This is an interesting case study in how a con man with charisma and a rock solid, even if fraudulent, answer to an intractable problem can get and keep a following.

He's the guy whose paper of a study on autism and MMR was withdrawn from Lancet. It is extraordinarily rare for a paper to be withdrawn. Bad studies are left in the literature and critiqued into oblivion. To get withdrawn from a journal, it basically has to be shown to be fraud.

He sounds very much how I imagine JS was with people. And yes, you can fool some of the people all of the time, especially if they are desperate for an answer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/magazine/mag-24Autism-t.html

These children have specific symptoms which involve physical symptoms and there has never been a valid study to actually attempt to verify his findings (which he pointed out himself were merely a possible link and not established in his small study).

The vilification of Wakefield seems to me to be a deliberate attempt by the medical community to silence him rather than a serious and scientifically based argument.

My grandson and a cousin of mine both have classic autism and this is a situation I have studied quiet thoroughly.

There was something obviously wrong with my nephew long before he was old enough for the MMR. Yet, the diagnosis came after. My SIL became reluctant to immunize her other children after his diagnosis.

My sibling is a pediatrician. He/she has not seen any increase in autism among his/her patients following an MMR. This sibling also has seen deaths among his/her patients from diseases that could have been avoided had the children been immunized.

But that doesn't change the fact that there really does seem to be a group of children with autism and accompanying gastrointestinal issues who were developing normally until that vaccine.

My son and daughter in law opted to vaccinate their youngest son on the extended schedule just to be safe. The baby only needs to have them done before he starts kindergarden so he gets one shot a month -- which seems like a reasonable precaution to me. (As an added benefit, he is nowhere near as miserable after his innoculation as his brothers and cousins were with their mega vaccinations.)

The study was removed because he faked the results. There was no "vilification" of Wakefield, he is a complete and utter fraud who was trying to promote his own vaccines.

There have been several large long-term studies in Finland and England the prove without a doubt that there is absolutely no link between vaccines and autism.

In California, they outlawed the ingredient that the proponents of this fraud said was the cause. The result: a higher rate of autism since it was outlawed, then before.

There are NO studies that prove without a doubt that there is absolutely no link between vaccines and autism. Of course that may just be because it is impossible to prove a negative. However, there is a growing scientific consensus that a sub-group of children may be more at risk to adverse effects to vaccines which lead to a form of autism. The reality is that autism is a complex condition and it covers a spectrum of causes and symptoms.

The National Vaccine Injury Program has awarded compensation to two children that I know of for autism claims after the MMR vaccinations, Hannah Poling and Baily Banks.

If you are interested in the research try:

http://www.tacanow.org/family-resources/scientific-studies-linking-vaccines-to-autism/

Or

http://www.tacanow.org/family-resources/compiled-autism-studies/

And I have read about Wakefield's work and the way the medical community's disagreement with that work was handled. I do not believe he falsified anything. My personal opinion is that he has had his character assassinated because he threatens a medical status quo.

Please understand, I am not anti-vaccine -- however, I feel that vaccines are more dangerous than the medical community wishes to admit and I believe that in the years to come it will be revealed that there was a pretty massive coverup of vaccine damage in children.

so now it's mercury? Which isn't present in the MMR vaccines? hmm, sounds like your own studies are proving that Wakefield is a fraud.

Sounds like you know just enough science to be dangerous. But not enough to sort through bs.

There has also been an increase of vets finding animals reacting adversely to high numbers of vaccinations, although it is all correlation with causation remaining undetermined.

I want to respect yours and others who view immunizations with suspicion, but I do see a fascinating similarity between the tactics of the FARMS/FAIR crowd and those groups opposing immunization. Both start with a set of apriori beliefs and then, working backward, select, filter, and reinterpret data to support their starting beliefs.

In FARMS folks have had to back off the continent-wide locations for the Book of Mormon peoples - marking them down to a Limited Geography hypothesis. The trend is toward an ever decreasing scope for the Lamanite/Nephite peoples. What's next? The "No Geography" hypothesis?

Similarly, in decades past virtually every ailment known to man has at one time or another been blamed on vaccines. Twenty years ago Harris Coulter's "A shot in the dark" blamed all kinds of neurological disorders on the DPT vaccine. A few years later Viera Scheibner's ".Medical Assault." book blamed SIDS on vaccines. Then the rise of the AIDS epidemic was blamed on polio vaccines.

All of these issues have largely subsided as masses of additional data have overwhelmingly discounted them. But much as FARMS bounces from one desperate exercise in desperation to the next so does the 'anti-vaccine movement' (AVM) bounce from one manufactured crisis to the next. With a smattering of semi-medical lingo, a generous helping of unsupported dark conspiracy theorizing, then mix in natural parental concern, and all the ingredients are in place for the AVM to exist.

More specifically: the NVIP program pays claims for purported injuries, but this by itself does not prove or validate any specific claim. The government indemnifies vaccine manufacturers against lawsuits and further reimburses much of the research costs for vaccines as a means to keep the vaccine programs alive. Without this the manufacturers would have dropped vaccine production decades ago. In a recent shareholder report Smith/Kline, manufacturer of many vaccines, reported only around 5% of their revenues came from vaccines. Compared to the market for other much more costly drugs the ROI for vaccines is just not worth it by itself.

The 'research' listed at http://www.tacanow.org was decidedly unimpressive, and in fact typifies the typical AVM approach. The author submits his/her interpretation to out-of-context snippets from of various studies. The interpretation is pre-determined in the best FARMS fashion and typically has no association to the central question: does thimerosol cause autism? One cannot determine the answer from the materials given.

The AVM groups, again in typical FARMS fashion, steadfastly ignore the mountain of evidence that the increase in autism diagnoses are largely the result of changes in diagnostic criteria and awareness. While some contribution from vaccines cannot be totalluy ruled out, it's clear that genetics play a major rule in the manifestation of autism:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21438146
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21484199
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21480499
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21482229

Late paternity increases the autism incidence:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21484199

Prenatal exposure to valproic acid is a hazard:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21458558

Fatty acid profiles may well be a factor:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21510882

The point of all this is that the causes of autism are likely multifactorial, with genetics likely predominating. The AVM crowd generally ignores any of these other contributing factors that have good evidence behind them. They choose instead to focus almost entirely on supposed vaccine injury. This despite the fact the thimerosol compounds were eliminated years ago from typical childhood vaccines - and yet the incidence of autism remains high.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=14

Wakefield? Clearly, at least to me, the man had his own disreputable agendas including huge hidden conflicts of interest, deception, unethical handling of study subjects. You can bet that if his study outcomes had come out different the AVM crowd would have heaped him with ridicule. But because, and only because, his dubious findings fit the AVM crowds' previous agenda he has become their hero.

He simply called for spacing them out... And his original paper wasn't involved with the subject of autism; Wakefield's speciality was as a gastro-enterologist, and that's what he was treating...

Way too much stuff for people here to sift through; my sister--who's an MD who teaches and does research on pre-natal care--only noted to me (besides pointing to Wakefield's being discredited) that thimerosal was--to the best of her knowledge--no longer in vaccines in this country (although it was in H1N1 vaccine distributed in 2009-2010).

There's been an attempt to link Wakefield with the thimerosal controversy which is wholly unwarranted, and a case can be made that there are attempts to "scare people with weapons of mass infection."

Note that most of the more sober voices on the subject are simply calling for more research (and are not denouncing vaccines), but they are being shouted down...

This stuff is way off topic, BTW...



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/2011 03:38PM by SL Cabbie.

As I said, my children do not believe their son's autism was related to his vaccinations but, just to be safer, they extended the schedule for their youngest son. And I will repeat that the extended schedule has had the happy side effect of being considerably easier on my youngest grandson. He does not have the high fevers and days of irritability and/or illness that my other grandchildren had after their massive innoculations.

Labeling people who want to see some good, solid research into the safety of vaccinations "anti-vaccination" is as much a thought-stopping technique as labeling ex-Mormons as "anti-Mormon".

Oh the old vaccine thing again.

You put something into someones system that makes large changes it could trigger any ammount of underlying conditions or not a single one. So there you go.

Anyone with sufficient muscle can do almost anything they want.

After all if someone can make a speaker at a General Conference re-do their speech/talk and pretend that they did not make an off message comment in the original and pass the faked recording off as the original, ANYTHING is possible.

By Dr. Nancy Snyderman
Chief medical editor
NBC News

In 1998, British doctor Dr. Andrew Wakefield published one report of 12 children where he linked the MMR (mumps, measles and rubella) vaccines to autism. Since then, there have been numerous big studies -- including one with 530,000 children and one with 1.8 million children -- and no link was found. This week a major British medical journal showed that Wakefield and his colleagues faked the research on the child patients.
As a physician -- and I am a former pediatrician -- I can honestly say that when that report was first published, science and public health took a huge step backward. We have a lot of mistrust to mop up.
Since that first erroneous report was published, we have seen outbreaks of measles and whooping cough in various cities around the country. In fact, California in 2010 broke a 55-year-old record for the number of cases of whooping cough. That's directly related to parents who haven’t vaccinated their children.

there is also the question of people who are not getting the vaccines that they are helping to spread disease. can you imagine polio coming back?? Forest Gump braces and all.... not being able to walk(FDR)... aint worth it. get your kids vaccinated!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/2011 09:00AM by bignevermo.

People today want an explanation for (and amelioration of) autism with the same intensity that people in the 1840's wanted certainty of their eternal salvation. And so the leaders were made into more than what they were/are, and followed unquestioningly by enough to create a following.



[I haven't read the article, BoJ, but I will. I am still glued to the crossword page.] ;)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/2011 05:09PM by Adult of god.