each other at risk.

[spiritwalk]

You just hit on a very important point - in science you never prove a hypothesis, you can only fail to disprove it.
Posted by rational_1
.......................
The scientists though must have a valid and true hypothesis to work on. One based on actual facts and not distorted ones.
When I was a kid there was no polio vaccine yet. Parents were told that we could get polio by swimming in cold water. Our paents knew that was true because that is what happened to FDR. He went swimming in the cold water up in maine and when he came out he had polio in just a couple of hours. They knew that was a fact. Scientists looked at this case and were directing research at finding the connection between swimming in cold water and the sudden onset of polio.

Just a couple of years ago, it came out that a couple of days before he was stricken FDR had visited a boy scout troup in NY and the kids in that troup were already in the infectious stage of polio and that within a couple of days they were dropping like flies.

This was deliberately covered up and the cold water story put out because there was a fear that it would be bad public relations for the boy scouts.

If there is any hypothesisthat someone would feel might end up being injurious to them personally and they withold that information, then independent researchers are going to have spend a lot of time going down wrong roads until they can find the correct path to an answer.

[garbosmed]

It should be noted who one of the Japan study''s authors is:

In a newspaper account dated December 23, 2001, Professor Sir Michael Rutter was one of seven %u201Cexternal expert witnesses%u201D who helped guide the course of the MMR inquiry in the United Kingdom. He reportedly was paid to provide reports to help Glaxo Smith Kline, a company that manufactured the MMR vaccine used in England. In the newspaper article, Professor Rutter is quoted as saying: %u201CWhen there are major issues of this kind to analyze it involves people in the field and inevitably there will be conflicts of interest. It is only unacceptable if these are kept secret.%u201D

One has to wonder, what''s a British psychiatrist doing co-authoring a Japanese study on autism epidemiology?

[garbosmed]

The Japan study you cite is deeply flawed for purposes of our discussion. The Uribe strain of measles that was used in the Japanese vaccine was never used here in the U.S. So for them to suggest that withdrawing MMR would have no impact on OUR autism rates is incorrect based on their own data. They are two different vaccines. Apples and oranges.

Further, while the study appears to show an inexplicable spike in autism cases starting in birth year cohort 1993, when MMR was "withdrawn", it actually is only telling half the story. That was the year MMR Uribe was swapped for single dose measles and rubella vaccines, and uptake surged. In addition, the thimerosal-containing Japanese Encephalitis vaccine was introduced that same year. It is entirely plausible for the 1993 surge in autism cases leads to the conclusion that the increase in vaccine uptake and the number and combination of vaccines might be a factor. This is one of several glaring omissions in the study, along with missing information on funding and conflicts.

[garbosmed]

Yes, but the Japan study you cite is deeply flawed for purposes of our discussion. In fact, the Uribe strain of measles that was used in the Japanese vaccine was never used here in the U.S. So for them to suggest that withdrawing MMR would have no impact on OUR autism rates is incorrect based on their own data. They are two different vaccines.

Further, while the study appears to show an inexplicable spike in autism cases starting in birth year cohort 1993, when MMR was "withdrawn", it actually is only telling half the story. That was the year MMR Uribe was swapped for single dose measles and rubella vaccines, and uptake surged. In addition, the thimerosal-containing Japanese Encephalitis vaccine was introduced that year. It is entirely plausible to believe based on these facts that the 1993 surge in autism cases is not dispositive of a connection with MMR, but rather leads to the conclusion that the increase in vaccine uptake and the number and combination of vaccines might be a factor. This is one of several glaring omissions in the study, along with missing information on funding and conflicts.

[notfooled]

I don''t know the truth of any of this, but I do know that the big pharmacutical companies would feed our kids raw sewege and cyanide if there was a profit to be made.

I have no trust in the FDA, the pharmacutical giants, nor bought and paid for judges and politicians.

I suspect the drugs the so called "experts" would have us swallowing like candy is not good for you, plain and simple.

As for not finding a link between autism and vaccines, so what, they said the same thing about tobacco and cancer for 50 years.

Trust not those who stand to profit.

[nibaru]

Drug companies creating future customers and using the law to keep it so

[rational_1]

And how can epidemiological studies be relevant-medically and/or legally- in the assessment of adverse reactions of individual children to a certain vaccine?
Posted by Garbosmed at 04:01 PM : Feb 12, 2009

They can''t - simple as that. They deal in percentages, in large populations and not with highly unusual cases. So, there might be a few kids who are susceptible to a vaccine causing their autism, but not many, because if this was a high percentage you would expect to see differences in autism rates in populations of people exposed or not exposed to MMR (which isn''t seen). But let me ask you some questions about this child- why is the vaccine necessarily responsible for autism in that child and how certain are you it''s the culprit (and on what evidence)? How much swordfish (loaded with mercury) did that child consume before the age of two? Does he live in a house with lead paint? Is there an insecticide or other chemical plant near his house? How do you know that exposure to anything else in his environment didn''t trigger his autism? How do you know it wasn''t purely genetic in his particular case? See where I''m going with this? It''s REALLY difficult to ascribe cause with any certainty when dealing with individuals. That''s why epidemiologists stick with populations - you can''t do statistics on an n of 1.

[rational_1]

If the better and more accurate epidemiological studies cannot disprove a causal link between MMR vaccination and a small number of cases, then one must wonder why the medical authorities continue to request and support epidemiological studies to disprove an adverse vaccine reaction- a clinical event?
Posted by Garbosmed at 04:01 PM : Feb 12, 2009

You just hit on a very important point - in science you never prove a hypothesis, you can only fail to disprove it. So a scientist who comes up with a hypothesis such as MMR vaccine causes autism would try to design experiments to disprove his hypothesis; i.e, if autism is linked to MMR he would hypothesize that in a population not exposed to it, the autism rate should be lower. Then he does the experiment and in this case disproves the hypothesis (the Japanese study I cited for example). The more of these tests the hypothesis can withstand, the stronger it is. That''s why evolutionary theory is so widely believed in by professional biologists - it has withstood 150 years of attacks. So all the negative studies regarding a possible link between autism and MMR vaccine are basically successful attacks on that hypothesis.