I Speak of Dreams

OH NO! The US has paid out $2 BILLION in vaccine injury compensation! That must mean vaccines are dangerous!

Actually, it doesn't.  It means the program is working as it was designed to do.  No medical intervention is without risk, including vaccines.  There have been, and there will be, people who suffer permanent, significant, adverse consequences from vaccination.   The rate of such injury is about 1 per million doses of vaccine.

The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program began October 1, 1988.  Since that time, it has paid out $2,213,229,050.37  to 2,810 people, as of the December 1, 2011 statistics report. 

I estimate that there have been more than 1.8 billion doses of vaccines administered to children six and under since the program began.  The average ratio of vaccine awards per million doses of vaccines is...1.3.    By my estimation, the awards amount to about $0.99 cents for every vaccine administered.  Here are the calculations (click to embiggen)

Estimated number of vaccines administered:

I set the uptake rate at 90%, which is artificially low, and derived the live birth numbers vaccine schedule from sources listed at the bottom of the post.  Note that this estimate is only for pediatric vaccines administered from birth through age six, ignoring the later pediatric, adolescent, and adult vaccines.  So there's a significant undercounting of the actual number of vaccines administered.

 Awards per dose of vaccine administered:

 Remember, we are only counting pediatric vaccines here, so the number of doses is underestimated.  The number of awards, however, is accurate and is the government's data.  Remember, we are talking about awards per million doses administered. 

Dollar value of awards per dose administered

Remember, the number of doses administered is underestimated.

Some other real risks:

In 2007, a total of  4,703 children under four and under died in the US. The two major causes were accidents and birth defects.

Pediatric deaths associated with influenza:  115  from September 1, 2010, through August 31, 2011.

In 2009, there were 162 traffic fatalities per million licensed drivers.

Don't be buffaloed by anti-vaccination lies and spin.

(note: these tables may give the impression that vaccine-injury awards are disbursed in the year of the injury.  This is an incorrect impression.  From the statistics page of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program:

Generally, petitions/claims are not adjudicated in the same fiscal year as filed. On average, it takes 2-3 years to adjudicate a petition/claim after it is filed.

"Compensated" are claims that have been paid as a result of a settlement between parties or a decision made by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims (Court). The number of awards is the number of petitioner awards paid, including the attorneys' fees/costs payments, if made during a fiscal year. However, petitioners' awards and attorneys' fees/costs are not necessarily paid in the same fiscal year as when the petitions/claims are determined compensable. 

Due to the populations receiving vaccines added to the VICP in recent years, the proportion of adults to children seeking compensation has changed. Since influenza vaccines (vaccines administered to large numbers of adults each year) were added to the VICP in 2005, many adult claims related to that vaccine have been filed.

Sources:

http://www.chop.edu/service/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-schedule/history-of-vaccine-schedule.html
1995 recommendations http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2607878/?page=5
http://www.immunizationinfo.org/
http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/statisticsreports.html#Stats
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6036a1.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/children.htm
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005067.html

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00053300.htm

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/rr/rr4405.pdf

The Year at The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism

cross-posted at The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism.

My main volunteer activity this year was working on The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism, the blog and the book.

We published 189 posts from 114 authors, many new to Thinking Person's Guide to Autism. The complete list is below the fold.

We branched out. I started to categorize the blog posts using the section headings from the book, and realized a lot of the posts didn't exactly fit. We published a lot more posts by autistics, and more on adult issues in autism. Advocacy wasn't a heading in the book, but was a big subject this year, and into the future. Technology and research were also covered with more posts than in previous years.

Thinking Person's Guide to Autism went to, and reported on, conferences: the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR), the International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference, Hacking Autism's App Hackathon, UCSF's Developmental Disabilities Conference, and BlogHer.  In terms of virtual events, we observed Autism Awareness Month by posting daily, and promoted and reported on Autistics Speaking Day.

In 2011, our  Facebook page (www.facebook.com/thinkingpersonsguidetoautism) developed a lively community of its own.  We use it not just to publicize posts here, also but to put up short articles and links of interest to the community.

There were two big events here: One was the Self-Advocate/Parent Dialogues, which began on September 19 and ran until September 30. About these conversations, TPGA editor, self-advocate, and autism parent Carol Greenburg wrote:

The thing about conflict resolution is that it requires conflict, which is messy, no matter how sensitively it's handled. Just because it's inevitable doesn't mean it's not annoying. In fact, in my experience, speaking as an individual unable to fully represent any community of any kind, the more annoying the task, the more important it is.

Editor Shannon Rosa wrote:

This has been, and will continue to be, an imperfect process. It will continue to be hard work. It will also require a lot of tolerance for the mess and the imperfection, and eyes on the larger prizes of dialogue and constructive conversations.

The other big event was the long-awaited release of our book, The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism, followed by Steven Silberman's review, naming it his "Book of the Year."

What is in store for 2012? Running more wonderful posts from you, our community, and more autism advocacy.

On behalf of the entire Thinking Person's Guide to Autism editorial team, I want to express our  deep thanks and gratitude for our readers and contributors.