Don't Just Skim The Headlines: STILL No Link Between Autism and Vaccination/Vaccines/Thimerosal

Update: the anti-vaccination, autism=mercury-poisoning True Believers are making hay out of this decision.  Below the fold, a round up of reality-based responses.

Julie Gerberding:

"Let me be very clear that (the) government has made absolutely no statement about indicating that vaccines are a cause of autism," Gerberding told reporters in a telephone briefing.

"That is a complete mischaracterization of the findings of the case, and a complete mischaracterization of any of the science that we have at our disposal today. So I think we need to set the record straight on that."

Should parents suspect mitochondrial orders if their children have symptoms of autism?

Dr. Edwin Trevathan, director of the CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, said the Poling case did not demonstrate any link between vaccines and autism.

"I think it's also worth noting that most children with autism do not seem to have a mitochondrial problem," he told the briefing.

"So this association between mitochondrial disorders and autism is actually probably relatively rare. But the association between mitochondrial disorders and severe brain damage and dysfunction is one that is not as rare and is actually quite important."

My position is still that parents who totally refuse to vaccinate are (a) mis-informed and (b) selfishly putting other people at risk.

At the very least, vaccine-refusing parents should take strict precautions against exposing their ill children to others.  As in, quarantine.  Don't fly.  Don't take the ill child to a physician -- ask the physician to come to them.  Live like it is 1945.

Update:

The suit was brought by Terry and Jon Poling on behalf of their daughter, Hannah Poling.  Jon Poling is a neurologist and Terry Poling is a nurse who became a lawyer. Some more educated commentary from reputable sources.

Arthur Allen, journalist and the author of "Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver"

http://www.washingtonindependent.com/view/recent-vaccine

According to two people with intimate knowledge of the vaccine court, the compensation that will be paid to Hannah Poling is not the first paid by the court to a child with symptoms of autism. On Thursday I noted that the award, which has gotten huge media play, was quite unusual and does not mean that the government is acknowledging that vaccines cause most cases of autism—or even this one, which isn’t exactly autism.

New Scientist Magazine: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726464.100-autism-payout-reignites-vaccine-controversy.html

Significantly, the government's decision says nothing about whether vaccines cause autism. Instead, government lawyers concluded only that vaccines aggravated a pre-existing cellular disorder in the child, causing brain damage that included features of autism. [snip] Experts say these links do nothing to prove that autism originates in the mitochondria. "It's not surprising that mitochondrial function is abnormal," says Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale University. "With neurodegenerative disorders almost any marker of cell health will be worse than in controls." Without more research, he adds, it is impossible to say whether the mitochondrial problems are the cause of the disease or its by-product (see "Can autism be a mitochondrial disease?"). Those who argue otherwise, are "making multiple assumptions that are not established", Novella warns.

Steve Novella's Neurologica Blog: http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php?p=203

(I highly recommend you read this post, as it is an excellent example of how real scientists think).

David Kirby, author of Evidence of Harm, wrote a highly misleading article the other day in the Huffington Post on this issue. Orac has already done an excellent job of tearing down Kirby’s claims. He points out that legal cases are often decided for legal - not necessarily scientific - reasons. That the government only conceded that “compensation is appropriate.” That is all - they conceded nothing about the larger question of vaccines and autism. Orac also points out that if this case were a concession of a connection why would the petitioner’s lawyers settle and give away a case that could win them all their other cases?

Orac, at Respectful Insolence, has a round up of posts addressing the Poling case.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/03/antivaccination_propaganda_about_the_pol.php

WebMD has an interview with Jon Poling

http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20080306/dad-in-autism-vaccine-case-speaks-out

An experience like that might understandably turn any parent -- even a doctor -- against childhood vaccines at all costs.  Surprisingly, it has not, Poling tells WebMD. "I don't think the case should scare people," says Poling, 37, who emphasizes that vaccines, like all of medicine, carry risks and benefits.

Some parents of children with autism react to the case:

Club 166:

I believe the father who writes Club 166 is a physician.

club166.blogspot.com/2008/03/its-not-our-fault.html club166.blogspot.com/2008/03/in-case-there-was-any-doubt.html

Here's my unsolicited advice to the Polings:

OK, you pulled it off. You managed to tap into the financial largess of the US government (which means the rest of us are paying for this). Once you get your check, do us all a favor (especially yourselves) and just stop talking about this. Because I know that you'll never publicly admit that you were wrong, that Hannah had a genetic disease that something was bound to aggravate, and it just happened to be a fever that may have been caused by vaccination, but nobody really knows.

And I know that if you get stuck in the "pity party" and blaming others that you'll never come to truly accept and love Hannah as she is. You may think that trying to constantly trying to "fix" your daughter is the best thing you can do for her, but she will tell you later how devastated she was that you never accepted her for being her. Let go of the anger you feel, or it will disintegrate your family. The rest of us will take the extra 5 years to undo the damage you've done, and educate the American public that vaccines really don't cause autism. Just take the money and go away.

One Dad's Opinion onedadsopinion.blogspot.com/2008/03/autism-mito-vaccine-court-and-polings.html

The purpose of this post is to lay out as clearly as I can my understanding of the Vaccine Injury case that was announced today in the national media.

I, like many of you, run the risk of misunderstanding the significance of this event due to my lack of knowledge about several of its key components. So I am going to try to summarize, with every effort to avoid bias or opinion, my understanding of the case of this 9-year old girl and what the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (Vaccine Court) has found.

If you would like to gain a much better understanding of how the Vaccine Court works, take the time to read this excellent summary.

A Life Less Ordinary

Is written by a mother and a biologist, one of whose children has autism

daisymayfattypants.blogspot.com/2008/03/just-facts.html

I wish, ineffectively, that all people could apply critical reasoning and intellectual curiosity to what they read and learn and hear. I wish that they could leave emotion at the door and look only at what the data are screaming at them. But I know that these wishes are impossibilities and always will be because our children are involved. What concerns me is that it will take the appearance of one of these diseases against which we vaccinate, in a population of unvaccinated children (either because of parental choice or child age), and serious disability or death before people remember why we have vaccines in the first place.

We vaccinated our children. We took a risk doing that, and we knew it. The known benefits accrued from the vaccines far outweighed those risks. People who choose not to vaccinate their children out of fear of those risks leave the burden of those risks on the shoulders of everyone else. If we, the "everyone else," did not take on that risk ourselves, these diseases that have killed and disabled millions before vaccines were available for them would make a comeback and devastate far more families than autism does. We who take the risk end up protecting not only our own children but also the children of those who do not vaccinate.

daisymayfattypants.blogspot.com/2008/03/deadly-history.html

I gritted my teeth and got my children their vaccines, possibly because I’ve read too much history. I’ve read too much about 50% infant and child mortality, about families having 10 children but seeing only one grow to adulthood, about a child’s being perfectly happy and healthy one day and in an iron lung the next, thanks to polio.

It seems to me that people who point fingers at and cry "conspiracy" about one of the most successful, useful, and life-saving health discoveries of modern times have either never read these horrible and all-too-common stories or never lived through the times when your classmates might vanish one by one because of a diphtheria outbreak. Of all the families I’ve ever met in my lifetime, I know of only one child who has had a severe reaction to a vaccination. If I lived in pre-vaccine times, there likely would be hardly any family of my acquaintance who had survived exempt from the loss of a child due to some devastating “childhood” disease.

We have vaccines so that our children will survive childhood, or at least will have a better chance to do so. So that we will not wake every day, especially in the midst of an outbreak, wondering if that will be the day that we watch our child die. Yes, there are risks with vaccines, but these risks—from the larger picture of public health to a close-up of each individual family in the world—are far far less than the risks associated with experiencing even one of the diseases against which we vaccinate.

Comments

[Karoli]

Even the father of this child is not anti-vaccination. He did say that he thought it was worth being careful. I'm not sure what that meant, but this decision seems to be a splitting of the baby and muddying of the issue to me. They don't admit any causation, but admit a relationship? It's just weird.

[Melissa]

ABSOLUTELY there is a link between vaccines and autism, especially when a child gets the vaccines and has a "leaky gut" and a low immune system. The Specific Carbohydrate Diet, S.C.D., is THE SOLUTION!!!! Look into it for ALL the Children!!!!!

[Jen]

Thank you for putting these links together. It's handy to have something to point people to (like my mother-in-law, argh).I wish these sorts of responses got as much press as the initial verdict, but that would be too easy.

[Y. Jacobs]

I guess the formaldehyde, aluminum, animal cells, etc., in the vaccines just cannot have lasting health repercussions for babies who have yet to develop an immune system, before they're shot up with known carcinogens.

It's also funny how parents who choose not to vaccinate are considered uninformed, derelict, etc., and how people, until the destruction visits their home and their children, are in love with a government that can tell no lies though this same bureaucratic arm and it's corporate affiliates have proven time and again they cannot be trusted and will place your health in jeopardy (Tuskegee experiment, Acres of Skin, Guinea Pig Kids, Medical Apartheid, A Higher Form of Killing).

Oh, and the pharmaceuticals in the water won't harm you either: you'll just find yourself jumping off walls from the anti-depressants and find out your male child is developing some big old biddies. ;-)