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Family To Receive $1.5M+ In Vaccine-Autism Award

Posted by timothy on from the welcome-to-a-jury-of-your-peers dept.

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?"

26 of 594 comments (clear)

  1. What? by Ssherby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is it April Fools day already?

    --
    You keep using that word.
    I do not think it means what you think it means.
    1. Re:What? by Kilrah_il · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    2. Re:What? by Ssherby · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Thanks for the vindication.

      But unfortunately a few anti-vaccine Nazi types with mod points burning holes in their pockets came tearing through this comment thread not long after I posted that.

      When I first read this and I thought almost immediately about April Fools stories on /. primarily because an estimated 20 million award seems punitive and excessively so. And who is being punished here? You and I and everyone else who had nothing to do with this.

      While I feel sorry for this girl and her family, it is not my fault this happened. And I cannot see how providing care for this girl could possibly cost this kind of money. It would have made more sense to have a reasonable pain and suffering award up front, plus some reasonable standard of living allowance annually, plus the government picking up the tab on all related medical costs. Somehow I doubt the total of which would come anywhere near 20 million

      --
      You keep using that word.
      I do not think it means what you think it means.
    3. Re:What? by Seumas · · Score: 5, Funny

      Hare dare you question Jenny McCarthy! She has been a playboy model **AND** squirted out a child, so she is clearly far more qualified in the field of science, research, and analysis than any of us!

    4. Re:What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Death is far cheaper than ongoing survival, and illness is horribly expensive.

    5. Re:What? by m.ducharme · · Score: 5, Insightful

      While I don't necessarily disagree with your assessment of the problem, I don't think your solution - to have doctors police themselves in malpractice claims - is a very just one. Doctors on a committee have a lot of self-interest in seeing that fewer malpractice awards get handed out, whether deserved or not. Besides, don't the professional colleges already regulate doctors, and mete out penalties including training, suspension or revocation of licenses? None of these things provide any remedy to the person who's been injured by a doctor's negligence.

      --
      Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
    6. Re:What? by Invicta{HOG} · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Now you know by tsotha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Now you know by phantomcircuit · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Manufactures of vaccines are granted immunity from lawsuit. The money for this will come out of tax payers pockets. Incidentally it means that nobody involved had any benefit to fight paying these people.

  3. Dear Federal Government, by mdenham · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Previous condition by Epeeist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Previous condition by WarJolt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Don't be so sure. Think about it. Without a test your child too may have a rare mitochondrial disorder. Without a study no one knows how prevalent the disorder might be. When it comes to parents even vaccines that have a higher chance of saving a life than causing autism become something to worry about.

    2. Re:Previous condition by Psychotria · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This does not validate the views of the anti-vaccination brigade.

      I wonder how often and loudly you'll need to repeat that in order for it to maintain its buffering effect against reality...

      -FL

      I have no idea what your comment means, but it's modded insightful so I have to respond. The reality is that the diseases that vaccinations prevent are far more horrible than you can imagine, probably because you've grown up in a world without them. Parents who do not vaccinate their children are irresponsible. They are blind to what these diseases do because when they grew up the diseases barely existed in countries with vaccination (if at all). By not vaccinating your children you not only risk their lives but you risk the lives of countless others. The reasoning behind the choices of not to vaccinate are largely based on pseudoscience and absurd.

    3. Re:Previous condition by bertok · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Previous condition by DarwinSurvivor · · Score: 5, Insightful

      First of all, the number of people who get sick from a vaccine even closely to the degree they would have with the disease it is so unbelievably small it's not even worth considering.

      Second of all, you are completely ignoring the social side of this. If nobody gets vaccinated, some people will get sick. Without vaccines the disease spreads quickly and eventually (it doesn't take long) a large majority of the population starts getting sick. With vaccines however, the disease is not able to survive further than a few victims and eventually (5 years or so) if nearly everyone is vaccinated, the disease DIES.

      This is exactly what they did to smallpox in North America. They vaccinated so many people (pretty much everyone over 30-40 has the scar from it) that the disease is almost unheard of in North America. In fact, if it's so much as suspected at a hospital, the entire place is put into lockdown.

      1 person out of 5000 getting sick from a vaccine (generously bad number) is nothing compared to what happens when people don't get vaccinated and the disease hits everyone. Remember, if you don't get vaccinated for something, the main reason is probably that most people around you DID. So stop being selfish and help SOLVE the problem!

    5. Re:Previous condition by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  5. Legal outcomes include luck by Mathinker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > 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.

    1. Re:Legal outcomes include luck by phantomcircuit · · Score: 5, Interesting

      They didn't sue the drug company. They sued in a special court where the payout comes from the tax payers.

      They won because nobody had any incentive at all to fight them.

  6. Re:All scientific data?!? by Dahan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes--all of the ones that are published in peer-reviewed journals, at least.

  7. Another great step backwards... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:vaccines by Sir_Lewk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    who knows what shit's in there?

    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)
  9. Re:vaccines by Kilrah_il · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  10. Background on the case by jaffray · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  11. Bullshit by RenHoek · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  12. Case settled before trial - no crazy jury involved by sartin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  13. Re:Personal attacks have no bearing by Dragonslicer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    hen 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).

    You're forgetting a third possibility, that it's being diagnosed more frequently (whether correctly or incorrectly is an issue that I'll leave to biological and medical experts). A hundred years ago, we didn't know that Pluto existed, but that doesn't mean that it didn't exist before then.