Courts quietly confirm MMR Vaccine causes Autism

Adrian Wong · Aug 10, 2013

'Ere we go again...

This has been spreading on Facebook and elsewhere like wildfire - "Courts quietly confirm MMR Vaccine causes Autism", sending anti-vaxxers into a frenzy of verbal and electronic masturbation. Is this vindication for the long-beleaguered league of extraordinary crazies? Not so fast.

Without even reading the article, I can tell you that :

1. Courts can rule anything they want, but it doesn't mean they are right. Always follow the science.

2. The science is indisputable. With the sole exception of the debunked Wakefield study, all other studies on the link between the MMR vaccine and autism have shown NO correlation nor causation between the two.

3. Even Andrew Wakefield himself isn't against vaccination. He just wants everyone to use monovalent vaccines that he developed to replace the MMR vaccine.

4. Scientists have been able to diagnose autism in toddlers as young as 4 months old. Another new alternate diagnostic method was able to diagnose autism in toddlers as young as 6 months old. That proves that the MMR vaccine cannot possibly cause autism, because the MMR vaccine is only given at 12-15 months of age.

5. If that's not enough, the prevalence of autism in families who do not vaccinate their children have remained the same as the vaccinated community.
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If all that cannot convince people that the MMR vaccine is not the cause of autism, then I don't know what will.

But let's have a look at the article that has the anti-vaxxers salivating like rabid Cujos :

Courts quietly confirm MMR Vaccine causes Autism

July 27, 2013. Austin. After decades of passionate debate, parents probably missed the repeated admissions by drug companies and governments alike that vaccines do in fact cause autism. For concerned parents seeking the truth, it’s worth remembering that the exact same people who own the world’s drug companies also own America’s news outlets. Finding propaganda-free information has been difficult, until now.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield
For that discovery way back in 1996, and a subsequent research paper published by the doctor in 1998, Andrew Wakefield has found himself the victim of a world-wide smear campaign by drug corporations, governments and media companies. And while Dr. Wakefield has been persecuted and prosecuted to the extent of being unable to legally practice medicine because of his discovery, he has instead become a best-selling author, the founder of the Strategic Autism Initiative, and the Director of the Autism Media Channel.

But in recent months, courts, governments and vaccine manufacturers have quietly conceded the fact that the Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccine most likely does cause autism and stomach diseases. Pharmaceutical companies have even gone so far as to pay out massive monetary awards, totaling in the millions, to the victims in an attempt to compensate them for damages and to buy their silence.

Grassroots outcry
It was a regular reader named Kathleen that brought this ongoing story to our attention here at Whiteout Press. When asked what her connection to the vaccine-autism battle was, the young reader replied, “I just researched it for a school project a while back and then I stayed on top of it, until I couldn't stand it anymore. I'm not a parent, nor do I belong to any organization - a mere outside observer.”

This reader isn’t alone. The news that vaccines cause autism has spread across the US despite a coordinated media black-out. She takes her concerns one step further explaining, “All I want is to see this information where the public can access it. I've looked everywhere, and no one gives this dire Wakefield situation even ONE small mention.” She goes on to give us another motivation for her activism, “In Washington State, where I'm from, vaccines have become mandatory for school children, which is very frightening!”

Landmark rulings
In December 2012, two landmark decisions were announced that confirmed Dr. Wakefield’s original concern that there is a link between the MMR vaccine, autism and stomach disorders. The news went mostly unreported, but independent outlets like The Liberty Beacon finally began publishing the groundbreaking news.

The website wrote last month, ‘In a recently published December 13, 2012 vaccine court ruling, hundreds of thousands of dollars were awarded to Ryan Mojabi, whose parents described how “MMR vaccinations” caused a “severe and debilitating injury to his brain, diagnosed as Autism Spectrum Disorder (‘ASD’).”’

The Liberty Beacon went on to describe the second court ruling that month, as well as similar previous verdicts writing, ‘Later the same month, the government suffered a second major defeat when young Emily Moller from Houston won compensation following vaccine-related brain injury that, once again, involved MMR and resulted in autism. The cases follow similar successful petitions in the Italian and US courts (including Hannah Poling, Bailey Banks, Misty Hyatt, Kienan Freeman, Valentino Bocca, and Julia Grimes) in which the governments conceded or the court ruled that vaccines had caused brain injury. In turn, this injury led to an ASD diagnosis. MMR vaccine was the common denominator in these cases.’

The report echoes the exact same sentiment that our reader conveyed – Dr. Wakefield has had his career and reputation destroyed over the past 15 years, but has just been vindicated. The account reports, ‘While repeated studies from around the world confirmed Wakefield’s bowel disease in autistic children and his position that safety studies of the MMR are inadequate, Dr. Wakefield ’s career has been destroyed by false allegations. Despite this he continues to work tirelessly to help solve the autism catastrophe.’

The article from The Liberty Beacon closes with a direct quote from Dr. Wakefield himself to the independent grassroots outlet, “There can be very little doubt that vaccines can and do cause autism. In these children, the evidence for an adverse reaction involving brain injury following the MMR that progresses to an autism diagnosis is compelling. It’s now a question of the body count. The parents’ story was right all along. Governments must stop playing with words while children continue to be damaged. My hope is that recognition of the intestinal disease in these children will lead to the relief of their suffering. This is long, long overdue.”

Wakefield attacked again
Since the world has slowly become aware of the dangers of the MMR vaccine, parents around the globe have refused to get their children vaccinated. Earlier this year, the UK government singled out Dr. Wakefield and blamed him for the rising number of measles outbreaks in the country. In an April 2013 interview, he responded publicly.

The website TheRefusers.com published both the video, as well as the written transcript, of Dr. Wakefield’s public response. Below are some excerpts of the doctor’s remarks:

“The important thing to say is that back in 1996-1997 I was made aware of children developing autism, regressive autism, following exposure in many cases to the measles mumps rubella vaccine. Such was my concern about the safety of that vaccine that I went back and reviewed every safety study, every pre-licensing study of the MMR vaccine and other measles-containing vaccines before they were put into children and after. And I was appalled with the quality of that science. It really was totally below par and that has been reiterated by other authoritative sources since.

All I could do as a parent was to say, ‘what would I do for my child?’ That was the only honest answer I could give. My position on that has not changed. So, what happened subsequently? At that time the single measles vaccines were available freely on the National Health Service. Otherwise, I would not have suggested that option. So parents, if they were legitimately concerned about the safety of MMR could go and get the single vaccines. Six months later, the British government unilaterally withdrew the importation license for the single vaccines, therefore depriving parents of having these on the NHS; depriving parents who had legitimate concerns about the safety of MMR from a choice; denying them the opportunity to protect their children in the way that they saw fit.

And I was astonished by this and I said to Dr Elizabeth Miller of the Health Protection Agency, ‘why would you do this, if your principal concern is to protect children from serious infectious disease? Why would you remove an option from parents who are legitimately concerned about the safety of MMR?’ And her answer was extraordinary. She said to me, ‘if we allow parents the option of single vaccines, it would destroy our MMR program.’ In other words, her principal concern seemed to be full protection of the MMR program and not protection of children.”

Dr. Wakefield himself reiterates the final conclusion of the courts in various countries, but censored by the world’s media outlets saying:

“Now this question has been answered not by me, but by the courts, by the vaccine courts in Italy and in the United States of America where it appears that many children over the last thirty years have been awarded millions of dollars for the fact that they have been brain-damaged by MMR vaccine and other vaccines and that brain damage has led to autism. That is a fact.”
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Wow.. Scary, isn't it? A major conspiracy to give our kids autism through the MMR vaccine AND defame Andrew Wakefield. Why would people do that??? Why are there so many evil people in the world???

Well, apparently, the writer didn't do his homework... which became embarrassingly obvious when a reader called Chrys responded :

1. Both cases were unpublished which means that no-one has full access to what the court decided.

2. In the case of Ryan Mojabi, the court ruled that (on the preponderance of evidence - ie more than 50 per cent likely) the vaccine caused Ryan's encephalopathy - not autism. As David Kirby reports in the Huffington post, "Whether ... Ryan's ... vaccine-induced brain disease led to ASD [Autism Spectrum Disorder] is unknown. The concession document is under seal.

3. In the case of Emily Moller, according to David Kirby, "HHS [The US Department of Health and Human Services] did not admit that vaccination caused encephalopathy or autism, but merely decided not to dedicate more resources to defending the case."

4. Although it is true that the HHS underwrites autism treatments for children in its vaccine-injury programme, it has "never concluded in any case that autism was caused by vaccination."

For clarification. The jury is out on whether encephalopathy 'causes' autism. Most children with autism have never had encephalopathy according to the CDC.

The overwhelming weight of scientific evidence on the considerable amount of research into a purported link between vaccines and autism shows no such link exists. The preponderance of evidence required to make such a finding in a scientific study is considerably more than the 51%:50% preponderance required in the 'vaccine court'.

Notably, a study by the Danish Medical Research Council in 2002 followed more than 500,000 children over 7 years and found no association between MMR and autism. The study was reported in the reputable New England Journal of Medicine. The only study, published in a credible, peer-reviewed, medical journal which has purported to have found a link between MMR and autism is Dr Andrew Wakefield's. Wakefield's findings could not be replicated by other researchers - a prime requirement to establish 'proof' in science.

An investigation showed Wakefield had an undisclosed financial interest in proving a link between MMR and autism. Two of his co-authors withdrew their support for his study's interpretations. Wakefield was found to have undertaken his research on children without ethical approval. An investigation by the British Medical Council into Wakefield's autism research found: "three dozen charges proved, including four counts of dishonesty and 12 counts involving the abuse of developmentally challenged children." (Wikipedia).

The Lancet fully retracted Wakefield's 1998 paper. Wakefield was struck off the Medical Register in May 2010, having been found guilty of dishonestly falsifying his research in the interests of financial gain.

No-one argues that vaccination does not pose *some* risk. However, considering the millions of vaccines administered each year, serious adverse reactions are extremely rare (less than 1 out of a million doses). Conversely, there is a high risk of children suffering encephalopathy from high temperatures if they contract the diseases the MMR vaccine prevents. According to the CDC, one child in every 1000 with measles will develop encephalopathy - consider this against less than 1 in a million for MMR.
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This led Whiteout Press to backtrack on their sensationalized story, claiming that they only want to bring "all sides of the story". Well, spin it better next time. Teaching the controversy is bullshit. You got caught not doing the necessary research on the story, so own up to it.

SkepticalRaptor has this to say about the whole ridiculous affair :

Let’s start with the ruling from a provincial court in the middle of Italy that disregarded all other science.

Mr. Andy Wakefield‘s paper alleging a connection between MMR and autism has been retracted by the Lancet. The Italian court pretended that real science did not retract the article and, instead, used it as a basis of their ruling.

Mr. Wakefield perpetrated a fraud, described in detail in a series of articles in the British Medical Journal, here, here, and here. The investigations revealed that Wakefield committed fraud in an attempt to make money from trial lawyers who were seeking to sue MMR vaccine manufactures. That’s bad enough, but it was also discovered that Wakefield owned rights to another measles vaccine, and by destroying the credibility of the MMR version, he had planned to make significant amounts of money in marketing his own. All of these intents to commit fraud, along with the actual commission of fraud, lead to Wakefield being stricken from the rolls of physicians and surgeons in the UK. Of course, none of these points mattered to the Italian Court.

Of course, those Italian courts decided that geologists who were not able to predict an earthquake (nearly impossible to do, scientifically) were guilty of something and sentenced to six years in jail. The Italian courts obviously are clueless about science, but they have a long a tradition of suppressing science.

But let’s be clear. Legal systems are not built on the scientific method. They are incapable of deciding which evidence is scientifically sound and which is not. Courts decide on the law, they are mostly incompetent on deciding on the value (or non value) of scientific evidence, that’s not how they’re constructed. In fact, most court’s foundations are based on what science calls “false equivalency,” because it gives each side the right to make its own claims irrespective of the quality of evidence, and a panel of non-experts (a jury) is supposed to determine which side’s evidence is better. That doesn’t work in real science.

Despite a very large list of peer-reviewed scientific studies (listed below) that completely debunks any link between MMR vaccines and autism, why on earth would the Italian court decide the exact opposite? Well, courts are not infallible, so they occasionally make errors. The provincial Italian court of jurisdiction, approximately at the level of a US state district court, can be appealed, which is ongoing. Apparently, the Italian Health Ministry also didn’t present the list of information to the courts that I just did above–they apparently laughed off this court case, because it seemed to be nonsense.

Finally, to play the conspiracy game that the tin-hat wearing vaccine deniers love, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, Luca Ventaloro, is a well known Italian anti-vaccine advocate who provides legal advice on how to avoid compulsory vaccinations. Ventaloro used, as his ”expert medical witness,”, Massimo Montinari, who has not authored any biomedical research papers on autism, MMR or vaccines; however, Dr. Montinari did author the book ”Autismo: i vaccini fra le cause della malattia” and sells his own autism “cure” protocol. As the tin-hat types always say, “follow the money.”

Next up is the claim that the Vaccine Court, which is the Office of Special Masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims who administers a no-fault system for litigating vaccine injury claims (the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, or NVICP), was paying out “billions of dollars in claims.”

The court was set up as a method to quickly review claims against vaccine manufacturers for injuries from vaccines, and quickly weed out claims that are not obviously related to vaccines. The reason this court was established to shield manufacturers from the excessive litigious nature of Americans (to both make money and to blame anyone but themselves). It was becoming apparent that the cost of this litigation for manufacturers, usually made by attorneys trolling for business, was going to drive away vaccines from the US market. And rational people know that no vaccines means a lot more deaths, so they set up a system, funded by a tax on vaccines, to pay for damages that might have been caused by a vaccine.

Let’s be clear. All medical procedures have a risk. Taking acetaminophen has a risk. Having surgery has a risk. And getting a vaccine has some risk, no one says that vaccines are perfectly safe.

Since the “Vaccine Court” was established, over 1.8 billion (billion!) doses of vaccines have been given to children in the United States. As of December 2011, the program, since being established in 1988, has paid out $2,213,229,050.37 to 2,810 people, an average of around $760,000 per claim settled.

This means that the courts are paying around $0.99 per every dose of vaccine delivered. And the number of claims is around 1.8 per 1,000,000 doses of vaccines administered.

And this ignores the fact that courts aren’t deciding on science. Many of the claims are made despite the lack of causal evidence, but more on a Post hoc ergo propter hoc correlation.

In fact, the Autism Omnibus trials, which was specifically set up to adjudicate claims that vaccines cause autism, has rejected all three test cases and subsequent appeals have failed.

But the real news is that there is no news. Because the anti-vaccination lunacy lacks any substantial support for their various tropes about vaccines causing any number of things, including autism, they need to rely on hero worshipping one of the great scientific frauds of all time, Andy Wakefield, or on a minor Italian provincial court, or on exaggerating claims from the NVICP.

On the other hand, there is a wealth of evidence that specifically and conclusively refutes the hypothesis that there is a link between the MMR vaccine and autism:

The Cochrane Reviews stated that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism, after a meta-review of 31 published scientific studies that examined the possibility of any link between the MMR vaccine and the health issues claimed by Wakefield. Cochrane concluded that, “exposure to MMR was unlikely to be associated with Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, autism or aseptic meningitis.”

There are no scientific or medical controversies about this conclusion.

Medical and scientific experts have agreed with the conclusion that MMR vaccine is not associated with autism.

But it did lead to a public health crisis based on this fraud.

Well constructed epidemiological studies have also shown no link between MMR vaccine and autism in Denmark, England, Japan, Japan, Japan, Poland, and the United States.

Despite claims that Wakefield’s findings were reproduced, not one single peer-reviewed paper ever supported the Wakefield’s claims. None.

Numerous studies specifically invalidate his claim.

In October 2004, a meta review, financed by the European Union, was published in the October 2004 edition of Vaccine and assessed the evidence given in 120 other studies and considered unintended effects of the MMR vaccine. The authors concluded that “exposure to MMR is unlikely to be associated with Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, autism or aseptic meningitis.”

A 2007 review of independent studies, performed after the publication of Wakefield’s fraudulent article, found that evidence did not support a causal association between vaccines and autism.

A 2009 review of studies on links between vaccines and autism concludes that “twenty epidemiologic studies have shown that neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism. These studies have been performed in several countries by many different investigators who have employed a multitude of epidemiologic and statistical methods.” They also stated that the large size of these studies would have identified even minor correlations, and even then nothing was found.

Let’s review. The Italian Courts made a bogus decision based on a fraudulent paper from no-longer-a-doctor Wakefield that was withdrawn by the publisher. After billions of doses of vaccines given, a tiny number of people have made claims that vaccines have caused injury, adding up to about $1.00 per vaccine dose. Again given that all medical procedures have some risk, the fact that vaccines saves thousands, if not millions, of lives in the USA, the tiny risk is overwhelmed by the huge, scientifically supported benefit. And we’re not even sure if there’s a real causality between the vaccines and the injury from a scientific point of view. And finally, peer reviewed articles in high impact journals establish that there is no link between the MMR vaccine (and in some cases, any vaccine) and autism. MMR vaccines (or any vaccine) do not cause autism. Wishing it so, or claiming it’s so, doesn’t making it so.
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Courts quietly confirm MMR Vaccine causes Autism

Adrian Wong Da Boss Staff Member

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Courts quietly confirm MMR Vaccine causes Autism

Adrian Wong Da Boss Staff Member

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