Posted on 02/08/2009 7:53:58 AM PST by jalisco555
THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.
Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.
The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. It claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions.
However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
“The danger is in letting theoretical harm deter us from actions have proven good.”
Yes, that is a danger. And we must remain vigilant to it.
There is also a much less theoretical danger from injecting children with things like mercury.
Let us remain vigilant to BOTH dangers.
One size fits all rarely works. Unfortunately, look for a lot more of it in the future.
You may be right. I haven’t studied Asperger’s.
My sons have “symptoms” like developing academic skills at different ages (reading at 4, writing at 8), talking to invisible space aliens, getting angry when they don’t get what they want, and so on. None of them would be considered “autistic” by a reasonable adult - they look people in the eye, make physical contact voluntarily, and engage in sensible conversation at times.
However, if the school system found them to be a nuisance, they could be “diagnosed” for the system’s convenience. “Hey, look at all these autistic children - I wonder what’s causing this all of a sudden!”
My husband just didn’t want put his laundry away, find things for himself in the refrigerator, or make sure there was money in the bank before he wrote a check.
I do not think it is new, but was an unnamed disorder until recently.
People who suffered from this were called “different” or “odd”.
I have an uncle and a nephew with symptoms similar to my son. All 3 are 2nd child, and male.
Regards,
Texas Fossil
This is how global warming gained traction. Unethical scientists make lots of money giving politicians studies to support political goals.
Those scientists should be sanctioned by their peers whose reputation is tarnished by this kind of behavior.
Sound very familiar.
Symptoms almost always include OCD, depression, frustration, not understanding subtle communications. But gifted in science, technology, and engineering fields.
My sympathy to you.
Maybe. I think it’s “odd” to expect every human being to develop in exactly the same way as any other. The boy who used to get up in the middle of the night to jump on the trampoline was definitely hyperactive, but now that he runs marathons and plays drums a couple of hours a day, it’s less disruptive. A high level of energy and activity is generally a positive thing in life - just not in a classroom.
Yeah, like that's never happened before:
DDT ("silent Spring")
Population "control" (i.e. abortion).
Nuclear power generation ("The China Syndrome").
Global Warming (conpiracy of the Left).
Thimerosal (ethylmercury bound to thiosalicylate) was used as a vaccine preservative for approximately 50 years before there was even a single concern raised about it being neurotoxic. When that concern was raised, it was raised not by anyone in the medical or scientific community, but by the parents of autistic children that were scrambling in the 1990s to find an environmental cause to blame for the condition of their children. Also, the concern was based entirely upon the known toxicity of METHYLmercury, which is a different chemical compound with one fewer methyl group than ethylmercury. That single methyl group is quite powerful. For example, ETHYL alcohol is the alcohol that makes beer fun to drink, while METHYL alcohol is toxic in any amount. There is not, and never has been, any data indicating that thimerosal is a neurotoxin. However, the facts have never been allowed to get in the way of the hysteria.
In 1997, Congressman Frank Pallone proposed an addition to the FDA Modernization Act that caused the FDA to assess all of its products for mercury content. However, as there was no standard for a safe level of exposure to ETHYLmercury, the standard for METHYLmercury was used. Since methylmercury is toxic even in minute quantities, the level of ethylmercury present in required childhood vaccines exceeded that level, and was deemed “unsafe.” Once again, the fact that the two chemicals have completely different properties was not allowed to become a barrier to causing worry among parents.
Furthermore, there has been not one iota of thimerosal present in required childhood vaccines since 2001. The thimerosal was removed not as an admission that it was neurotoxic, but because the American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC did not want parents to decline vaccines for their children out of the fear spread by the anti-vaccine brigade regarding their harmfulness. However a study performed by the California department of Public Health has noted no decrease, and in fact an increase, in autism diagnoses in that state since 2001. If thimerosal was the culprit behind autism, then why has there not been a decrease in diagnoses in recent years, as children born since 2001 diagnosed with autism have not received vaccines containing thimerosal? The answer is that thimerosal was never the culprit behind the development of autism. Members of the anti-vaccine brigade draw a temporal relationship between the administration of the vaccines and the age at which signs of autism are noticed. However, correlation does not imply causation.
There have been many, many scares invented in recent years that have attempted to pin the blame for autism on vaccination. In Great Britain, thanks to Andrew Wakefield, parents were worried about MMR vaccine instead of thimerosal. It’s been known for years that Wakefield’s “study” was bunk, but that hasn’t stopped the anti-vaccine brigade. Nevermind the fact that Wakefield received financial compensation from the Legal Aid Board, a group that was seeking evidence that vaccines caused autism for use in litigation, and that he never disclosed this compensation at the time he published his “study.” Nevermind that several of the parents of the children who were included in the study were clients of the Legal Aid Board. Nevermind that large studies failed to confirm Wakefield’s hypothesis, and that ten of Wakefield’s twelve co-authors publicly retracted the earlier work.
Now, the anti-vaccine brigadiers have found new bugaboos. They theorize that the number of vaccines children are given at one time present too much a strain on their bodies, or that the actual toxin in the vaccines that leads to autism is aluminum and not the thimerosal that they griped and moaned about. None of these newer theories have any scientific basis. However, one fact is known, and that is that childhood vaccines prevent diseases that may cause life-threatening and devastating illnesses.
Learn some facts before you go off repeating hysterical claims that may scare parents into declining disease-preventing and life-saving vaccines for their children.
Well, he is an engineer, and a musician, and a distance runner. But not depressive ;-).
I figured it was just “Married Man Syndrome,” where a person becomes incapable of doing things if he knows his wife will do them for him.
Anyway, we’ve been (mostly) happily married for 20 years!
exactly.
just about every language/speech impaired or delayed speech toddler seems to be labeled autistic.
Autism is a debilitating illness and in my son’s “generation”,(he’s 28),the children presented as totally unresponsive unless they wanted to interact and of course their interactions were totally nonverbal,inappropriate etc.
I agree, but Aspies are definately different.
I know several and they have a lot in common. This is a bigger issue than individual differences.
That’s exactly my point. Thimerosal does not equal atomic mercury.
Got you beat, my wife and I will be married 38 years in March.
But it can easily become atomic mercury. The body can handle a little chlorine, but a little mercury is a lot worse for the body.
What part of “might as well stay on the safe side since it’s not the active ingredient” doesn’t make sense to you?
Picking on a single element in a compound - a complex molecule - is the dumb thing to do. Likewise, while Carbon, Nitrogen, and Hydrogen are all not merely benign in isolation but ESSENTIAL to life, their simplest combination - (H-C=N) hydrogen cyanide - is absolutely lethal.
I'd love to see a cite on that particular 'fact'. If you don't have one, I'd say that you're making things up as you go along.
Here's a study that directly contradicts what you're saying:
I’ve had a brief search but can’t find the page where I saw it. Found this though FWIW http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3000884.stm
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