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My cousin's little boy was a healthy regular little 2 year old until he got vaccinated.
Doc Who Tied Vaccine to Autism Ruled Unethical
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In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist at London's Royal Free Hospital, published a study in the prestigious medical journal Lancet that linked the triple Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism and bowel disorders in children. The study - and Wakefield's subsequent public statements that parents should refuse the vaccines - sparked a public health panic that led vaccination rates in Britain to plunge.
Wakefield's study has since been discredited, and the MMR vaccine deemed to be safe. But now medical authorities in the U.K. have also ruled that the manner in which Wakefield carried out his research was unethical. In a ruling on Jan. 28, The General Medical Council, which registers and regulates doctors in the U.K., ruled that Wakefield acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" during his research and with "callous disregard" for the children involved in his study.
After the finding, Wakefield, who now heads an autism research center in Austin, Texas, described the decision as "unfounded and unjust." He added that he had "no regrets" over his work.
The General Medical Council, which will now decide whether to revoke Wakefield's medical license, highlighted several areas where Wakefield acted against the interest of the children involved in the 1998 study. It criticized Wakefield for carrying out invasive tests, such as colonoscopies and spinal taps, without due regard for how the children involved might be affected. It also cited Wakefield's method of gathering blood samples - he paid children at his son's birthday party $8 to give blood - and said that Wakefield displayed a "callous disregard for the distress and pain the children might suffer."
The panel also criticized Wakefield for failing to disclose that, while carrying out the research, he was being paid by lawyers acting for parents who believed their children had been harmed by the MMR jab.
The panel's ruling follows a refutation of Wakefield's research from the scientific community. Ten of 13 authors in the Lancet study have since renounced the study's conclusions. The Lancet has said it should not have published the study in the first place, and various other studies have failed to corroborate Wakefield's hypothesis.
Despite this, the effects of the media frenzy surrounding Wakefield's research - a study found that MMR was the most written about science topic in the U.K. in 2002 - continue to be felt in Britain. Vaccination rates among toddlers plummeted from over 90% in the mid-1990s to below 70% in some places by 2003. Following this drop, Britain saw an increase in measles cases at a time when the disease had been all but eradicated in many developed countries. In 1998, there were just 56 cases of the disease in England and Wales; by 2008 there were 1,370.
Despite assurances from various health bodies that Wakefield's study was seriously flawed, he still has a dedicated following among parents concerned about a rise in autism rates in the U.K. and U.S. - the cause of which has so far baffled health experts. Wakefield is now the Executive Director of the Thoughtful House autism center in Texas, which the Times of London recently claimed receives millions of dollars in donations each year. At the ruling in London, Wakefield was flanked by a small group of supporters, some of whom shouted in protest as the ruling was read out. Speaking after the hearing, Wakefield remained unbowed, and addressed his supporters directly: "It remains finally for me to thank parents whose loyalty has been extraordinary, and I want to reassure them that the science will continue in earnest."
My cousin's little boy was a healthy regular little 2 year old until he got vaccinated.
now what is wrong with him?
Wakefield is a whack job. Have y'all seen the Dateline about the study? It shouldn't of even been considered a scientific study.
With MMR? Why did he get it so late? I believe the first dose is at 12 months and then again at 4-5 yrs? I'll need to double check the CDC guidelines.
measles, mumps, rubella?
Yep that's the one he associated with autism.
oops.didn't read the above article, but i knew it.
The vast majority of vaccines are done by the time a kid is 18 months old-- and yes, MMR is at 12 months.
No one has ever been able to reproduce any sort of study that links vaccines with autism. Just because 2 things happen around the same time does not mean that one is the cause of the other.
If I learned anything in my research class it is that correlation does not equal causation. It can be compelling, but never proof.
all i know is if you are going to get your kid vaccinated you better go to YOUR pediatrician who you know and trust and not go to the city for mass vaccinations where you dont know what the you're going to get.
shyeah right dah
After which he was a healthy regular little 2 year old with an increased chance of surviving certain diseases.
Well yeah but he also has autism.
I am not sure about the connection between the two. Personally I have made sure that my daughter has received every vaccination. Just yesterday she received 4 shots in her little legs.
I am not saying that I am opposed to it. I am just throwing out that they seem to believe that there was a connection to the vaccination and his autism.
Correct.
"I washed my car, then it rained, therefore washing my car causes it to rain."
Conspiracy theorists, like Wakefield and others, revel in logical fallacy, and build their entire bodies of "evidence" around them.
Generally such things almost universally arebased on bad science, as it was in this case.
That the guy was guilty of a few ethical lapses along the way does not surprise me either.
Given that the average adult in the US has detectable levels of HUNDREDS of chemicals in their bodies, any ONE of which could cause some minor fetal developmental problems we don't know about, I personally think that there would have to be a VERY solid scientific basis for pinning the rise on any one cause, ESPECIALLY a cause attributed to something happening after a child is born.Well yeah but he also has autism.
I am not sure about the connection between the two. Personally I have made sure that my daughter has received every vaccination. Just yesterday she received 4 shots in her little legs
I am not saying that I am opposed to it. I am just throwing out that they seem to believe that there was a connection to the vaccination and his autism.
From what I understand about human development, it seems to be that the cause is far more likely to be found in utero than post-natal, as the developing human embroyo is far more susceptible to disruptions in the very delicate development track than fully formed, if juvenile,bodies.
The Huffington Post February 2, 2010
David Kirby
Author/Journalist
Posted: February 2, 2010 06:23 PM
The Lancet Retraction Changes Nothing
Dr. Andrew Wakefield is one of the most vilified medical prac ioners of recent times, and now he carries the extremely rare dishonor of a retraction in The Lancet, on the paper he coauthored in 1998 suggesting a potential link between autism, bowel disease and Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine.
I believe that the public lynching and shaming of Dr. Wakefield is unwarranted and overwrought, and that history will ultimately judge who was right and who was wrong about proposing a possible association between vaccination and regressive autistic spectrum disorder (ASD).
Wakefield's critics can condemn, retract, decry and de-license all they want, but that does nothing to stop or alter the march of science, which has come a long way over the past 12 years, and especially in the last year or two. The evidence that autism is increasing at alarming rates, and that some thing (or things) in our environment is wreaking havoc on a vulnerable one-percent of all US children is now so irrefutable that, finally, the federal government is climbing aboard the environmental research bandwagon - way late, but better than never.
This long-overdue paradigm shift will leave many in the scientific community with some proverbial but nonetheless uncomfortable egg on their increasingly irrelevant faces: Those who have protested with shrill certainty that autism is almost purely genetic, and not environmental in nature, and therefore not really increasing at all, will hopefully recede from the debate.
And that begs a nagging question: If those people were dead wrong about environmental factors in autism, could they also be mistaken in their equally heated denials about a possible vaccine-autism link? More bluntly, why should we heed them any longer?
We need to examine a host of environmental factors (air, water, food, medicine, household products and social factors) and how they might interact with vulnerable genes to create the varying collection of symptoms we call "autism." But these triggers almost have to be found in every town of every county of every state in the land - from Maine to Maui.
Are vaccines the only contributing factors to autism? Of course not. Other pharmaceutical products like thalidomide and valporic acid, as well as live mumps virus, have been associated with increased autism risk in prenatal exposures, so we already know that a variety of drugs and bugs can likely make a child autistic.
But, there are now at least six published legal or scientific cases of children regressing into ASD following vaccination - and many more will be revealed in due time.
There was the case of Hannah Poling, in federal vaccine court, in which the government conceded that Hannah's autism was caused by vaccine-induced fever and overstimulation of the immune system that aggravated an asymptomatic and previously undetected dysfunction of her mitochondria. Hannah received nine vaccines in one day, including MMR.
Then there was the Bailey Banks case, in which the court ruled that Pe ioners had proven that MMR had directly caused a brain inflammation illness called "acute disseminated encephalomyelitis" (ADEM) which, in turn, had caused PDD-NOS, an autism spectrum disorder, in Bailey.
And last September, a chart review of children with autism and mitochondrial disease, published in the Journal of Child Neurology, looked at 28 children with ASD and mitochondrial disease and found that 17 of them (60.7%) had gone through autistic regression, and 12 of the regressive cases had followed a fever. Among the 12 children who regressed after fever, a third (4) had fever associated with vaccination, just like Hannah Poling.
The authors reported that "recommended vaccination schedules are appropriate in mitochondrial disease," although "fever management appears important for decreasing regression risk."
That conclusion, however, is not supported by some of the world's leading experts on mitochondrial disease, including Dr. Douglas Wallace, a professor of pediatrics and biological chemistry at UC Irvine, and director of its Center for Molecular & Mitochondrial Medicine and Genetics. "We have always advocated spreading the immunizations out as much as possible because every time you vaccinate, you are creating a challenge for the system" in people with mito disorders, Dr. Wallace, who was recently named to the National Academies of Science, testified at a federal vaccine safety meeting.
The possibility that vaccines and mitochondrial disease might be related to autism was also supported in another chart review published in PLoS Online. The authors wrote that mitochondrial autism is not at all rare, and said that, "there might be no difference between the inflammatory or catabolic stress of vaccinations and that of common childhood diseases, which are known precipitants of mitochondrial regression."
In fact, they added, "Large population-based studies will be needed to identify a possible relationship of vaccination with autistic regression in persons with mitochondrial cytopathies."
Another fact that gets little attention in this never-ending debate is that more than 1,300 cases of vaccine injuries have been paid out in vaccine court, in which the court ruled that childhood immunizations caused encephalopathy (brain disease), encephalitis (brain swelling) and/or seizure disorders. Encephalopathy/encephalitis is found in most if not all ASD cases, and seizure disorders in about a third of them.
If we know that vaccines can cause these injuries, is it not reasonable to ask if they can cause similar injuries that lead to autism? (Stay tuned as those 1,300 cases come under closer scrutiny).
Fortunately, the federal government seems to be getting serious about identifying ALL potnetial environmental factors that could contribute to autism, including a few studies that take in vaccines and the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal. And President Obama's brand-new budget includes increased spending for autism research at NIH, including money to help identify environmental factors that contribute to ASD.
Meanwhile, the National Vaccine Advisory Committee has unanimously endorsed a CDC proposal to study autism as a possible "clinical outcome" of vaccination, and has recommended several more studies pertaining to vaccines and autism, including a feasability study on analyzing vaccinated vs. unvaccinated populations.
And over at the government's leading autism research panel, the Inter-Agency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), the Chairman, National Ins ute of Mental Health Director Dr. Thomas Insel, recently told me that that better diagnosis and reporting could not "explain away this huge increase" in ASD cases.
"There is no question that there has got to be an environmental component here," Insel said.
I asked him if the IACC would ever support direct research into vaccines and autism, now that CDC has rasied the estimated ASD rate from 1-in-150 to 1-in-110, in just two years. "I think what you are going to see with this update is that there is a recognition that we need to look at subgroups who might be particularly responsive to environmental factors," he answered.
So what might those factors include? Well, it turns out that the IACC has unanimously recommend research to determine if certain sub-populations are more susceptible to environmental exposures such as "immune challenges related to naturally occurring infections, vaccines or underlying immune problems."
Nobody seriously thinks that the retraction of The Lancet article, and the international flogging of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, will do anything to make this debate go away. And they are right.
And the chances are he would have been diagnosed autistic without the vaccine. The only thing that might have changed that diagnosis would have been if he'd died of one of the diseases he hadn't been vaccinated for.Well yeah but he also has autism.
I am not sure about the connection between the two. Personally I have made sure that my daughter has received every vaccination. Just yesterday she received 4 shots in her little legs
I am not saying that I am opposed to it. I am just throwing out that they seem to believe that there was a connection to the vaccination and his autism.
I see nothing in the history of Dr. Wakefield to suggest that he "seems to believe" what he says. Clearly he's trying to make others believe something he knows good and well isn't true, and he can count on fools like you to make ignorant statements about your sister as though there's any evidence of anything related, with no regard for the consequences.
Wakefield applied for a patent for a competing vaccine some time earlier, which he never disclosed. Further, his research was funded by a group planning a class-action lawsuit against the drug companies. He faked research, failed to follow protocols, ignored results that didn't fit his goal and called a press conference to announce the dangers.
After his announcement, vaccination rates for MMR plummetted worldwide, particularly in Britain. All you need to know is that the autism rates didn't drop at the same time, but you made your propter-hoc statement after the announcement that the medical journal had retracted his original article for all the above reasons. You should be smarter than Boutons and actually use your brain to evaluate the information you're given.
First off little guy it was my cousin and not my sister. Clearly you didn't read everything I posted since I said that I have made sure that my little girl has received every vaccination. Had I truly believed that what this guy says is true I probably wouldn't have made my baby go through all those shots huh?
by "they seem to believe" I meant my cousin and her husband and not Dr. Wakefield. Mybe you should actually read what I said instead of blindly quoting me.
4cc - You fixed my quote to say what I meant. I meant the two happened around the same time, so thanks.
Maybe you should follow your own advice.
Yeah, my bad. I was editing the box and couldn't go back and check, but it's important that this otherwise meaningless mistake on my part is what you're able to walk away from that with. Way to use your head.
Yet you didn't mention any of that in your initial post:
Had you truly believed what that guy says is true then perhaps you shouldn't have made such a statement about your cousin. The implication from that leading sentence with no qualification is your responsibility, and it's idiotic. People that make statements linking one thing to another in public, potentially causing others to make dangerous misinformed choices is irresponsible, particularly when those people vaccinate their own children. Sorry you got called out for it and can't man up and admit the mistake.My cousin's little boy was a healthy regular little 2 year old until he got vaccinated.
I am not sure about the connection between the two. Personally I have made sure that my daughter has received every vaccination. Just yesterday she received 4 shots in her little legs
I am not saying that I am opposed to it. I am just throwing out that they seem to believe that there was a connection to the vaccination and his autism.
It may have been a meaningless mistake to you but what it showed me was that you were just partially reading what I posted.
I didn't?
Again showing me that you didn't read what you even quoted.
Sorry you can't man up and admit that you are an idiot. If someone makes a decision regarding their children based on a post on SpursTalk then they are idiots. I did go back and say that 4cc corrected my post and correctly posted what I originally meant to say. Not only did I give him credit but I believe that showed that my first post was a mistake, thus "manning up".
Even mouse can post longwinded statements on here dude, it doesn't make you smart.
i'm gonna have to go with boutons on this one
The initial ruling used Wakefield's claims, the appeal went through because it was recognized that he is not credible. Find an actual study that shows vaccines have links conditions such as autism, not people saying "big pharma" wants to hide the truth. Try to be a little rational here, unlike with your moon landing thread, if you want to not be immediately written off. Don't be that guy who thinks the element mercury is the same as ethylmercury
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