“Middleton said the vaccination mandates are not about children’s health.
“I believe the government and big pharmacies are in bed together,” Middleton said, adding that if the state cared about children’s health it would demand “green vaccines” that do not contain neurotoxins and carcinogens such as thimerosal, formaldehyde, mercury and aluminum.

Assemblywoman Charlotte Vandervalk (R District-39), the primary sponsor of the conscientious objection bill, said federal law exempts vaccine manufacturers from liability. She said the federal government compensates those parents who can establish a firm timeline between a vaccination and a resulting injury or death and has paid $910 million toward vaccination-damaged children. She said as of Oct. 1, the federal government had 988 vaccination-related deaths on file.
“What about the products causing the deaths?”

Your near future offspring may be immune against side effects of vaccinations, due to good immune systems and other genetic traits, that are common amongst generations of well fed (naturally) individuals that skipped vaccinations, as was once in our parents time whicn vaccinations were not so religiously administered and but a few (enough to have caused havoc in the immune systems, i.e., MS, tuberculosis, allergies, leading to the Defeciency called AIDS in hunger stricken areas who have been vaccinated anyway part of the “charitable” programs of Unicef etc.

But if there has been too much vaccinations on your and your spouces side – beware

In New Jersey alone autism appeared 1 tin 2000 and now it is up to 1 in some 80.

Was autism not diagnosed – I doubt it! is it not a conspicous disease?

I hope for your sake Ben Goldacre that yours and your wife’s forefathers were not immunised “properly” that you may bring into this world a healthy child.

Is Mr Goodacre *really* Dr Goodacre? If it does turn out, someday, that thimerosol didn’t ever cause autism, what assurance did you have of that before the fact, when you and your colleagues were injecting it willy-nilly into trusting infants? What assurance did you have, or will you ever have that it does not cause other, less well publicized, illnesses? At some point you must have taken the oath; what happened to, “First, do no harm”?

‘ To suggest the cause is genetic is a cruel joke: the human genome doesn’t change in one generation.’

You don’t seem to acknowledge that in some ways the work of McClintock could challenge the second statement…..I won’t go into details…

As for MMR I have one thing to say…..increased awareness and diagnosis rates ?

Ben can we have some wholly unscientific jokes now please ?

The material starting at page 147 (as numbered in the PDF; keyword “hair”) was most interesting.

Someone reading less than the whole report might notice them seeming systematically to reject studies that contradict their conclusion. However, the real implication of these rejections is that not enough detailed U.S. data has been available, or studied properly, to draw the broad conclusions they offer. They have had to make do with much more limited studies, largely on populations of other countries which depend heavily on a marine diet. That said, they appear to know what they are about, and the apparently much stronger connection with maternal exposure to toxins is intriguing.

The detail that MMR vaccine, on one hand, and other vaccines containing thimerosol, on the other, are parallel and independent concerns will be a surprise to many. The two have been routinely confused in popular accounts, and neither side of the popular debate has, typically, made any attempt to unconfuse them.

In response to Bob’s remark, “The prevalence of orthodoxy in research Mr. Myers claims, however, and the resultant public distrust he discerns that stems from it, is where his argument fails. … at the end of the day, money talks.” Precisely my point: orthodoxy is money talking. Certainly the prevalence of orthodoxy varies widely from one field to another; it may be Bob’s good fortune or ill discernment not to have noticed any. Either way, that does not match the experience of people engaged in research, obliged to fuzz their results carefully so as not to provoke hostile interest by members of review boards, and (more usually) to concentrate on more readily-funded questions instead.

It should interest almost everyone that the 1995 study demonstrating DNA damage from exposure to low levels of modulated microwaves (e.g. cell phones) has not been repeated — not for lack of interest, but for lack of funding. Those who were inclined to try have been obliged to pursue other, less disruptive lines of research instead. Bob is right, here, that the truth will out — but only in a decade or two, as industry experiments, unethically, on the population at large, rather than safely in the lab.

I have three points to make:
1) I agree with people who suggest that Ben Goldacre’s article is rather too vehement in his attack on the media over the MMR issue to be taken at face value. It’s hard to take someone seriously as an unbiased scientific observer when they seem like they are emotionally involved.

However, that does not mean he is wrong. He isn’t. He is absolutely right when he says that no decent studies have shown links between MMR and autism, or for that matter even between thimerosal and autism.

2) That brings me to my next point… We (humanity, not just scientists) must have standards! I know, I know — people who support Dr. Wakefield are not going to want to hear this…but there are definite established non-biased methods to critically evaluate scientific research (I won’t go into the details).

We need to be able to depend upon our doctors to apply those standards when they read current research in order to sift out the rubbish from the important information. It seems to me that many people who have posted here have lost their trust in the medical profession. I’m sure they have their reasons and possibly sad stories to go with them.

Some people have the time and the commitment to teach themselves about medical issues and the scientific research that is applicable to them. Some people have the time to ask questions of various different subject matter experts in order to develop their own educated viewpoint on a subject. I’m sure many parents of autistic children fall into that category.

As we can tell, though, from the confusion amongst our friends and neighbours most people just don’t have the time or possiblity the ability to educate themselves. Which is why there are thousands of people who dedicate themselves to life long learning as physicians!

3) I decided to look up information on thimerosal like some of you suggested. I found a few papers in PubMed which were inconclusive on the link between the preservative and autism, but suggested more research be done on the link.

I also found this interesting fact sheet from the CDC. I don’t know if it is applicable to the UK, but I think it might be.

Turns out thimerosal was never in MMR jabs. Ever.

www.cdc.gov/nip/vacsafe/concerns/thimerosal/thimerosal-vacs-facts.htm

I hope I didn’t offend anyone, and I’m sorry if my view is hopelessly biased in favor of physicians. I work and study with so many amazing physician research scientists that I felt compelled to make some comment, inadequate though it may be.