נצל"ש כתבה על חיסונים ואוטיזם
Well, Well, Well: Vaccines and autism Connie Howard /
[email protected] If we’re to believe CNN’s Campbell Brown brought us the whole story with her February 12 coverage of the immunization controversy, the only cause for concern is the one posed by parents opting out of vaccine programs. And if we’re to believe Newsweek’s Sharon Begley (“Anatomy of a Scare,” February 21, 2009), the entire controversy was built on a house of cards that has now been demolished. The Huffington Post and Robert F Kennedy Jr, however, add key information omitted from the other stories. The US “vaccine court” on February 20, 2009 awarded the parents of 10-year-old Bailey Banks a lump sum of over $810 000 plus an estimated $30 000 to $40 000 annually, based on an unequivocal ruling made in June of 2007 that his brain damage was a direct result of his MMR vaccine. His was not an isolated ruling. A CBS investigation has found that the vaccine court has awarded close to $2 billion in compensation to over 1300 families claiming vaccine damages since 1988. “In many of these cases,” writes Kennedy, “the government paid out awards following a judicial finding that vaccine injury lead to the child’s autism spectrum disorder.” But in many of the successful cases, though medical records show the children display classic symptoms of regressive autism, the word “autism” was avoided. The court is, in Kennedy’s words, “quite willing to award millions of dollars in taxpayer funded compensation to vaccine-injured autistic children, so long as they don’t have to call the injury by the loaded term ‘autism.’” In Bailey’s case, evidence provided by a neurological exam 16 days after his MMR shot had shown Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM), which led to Pervasive Developmental Delay. The court ruled Bailey’s ADEM “severe enough to cause lasting, residual damage,” and that he “would not have suffered this delay but for the administration of the MMR vaccine.” Care taken to avoid a link between vaccines and autism is understandable: a causal link would do irreparable damage to vaccine programs. Care taken is therefore extensive; jury trials aren’t allowed, vaccine defenders have unlimited resources for expert witnesses and litigation costs while plaintiffs cover legal costs on their own. And, Kennedy informs us, plaintiffs have no right to discovery against the pharmaceutical industry or the government—US government epidemiological data of vaccinated children has been kept out of the hands of plaintiffs and independent scientists. The Centers for Disease Control has also actively suppressed and defunded epidemiological studies that might establish a causal link, and refused to fund research comparing vaccinated groups with unvaccinated-by-choice groups of children not in the public school system. Vaccines have in some instances been a great gift and saved lives. But they have also become big business, and business needs growth. Opposition to mass vaccination programs is, contrary to common belief, gaining momentum with good reason. The Journal of Child Neurology has published an analysis of previously published research that had initially concluded no connection between vaccines and autism—and now concluded it had wrongly drawn those conclusions, that there is in fact a significant link between blood levels of mercury and diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder. The award to Bailey’s family followed a judgment by the same court that had thrown out three claims involving MMR and autism, a victory hailed by vaccine proponents as proof that doubts about vaccine safety had been demolished. But in light of this new information, that’s clearly not the case. Dr Bernadine Healy, former director of the National Institutes of Health, has called for more research into sub-groups potentially at increased risk of vaccine reactions. In a CBS interview late last year, she said she believed “governments have been too quick to dismiss the concerns,” and that she “takes issue” with the decision of the Institute of Medicine not to look for susceptibility groups. She, along with thousands of others, rightly opposes the stalling of science out of fear what the research might yield. V
