If my recollection above is correct, then all of his co-author colleagues who later renounced the study, were in effect renouncing their own conclusion that the study was inconclusive!!! Exactly what the establishment were trying to claim!

This is important when you recall that the press/establishment repeatedly claimed the research (and Wakefield himself) were claiming to have found a link. Bad interpretation on the part of the press? If true, it also implies that those who renounced their own work might have been concerned about their own personal situations.

Can somebody correct me please? – I don’t like to be wrong!

Btw, While I accept he may have made mistakes(I am not a medic etc) I was under the impression good science was about asking the sort of questions that Wakefield did, and that all research was good in some way -ie a “no causal link” answer can be just as informative as a positive link. Further, while scientists, journalists etc should try to undertake the best possible work they can, sometimes even the bad science tells us something about say, the peer review process, how to better reduce errors, Accreditation flaws etc, and by identifying those flaws we can address them. Provided it’s not hectoring, criticism is always constructive.

Of course a corollary of the above para is that the atmosphere between Wakefield, the press and the establishment could have warped the direction of research and hence the wider picture

There does not appear to have been a consolidated paper that attempts to show how vaccines might cause brain damage by a review of the scientific literature except for the one that I have published on various web sites including scribd. [2] It has been published for open access. This paper looks at the causative factors mainly from the effects of the whooping cough vaccine (pertussis).

However, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Immunization Program, promulgates that the risks from MMR vaccine can be permanent brain damage. [3]

Epidemiologists will probably say, and quite rightly, that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the occasional damage that is caused by some of them. The number of payments for vaccine damage in the UK is in excess of 1,000 and compared with the number of children who have benefitted, that number is miniscule bit not unimportant.

Over a thousand children will be living diminished lives as a result and their parents will be anguished that they were, in part, responsible for their child’s disability.

For this lifetime of inequality and the loss of; normal education, a job and a life that contains the expectancies that most of us have envisaged and possibly achieved, the maximum award is, If you are severely disabled as a result of a vaccination, a one-off tax-free payment of GBP120,000.

It is this shameful situation that ought to cause concern rather than a continuing denouncement of Wakefield. He may have got his understanding of the relationship between MMR and Autism wrong but that does not prove that there isn’t one.

1 www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1979/17/section/1

2 Challoner A. Brain Damage Caused by Vaccination. www.scribd.com/doc/19408267/Brain-Damage-Caused-by-Vaccination 2009.

3 www.cdc.gov/nip/publications/VIS/vis-mmr.pdf

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm1CTxaw3AY

the other 9 sections are also on youtube

Delayed acquisition of neonatal reflexes in newborn primates receiving a thimerosal-containing Hepatitis B vaccine: Influence of gestational age and birth weight
by
Laura Hewitson Lisa A. Houser, Carol Stott, Gene Sackett, Jaime L. Tomko a, David Atwood, Lisa Blue, E. Railey White and Andrew J. Wakefield

I thought I’d wait a while before replying just to see if you could muster a good argument- sadly I was disappointed.

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks”
Funny that I was thinking the same thing – I seem to have triggered a lot of protestations from Ben and his acolytes

quasilobachevski – I thought I addressed your points pretty directly- are you SERIOUSLY telling me that you think this is a valid piece of work?

pv – so a person who has made accusations against Brian deer and the GMC is wrong because they (the accused) have said he is a mentally deranged fantasist? – Well they would say that wouldn’t they. What did you expect them to say? Rather than take sides in that way I suggest you read what all parties have said and then use your own logical powers of reasoning.

On the subject of Wakefield- may I suggest that the sudden resurgence of interest in his case was in a desperate attempt to try to block this paper:

fourteenstudies.org/pdf/primates_hep_b.pdf

which had passed the peer review process but now seems to have been withdrawn at the request of the editor- the results are pretty damning wouldn’t you say? Does anyone want to point out a specific problem with this paper? I cant see why it would be withdrawn other than for political reasons, even if you say there weren’t enough monkeys in the experiment, the least that should happen is that this work should trigger a larger scale study to confirm or refute its findings, this is how good science works, is it not?

- I wait for further accusations of being a dunce, madman, idiot – please use your imaginations and see what other words you can come up with to try and refute me with personal insults- its always the best standby when you haven’t got a real argument to fall back on.

“I once spent quite a bit of lab time showing that a paper in PNAS was wrong”

The lady doth protest too much, methinks. I love how your evidence against vaccines come from people who stated the following regarding evidence:

‘Physicians must beware of accepting the concept of a standard of care that is itself evidence-based, threatening the autonomy of physicians and subjugating the patient’s interest to that of the collective.”

They also share your love for Ayn Rand quoting them in their editorials. You are very apt bedfellows indeed.

Ps. Having problems posting at the moment, so sorry if this has appeared before

I agree that it would be preferable if they had given the figures. But let me just summarise how the debate so far has gone.

1. You said there was a problem with the NEJM paper.

2. You changed your mind and said the problem was with the Pediatrics paper.

3. I pointed out that the authors address your complaint.

4. You blustered and moved on to something else.

Have you ever heard Ben talk about the rhetoric of denialism? You’re a classic example. When one of your arguments gets knocked down, you move on to the next with no sign of self-criticism or apology for wasting everyone’s time.

Funnily enough, I can’t be bothered to watch your video. I have better things to do.

Oh, and one other thing. Ayn Rand? Ron Paul!? Ahahahahahahahaha! Ahahahahahahahhahaha! Thanks, I needed a laugh.

<i<just because you and Ben call me an idiot doesn’t make it so – I assume you have heard of the term ad hominem?

You also need to brush up on your reading and comprehension skills. It’s not because anyone says says you are an idiot, it’s because you make it so evidently obvious. And you seem to be wearing your pointy “big D” hat with more than a modicum of pride.
You cite books written by a known fantasist and fraudster as if they have some merit. You make claims about Brian Deer and the GMC which are patently false (and have been refuted by both Deer and the GMC), presumably because they fit in with your prejudices. So far you haven’t acknowledged the error of your claims. And you expect to be taken seriously.

I’d say you’ve dug yourself an escape-proof hole there. Keep digging!

i guess if we were at a party i’d just ignore you. if you were being as annoying as u have been in my house (which u kind of are) i guess i might think about asking you to leave

now, on this thread, i’m happy to leave you being dumb about vaccines, because we expect fools on those threads. what i found objectionable was when you drifted and started to be tedious on another thread. that was like jumping on a table and shouting at a party, and demanding that everyone looked at you and attended to you and your thoughts, instead of having their own chats. that’s why i think you’re unpleasant. you’re very free to continue being a fool here. we have no obligation to like you.

(sorry about the spelling – I’ll run things through a spell checker in future if it makes you happy)

www.badscience.net/2010/02/moments-of-genius/

nothing has been censored, i can find no evidence of you posting anything to that thread anywhere in my email or the web interface of this website.

you’re an idiot, and a waste of time, pure and simple. and now you’re quoting JPANDS. beautiful that you’ve found each other, they’ll probably print an academic article from you if you send them something, give it a go.

On the subject of systematic reviews and MMR’s (nicely combining the two subjects in one) here is a paper outlining some of the problems with the Cochrane review on MMR:

C.G. Miller (2006) Questions on the Independence and Reliability of Cochrane Reviews, with a Focus on Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccine, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 11(4) pp111-115.

www.jpands.org/vol11no4/millerc.pdf

video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=6890106663412840646&ei=w995S9TtNdOM-AaBpvjEBw&q=mercury+vaccines&hl=en#

Good question – unfortunately not because accurate diagnosis of autism and ASD is still a developing process. Autism diagnosis rates may have increased over the last 20 years – but the prevalence of autism or ASD may not have.

More cases of autism are being diagnosed, but this could just be that we are able to recognise ASD now where before it went undiagnosed. It’s hard to get a precise prevalence rate because ASD varies so much – Asperger’s Syndome or high functioning autism may never get diagnosed if the person is able to live a relatively normal life and the ASD isn’t accompanied with any learning difficulties. More accurate ability to diagnose autism really improved from the 90′s, whilst widespread use of MMR was introduced in 1988 (so the effects would theoretically be seen early 90′s). It’s like which came first, the chicken or the egg (and is it even a chicken’s egg anyway)?

The authors of the Pediatrics paper address your criticism on the nose. Specifically, they say the following at the end of the first column on page 605.

In additional analyses we examined data using inpatients only. This was done to elucidate the contribution of the outpatient registration to the change in incidence. The same trend with an increase in the incidence rates from 1990 until the end of the study period was seen (data not shown).

Alisdair.Kay,

In the NEJM paper they do two different analyses. One measures persons, and the other person-years. I think you’re referring to the second analysis. The difference is explained in the first footnote to Table 2, which documents the results of the second analysis. It says

The distribution of cases of autistic disorder or other autistic-spectrum disorders according to vaccination status differs from that in Table 1 [the first analysis] because, in this analysis, children who were vaccinated after the disorder had been diagnosed were classified according to their vaccination status at the time of the diagnosis (i.e., as unvaccinated).

From this I infer that, in the first analysis, children who were diagnosed with autism were counted as vaccinated or unvaccinated in the obvious way.

(The statistical analysis section doesn’t say this exactly, and seems really confusing.)

pv,

Very sorry to have misrepresented you. Of course you’re right that Wakefield never established a link.