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

[Surt]

Problematic given that lawyers of differential quality have differential cost. So if I try to sue a big corporation, and they decide to run up the court costs into the millions, I'm screwed if I lose? I may as well not sue, no matter how legitimate my claim.

Re:Litigious society

[Martin Blank]

You are required in all US states to provide your child with an education that meets state guidelines. This is usually done via public and private schools, but some choose to home-school their children. In some states, home schooling is allowed only by persons with teaching credentials, meaning that parents must get such credentials if they wish to be their child's teacher, or hire a tutor.

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

[budgenator]

I'm sorry, but a vaccine that gives people autism is pretty much the definition of 'defective in design or manufacture.' Not that there is such a thing, but if there were, the company that produced it would be at fault.

Well let's see

Andrew Wakefield (born 1956) is a British-born surgeon and researcher best known for his discredited work regarding the MMR vaccine and its possible connection with autism and inflammatory bowel disease.[1] Wakefield was the lead author of a 1998 study, published in The Lancet, which reported bowel symptoms in twelve children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders, to which the authors suggested a possible link with the MMR vaccine. Though stating "We did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described," the paper tabulated parental allegations, and adopted these allegations as fact for the purpose of calculating a temporal link between receipt of the vaccine and the first onset of what were described as "behavioural symptoms". Andrew Wakefield

His "test subjects" were attending a birthday party hosted by a lawyer suing drug company over immunizations causing "autism". Wakefield was one of the last authors of the paper published in the Lancet, 10 of the 12 Co-Authors had had their names removed from the paper and finally the Lancet took the almost unprecedented action of officially retracting the paper.

In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.
The Editors of The Lancet The Lancet, London NW1 7BY, UK

Furthermore the British General Medical Council detremined that Wakefield was dishonest, irresponsibile and showed callous disregard for the distress and pain of children.
Autism Spectrum Disorders are genetically based and the rates of diagnosis are increasing long after thimersol has been discontinued in vaccines. It's just coincidence that the symptoms of profound Autism become unavoidably obvious at the same time the MMR is given to toddlers.

Re:Litigious society

[Martin Blank]

It has been pressed, and it has been found to be constitutional in most cases, as least in California.

In re Rachel L., et al., v. Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles dealt with this. The 2d. District Court of Appeals, in a 3-0 opinion written by Justice Croskey, noted that "California courts have held that under provisions in the Education Code, parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children." The opinion addressed several points, including claimed religious exemption, and found that the parents' assertion that they can home school the children due to "sincerely held religious beliefs" doesn't hold up, in part because the assertions (which were not made under penalty of perjury) were too sparse to be taken as conclusive evidence of their beliefs. The sparseness may have included an apparently long string of reasons the parents gave to officials, religious reasons being added only fairly late in the game.

They do make note of an exception for Amish children under the case of Wisconsin v. Yoder, decided by the US Supreme Court in 1972. The Amish are able to make limited religious exemption to going to school. However, the Amish in that case still accepted compulsory external education through the eighth grade. It was only after eighth grade that an exemption applied, and only because the Amish way of life rests on "deep religious conviction, shared by an organized group, and intimately related to daily living" which is centuries old. That case involved witness testimony that compulsory education past the eighth grade, at which point Amish children begin learning a trade and incorporating fully into Amish society, would "ultimately result in the destruction of the Old Order Amish church community as it exists in the United States today."

In summary, compulsory education under the tutelage of credentialed teaching professionals is currently seen by the courts, at least in California, as constitutional. The case was remanded to the trial court for factual findings, but the opinion was appealed to the state Supreme Court. I can't find any listings for it there, so I can only presume that it was denied certiorari and the trial courts are sorting it out. If it is still going through the trial courts, the appeals court ruling would hold sway throughout the state.

Re:Litigious society

[luwandah]

Have you ever stopped to wonder why polio is so uncommon in the US? Yep, vaccines.

We are currently seeing a resurgent of measles cases in kids BECAUSE parents are not vaccinating their children due to concerns for vaccines causing autism. This will happen with polio as well. You assume a steady state of population in the US (or other country) without influx of unvaccinated, exposed people.

You fail to realize that not every vaccine works as a post-exposure prophylaxis. There are some that do and some that don't. I don't recall if polio is one of them, but a quick pubmed search could probably find out.

Modern medicine is a field of balanced risks. Every medication I prescribe for a patient has a potential to cause harm. I and the patient have to balance this risk versus the risk of not treating the disease. Absolutely no treatment in medicine is "safe". For most, the benefit outweighs the risk. Even supplemental oxygen can be disastrous in a patient with lung disease.

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...

[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.

"antivax" people

[drDugan]

The use of vaccines is a public health necessity; vaccines are by far the most cost effective tool we have for preventing the spread of communicable diseases.

There have always been controversies about vaccines: there is non-zero risk to individuals from any medical treatment, and significant benefit to the population as a whole. As a single individual, you remove the (very small) risk by not having the vaccine, and you gain most all of the benefits if most everyone else around you has been vaccinated.

Spreading fear and misinformation about the safety of vaccines can cause direct, measurable and irreversible harm. Measuring the connection between a medical treatment and possible harmful effects is something drug companies can do very well, and the FDA approvals process (when it works) keeps the companies honest. We have solid, irrefutable and repeatable scientific evidence that shows vaccines do not cause these diseases, like autism.

The best article covering this was in the Bad Astronomy blog from Discover, aptly titled Antivax Kills.

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:"antivax" people

[Duradin]

"Chicken pox also has a vaccine, but if you get it as a child you only risk a week at home, some itching, and maybe a scar if your parents can stop you from itching too much."

Actually chicken pox can lead to shingles later on, so it's not just an itchy week at home.

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.

This won't change anything...

[silverpig]

...because Jenny McCarthy can't read.

Re:vaccines

[hardburn]

I personally find the abundant anecdotal evidence . . .

You could have put that in your first sentence and saved us the trouble of reading the rest.

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!

Let me be crystal about this

[WillAffleckUW]

Let me be crystal clear about this, vaccines do not cause autism nor is there any decent study that is statistically and/or scientifically valid which shows such a provable correlation.

And we're running studies of autism here, led by one of my colleagues who has an autistic child herself.

You really need to move on.

The problem is that, for most people, they grasp at straws and try to find some observable "cause" they can link with autism. It's quite possible that it has more to do with environmental and/or emotional stresses on the mother but people try to put the cart before the horse and "prove" that a vaccine - which may have been due to travel (hint - enviro/emo stress) or bad health conditions (same) - was the cause.

Please, move on, you're just embarrassing yourselves.

Re:Vaccines aren't as simple as people think

[Anonymous Coward]

Look into the HPV vaccines, actual risks.

Yes, let's look at them.

Odds of dying of cervical cancer: 500 to 1.

Odds of dying from the HPV vaccine: 145,000 to 1.

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:look at the amish

[GameMaster]

Also, the number of Carribean pirates has dropped since the 1800's. Obviously, it's the lack of pirates that is causing global temperatures to increase.

And the Amish do vaccinate

[NeutronCowboy]

Shoulda known better that the research into Amish autism rates had already been done...

Blame the Lancet

[Pedrito]

The Lancet didn't retract that ridiculous paper from 1998 until last month and it pretty much started all this ridiculous BS. It's absolutely unconscionable that they didn't retract it sooner. Ten of the original 13 authors retracted back in 2004. That should have been a hint.

The problem with vaccines is that being vaccinated as an individual isn't what makes you safe. It's the vaccination of the herd that protects. That is, for a particular disease that you might be vaccinated against, let's say measles, it's safer to be the only person in a crowd who isn't vaccinated than to be the one person in the crowd who is vaccinated. Vaccines aren't 100% effective and what makes them truly effective, is having everyone take them.

Back in 2006, some girl in Indiana got measles on a trip to Romania. She came back and shared that gift with the people in her church, simply by showing up. Roughly 10% of the 500 people present weren't vaccinated and 32% of those people developed the measles. One person who got the vaccine also got the measles, but 94% of the cases were unvaccinated people.

The problem these days is that people don't bother to learn history. Anyone who's been to an old cemetery (I live in Arkansas, and we have tons of them) pretty much can't miss the fact that there are tons of kids aged 10 and under buried. Why? In the early 1800s, infant mortality was about 20%. Think about that. One in five infants (1 year old and younger) died. A lot more died before the age of 5. Not all of that is vaccines, but a lot of it is! Before the vaccine, smallpox alone was killing 400,000 Europeans a year.

Personally, I think vaccines ought to be required by law because they're a public safety issue and people who won't do it should go to jail.

Some != Most (except for large values of some)

[Thorrablot]

The problem is that, for most people, they grasp at straws and try to find some observable "cause" they can link with autism. It's quite possible that it has more to do with environmental and/or emotional stresses on the mother but people try to put the cart before the horse and "prove" that a vaccine - which may have been due to travel (hint - enviro/emo stress) or bad health conditions (same) - was the cause.

OK - as a parent of a six-year old with "primary" autism (e.g. low-functioning), I'd like to clear the air on a few points:

• "Most" of the parents of autistic kids don't buy into the vaccine-causes-autism bunk - only a very vocal minority, which unfortunately our media amplifies
• The mechanism behind autism is, as you undoubtedly know, not well-understood. In the absence of a good understanding, this kind of uninformed speculation thrives.
• Lives have been lost as a result due to botched "Chelation" therapies, and money is being made by the self-styled DAN doctors who tell desperate parents what they want to hear

Please, move on, you're just embarrassing yourselves.

I have met a number of other parents of autistic kids. Those that are desperate enough to by into these theories are (often) otherwise rational, intelligent people. They are desperate for hope, and feel they owe it to their child to attempt some kind of cure. Whether this is due to denial (of the permanent disability) or unrelenting hope and a moral code that says "anything is better than nothing", I don't know. I do know I can relate to this, to a point, and was frustrated at the limited medical treatments available for my own son. Please have some sympathy for these misguided parents, as the real culprits are the alt-medicine charlatans who claimed to have found the cure, and the DAN doctors who really ought to know better.