Court Rules Against Vaccine-Autism Claims Again

barnyjr writes "According to a story from Reuters, 'Vaccines that contain a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal cannot cause autism on their own, a special US court ruled on Friday, dealing one more blow to parents seeking to blame vaccines for their children's illness. The special US Court of Federal Claims ruled that vaccines could not have caused the autism of an Oregon boy, William Mead, ending his family's quest for reimbursement. ... While the state court determined the autism was vaccine-related, [Special Master George] Hastings said overwhelming medical evidence showed otherwise. The theory presented by the Meads and experts who testified on their behalf "was biologically implausible and scientifically unsupported," Hasting wrote.'"

Comments

Litigious society

[religious freak]

Not only that, but why should the parents be entitled to "reimbursement" even if the immunization did cause the autism? Yes, the product should be immediately pulled, but do they have a right to get rich because of some hitherto unknown side-effect of a well intentioned vaccine? I don't think so.

Re:Litigious society

[TwiztidK]

The parents shouldn't be given enough money to become rich but, in the case that the vaccines did cause the child to be autistic, they should be given money to assist with treating their child's autism.

Re:Litigious society

[jfengel]

If the government is going to force people to get vaccinated (and they do; you can't go to school without it), there is at least some burden on them to pay for the negative effects, no matter how well intentioned.

In the US there is a National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to handle precisely this sort of thing. Some people genuinely are harmed by those well-intended vaccines. They do help out everybody (herd immunity), and everybody pays into the compensation fund, to the tune of 75 cents per shot.

Clearly, that's a tempting pile of money, and desperate parents of autistic children are willing to ignore the data that says quite clearly that there's no connection in order to get to it.

Re:Litigious society

[Mister Whirly]

That is for everybody's safety. Could you imagine another outbreak of polio, or mumps, or any other disease that has virtually been stamped out (at least in countries that do immunizations) by immunizing? Sorry, but it is not a right for your child to go to a certain school. If you want to go to a specific school, you must adhere by their rules. I am sure there has to be some alternative schools out there that don't have immunization requirements. You can always home school your child if you really don't want to give them immunization shots as well. But acting like your rights have been violated because you have a medically unproven opinion about immunization, and pretending that public schooling is required by law (it isn't), is dishonest. What about the rights of the other hundreds or thousands of children at the school - the ones that have parents that understand the dangers of not immunizing, and who do adhere to the rules? What if you applied the same logic to another scenario? What if I decided that taking the driver license test would give me cancer, and I decided I could just start driving without ever taking the test. It would be ridiculous, and I would be putting others at risk through my behavior.

Re:Litigious society

[uncqual]

Ways to address some of the problems of "loser pays" include:

• Limit the amount the loser pays in expenses to be the lesser of what the loser and the winner spent on the case. (This mitigates the "imbalance of resources" problem)
• Allow any party to "opt out" of "loser pays" (and the expense reporting requirements below) but if they lose they still have to pay the full expenses of other parties that didn't opt out (even if those expenses are greater than what they would have paid if they had not opted out) and if they win, they get no reimbursement for their expenses. (This allows one party to mask their expenses and/or avoid the overhead of reporting - but at potential cost)
• Require that each party file weekly "detailed expenses to date" reports electronically with the court and all parties can see the total (but not the detail) of other parties' reports.
• If a lawyer charges their client any contingency fee, that party is ineligible for reimbursement of their legal fees if they win, but if they lose, the lawyer, not the client, pays for the winners' legal expenses. Each party must make an declaration in the initial filing if they will/will not be charging their client an contingency fee. (It should be possible to alter this decision later at the court's discretion, but some "pro rata" rules would need to be established to limit the % contingency and reimbursement based on what was spent before and after the change in this decision.) (This would discourage frivolous lawsuits where the lawyer is willing to spend his/her time in hopes of lucky jackpot)
• Lawyers in "loser pays" cases can not charge their client anything if they win and the loser actually pays all the expenses filed with the court. If a loser defaults on their obligation to pay, perhaps the prevailing party's lawyer can, by prior arrangement, take part of the judgment. (This encourages accurate reporting by all parties).
• Subject expenses to audit by a court approved auditor and limit expenses reimbursable to the winner to "reasonable and necessary" However, "unreasonable" expenses by the loser are still counted for the "lesser of winner and loser expense calculations" - they shouldn't have recorded or incurred any unreasonable or unnecessary expenses. (This will discourage unnecessary expenses and motions)
• If expenses are not recorded in a timely fashion, they would be disallowed for "loser pays" calculations IFF the party that records them late wins (i.e., such expenses won't be reimbursed). (This discourages "late reporting" to game the other party's expectations of their risk).
• Expenses that are recorded and later reversed would be counted (even though subsequently reversed) for "loser pays' calculations IFF the party that records them and reverses them loses. (This discourages reporting of charges "early" to intimidate the other party).
• Parties that intentionally misrepresent expenses or manipulate the timing of their reporting would be subject to sanctions (including being found in contempt of court, fines, removal from the bar, etc).
• If a party sues for $X and ends up being awarded $Y where $Y<$X, only $Y/$X of their expenses will be reimbursed by the loser. (This will discourage exaggerating claims)
• The final "loser" is determined when the last appeal is resolved or the period for filing an appeal has elapsed - intermediate "wins" have no bearing on the final settlement of legal expenses.
• If a defendant makes a financial offer to settle with no other restrictions (such as gag clauses) except that acceptance of the offer completely resolves all claims being litigated, the defendant's liability to pay legal expenses of the plaintiff (because the plaintiff prevails) will be limited. If any settlement amount offer made was greater than or equal to the amount of the final judgment, the defendant would only be liable for the prevailing parties' legal expenses up to the time the first such of

Re:Litigious society

[winwar]

"What public health risk is there really?"

You are kidding, right? Right?

Okay. I am going to assume that you are merely extremely ignorant. The reason for the low public health risk is vaccines and their heavy use.

"Even un-immunized the risks of most sicknesses are quite low to cause any real damage. Measles, Mumps and Rubella generally are low-mortality when generally speaking."

Ever hear of the flu? You know, that seasonal illness that is estimated to kill about about 36K a year. I think you would consider the flu to be a rather low mortality and low risk disease. I wonder what the dead think. That doesn't count the lucky ones who just got to be hospitalized.

For measles: One in 1000 cases of measles results in encephalitis, with a high rate of permanent neurological complications in those who survive. Approximately five percent develop pneumonia. The fatality rate is between one and three per 1000 cases. Without vaccination most people would catch it. What's a couple million cases a year times a few per thousand....

"Yeah, a few kids might be really sick, but if treatment is quick enough, it is easy to contain and cure."

See above.

This won't stop...

[jgreco]

This won't stop the paranoid from preventing their children from being immunized because some of these same people have interesting theories about how the vaccines are deliberately nefarious in other ways (going as far on out there as mind control, etc). These people and their little theory have done more to damage public health in a short amount of time than a lot of other things...

Re:This won't stop...

[thms]

That is the mean thing here, the vaccination system can support a certain number of freeloaders, so on an individual level these do not select themselves out of the genepoop. They can rest their hands and still reap the benefits from those who actually take the really really small risk of complications stemming from an inoculation. Risk of catching and dying from an infection c*X%, risk of vaccination complications Y%. But after a vaccination quota of Z% the c modifying the X% outweights the Y% - so you are an egoist and don't go, perfectly logical!

Classical game theory, the Tragedy of the Commons subtype to be precise. The fact that rational individuals all acting in their own self interest (which you can show mathematically) can ruin it for everyone is a very good for cause for government to step in and fix this if the egoism becomes too prevalent.

Now, back to Darwin, on a larger level this can of course endanger an entire species, but also drive selection towards a new species which has the rules of cooperation, i.e. altruism, written into their genes, voilá, social animals!

Re:This won't stop...

[uglyduckling]

The probability is 0%. There is no causal link between the two. They are unrelated disease processes, and have no more link than if you walked under a ladder, had a black cat cross your path, then got bowel cancer. The only thing that has ever raised the possibility of a link is a very small, very biased study by a crackpot doctor who wasn't even a specialist in the field, funded by a group of parents who had an a priori wish to have a link proven. You might as well pick any other unrelated medical intervention in your child with no biologically plausible relation to autism (e.g. having the umbilical cord to less than 5cm length at delivery, to pick something random from thin air) and then refuse to have the umbilical cord cut short in any subsequent children you may have until someone relents and does a study.

Re:"antivax" people

[CheshireCatCO]

there is non-zero risk to individuals from any medical treatment,

Yep, something to always remember about any drug you might take or any treatment you might undergo. But it's also worth remembering that there's a non-zero risk to eating food (could be tainted), driving a car, or sticking your face in a fan*. Life is all about balancing the risks, not eliminating them entirely. In some ways, we're victims of our own success at risk mitigation: we've come to view risks as optional rather than a matter of course. (Applies to not just medicine, but also space travel, the way we raise our kids, and pretty much everything else.)

* With a tip of the hat to Frank Drebin, Police Squad.

Re:look at the amish

[hardburn]

The Amish also don't drive cars. Maybe your mom driving a car while pregnant with you causes autism!

Greed is nothing new

[sjbe]

Dunno if you know this or not, but there have been radical developments in greed and corruption over the last couple of decades,

People are just as corrupt as they ever have been. If you think people are more corrupt now than in years past you are either very naive or very stupid. Go pick up a history book. The methods (sort of) change but people don't.

It can all be solved and summarized in two simple words; loser pays. That would likely flush out 80% of the crap clogging the system today.

And your evidence for this is what exactly? Because it sounds vaguely logical? Yes loser pays would solve some problems but it would create others. It would reduce some of the more frivolous lawsuits but it would also make some needed lawsuits too risky to attempt. Loser pays strongly tilts the playing field towards those with the most money - even more so than it already is. I don't necessarily have a problem with the general concept of loser pays but please recognize that it isn't something that is going to cure every ill in our legal system.

Frankly if you want to reduce the load on our legal system, stop the ridiculous "war on drugs" - at least the portion related to user and possession charges. The US incarcerates a percentage of the population on minor drug charges that is way out of proportion with other industrialized nations. The war on drugs has FAR more to do with our clogged legal system than frivolous torts.

Re:I find it funny

[techno-vampire]

That people are so quick to blame pharmaceuticals for everything that may happen post vaccination.

The parents in this case are suffering from the logical fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc, or, "after this, therefor because of this." That is, they believe that the fact that their child developed autism after being vaccinated is proof that the vaccine was the cause of the autism. This makes as much sense as saying that if you get hungry for breakfast after sunrise, the Sun's rising must have caused you to get hungry.

Re:"antivax" people

[PCM2]

Of course there's a question. It pops up semiregularly. Here in the United States, the most recent debate arose because some schools began to require vaccination for HPV (human papilloma virus). This was controversial because:

1. Only girls can be vaccinated; there is not yet any vaccine for boys.
2. HPV is vilified in our culture as the virus that causes genital warts. It's believed to cause a lot of other things besides, but this is the most widely known effect.
3. Antivax people think vaccinations are dangerous.

The fact that only girls can be vaccinated was an issue for some, but a very minor one. (If a medicine exists that can lower blood pressure but which only really works on people of African descent, that's not racism, no matter what anyone says.)

Most of the vocal complaints tended to focus on the third point: that parents were afraid that more vaccines exposed their children to greater risks. While some dissenters actually believed this, however, this argument also tended to conceal the debate over the second point.

HPV is a sexually transmitted disease. Vaccinating girls against a sexually transmitted disease is tantamount to implying they will be having sex. Vaccinating very young girls, therefore, is absolutely abhorrent and -- to conservative Christians, in particular -- only underscores the moral depravity of modern society.

Now, just to be clear, the reason you want to vaccinate girls against HPV is not to keep them from getting unsightly genital warts when they go out having sex with strange men while they're in primary school. The reason you vaccinate them at a young age is because they're not having sex then, and a vaccine only works before you catch the disease. (Some studies suggest that up to 90 percent of the adult population carries some form of HPV.) And the reason you vaccinate them at all is not to enhance their sex lives, but because if they do catch a certain form of HPV it can lead to papillomas that can be very hard to detect until they turn into cervical cancer, which, if not detected, can kill them stone dead. In other words, this is a vaccine you give someone as a girl to aid her chances of living to become an old woman.

The problem for some, though, is that removing the threat of sexually transmitted disease tends to undermine abstinence-only sexual education programs in the United States, which are a key component of the platforms of the Christian Right and anti-abortion activists. That's right; for some people, the real problem is not that vaccination gets you autism. The problem is that vaccination gets you abortions. They don't like to talk about that, though, because abortion is such a hot-button issue and many on the Left immediately tune out at any whiff of a religious undercurrent in politics. So instead they jump on the bandwagon claiming all vaccinations are "untested," "experimental," "have unknown side effects," etc. Even people who don't believe in religion can fall for junk science.

This is just one example of how these issues can quickly become clouded by politics, but it also demonstrates why we must continue to emphasize the science and the science alone. Vaccines save lives. If you get vaccinated and it doesn't directly save your life, it still might have saved mine (through effects such as herd immunity). People shouldn't die young of any disease, be it mumps, measles, polio, of cervical cancer caused by HPV.

Smallpox is wiped out, should we still immunize for it?

Interestingly enough, in the United States we don't. So I guess the "pro-vax" folks aren't as crazy as the antivax folks want to believe.