Dr. Walter Spitzer on vaccine safety (from the April, 2002 hearings):
| I would just like to allude to this, Mr. Chairman. I have been looking for 17 months for studies with scientific admissibility that are adequate pharmacological-epidemiologic evidence of safety, which you would need when a concern has arisen in the community about safety of a particular drug. I have not found any. I have not found it. A proper study of safety under the current conditions, given the frequency of the disorder, would require about 450,000 children. I went through that with statisticians at Cambridge. And that has never been done. And the ``safety studies'' published are of scores of patients. That is a type of sample size which is simply inappropriate, insufficient, and not a scientific way to look at the safety of a drug. I am astonished that the authorities in the United Kingdom, the United States, and my country of Canada are not requiring it the same way they have required us to do it for all contraceptives, for the right reasons. |
[Once again, the emphasis is mine.]
A note on Dr. Spitzer: Walter Spitzer is a well-known epidemiologist, Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology at McGill and Clinical Professor of Medicine at Stanford. He is a late-comer to the debate on MMR and autism. As he has stated in his congressional testimony and in his scholarly work, he has no vested interest in the debate. He has no family members with autism, nor any connection with pharmaceutical companies, nor any body of work in this area to protect.
I thought we were talking about MERCURY and autism?
I find it amazing hiw easily you people can switch between the two.