Searching for a Vaccine Against Misinformation
Editorial Board | Nov 29, 2009 | Comments 11
BY EMILY LING
“Might hurt just a little bit — just a little bit — but it’s going to help a lot!”
That is a line from a song that Sid the Science Kid and his computer-generated pals sang on a recent episode of Sid’s eponymous public television children’s show. In every episode, Sid has a “Super-duper-ooper-schmooper” big idea. Last week, on a show entitled “Getting a Shot: You Can Do It,” Sid’s big idea was that getting vaccinated is a good idea.
50 years ago, few people would have argued with that idea. Vaccines were seen as medical miracles. Along with antibiotics, they saved millions of lives. Common diseases like polio, measles, smallpox and diphtheria were greatly reduced if not completely eliminated. Childhood mortality fell dramatically.
People used to be able to grasp the positive impact that vaccines were having in their daily lives because they had first-hand experience with the diseases that they prevented. Mumps used to infect over a million children a year. Measles infected four million. In 1963, when the measles vaccine was introduced, there were few parents who didn’t appreciate it.
Now, insidiously, vaccines have become a victim of their own success. Like many public health instruments, vaccines work best when nothing actually happens. So as vaccines eliminated various diseases from our lives, the collective memory of why we needed them in the first place has faded.
That is why by 1998, when the British medical journal The Lancet published a study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield linking autism to the MMR vaccine, a deep-rooted and irrational fear of vaccines had gained ground in the general population. The findings of Dr. Wakefield’s study were never replicated, even though dozens of studies tried. They couldn’t be, because Wakefield was essentially a fraud. He has been thoroughly and completely discredited. In several independent investigations, he has been accused of falsifying and manipulating data, of suppressing evidence that contradicted his claims and of accepting money from lawyers representing parents who wanted to prove that their children had been harmed by the MMR. 10 out of 12 of Wakefield’s research collaborators issued a retraction of the original paper.
Yet, the fear of vaccines persists. In fact, it has grown. People like Jenny McCarthy and Bill Maher, people without any medical training, have abused their public platforms to spread misinformation about vaccines. Their message has been welcomed by a public that is increasingly distrustful of vaccine and science in general.
That distrust is so widespread that it exists even at UCI, a university whose own laboratories have originated various advances in vaccine technology. Last week, when UCI offered free H1N1 vaccines to anyone who fell into certain risk groups, many students failed to line up. People cited anecdotes to explain why they weren’t: a friend had gotten sick after getting the vaccine; some unnamed source warned that it was dangerous.
These students don’t seem to care that the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control have both found the H1N1 vaccine to be no less safe than the seasonal flu vaccine. It doesn’t matter that the injected form of the vaccine doesn’t even contain a live virus, making it impossible for anyone to catch H1N1 from the vaccine. It doesn’t matter that it takes 10 days for the vaccine to take effect, meaning that if someone gets sick right afterwards, it’s probably because they didn’t get vaccinated early enough. It doesn’t matter that even after millions of doses were administered, only one substantiated death, in a patient with underlying health issues, has resulted. The facts just don’t seem to matter.
More and more people are refusing vaccines, not just for H1N1 but also for other diseases. In California, the number of kindergartners entering school with vaccine exemption has more than doubled since 1997. The pattern is repeated across the nation. On Vashon Island, a well-heeled suburb of Seattle, an astounding 20 percent of parents have opted out of vaccines for their children.
These people aren’t crazy. They certainly aren’t stupid, or uneducated or delusional. They aren’t members of a fringe group. They are perfectly normal and, for the most part, intelligent people. That’s what makes this phenomenon so disturbing.
People have the right to decide what they put into their bodies. But it’s important to remember that vaccination is a personal decision with public implications. One person’s decision to skip vaccination, when repeated on a larger level, compromises the effectiveness of vaccinations for everyone else. In 2008, a measles outbreak spread across 15 states. In August of that year, as the outbreak continues, a CDC report found that of the 131 infected patients, only 19 had been immunized. That outbreak was a warning shot. If the current trend against immunization continues, diseases that no one has seen for years will be back with serious consequences for public health. So please, get vaccinated. Or if you don’t for whatever reason, don’t spread misinformation because unfortunately that is one disease against which no vaccine has yet been developed.
Please send comments to newuopinion@gmail.com. Include name, major and year.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Filed Under: Opinion
Antaeus has given some of the most bizarre talking-points I’ve seen. From the very beginning of his post he insinuates a conspiracy by calling supporters of Dr. Wakefield a “cult.” It is positively absurd that the very same people who dismiss a link between MMR and autism by calling it a “conspiracy” would resort to the very same tactics of conspiracy mongering they claim to denigrate.
He further descends into his mantra of spin portraying the amount of money given to Wakefield as a personal payoff while neglecting to mention that it was the total funds he had received over the course of 9 years from early 1996 towards the end of 2004, and money that went into his research, not to him personally. Such a grant would be well within the range of modesty, especially for a surgeon.
I agree 100% with him, however, that to penalize only one side of the controversy for COIs but not the other is entirely wrong. So then why is Dr. Andrew Wakefield facing the GMC for it on these charges while Murdoch’s connection to GSK is seemingly a non-issue by comparison, especially when the press is not supposed to be taking sides in controversies such as these?
The fact is this: The clinical findings of The Lancet paper have gone unchallenged and are therefore good science, according to the editor-in-chief Dr. Richard Horton himself. So the accuracy of the study is a given. The aspects of this wholly unrelated to science are what detractors such as Feldspar seem to be interested in, given that he then goes on to incorrectly state that children in the study were referred to him by lawyers, when in fact they were referred to Wakefield on an entirely clinical basis and were admitted to the study in chronological order. The fact is, 11 of the 12 subjects merely went onto pursue litigation against MMR manufacturers, which has no bearing on the concerned study.
Sadly, Feldspar continues his rant of deluded thinking by resorting to his double-standard accusation, when in fact this merely illustrates my point further. He conveniently neglects that while Andrew Wakefield filed the PCC complaint against Brian Deer, he is not also writing about it in a newspaper with a circulation of 1.2 million that’s supposed to be “neutral.” Brian Deer on the other hand, while making the original complaint to the GMC, has also been writing about it in The Sunday Times. His best “evidence” that he is not the original complainant is a sketchy email from the law firm of the GMC, Field Fisher Waterhouse, in which the sender mistakenly says that the GMC approached Brian Deer asking him for evidence.
Early email exchanges between Deer and the GMC suggest otherwise, with an email to GMC administrator Tim Cox-Brown from Brian Deer dated February 25, 2004, in which Deer says, “I write to ask your permission to lay before you an outline of evidence,” which also directly implicated the three practitioners now standing trial: Simon Murch, John Walker-Smith and Andrew Wakefield, stating their names and registry numbers. Had he not been approach, Brian Deer would have needed no such permission, it also reveals that the outline of allegations against Wakefield and his colleagues, also in fact came from Deer, whose been writing about the story ever since.
Equally telling about Deer’s bias is who put him on the story to get Wakefield in the first place, Paul Nuki, a former editor of The Sunday Times. Nuki is the son of a doctor who played a pivotal role in approving one of the very first MMR Pluserix vaccine in the UK, made by GlaxoSmithKline, later banned for causing viral meningitis. Even more telling is that by the time the UK approved this vaccine, it was already banned in Canada.
It is equally unfortunate that on thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative, Feldspar and friends get it just as wrong.
I now see someone named Colleen say that the amount of mercury in vaccines is no more than in a tuna fish sandwich, neglecting to mention that unlike vaccines, there are EPA warnings against the levels of mercury in fish, particularly tuna, deeming it unsafe for consumption by pregnant women and small children. Every state in the union has these warnings except for Wyoming, where the Republican legislature refuses to test the fist. She question why these warnings exist for fish but not vaccines when the mercury in shots has been shown to cross the blood-brain barrier and stay there much more easily than methylmercury.
She further descends into this mantra, stating that thimerosal was taken out of vaccines while autism rates have gone up. What she neglects to mention was that the autism rates used to study the thimerosal connection were in very young children at a time when the average age of diagnosis was dropping dramatically. This change caused what would have been an estimated decrease in autism rates to turn into an artificial increase during the phase-out.
What she says about Wakefield is no better, calling him a “fraud” with no evidence to back it up like our friend Antaeus, and incorrectly stating he paid parents to take their children’s blood samples. Aside from the sheer ridiculousness of this allegation on its own, it is also completely wrong like all the others. Wakefield did not pay the children, he rewarded them for giving blood samples at his son’s birthday party, big difference. She also says the co-authors said the findings in the paper were not scientifically sound and retracted it after publication. This has to be a lie considering the fact that the co-authors said no such thing and did not retract the paper, only the portion of the conclusion where it links the MMR vaccine to autism.
After that, Antaeus Feldspar goes further into the black hole of knowledge he entered before. The evidence that autism is autoimmune is becoming increasingly understood. There have been repeated findings of vaccine-strain measles in the guts of autistic children which to this day go scientifically unchallenged.
Next up, he repeats some highly-common fallacies of the Simpsonwood meeting in June 7-8, 2000, stating that Verstraeten’s data did not link autism to mercury. In fact it did, it just was not statistically significant like connections were to other more common neurological disorders. In fact, earlier data generated by Verstraeten show very significant causal findings between autism and thimerosal, the raw data behind those were never opened up to outside researchers for public scrutiny and were in fact destroyed as testified by a private contractor to the August 2004 IOM meeting. The original source for this is not Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but in fact David Kirby, who wrote about this in his book “Evidence of Harm.”
The last three paragraphs by Antaeus are an utter fabrication, most likely borrowed from vaccine-millionaire Paul Offit’s book. The speculation that children not subjected to the vaccine schedule are therefore less likely to be diagnosed is little more than wishful thinking by attendees at Simpsonwood and was not how the remaining associations to neurological disorders went away at all.
What really happened was that after Simpsonwood, Verstraeten’s research team bought the medical records of a third and failing HMO, Harvard Pilgrim, with a record system in shambles and did not even use ICD-9 coding like the previous two HMOs Verstraeten studied, despite already having a large array of HMOs to choose from that are already part of the Vaccine Safety Datalink project. Inevitably, no associations were found in this third HMO, and the conclusions simply was that associations were “not consistent across HMOs.” During this time, Verstraeten had left the CDC to go work for GlaxoSmithKline, while still working on this study. This pitiful example of research was eventually published in Pediatrics, which did not disclose that Verstraeten had been employed by GSK over the last two years, yet unlike Wakefield, his career is in no jeopardy. The following year, Verstraeten wrote to Pediatrics that his study was “neutral” anyway and therefore could not be shown to prove or disprove a connection as Antaeus has been trying to do. So his point is moot.
In bringing up Generation Rescue’s survey sample, he unknowingly rebuts the false claim his side including the government uses to avoid a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study, that its unfeasible because few unvaccinated children exist. He also neglects the results of the survey, which found in boys who are 4-9 times more likely to have a neurological disorders as it is, that vaccinated boys were 155% more likely to have a neurological disorder, 224% more likely to have ADHD and 61% more likely to have autism. A non-profit was able to accomplish what the government refuses to carry out.
H.L. Mencken once wrote that “There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” Tony Bateson, by disdaining any information on autism, a biological disorder, that is “long on the language of biology,” or too “wordy”, leaves little doubt that he hopes to be the discoverer of that easy solution. Unfortunately for his desires, his inability to find any unvaccinated person with an ASD illustrates only that he has not been searching very hard, because in June 2007 the anti-vaccine group Generation Rescue publicized the results of a commissioned phone survey which reported 991 fully unvaccinated respondents, 37 of whom had an ASD. It’s too bad that Tony has spent so much time “insisting” on making personal visits to Harley Street doctors that he hasn’t ever found the time to do a simple Google search, at least not since June 2007.
(Actually, I suspect that sometime between the 4th and the 9th of this month, someone did bring the phone survey to Tony’s attention. By accident I stumbled across another comment our Mr. Bateson left on a different website. His claim there was similar to the one he made here, except that there all his claims about there being no unvaccinated persons with ASDs are carefully hedged with “in the UK”. Of course, the existence of any unvaccinated person with ASD torpedoes Tony’s dreams of a neat, plausible, easy answer, whether that person is in the UK or not.)
One characteristic of people who write in defence of universal vaccinations is that they are wordy, pseudo scientific and long on the language of biology. I don’t claim any of that I rely upon my own observations from over 4,000 family contacts, millions of readers in the UK national press and a website that ran for seven years. Additionally I attended more than twenty parent and professional conferences aggregate attendance over 2,000 people. From all of that and thousands of hours of research reading only one person ever claimed that autism was present in unvaccinated people. He was a doctor who when I insisted upon visiting him in Harley Street, London failed to substantiate his claim and then said his papers were in Dubai. Months later they had still not turned up. I still have not found one!
Tony Bateson, Oxford UK
Bob Moffitt is correct about one thing: Andrew Wakefield is not the ONLY source from which parents are getting bad information. One of those is almost certainly where Bob got his false information about the CDC declaring that “1 in every 6 American child suffers some type of chronic autoimmune disorder, such as, autism, allergies, asthma, juvenile type 1 diabetes, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, ADD, ADHD” … The CDC would not make such a declaration for the simple fact that the causes of ADD, ADHD and autism and probably other conditions from Bob’s list ARE NOT KNOWN, much less known to be “chronic autoimmune disorders.”
Neither is Bob’s information about the 2000 CDC conference at Simpsonwood correct. Even assuming that Bob meant to talk about a link between thimerosal and autism, rather than a link between thimerosal and vaccines, anyone who actually READS the Simpsonwood transcript can see that although Verstraeten’s analysis of the data appeared to show a statistical correlation between vaccines using thimerosal as a preservative and certain neurological problems, autism WAS NOT ONE OF THOSE PROBLEMS. One of the first things Verstraeten said was that they had specifically looked to see if there was any correlation between thimerosal and autism, but that the data supported no such correlation.
Yes, I know that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims in his Rolling Stone article “Deadly Immunity” that Verstraeten’s data showed that “thimerosal appeared to be responsible for the dramatic increase in autism” and that the conference attendees had conspired to “bury” that information. But once again, checking the actual transcript that is supposedly Kennedy’s source for all his claims shows that he is completely WRONG about Verstraeten’s data EVER pointing to a thimerosal-autism link. So if he is the source for the claim that the CDC declared Verstraeten’s original data “lost” – and I’ve never seen anyone put forth that claim about the CDC who didn’t do so in almost exactly Kennedy’s wording – we really don’t have much reason to believe that, either.
So, you’re right about that one thing, Bob – Wakefield isn’t the only source of bad information about vaccines.
By the way, the real story of Verstraeten’s data is interesting, and very instructive. Verstraeten attempted to compare groups of children who were as much like each other as possible, with the only major difference between them being that one group had received vaccines containing thimerosal as a preservative and the other hadn’t. If that had in fact been the only major difference, then of course there would be reason to suspect that the difference in vaccination was what caused the children that got thimerosal vaccines to be diagnosed with neurological problems such as tics at a greater rate than the unvaccinated group.
But someone pointed out a possibility that Verstraeten had not accounted for in his preliminary analysis: perhaps the sorts of parents who don’t take their children to the doctor to get their vaccinations on schedule also don’t as readily take their children to the doctor for problems like tics. If this turned out to be ANOTHER major difference between the two groups, then how would we know which difference between the groups was the cause of their differing rates of neurological problems?
The solution turned out to be to observe that, if one group of children was getting diagnosed with neurological problems more frequently because they were taken to the doctor more frequently, they should also logically be getting diagnosed more frequently with physical problems that could not be reasonably explained as a result of vaccination (like clubfeet.) Now, if vaccination actually did cause neurological problems, then the “neurological difference” – the difference between the rate at which vaccinated children were diagnosed with neurological problems and the rate at which unvaccinated children were diagnosed with neurological problems – should be higher than the “physical difference” – the difference between the rate at which vaccinated children were diagnosed with physical problems and the rate at which unvaccinated children were diagnosed with physical problems. When Verstraeten re-examined the data, though, he found that the neurological difference matched the physical difference. That’s the way science goes: sometimes what looks like a smoking gun, when you look more carefully, turns out to be nothing but an illusion. What’s a miserable shame is that there are so many people out there who, for reasons of fanaticism or greed, want to keep those illusions going.
The preservative that most vaccine conspiracy believers think made their kids autistic was taken out of all childhood vaccines except the multi-dose formulation of the flu vaccine. The amount of the preservative that any child can get from all of his/her vaccines is now less than the amount in a tuna sandwich. Yet, autism rates have not gone down. That’s what the vaccine conspiracy believers themselves say about the rates. People, you can’t have it both ways. Either the rates should have gone down when the preservative was dramatically, exponentially reduced, or the preservative never had anything to do with autism in the first place. Logic points to the latter.
And Andrew Wakefield is factually a fraud. He paid parents to allow him to take blood from their kids. The co-authors of his paper in The Lancet subsequently stated that the paper was not scientifically sound, stating that the conclusions in it were not supported by the science and methodology. The paper was retracted from the journal. Retractions rarely happen; only when a paper is shown to be real junk after publication.
Unfortunately, the loss of confidence in our universal childhood vaccines and the policies by which they are administered…such as…48 doses of 15 vaccines prior to 6 years of age…as many as 7 – 8 vaccines in a single visit…has become widespread and continues to grow.
However, to suggest parents have begun distrusting vaccines because of Dr. Wakefield is ludicrous…after all….it is the CDC…not Wakefield or parents….that reports 1 in every 6 American child suffers some type of chronic autoimmune disorder, such as, autism, allergies, asthma, juvenile type 1 diabetes, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, ADD, ADHD, et….which were far less common in ALL previous…LESS vaccinated generations.
Indeed, recent allegations that science data was fraudulently manipulated to provide scientific “evidence” of global warming is eerily similar to the same suspicions raised at the Simpsonwood meeting in Atlanta, Ga, where the data proving “no link between vaccines and thimerosal”…was also mysteriously, conveniently, lost.
You really should consider that “science” in pursuit of truth has been hi-jacked in the past to promote propaganda instead. That’s why questions asked…such as the questions raised by Dr. Wakefield…deserve to be answered by INDEPENDENT sources…not subjected to the muckraking of old journalism meant to discredit him rather than his message.
Thank you, Emily Ling, for a well-researched and very sensible article. It’s sad that those who will react with the greatest vigor are those who still cling to a cult-like trust in Wakefield, and will continue to be willingly blind to the glaring evidence of his dishonesty.
Jake Crosby even alludes to the known fact that Andrew Wakefield was paid over half a million US dollars by a personal-injury law firm preparing a lawsuit against the manufacturers of the MMR vaccine but concealed this even from his co-authors on the paper, but amazingly, Jake asserts that “none of the legal money went into the paper.” Who is Jake Crosby, that he could make such a determination? “Sure, the politician took half-a-million dollars under the table from the land developer and then pushed through a change in the zoning laws that favored the developer, but none of that half-million went into the changing of the law!” We would scratch our head trying to figure out how ANYONE could actually believe such a thing, but coming in the same message where Jake tries to pretend that James Murdoch’s place on the board of GlaxoSmithKline means that any evidence of Wakefield’s misdeeds published in any newspaper owned by Murdoch must be somehow tainted even when the evidence is independently verifiable, it’s clear that Jake’s just practicing a double standard.
The fact is that, even IF everything that Wakefield reported in the Lancet paper about the condition of the 12 children was 100% accurate (which is by no means a given!) it would still be IMPOSSIBLE to accurately assess the scientific meaning of that data without knowing that the children were a preselected group. The fact is that 11 of the 12 children were in fact directly steered to Wakefield because they were participants in the litigation. The fact is that Wakefield concealed this fact – without which meaningful interpretation of the data is not possible – not just from the audience of his paper, but even from his co-authors.
One cannot brush these facts away with red herrings and falsehoods about Brian Deer, such as the false claim that Deer “is currently under investigation for breach of ethics and inaccurate reporting by the Press Complaint Commission” — in fact, since the 58-page complaint against Brian Deer was the work of none other than Andrew Wakefield, the PCC understandably decided to suspend such an investigation, pending the resolution of the General Medical Council’s inquiry into Wakefield. Jake would like everyone to believe that the only allegations of wrongdoing against Wakefield are coming from Brian Deer, but would rather that people DIDN’T know that the allegations of wrongdoing against Deer are coming from Andrew Wakefield. The marvelous double standard, again! Anyone who believes that Wakefield’s complaint against Deer is likely to find any actual breach of ethics or inaccurate reporting, by the way, should consider the fate of Wakefield’s previous libel suit against Deer: Even in the United Kingdom, where libel laws are notorious favorable to the plaintiff, Wakefield ended up dropping his suit and agreeing to pay Deer’s costs. The judge in that case, considering Wakefield’s “rather relaxed and dilatory approach towards litigation … which is supposed to achieve vindication of reputation” concluded that “it thus appears that [Wakefield] wishes to use the existence of the libel proceedings for public relations purposes” … much as Jake seems to be using the existence of Wakefield’s suspended complaint to the PCC for public relations purposes.
(Jake should also know by now that his claim that Deer is the “complainant” in the case against Wakefield is false. In the British legal system, “complainant” is a specific legal role; one does not become a complainant by making a complaint any more than professing one’s beliefs makes one a professor.)
I hope that people will read your well-written article and realize that their decisions should be based on high-quality evidence from the best sources, and that scientific frauds like Wakefield do not qualify as “the best sources” by any stretch of the imagination.
Allow me to correct a number of factual inaccuracies in this article.
First, the vast majority of the mortalities from infectious diseases declined before the drugs for them came out, this goes for both anti-Biotics and vaccines. The result was attributed to better living conditions, NOT drugs. The idea that they saved us is nothing more than an industry talking-point.
Perhaps worst of all, you also completely misstated the facts surrounding the MMR crisis. For one, the paper published in The Lancet led by Dr. Andrew Wakefield showed a link between autism and bowel disease, termed “Autistic Enterocolitis,” NOT autism and the MMR vaccine. The work linking autism and bowel disease has since been replicated in 5 countries and has even led the National Health Service in England to change its approach to autism, noting the gastrointestinal link. A temporal link to MMR noted by the parents was merely included in the discussion section, that was it. None of the legal money went into the paper in the first place, and a year before publication the law firm working with Wakefield disclosed their association with him directly to the office of Dr. Richard Horton, editor of the journal.
Subsequent research in the UK, US, Ireland and Japan were what found vaccine-strain measles in the guts and white blood cells of autistic children with regressive autism and bowel disease following MMR administration.
Claims of falsifying, manipulating and suppressing data are far from independent and come from a broadsheet newspaper article published earlier this year by one conflicted “journalist” with no education beyond a BA in philosophy, much less a medical background, and who was also the original complainant to the General Medical Council, essentially responsible for all the charges leveled against Dr. Wakefield and his colleagues. So that “journalist” was essentially reporting the story he created. He is currently under investigation for breach of ethics and inaccurate reporting by the Press Complaint Commission (PCC) in the UK as a result of his character assassinations. His newspaper even defied orders from the PCC to remove his articles from its website.
No wonder most of the coauthors to The Lancet paper were scared into cosigning the PARTIAL (NOT complete as you insinuate) retraction of an INTERPRETATION (NOT of The Lancet study itself as you incorrectly say) you mention in your article.
Moreover, eight days before the article ran, the head of the newspaper it ran in, James Murdoch (son of Rupert), was appointed to the board of directors for GlaxoSmithKline, the company that makes the MMR vaccine in Britain.
And yet, the situation here in the US is no better. We’ve just green-lighted an untested vaccine that contains mercury which exceeds EPA limits for widespread use in the population while giving full immunity to the manufacturers, even though this flu is no different from seasonal flus, and the last swine flu vaccine given in 1976 killed more people than the swine flu itself.
With these corrections in mind, it should be no wonder why, as you say in the more accurate section of your piece, that, “More and more people are refusing vaccines, not just for H1N1 but also for other diseases.”
In fact, you’ve stated the reason yourself:
“These people aren’t crazy. They certainly aren’t stupid, or uneducated or delusional. They aren’t members of a fringe group. They are perfectly normal and, for the most part, intelligent people.”
I can appreciate that people who believe that vaccination should be universal can be passionate about their beliefs. But to describe Andrew Wakefield as a fraud is quite disgraceful. Andrew Wakefield led me to enquire widely into the efficacy of vaccines when I first read of his work in September 1996 in a UK national newspaper.
What I have found in thirteen years of extensive research, during 2002 to 2004 almost at an industrial scale, is that there do not seem to be any unvaccinated people who are autistic. It is as simple as that, not science but arithmetic. Not one proven case of an individual wholly unvaccinated who subsequently was disgnosed as ASD.
Make of that what you will or disprove it! The USA would have identified the cause of autism many years ago but for mandatory immunisation.
Tony Bateson
Oxford, UK
People like Jenny Mccarthy are not “abusing public platforms to spread misinformation about vaccines”. They are parents who have lived watching their child get injured before their very eyes after a shot. I also saw my son get injured. Prior to his MMR, he was at 95% growth and a thriving 11 month old infant. After the MMR he went into a slow slide and now is about 30% height, has colitis (diarrhea started the week after he got his MMR and did not go away until he was successfully treated at age 5 by Andrew Wakefield’s clinic for the disorder that Wakefield and others discovered). Friend you know not of what you speak. Of course vaccines harm SOME who get it. And they protect all the rest. But until society is willing to help those children who get harmed from vaccines and acknowledge this happens, we are going to trust others not medical doctors or the media to give us information about what we saw occur to us and many friends right before our eyes. Don’t tell me I didn’t see what I saw. And–go to a special ed class and offer to change a five-year old’s diaper who had an apgar of 9 before he got his Hep B. . Okay?
Then tell me that vaccines are harmless to everyone. Even though every other substance on the planet save water is harmful to some of us some of the time.
People like Jenny Mccarthy are not “abusing public platforms to spread misinformation about vaccines”. They are parents who have lived watching their child get injured before their very eyes after a shot. I also saw my son get injured. Prior to his MMR, he was at 95% growth and a thriving 11 month old infant. After the MMR he went into a slow slide and now is about 30% height, has colitis (diarrhea started the week after he got his MMR and did not go away until he was treated by Andrew Wakefield’s clinic for the disorder that Wakefield and others discovered). Friend you know not of what you speak. Of course vaccines harm SOME who get it. And they protect all the rest. But until society is willing to help those children who get harmed from vaccines and acknowledge this happens, we are going to trust others not medical doctors or the media to give us information about what we saw occur to us and many friends right before our eyes. Don’t tell me I didn’t see what I saw. And–go to a special ed class and offer to change a five-year old’s diaper who had an apgar of 9 before he got his Hep B. . Okay?
Then tell me that vaccines are harmless.