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Family To Receive $1.5M+ In Vaccine-Autism Award
An anonymous reader, quoting from CBS News, writes "'The first court award in a vaccine-autism claim is a big one. CBS News has learned the family of Hannah Poling will receive more than $1.5 million for her life care, lost earnings, and pain and suffering for the first year alone. In addition to the first year, the family will receive more than $500,000 per year to pay for Hannah's care. Those familiar with the case believe the compensation could easily amount to $20 million over the child's lifetime. ... In acknowledging Hannah's injuries, the government said vaccines aggravated an unknown mitochondrial disorder Hannah had which didn't 'cause' her autism, but 'resulted' in it. It's unknown how many other children have similar undiagnosed mitochondrial disorders. All other autism 'test cases' have been defeated at trial. Approximately 4,800 are awaiting disposition in federal vaccine court.' How did this happen when all the scientific data points otherwise?"
The parent was modded troll, but sadly he has a point. The only research linking MMR vaccines to Autism (or Autistic-like symptoms) was proven a fake, while countless studies have shown that there is no link (correction: no link was shown. I know the difference). Yet, now we have the government admiting that the vaccine resulted in what happened to the girl.
The girl had a mithochondrial disease. Although unspecified, many of them cause encephalopathy that can be aggrevated due to many causes. If she had not been given the vaccine, the same would have happened a week/month/a few month later due to the common cold/gatroenteritis/ear infection/ whatever. To say that without the vaccine she would have been fine to this day is naive at best and deceptive at worst.
So yes, it sounds like a bad April Fools story. Sadly enough, it ain't.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
It's called Herd Immunity. While you and your children aren't well protected against the infections that moderns societies vaccinate against, everyone else is, providing indirect protection. The people around you aren't sick, so they can't pass on infection to you, even though you are vulnerable. You live in a country where the negative impact of you foregoing vaccination is minimised because everyone else did get vaccinated. Hardly a solid argument against vaccination.
Most vaccines don't provide total protection to any one individual anyway, so many people that think they are protected aren't, and get by, just like you, because of the immunity of the population as a whole. As long as enough people are immune, diseases won't spread. The problem is that some vaccines are only just barely effective enough to establish herd immunity. If enough people decide to forego vaccination, there could be a real problem. Diseases that have been nearly wiped out could make a comeback, imported by tourists or immigrants from the third world. Even people who been vaccinated might die or become paralysed by their thousands, because of a small, foolish minority of people like yourself.
The following article from the New England Journal of Medicine has a good summary of why the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program exists, and why some of its recent decisions, including the award in the Poling case, have been problematic. Basically, since 2005 the policy has been to concede cases where petitioners establish a plausible theory by which their injury could have been caused by the vaccine, rather than requiring proof or even scientific evidence that the vaccine caused said injury.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0802904
See also the Wikipedia article on the program, which also discusses the Poling case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court
Recently on Penn & Teller's Bullshit, how the anti-vaccination movement is bullshit.
Part 1/2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aky-sRri-NQ
Part 2/2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnxci5tezZY
I strongly suggest you have a look at it.
You said something fascinating that caught my eye:
> So there is actually a higher chance that the vaccine could make you worse off than you were before you got it.
This doesn't seem to be correct. Applying any medication to someone who is already ill is riskier than applying it to a healthy person: between allergies, mistakes in dosage, infections from visiting a hospital or mishandling needles, and allergic reactions that are far more dangerous in an ill person, the risk seems higher.
The problem is in the "benefit" side. The risk of getting polio or German measles today is small, so for an individual to refuse the vaccine significantly reduces their risk of such negative consequences, and creates only a miniscule risk for them of infection. The problem is when enough personally cautious people refuse the vaccine that a threshold of vulnerability is crossed and the disease becomes far more common, and the risk is increased, and especially if the disease mutates slightly and becomes drug-resistant or requires new vaccines. We do not want to see polio or German measles become rampant again.
And we had the opportunity, several times now, to entirely eliminate polio. The vaccine was ready, the last active strains of it could have been wiped off the planet (with digital storage of the DNA, just in case a sample was hidden somewhere). The remaining nations with transmitted cases are Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to WHO. Why does the disease still exist there? Because of war and fear of poison, especially of sterilizing poisons administered by foreign governments to control native population. By the time natives who understood enough biochemistry to attest to the vaccine's effectiveness and safety could be gathered, the stockpiles of vaccine for Nigeria, for example, had expired and were a complete waste of UN money.
Parents in the US refusing vaccines are doing the same thing. They're actually extending the lifespan of the particular diseases by leaving infectable children as a significant part of the population, enough to keep the diseases active.
According to the fine article the case was settled. There was no trial. There was no jury. This is what the government agreed to in order to avoid a trial.
This is not how vaccination rewards are decided. They are a part of the special VAERS program which is decided by a "vaccine" court NVICP (http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/). There are actually experts who decide compensation. This is all a part of an agreement that recognizes that vaccine makers would not make them if they were liable for litigation in the traditional sense. As a result, the US has set up a special system that pays patients out of a pool of money given by the vaccine makers so that they are protected from the litigation.
The trial lawyers would love to break this system - this is why you see so much misinformation on the internet. It is a potential bonanza for lawyers and patients and as a result there is a lot of pressure to allow open litigation. This would obviously drive up vaccination costs and possibly lead to shortages or incomplete coverage due to the higher costs of providing care.