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Rational1, please for the love of all that is scientific, do not quote vaccine patent-holder Paul Offit to me.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.