Lancet retracts paper that linked vaccine and autism

AFP ^ | February 2, 2010

[La Lydia]

PARIS

[NEBO]

Well my cousin was a healthy baby boy, then had the DPT shot, and never recovered. First he was sick, then retarded, then he died very young. He was perfectly healthy until that DPT shot.

[AnAmericanMother]

Yikes. Those are strong words from a disciplinary panel. They usually soften the blow.

This paper caused an awful lot of damage - causing people to chase wild geese and diverting their attention from possibly beneficial therapies and treatments.

[Tax-chick]

"We fully retract this paper from the published record," The Lancet's editors said ...

Yeah, that'll work.

[NEBO]

Three people on the news got the H1N1 shot and then developed H1N1 Guillain-Barre syndrome. One of them said she recovered after five months. I don’t know if the other two recovered yet. I had the H1N1 and I have had DPT shots and I had no ill effects. I wonder if they hit a nerve and caused nerve damage when they gave some of these shots.

[Tax-chick]

Do you really think this article implies that nobody ever has a bad, even fatal, reaction to a vaccine, or are you deliberately offering an irrelevant situation as if it were relevant?

Or did you share the anecdote “just ‘cause.” Sorry about your cousin; it’s terribly sad when things like that happen.

[AnAmericanMother]

Correlation is not causation.

Many developmental disorders first manifest at the time that the DPT series is given. Autism has always begun to show itself at the same age -- long before immunizations were common. It just used to be classified as childhood-onset schizophrenia or severe retardation.

[sticker]

Stop using logic, to the fear mongers logic is like holy water to a vampire

[Washi]

Are there any Freepers educated in Autism, Immunology, or a related medical field that can chime in on this?

This study was allowed to stand for 12 years. Is it truly a flawed study, or are the findings being retracted due to political and business pressures?

[La Lydia]

I am so sorry for your family’s loss. But correlation does not imply causation. The fact that these two events occurred does not mean that one caused the other.

[kevkrom]

I’ve got autisitc twins. Mrs. kevkrom is the research authority (and a trained epidemiologist), and her studied opinion of the vaccine <-> autism theory is that it’s junk science.

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

Similar story with my best friend’s youngest boy. Got the shots, got groggy, never came back. He’s institutionalized now.

[Missouri gal]

The vaccine injury debate continues, but I think people-including most scientists-have missed the likely link: It's the mitochondria. Vaccines, especially the combined vaccines, slam the immune system and force mitochondria to work in a frenzy. If the mitochondria are weak, they die from this assault. If a lot of mitochondria die, they especially die off in the nervous system, which is where autism manifests. Epidemiologists keep missing the link because they are only looking at the whole population, not at the vulnerable subset, which includes Down’s children and other children with neurological disorders. A recent article says over 5,000 cases have been filed with the National Vaccine Injury Program alleging autism caused by vaccines. That's a lot of circumstantial evidence for “no link.” See this article or search the Hanah Poling case for more info;
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vaccine-injury-case-offer

[hecht]

I am an MD with an autistic son. Angry parents want a scapegoat, unfortunately they are barking up the wrong tree.

[Joe Brower]

Do you folks have any theories of what does cause autism?

When I was in school in the '70s, we had a few kids who were handicapped physically, mentally, or both, but autism seems like it has just sprung up and bloomed over just the last 2-3 decades.

Something's behind it, obviously -- but what?

[browardchad]

Is it truly a flawed study, or are the findings being retracted due to political and business pressures?

Read the CNN report at the following link -- the doctor in charge of the study was guilty of quite a bit more than flawed science, or yielding to political/business pressure, apparently. It's unfortunate it took 12 years for Lancet to retract it.

Medical journal retracts study linking autism to vaccine

[kevkrom]

Do you folks have any theories of what does cause autism?

Not a clue. Neither of the twins have any of the known genetic markers, so it could be environmental, except their older (by 21 months) sibling is pretty much the definition of an anti-autistic child.

Some have theorized that it could have to do with advanced age of the mother. Probably not causal, but an additional risk factor.

Or it could simply be that, like Lupus, the rate of autism has always been there, just not properly diagnosed until recently.

[techcor]

Isn’t Lancet the one that published the study of the number of deaths in Iraq that ranged from either 5,000 dead of 500,000 dead (or something ridiculous) plus or many a few hundred thousand? The study all liberals now remember as “millions of Iraq’s personally killed by Bush”.

[sazerac]

Isn’t Lancet the one that published the study of the number of deaths in Iraq that ranged from either 5,000 dead of 500,000 dead (or something ridiculous) plus or many a few hundred thousand? The study all liberals now remember as “millions of Iraq’s personally killed by Bush”.

And was funded by George Soros? Yup, that's the one.