Authors reject interpretation linking autism and MMR vaccine

I agree with John Stone's response below:

"Many months on from Clifford Miller's original post we find that
still people will not address the key point, which is the almost utter
irrelevance of what has taken place in the past nearly seven years. What
was the reaction by health official to parents on learning that their
children had suffered serious adverse effects from the application of a
pharmaceutical product (namely MMR)? Was it to express concern? Was it to
change or modify the policy? Was it to launch an investigation? NO: THE
FIRST RESPONSE WAS TO DENY EVERYTHING. I think it is worth pointing out
that this attitude is neither responsible, trustworthy or even decently
human. From then on everything they did deserved to be treated with
extreme scepticism, derision and contempt."

A recent article by F. Edward Yazbak, MD titled
"VIOXX and Vaccines: Vive La Difference" points out that prescription
drugs that have adverse reactions are treated different than vaccines. (1)
Also, in the movie, "A Civil Action" (2), the John Travolta character
named Jan Schlichtmann, based on a true story, says that white males with
earning potential are usually people that win lawsuits and not children.
So too, it seems that adults that die or are injured by a prescription
drug matter much more than babies or children that die or are injured by a
vaccine.

References:

1.http://www.redflagsweekly.com/conferences/vaccines/2004_nov22.html

2.http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0120633/

Competing interests:
Founder of The Autism Autoimmunity Project and father to Eric Gallup, who was born normal and regressed into autism after receiving the MMR vaccine

C.G. Miller correctly writes in his letter that according to the rule
of evidence in law, parents’ videoed observations of their children’s
reactions to the administered vaccines are superior to “scientific”
evidence. According to Miller the standard of scientific evidence is much
higher than the standard of evidence in law because “the scientific
standard of proof is the highest known requiring irrefutability, which is
too high a hurdle when decision-making in the public interest is
concerned”.

As a scientist I feel compelled to comment on four aspects in the
consideration of scientific evidence relating to medicine:

1. The basic method of scientific inquiry is observation. What is
observed with the eyes and other senses is fundamental and material to
scientific evidence, in the age of technology observation with the senses
is augmented by laboratory tests and instrumentation. The case history is
the alpha and omega particularly in medical research. Patients themselves
are best equipped to describe their symptoms and, in the case of small
children, their parents or other carers.

2. Orthodox medicine is toxic and harmful. It seems accepted that all
medications have side (undesirable) effects. However, this is only
relevant to orthodox medications. Correctly administered, homoeopathic
remedies and natural remedies have no side effects. One has to elaborate
here that there could be uncomfortable feelings after homoeopathics but
they are desirable effects. Elevated temperature, rashes and vomiting are
signs of detoxification and of a desired change of a chronic condition
into an acute illness leading to healing.

3. Orthodox medicine with its pharmaceutical industry has become a
huge money spinner and as such has become vulnerable to political
interference. Vaccination is the best example. To make a lot of money,
vaccinators want to vaccinate every child. The more children are
vaccinated, the more obvious are the serious side (undesirable) effects
including brain damage and death. Politically motivated medicine denies or
plays down undesirable effects. The word “obvious” has been banished even
though it is considered prudent medical practice that when a medication or
a procedure is administered and symptoms appear afterwards, then that
medication and/or procedure must be considered as the cause of the
observed symptoms. Temporal relationship is the number one condition to
satisfy when endeavouring to establish causality, but pro-vaccinators
delegate temporal relationship to coincidence despite tens of thousands of
cases in which the same symptoms have occurred repeatedly after
vaccination.

4. The observed and measured symptoms are the facts and not the
conclusions of the researchers which often do not reflect the described
facts. A classic example is the observation of polio outbreaks occurring
after vaccination programmes:

In their paper on the polio epidemic in Taiwan, Kim-Farley et al.
(1984) wrote “Taiwan had been free of major poliomyelitis outbreaks since
1975, but from May 29 to October 26 1982, 1031 cases of type 1 paralytic
poliomyelitis were reported to the Taiwan health authorities. Before the
outbreak approximately 80% of infants had received at least two doses of
trivalent oral polio vaccine (OPV) before their first birthday…
Vaccinations received in the 28 days before onset of illness were not
counted because they might have been given after exposure”. The facts of
the matter are that the majority of vaccine-caused poliomyelitis cases
occur after the first and second doses (Strebel et al. 1992) while the
statement “…they might have been given after the exposure” is not a fact
but only an unproven assumption since there had been no major outbreaks of
polio since 1975 (for 8 years) and there was no reason to expect an
epidemic.

Sutter et al. (1991) described the poliomyelitis outbreak in Oman.
“From January 1988 to March 1989, a widespread outbreak (118) cases of
poliomyelitis type 1 occurred in Oman. Incidence of paralytic disease was
highest in children younger than 2 years (87/100 000) despite an
immunisation programme that recently had raised coverage with 3 doses of
oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) among 12-month old children from 67% to
87%.” Despite? Moreover, “There was no correlation between vaccination
coverage and attack rates by region; the region with the highest attack
rate (Batinah. 117/100 000) had one of the highest coverage rates (88%),
whereas the region with the lowest coverage had a low attack rate.” No
correlation? There was actually a perfect correlation between the coverage
rates and a number of cases, demonstrating that vaccine was actually
causing poliomyelitis in its recipients (and their contacts).

The fact of the vaccine causing poliomyelitis is further supported by
the events in Namibia. Van Niekerk et al. (1994) wrote “The last confirmed
case of poliomyelitis in Namibia had been reported in 1988. However,
between Nov 8, 1993, and Jan 7, 1994, 27 cases of paralytic poliomyelitis
were confirmed in the country. The outbreak had been limited to the south
health region; at least 80% of infants in this region had received four
doses of oral poliovaccine (OPV) by the age of 1 year… Of the 26 patients
whose vaccine status was known, 14 had received four doses of OPV, 6 had
one or two doses, and 6 no vaccine.” Hardly a great vaccination success!
Importantly, there was no vaccination programme in the north health region
and no epidemic. Despite such obvious facts to the contrary, the authors
wrote that vaccine efficacy for three or more doses of polio vaccine was
calculated to be about 80%. Since most vaccine-caused poliomyelitis occurs
after the first and second doses, then the “calculated 80% efficacy for
three or more doses” simply demonstrated that most of the cases in Namibia
occurred after the first and second doses.

Just like in Taiwan, mass vaccination in Oman was not only an abysmal
failure, but the vaccine actually caused the observed poliomyelitis
outbreak. Polio outbreaks closely following mass vaccination programmes
also occurred in Gambia, Albania, Romania and Brazil to mention just a few
of many examples.

Since 1996 I have been asked and written some 80 reports on shaken
baby syndrome, vaccine compensation and other vaccine related problem
cases in the USA, UK, Australia and Iceland.

The ubiquitous pathological findings in SBS cases are:

1. Central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) subdural and
subarachnoid and parenchymal haemorrhages and retinal haemorrhages
separately or together with brain oedema.

2. Diabetes insipidus accompanied by metabolic acidosis (low pH
values) polyuria, polydipsia and hyperglycaemia and in some cases by
bizarre rib and other bone fractures known to be characteristic of acute
scurvy and bizarre haemorrhages such as around the base of the scalp hair.

3. Lack of signs of external injury.

4. Blood clotting derangements (hypo- or hyper-coagulability)
including acquired von Willebrand Syndrome.

Medical “evidence” claims in unison that such injuries can only be
caused by shaking.

The truth is that there are dozens of research articles published in
refereed medical journals which link the above pathology to vaccines
(Scheibner 2001).

In many of my reports I now write that the accused parents are not
perpetrators of the observed injuries, in reality they are eye witnesses
to medical misadventure or iatrogenesis.

Medicine treats case histories as invalid and “only anecdotal” and
the word anecdotal has become a sort of dirty word in medicine. Medicine
tends to rely on diagnostic value of tests and instruments. In the SBS
cases, however, even though these tests themselves show clearly that the
observed injuries are a result of immunological injury rather than trauma,
they are ignored and the SBS diagnosis is made before any tests are done.

What about MMR causing autism? Even those researchers who found the
measles vaccine virus in the diseased gut of the autistic children denied
that their research represents the evidence of causality without defining
what they would consider the evidence of causality. When the wild and,
later on, vaccine measles viruses were found in the diseased brains of
SSPE sufferers, the causal link to these viruses was accepted without
dispute (Payne et al. 1969).

Many medical doctors have an alarming lack of understanding of
laboratory tests and particularly of x-.rays, one of the best examples
being mistaking typical bone changes (including bizarre “fractures”) known
to occur in scurvy, as traumatic fractures caused by the carers. This
devaluation of observation and instrument and laboratory tests as
diagnostic tools in SBS started with Caffey in 1946 when he published his
paper “Multiple fractures in the long bones of infants suffering from
chronic subdural hematoma”. In 1965 Caffey admitted that he was not a
formally trained radiologist: sadly, these days the formally trained
radiologists blindly follow the misinterpretations started by Caffey. The
result is a mess which will take years to rectify. In my Letter to the
Editor of “Vaccine” (Scheibner 2003) I wrote that I do not delve into
conspiracies, I rather talk about ignorance and stupidity.

Most mainstream journalists have little to contribute.

I conclude that medicine has to an alarming extent become a system
which is neither based on case histories nor on science. As one lawyer put
it, medicine is devaluing the rule of evidence in law and, may I add, also
the rule of evidence in medicine and science.

Quo vadis, medicine?

Viera Scheibner, PhD.

References:

Kim-Farley RJ, Lichfield P. Orenstein WA, Bart KJ et al. 1984.
Outbreak of paralytic poliomyelitis, Taiwan. Lancet (December 8): 1322-
1324.

Strebel PM, Sutter RW, Cochi SL, Biellik, RJ et al. 1991.
Epidemiology of poliomyelitis in the United States one decade after the
last reported case of indigenous wild virus-associated disease. Clinical
infect Diseases; 14: 568-579.

Sutter RW, Patriarca PA, Brogan S, Malankar PG, et al. 1991. Outbreak
of paralytic poliomyelitis in Oman: evidence for widespread transmission
among fully vaccinated children. Lancet; 338: 715-720.

Scheibner V. 2001. Shaken Baby Syndrome Diagnosis On Shaky Ground. J
Australasian College of Nutritional and environmental Medicine (ACNEM);
20(2): 5-8 &15.

Payne FE, Baublis JV, and Hidedo H. Itabashi. 1969. Isolation of
measles virus from cell cultures of brain from a patient with subacute
sclerosing panencephalitis. New Engl J Med; 281(11): 585-589.

Caffey J, 1946. Multiple fractures in the long bones of infants
suffering from chronic subdural hematoma. AM J Roentgenol & Radiation
Therapy; 56(2): 163-173.

Caffey J, 1965. Significance of history in the diagnosis of traumatic
injury to children. J Pediatrics; 67(5) part 2: 1008-1014.

Scheibner V. 2003. Response to Leask and McIntyre’s attack on myself
as a public opponent of vaccination. Vaccine 22: vi-ix.

Competing interests:
None declared

Dr Wakefield raised a serious question about a small subset of autism
cases. It is important as the first piece of apparent evidence of a link.
However in the wider question of vaccine safety, it does not claim to give
an opinion.

Other studies appear to show that there are problems with
vaccinations. These are simply ignored by the authorities, who seem to
believe in dogma based medicine, rather than evidence based medicine.

There is no study showing that a population of vaccinated children is
healthier than a population of never vaccinated children.

The Danish study is the closest we have to this. However as the
previous use of the DPT for the autistic population was not considered,
the study seemed inconclusive to me. If the Danish data really does show
no relationship those who have been vaccinated with MMR or DPT and autism,
then the finger will probably still point to Mercury poisoning from
vaccines.

Until there is a cause found for the autism that is prevalent today,
then the vaccines remain the prime suspect
(I assume that the Autism associated with systems thinking is natural).

Competing interests:
None declared

Defending herself against a claim of "conflict of interest" in
Private Eye (19 March 2004) Prof. Elizabeth Miller, Head of the
Immunisation Division of the UK Health Protection Agency states: "Firstly,
there can be no conflict of interest when acting as an expert witness for
the courts, because the duty to the courts overrides any other obligation,
including to the person from whom the expert receives instruction or by
whom they are paid".

If this is the case what was basis for the events of four weeks ago
when leading scientists, clinicians, journalists and politicians
(including the Chief Medical Officer and the Prime Minister) queued up to
publicly condemn Dr Wakefield on precisely this same basis? If we can no
longer have ordinary decency in our public life, we have to ask why?

Competing interests:
Parent of an autistic child