A press conference touting “proof” that vaccines cause autism and that the government has admitted it?

…its Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has been awarding damages for vaccine injury to children with brain damage, seizures and autism.

Nice sleight of hand there. Strongly implies that ‘brain damage, seizures and autism’ are the aforementioned ‘vaccine injuries’ for which damages were awarded, without actually stating it.

Should be good for the utter stupidity presented at this non-event.

Apropos: a study in England that confirms that the “epidemic” in autism is an artifact caused by the change in diagnostic criteria:

Epidemiology of Autism Spectrum Disorders in Adults in the Community in England

Traolach S. Brugha, MD(NUI), FRCPsych; Sally McManus, MSc; John Bankart, MSc, PhD; Fiona Scott, PhD, CPsychol; Susan Purdon, MSc, PhD; Jane Smith, BSc; Paul Bebbington, PhD, FRCPsych; Rachel Jenkins, MD, FRCPsych; Howard Meltzer, PhD

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2011;68(5):459-465. doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.38

Agreed, I like the slight of hand there. Expected though …

I still don’t understand why people can’t parse the difference between a severe mental handicap that results in brain injury, and autism. Because they share similar traits, doesn’t make them equal.

After all the vaccine crap posted here, I happened to ask my mom if I ever reacted to a vaccine.

She replied, “Only the MMR.”

“Your sister wouldn’t talk for a few days and you couldn’t walk for a week or two. But after that we were ok.”

Some crazy correlations you ask me. We got vaccinated the the same time and we both developed immune/neurological disease in our twenties. Needless to say, I obviously have no memory of this, but I am now more open to the idea that vaccines could cause disease, and I’m not sure it’s possible science can be rigorous enough to end the debate.

However, that being said, I remain agnostic.

Correlation and causation… Check it:

“I got circumcised at birth and couldn’t walk for a whole year afterward.”

Clearly, by the logic used by anti-vaccine types, circumcision takes away the ability to walk.

(Except, it doesn’t, but polio does.)

RFK Jr. Was supposed to give a press conference about a month ago like this.

The study is in process at the PACE law journal
http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/plr/

The study appears to be the one David Kirby started telegraphing years back: a look at the vaccine court decisions and a statement that the “prevalence” of autism in that group is high compared with that expected.

One concern I have in advance is the fact that many cases were decided early on based on a table injury assumption that was incorrect. The “residual seizure disorder” table injury was removed at about 1995. It was removed because the science that put it there in the first place was wrong.

Hannah Bruesewitz, whose case was recently decided by the supreme court, would very likely have been considered a table injury had her family filed something like a month earlier.

Also, the fact that court cases have been decided on autism has already been made public. Kathleen Seidel made this public years back. Others copied her, and, no doubt, this is what got the ball rolling on this study.

Up until now, the definition of “vaccine injured claimant” from these groups has been “someone who filed”. By that logic, autism is highly prevalence within the vaccine program, as about 5000 cases were filed for the Omnibus.

It will be interesting to see how many cases involve autism, and how many involve “autistic tendencies”.

Such as this case:
“(6) As a sequela to the encephalopathy, Wes Ian Kleinert suffered complications for more than six months after the administration of the DPT vaccine, and he continues to suffer from these complications, which have developed into a residual seizure disorder and autistic tendencies. ”

Next week promises to be a big week for autism news. IMFAR has their news conference on Wednesday.

@ Matt Carey: The case you cited, Wes Ian Kleinert, really interests me. If in fact the child received the whole cell antigen DPT, he may have had a high fever…it was one of the problems with DPT. The citation provided no other pre-existing conditions such as infantile febrile seizures, failure to meet developmental milestones, or any genetic testing. I suspect the citation deliberately left out an evaluation for mental retardation….yet uses the buzzwords “autistic tendencies”.

If the child has any degree of mental retardation… autistic-like behavior or “autistic tendencies” are manifested frequently as well. Parents of moderately, severely and profoundly retarded children consider themselves fortunate if the “autistic tendencies” that go along with their child’s impairment is limited to (harmless) self stimulating behaviors rather than the very difficult to manage self-injurious behaviors.

See that is what happens when the original diagnoses for special education gets changed from “Learning Disabled” to ASD, from ADHD to ASD and “Mental Retardation” gets changed to ASD.

ASD has become the “trend thing”..the disorder dejour. It, in many cases, has turned into the mantra “my child was injured by vaccines”, especially when you have celebrity moms, backed up by a alternative medicine doc, naturopaths, homeopaths other “nutrition” experts who are believed by a gullible, vulnerable group of parents.

First off, this “study” is simply a compilation of legal decisions. And even if the VICP had compensated parents for autism caused by vaccines, that is a legal decision (in a system biased in favor of the plaintiff) about what caused the “autism” and a legal decision that the injury was, in fact, autism. [Note: as I recall, the VICP has not specifically compensated for “autism” and – again, based on my possibly flawed memory – there was a large “omnibus” proceding which came out rather strongly against the hypothesis that vaccines caused autism.]

And, to bring the point home, legal decisions are not data. The data indicate that vaccines do not cause autism.

Secondly, if – as the data suggest – vaccines do not cause autism, we should still expect that at least 1% of so of the cases filed with the VICP should involve children with autism. This is the current estimate of autism prevalence in the US, so it would be significant if there was a lower autism prevalence among children claiming compensation through the VICP.

In fact, since filing VICP claims en masse for autism has been somewhat of a cottage industry among tort lawyers, I think that we should expect a much higher autism prevalence among VICP claims and – as a result – among those awarded compensation.

Finally, it appears – from the press release – that this “study” will attempt to conflate “brain damage” and seizures with “autism” in an attempt to artificially inflate their numbers. This suggests that even the liberal VICP awards didn’t give the authors the “data” they needed to make their pre-ordained point (i.e. that vaccines cause autism).

I expect they will do this by claiming that children compensated specifically for seizures, encephalitis or “brain damage” also have autism or “autistic features”. Given the protean nature and flexible diagnostic criteria for “autistic spectrum disorder” (not to mention the flexible practitioners who diagnose it with little rigour), this is not a very sound argument (to say the least).

So, watch for these three tactical manoeuvres at the press conference:

[1] Using legal decisions as scientific data.

[2] Neglecting to mention that tort lawyers have “stuffed” the VICP with “autism” claims.

[3] Claiming or implying that “brain damage” and seizures are equivalent to “autism”.

I may be completely wrong, but having watched this particular Kabuki theatre play out so many times, I think I know how this one will turn out.

Prometheus

I am predicting right now that this will be some highly cherry picked internal communication of a government agency taken entirely out of context.

You’re probably giving them too much credit. I am expecting this to be their evidence:

For over 20 years, the federal government has publicly denied a vaccine-autism link, while at the same time its Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has been awarding damages for vaccine injury to children with brain damage, seizures and autism.

That and variations of that statement.

The claim that the government has admitted that vaccines cause autism has a familiar ring.

It reminds me of the NaturalNews revelation of an HPV “vaccine hoax”, in which Mike Adams trumpeted that the FDA knew that HPV doesn’t cause cervical cancer but approved the Gardasil vaccine because, well, because it’s part of an Evil Big Pharma Conspiracy.

Mikey seized on an FDA publication which noted that most HPV infections are cleared by the immune system without causing cervical cancer, therefore hey presto! the FDA has admitted that the virus is blameless.

I expect similar deception to be unveiled at the autism lawyers’ press conference.

Given that Age of Autism recently praised Mike Adams’ NaturalNews as a reliable news media source, we shouldn’t be too surprised at the overlap in tactics.

@14 Agent Smith:
“It figures that such tripe is being published by a festering toilet of a law school like Pace. The type of law schools that is just barely above getting its accreditation revoked by authorities. I would be really surprised if more than 10 percent of their students actually get law jobs after graduation and the tuition is around the 45k a year mark. They are the law equivalent to the online, for-profit degrees in sciences.”

Actually, Pace highly regarded in Environmental Law (its LLM is ranked as the #3 program), although the law school is generally a low second tier or high third tier program. There is no chance it will lose its accredition. Full disclosure, I am not a Pace Law School grad, nor is any member of my family. As the recently made popular saying goes, “I don’t have any skin in that game.”

Still, there are three related problems with a law journal publishing this. First, as Prometheus correctly states (and analyzies the problem), a legal case is not data and does not provide data. He could go one and also explain (as he did once in a blog on his own site) that there are a significant number of cases in which the proffered opinions of “vaccines cause autism” experts have been disallowed by courts as failing to meet the applicable legal standard for admission into evidence and consideration by the jury. This has occurred under the Daubert, Frye and modified Frye tests. Accordingly, any reliance on legal decisions would also have to factor in those cases in which the proffered opinions were not admitted as not meeting basic reliability criteria (and also factor in those decisions in which an opinion was admitted, but the expert’s opinion testimony was limited, sometimes quite severely limited, in its scope).

Second, a law journal is not a scientific publication. The criteria for article selection and editing standards (and expertise of the editors) are completely different. There is no peer review or any procedure akin to peer review. And, it is perfectly ethical for a law journal article to advocate a position (and ignore evidence that contradicts the opinion of the author).

Finally, the Pace Environmental LLM is clearly a captive of its chief benefactor: RFK, Jr. It’s an excellent program, but has an obvious political slant. One must be a true believer in the issues in which RFK, Jr. is a true believer — which includes vaccines cause autism, and human activity is the cause of catistrophic climate change. Since law is essentially politics, there aren’t many valid objections to this, since law isn’t science (although much science is becoming heavily politicized in the search for public funding).

@stripey_cat And not only are they “broken,” but they’re all “broken” in the exact same way. The idea of different conditions with overlapping symptoms is totally alien to them. Because my OCD shares a few symptoms with ASDs, clearly I have been damaged by vaccines JUST like those with autism. Both cases are TRAGEDIES, because we’re not WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. Ugh.

For all the challenges I have faced, I neither need nor want their pity and condescension. Those of us with neural variations need accommodation and understanding, and to be treated as individuals.

Oh boy, this should be fun! Shot down in flames in pretty much every scientific arena, the loonies now think that they’ve found their “proof” in legal decisions (and only after some apparent stretching, if the press release is any indication). So once again, at best, it’s “argument by anomaly”. I mean, when you want good scientific research, don’t most people first reach for law journals? Since it’s said that “turnabout it fair play”, perhaps in the next AAP journal they can publish an article where Pediatricians detail the limits of the 14th Amendment.

I nominate Red Queen for the Frigging Fox “News” viewer/reporter…just kidding Red Queen.

Thanks for the link to Fox News. I viewed that rather long video on You Tube with their medical “expert”…merely a re-hashing of the tiresome vaccine-autism link and playing with the numbers of people now diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum; totally unscientific and boring.

@ Red Queen: I did some slumming at Age of Autism and they are featuring the “doctor” who will appear at tomorrow’s press conference in a video…unable to view it on my laptop.

The “doctor” is Sarah Bridges, Ph.D.; she is an “Executive Coach, Consultant and Thought Leader”; she has her own webpage at:

Sarahbridges.com

Sarah has her own press office and I also did some slumming over there and viewed her article in the Washington Post “Something was Wrong with Porter” and her article in Seed Magazine “The Rise Against Mercury”…what drivel.

So much for the “revealing” press conference showing a conspiracy on the part of the Federal government…I can hardly wait.

It’s all so funny…until you yourself have a beautiful child with so horrible a disability as autism. Are vaccines linked to autism? There is some very convincing evidence…

@cajungal: My 12 year old son was diagnosed with high-functioning PDD only a week ago. His early childhood verbal scores and intelligence have never been questioned, they were all in the 65% range. I don’t see him as disabled, I see him as different from the majority.

Now instead of calling my child disabled, perhaps you might cite some of your “convincing evidence”.

Lilady

I viewed that rather long video on You Tube with their medical “expert”…merely a re-hashing of the tiresome vaccine-autism link and playing with the numbers of people now diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum; totally unscientific and boring.

But we all know you are a medical expert. 2 years on top of an LPN degree in the pre scientific ’60’s. Surely you are objective and therefore scientific with no “skin in the game” right?

No! You vaccinated people for a living. You’ve convinced yourself it was the best thing to do no matter what happened to your indigent patients. You were more committed to an idea than to what happened to each patient you deceptively gained trust in. That’s Ok. That’s what you “believed” in.

So, along the “medicine has progressed” mantra that pervades science blogs mentality, you undoubtedly administered some of these less than ideal medicines. How do you feel that you undoubtedly harmed some of your unsuspecting patients? Do you block it out? Do you rationalize, like some religious doctrines, that you did more good than harm therefore you’re a good person? Do you deny that medicines harm? What about vaccines? Do you deny that you ever caused harm?

Ugh Troll: you have repeatedly attacked me on this blog with your vicious postings. I am not an LPN I am a registered nurse who is still licensed to practice. Unlike you I graduated college with a BS-Nursing degree from a real university. Unlike you I know statistics, medical epidemiology, disease process, immunology, bacteriology and virology…somewhat more educated in sciences such as anatomy/physiology, organic and inorganic chemistry, care of patients…than you could ever aspire to. My specialty when I was “gainfully employed” was, and remains Public Health. If you were ever gainfully employed..what was your profession..flipping burgers doesn’t count.

I suspect you have some sort of “mommy” complex manifested by your nasty postings directed to me…weird and sicko.

Perhaps your real mommy told you that your many problems of socialization in the real world, your lack of pursuing higher education and your just plain laziness/lack of gainful employment is because you are vaccine “injured”…she lied to you Ugh Troll.

Get an education, try to develop a real personality, knock it off with the “imaginary” children…we all find it tedious and disturbing…and by all means get a real job and get off the dole.

while at the same time its Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has been awarding damages for vaccine injury to children with brain damage, seizures and autism.

Wait, last I heard from these folks, the evil court system had barred the poor vaccine victims from receiving any compensation as part of the Vast Government Conspiracy.

I guess the conspiracy is only half-vast.

lilady, I really wouldn’t let it bother you when someone who cannot subtract 40 from 2011 and get the correct answer questions your knowledge level.

@MI Dawn, if legalities were the arbiter of scientific truth, then using AoA’s apparent logic Heliocentrism wasn’t formally recognized until 1992 when John Paul II formally acknowledged that Galileo was right and that the church’s legal system had been in error.

full paper is here and is (upon first browse) a joke – cannot wait for Kathleen Seidel’s take down – will give it a thorough read later!

@Gizmo: I know, and I don’t mean to imply that legalities are the determining factor. But little augie can’t even give LEGAL facts that vaccines are recognized as a cause of autism, much less the valid scientific facts (which we all know are suppressed by Big Pharma anyway – snicker).

@ Catherina: Thanks for the link. I read through it and it has nothing, nada, zilch, bupkes in the way of new information. What a waste of money and resources to try and prove (unsuccessfully, again) a vaccine-autism link.

(Please don’t make me read the dreck, again), but did I see something about childhood-onset asthma somewhere in the paper?

One of the wildest, unsubstantiated government conspiracy theories I have ever read.

@Denice Walter: It’s all about the tort money, and all about the rage when confronted with the sad fact that life at times is not fair and it is how we accommodate that fact which is what distinguishes us. We humans have rights, but here it appears that the right of her autistic child(ren) outweighs the right to life of those who have not been vaccinated, here as well as in poor Third World countries (witness her sad demonstration at Microsoft’s NYC offices when the Gates Foundation had the NERVE to suggest vaccination to eliminate, oh polio and other infectious diseases which deprive the Third World of a fresh generation which could solve their problems). She has little understanding (even for one schooled in the law) of “unintentional harm” – if you drive a car incorrectly, it will kill you,. If you board a flight, you might not survive it.Her association with the “woo meisters” align well with what appears to be a Messianic complex (they call her a Warrior Mommy, after all). Even those with monied “credentials” can be easily fooled when outside their areas of expertise, especially when one shapes the facts to fit their agendas..
As far as RFK, Jr., well I can only thank the powers that be in that the clan is in eclipse. (I guess that’s the power of public relations, an “entitlement” ethic and instant expertise- after all, his dad was Attorney General at what, 28?).
I’ve also reviewed the 26 “studies” which claim a MMR-Autism link and find the pretzel logic astounding. Oh, and by the way, I have NO connection with Big Pharma whatsoever, and have led efforts to get pens, pizza, doughnuts, samples, bimbo cheerleaders as detail reps, and others of that ilk out of my hospitals and clinics.
I can tell you a hell of a lot more, but not in this forum..

@40

i was wondering what happens the rates of infectious mortality when wars destory santations systems and food production. Things like plauge dysintary thyphiod do but not measels and such. though they do when pop up when vacine rates drop like the break up of the soivet union any ideas

I viewed the press conference at:

http://www.upstream.tv/recorded/14611371

Nothing new there, just the same old arguments from parents whose children received compensation for onset of seizures following immunization that resulted in severe/profound degrees of intellectual impairment…along with autistic-like behaviors.

Each of the speakers reiterated that they are not anti-vaccine, but rather proponents of safe vaccine and want Congress to hold hearings about the vaccine court’s decisions…and that kids who are diagnosed with autism should be compensated.