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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?"
Is it April Fools day already?
You keep using that word.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
If you ever wondered why drug companies would rather work on yet another allergy medication instead of vaccines with a much bigger potential to help people, well, look no further.
My doctorb has proof that I have a previously unknown mitochondrial disorder that does not cause, but results in, a deep-seated need to receive large quantities of money.
$2.2 billion dollars would be appreciated as compensation.
As was noted in the article, the girl had an underlying condition which the vaccine aggravated. It was a very specific case.
This does not validate the views of the anti-vaccination brigade.
> How did this happen .... ?
Every time you go to court, there will be a certain amount of randomness in the outcome, because the legal system isn't run by mathematical logic, it is run by humans (lawyers, judges, juries) and they are notoriously unpredictable.
Yes--all of the ones that are published in peer-reviewed journals, at least.
I truly feel for people who have complications as the result of taking any medicine, but if you consider the vast numbers of people who receive vaccinations with no issues at all, the side-effect cases are extremely minute. Like everything else the American health care system ails from these days, all these successful lawsuits will do is push researchers and pharmaceutical companies to cease development and production of vaccinations as their insurance rates etc go up. Only when people have to see their child die from what would have been an easily prevented disease, or watch his/her body broken by something like polio, will they realize how much vaccines are needed and how f'ed up our lawsuit happy country has gotten.
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?"
I'm certainly not a doctor and may be misunderstanding this, but the way i think of it is this: when you execute someone, you provide with them a "lethal dose" of poison. In reality, there is no such thing as a "lethal dose", but rather it's defined as something that is 99.9999% (or whatever) percent likely that you'll kill someone given his/her physical conditions. Yet naturally, some survive - but that doesn't make it any good for you. Same with vaccination: yes, some rare people may have developed some condition that counteracts the benefits of the vaccines, but that doesn't mean it's bad for you.
So, ultimately, this in itself doesnt contradict previous studies - in this case we're dealing with an isolated case (the so-called statistical "outlier"), whereas before you were (presumably) dealing with a random selection of individuals, representative of the general population
what really concerns me more, however, are the possible repercussions of this asinine decision. They get so obsessed over isolated cases that they completely neglect the larger picture. To quote another poster:
If you ever wondered why drug companies would rather work on yet another allergy medication instead of vaccines with a much bigger potential to help people, well, look no further.
Five years later, the government settled the case before trial and had it sealed.
In just about every way imaginable, this is the wrong thing to do. We're now going to have more fear-mongering about vaccines with everyone pointing at this case, and because it's sealed, no-one will know why.
It sounds terrible that vaccine + undiagnosed mitochondrial disorder can result in autism, but what happened should be open so that we can learn from it.
That's not how you properly challenge that claim. This is a subject that a lot of people care about, and have spent a lot of time (failing) trying to find studies that support a connection between Autism and Vaccination. If you want to do it correctly, you find a peer reviewed study that 1) shows a connection, and 2) hasn't been already shown to be a crock of shit. The ball is in your court.
Go ahead, we're waiting...
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Way to find a way to stretch this into an attempt to start yet another healthcare flamewar on slashdot.
Personally, I think I'll abstain, and not take your very obvious bate. I'll continue finding this settlement flat out absurd, but for none of the strawman reasons you suggest. I do not deserve that kind of money for a bullshit 'medical accident', and neither do they.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Right. All that documented history of vaccines wiping out smallpox, and nearly wiping out polio, and all those mountains of empirical evidence showing no correlation between vaccines and autism really suggests that we can't trust vaccines. Gotcha.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Anyone who can be irked to actually research it. These things are highly scrutinized by countless people during their development process. You might not understand it, but that doesn't mean you should try to burn it for being a witch.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Hey, there are stuff in there with many letters and more than 3 syllables. Many of them contain Duhydrogen monooxide, which is a known "bad stuff". Anything with that many letters must be bad.
Oh, and on a more serious note:
chances are with a few minutes of research you are smarter than your doctor...
You might be smarter than your doctor, but I assure you that even after an hour of intensive googling, he is better informed than you are in medicine. Yes, you should not blindly do whatever the doctor says - you should ask questions, ask for a second/third/... opinion, research for yourself, etc. But to think that after a few minutes' research you would be more knowledgeable than him is a bit insulting.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
There are book authors, researchers, and television commentators who build their entire careers on the fears of parents.
When someone, anyone, comes along and offers a cut-and-dried explanation to a common problem ("Tour child is autistic? It was vaccines!"), they cling to the idea. The author/commentator/researcher has given them a target for their fears and misunderstandings. Like and angry lynch mob, they will accept the first target they can, regardless of the facts. They are blinded by their desperation to know what went wrong with their child's health, and their threshold for truth is set very, very low.
chances are with a few minutes of research you are smarter than your doctor...
A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing...
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.
I'm taking estradiol valerate for hormone replacement therapy. Now it's quite possible that I might have some undiagnosed predisposition to breast cancer or some other disease that is dependent on estrogen or even just the compounds used in its delivery, but if this turns out to be the case I'd be a bloody fool to start suing people for it, because it's not as if I would have gone without the medication if I knew there was a 1 in 10.000 chance it could kill me. No, seriously, between people smoking, driving without a seatbelt and eating garbage, I just don't believe that any rational person would abstain from important medical treatment due to a very minor chance of complications, unless of course they've been pressured to do so by the kind of fear mongering nonsense you've seen against the MMR vaccine.
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.
They're not fecking stocks, ruled by brownian motion and the machinations of a shadowy, powerful group of elite monkeys.
The diseases they prevent aren't gone, merely suppressed. If you stop suppressing them, they'll come right back to the levels they had before.
And the only way in which the vaccines are different is that about 30 years ago, they removed the junk in them that the hysterical antivaccinites were claiming causes autism, with no effect on the actual autism rates...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Our tax dollars at work, paying off nutcases $20,000,000 to avoid a $10,000 trial. Brilliant.
(Yes I pulled that trial cost right out of my ass, but I doubt it would be anywhere near the 20 mil they settled for)
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Unfortunately, a Slashdot reader believes that a personal attack will pass muster with this community. We are too smart for that. When doctors talk of obesity they often state, our genetics didn't change, so environmental factors must be contributing to the rise in obesity. The same must be said for Autism. Our genetics did not change, so there must be an environmental factor (or factors). The thing that bothers me is that people become polarized over the issue.
The parents of Autistic children (I am one) tend to focus too much on one environmental factor (Vaccines) when there are plenty of other factors. They also discount the benefits that vaccines have provided to our society in general. The "informed" community ignores research that does not concur with their point of view while making character attacks by associating those parents with Playboy.
Both groups have some valid points, but will never make progress while pointing the finger at each other. My hope is that a group will come together with open minds to research Autism no matter where the evidence leads them. For instance:
The industry that I work in (computers & electronics) seems to be the worst at contaminating the environment. According to National Geographic, electronics account for less than 2% of landfill waste while contributing 70% of landfill toxicity.
http://s.ngm.com/2008/01/high-tech-trash/computer-interactive
Funny how the rise in Autism closely matches the rise of this industry. Are there any statisticians interested in looking into this?
There is also a factor of chemical contamination, which is largely undocumented in public records. Companies can register various chemicals as perfumes, apply for trademark protection, and withhold the chemical composition based on trade secrets.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/01/by_scott_hensley_debates_rage.html
When it comes to vaccines, however, I am still wary of the methods of sterilization, including the addition of Formaldehyde, Aluminum, and Mercury (still in the multi-dose flu shot). Although I am not a health professional, I understand that many diseases have been mitigated through vaccination, and that vaccines have been very effective. Personally, I would hope that vaccine sterilization is best achieved through gamma radiation of single dose vials. Then again, some people go crazy with the word "radiation".
I have followed Dr. Wakefield's ethical case, and understand that his methods were at question, and his results have not been duplicated in humans. Although there is a new study which calls the vaccine regimen of the 1990s into question.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20628439
I also understand that it is not in the interest of vaccine manufacturers to find a link with Autism.
http://www.askdrsears.com/thevaccinebook/labels/Vaccines%20and%20Autism.asp
I also suspect that there is a link to the bowel. I don't know an Autistic kid who doesn't have bowel problems, but that is a limited view. For my son, treatment for Candida and the use of probiotics has helped enormously.
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/33/14691
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/peds.2009-1862v1
When he stops taking probiotics, however, his symptoms reappear. Stool samples have been used to verify the issues. A gluten free / casein free diet helps both Stephen, and the family member with MS.
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/07/21/toxic.trio.identified.basis.celiac.disease
http://www.jimmunol.org/cgi/content/full/182/7/4158#TI
I seem to recall a recent Slashdot article about Gluten, but cant find it anymore.
So what this really comes down to for me is, "You are what you eat, drink, breathe, etc." Autism appears to have both a genetic and environmental component. We have to stop bickering over this crap and start working to resolve the issue. Anybody interested?
Indeed, the Vaccine Court tilts toward the plaintiff in multiple ways. The government pays the plaintiff's lawyers, win or lose, so there is a big incentive for lawyers to take such cases, even if the chance of winning is slim. And the standard of evidence is lower in the Vaccine Court--basically, compensation is awarded if it is at all plausible that a person's injury could have been caused by the vaccination. And if the plaintiff loses, they still have the option of suing in regular court.
However, I think that this is reasonable. Vaccination does not just benefit the person being vaccinated, it benefits society, because the main way in which vaccination prevents disease is not by protecting the individual from infection, but rather by making it impossible for an epidemic to get started in the first place. Immunity to disease (whether from vaccination or previous exposure to the disease) is not absolute--the risk of contracting the disease is reduced, but not to zero. The reason most people do not contract diseases like measles, whooping cough, or polio is that an infection is unable to spread through the population, because on the average an infected person ends up infecting less than one other person. When that is the case, the disease cannot spread, and simply peters out.
But when immunization is successful, the disease is virtually eradicated from the entire population. Vaccines are some of the safest effective medical treatments known to man, but they do have risks, albeit very small. But when a disease is nearly eradicated, the risk of the disease to each individual is less than the risk of the vaccine--so long as all of his neighbors are properly vaccinated. So the situation is tailor-made for a "tragedy of the commons," in which each individual pursues his own selfish self interest, and as a result, everybody suffers far more than would have been the case if everybody had cooperated to share a small risk in order to avert a much greater one.
So it makes sense to provide a public safety net to compensate everybody who suffers a genuine vaccine injury--because people who get vaccinated are performing a public service. Yes, this will means some people will be compensated who would have gotten sick anyway, and Hannah Poling is very likely one of these. Mitochondrial diseases can be triggered by many stressors, including very minor illnesses, so there is a good chance that something or other would have triggered Hannah's illness even if she hadn't been vaccinated. Indeed, children like Hannah may well be at greater risk if they are not vaccinated, but that is obviously of little comfort to anybody after the fact.
So just as our criminal justice system occasionally lets real criminals go free to protect the innocent, the Vaccine Court sometimes rewards unscrupulous lawyers who exploit parents of autistic children, and sometimes provides compensation to people who probably aren't really entitled to it. But that is a small price to pay for providing just compensation for those who actually do suffer genuine harm from vaccination
False in two respects. First, it is not true that the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine only immunizes against the toxin. Second it is not true that immunizing only against the toxin does not reduce the spread of the disease. (hardly surprising that preventing a symptom--coughing--that spreads disease would reduce the spread of that disease)