Italian Court Rules that MMR Vaccine Caused Autism

Post Reply New Topic

Now, children have seizures from fever from time to time and usually the child is just fine, but not always. This is a risk factor.

And I am pro-vaccine. For example, a malaria vaccine would help a lot of people. And I personally have gotten a flu vaccine three out of the four past years (and the informational sheet at the pharmacy which they ask me to fill out and sign does ask if I've had Guillain Barre before).

Well lets look at before the Vaccines:

First lets look at Rubella, in 1964 before the vaccine came out, around 1 in 200 infants were born with congenital rubella syndrome.
Whooping Cough is even worst, before the Whooping cough vaccine, around 0.5-3% of Children died before adulthood.

Vaccines do far more good than harm.

You can find a pretty good list of studies done comparing the link between autism and the MMR vaccine here:

MMR-autism studies summary

And I would also like to point out that the most likely reason that the autism rates in undeveloped countries with limited vaccination programs is that it often goes undiagnosed in countries where the medical system is unable to handle a vaccination program (their mental health programs are likely just as poor).

And as for big pharma being behind some sort of cover-up conspiracy, perhaps you should look at the group of lawyers that paid Wakefield a crapload of cash to prove the link between autism and the MMR vaccine so they could try to win a bunch of money from big pharma. And this was in the UK, so the fact that the US has a for-profit healthcare system being some sort of proof that scientific studies here are more corrupt seems to be an invalid argument.

That page leads to a site that is deliberately blacked out with the statement that domain ownership has expired. Even using the alternative wordpress link just loops back to it.

Here's the page in the wayback machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/201210110733 ... se-autism/

Yes, that's part of being discredited - losing the ability to practice your profession.

Also, the two videos linked in the post are:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW1IEqKuf6s[/youtube]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Tl3tUQng9Q[/youtube]

Absolutely. Most of the studies supposedly debunking the vaccine-autism connection focus on a red herring called thimerosal, which hasn't been in vaccines since 2001. To my knowledge, none have looked at the vaccine-autism connection through the new autism-auto-immune paradigm that has emerged as a scientific consensus on the etiology of autism since 2010.

There are studies of children in Africa showing that autism may develop from a malaria infection. It's not out of the question to think that bombarding a child's immune system with 8-10 serious diseases at once--rather than just one--would be even more likely to cause an auto-immune disorder (not just autism) to develop.

I think the majority of the studies focused on thimerosal because that was the initial focus of the vaccine-autism link crowd. A lot of the studies that were done on it came out years after the vaccines stopped using it because it took that long to complete the studies.

I believe there are several studies currently in progress evaluating a link between immune system activity and autism, but it may be some time until they are completed and the papers are evaluated, written up, peer reviewed, and published. I know there is one being conducted here that is data collection based, and is a comparative study between vaccinated and unvaccinated children (just looking at a possible link; no causal analysis). I don't know how big the sample size is, but I know it is looking for worldwide data (although I don't know their selection criteria, either).

I personally don't believe autism is caused by the vaccination schedule. Newborns are bombarded by bacteria and viruses before they're even born, so their immune systems are in overdrive already. That doesn't mean that the inactive viral fragments in the vaccines don't push it over the edge in some cases.

I personally feel like the cause is more likely to be causes. I also think that it is more likely to be influences on the fetus in the womb during neural development. I think there may be a genetic inclination, as well. These are just opinions, though, so take them for what they are worth.

There is a lead time in getting a study from conception to publication.

It may be worth noting that the legal system in question here is the same one that convicted a group of Italian seismologists of manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake - an event which, by its very nature, is unpredictable.

I wouldn't put much store by this decision, were I you.

Sounds almost as bad as the U.S. criminal legal system. I heard they convicted a bunch of people for being homeless but then refused to convict a bunch of bankers who committed multiple felonies which caused these people to become homeless.

I also haven't heard anything particularly bad about Italy's civil court system. GTFO if you don't know the distinction.

Saw somebody on WP post this quote somewhere (don't remember where or when or why):

“The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.”
-Bertolt Brecht

And that's why most legal systems don't work half the time.

Hope this is related 'enough' to post here. It is from NPR.


"McCarthy's Vaccination Stance Complicates Job On 'The View'
Jenny McCarthy, a regular guest host on The View, has been selected as a permanent co-host beginning in September. The appointment has sparked controversy because of McCarthy's anti-vaccination advocacy.

Donna Svennevik/ABC via Getty Images
The newest co-host for Barbara Walters' chatfest The View is a vivacious and outspoken model, actor and activist for children, seemingly a perfect person to have at the table of the successful network talk show.

But Jenny McCarthy is also one of the nation's leading skeptics about the safety of vaccines. And in that role, ABC's newest star has stirred consternation.

"Her information at least when it comes to vaccines is absolutely baseless," said Dr. Edgar Marcuse, a pediatrician and professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the University of Washington in Seattle. "It has no scientific support whatsoever."

Marcuse has helped to lead efforts in that state to convince reluctant parents of the benefits of immunizing their children against communicable diseases. "It ends up being pretty irresponsible to propound a course of action that actually can endanger the children of your listeners," he said.

The View's creator, Walters, is stepping aside from the show later this year, while former co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, its most reliably conservative voice, decamped for Fox News' morning show Fox and Friends. Joy Behar, who has appeared on the program since 1997, is leaving in August, while Whoopi Goldberg and Sherri Shepherd will remain.

McCarthy would seem an ideal replacement for Hasselbeck. She's a natural (and sometimes coarse) comic figure who, as the writer and media critic Seth Mnookin notes, exploded the idea of how a blond bombshell should behave.

Many of today's new parents grew up seeing McCarthy as an instantly recognizable figure in popular culture, appearing on the cover of Playboy magazine, writing openly about sex, fame and love — and hosting a dating show on MTV.

"Jenny McCarthy is a big personality. She is like a party starter," said Christina Norman, a former president of MTV and former CEO of Oprah Winfrey's OWN network. "She's sort of taken that brand that she has about being outspoken and transform[ed] it out to being outspoken about other things as well."

Norman said McCarthy has positioned herself as "a smart authority, an independent thinker, and somebody who is not afraid to say what she thinks." The View has tapped McCarthy to provoke widespread reaction among viewers, Norman said, not widespread agreement.

The source of controversy involving McCarthy stems from her work as an advocate for the parents of children with autism. After the 2002 birth of her son Evan, McCarthy said he had been diagnosed with autism and attributed it to vaccination. More recently, she said he has been cured of autism through naturalist remedies, such as shifts in diets and avoidance of household chemicals.

Mnookin is author of the 2011 book The Panic Virus, which carries the subtitle "The True Story Behind The Vaccine-Autism Controversy."

“ In this country, certainly she is the single most important figure in kind of popularizing this notion vaccines are dangerous and could potentially cause autism.
- Seth Mnookin, media critic
Mnookin said he first became aware of McCarthy's advocacy several years ago as friends who were young parents fretted over having their children get shots. Many cited McCarthy to justify their anxieties over the safety of vaccines. Mnookin said McCarthy's celebrity ensured her books received coverage from big shows such as those hosted by Winfrey and Larry King, even as the link between autism and vaccines is given credence by no medical authority.

While the vast majority of parents across the country immunize their children, participation has fallen meaningfully in certain communities.

"In this country, certainly she is the single most important figure in kind of popularizing this notion vaccines are dangerous and could potentially cause autism," Mnookin said.

In recent years, McCarthy has tempered her rhetoric, calling on public officials to slow down vaccinations and to study them more. But Mnookin and other critics say that still serves to cast doubt on the single easiest way to ensure that children are safe from major, but preventable, diseases.

Neither Walters nor McCarthy has been willing to address the controversy since the announcement that McCarthy will join The View. A spokeswoman for Walters says the formula for the show "remains the same as it has always been ... different women, different topics, different points of view." She also noted that McCarthy has appeared 17 times on the show and served as guest co-host eight times.

Interestingly, in her book Mother Warriors, McCarthy wrote that Walters was among the toughest interviewers she faced on the subject of vaccines. McCarthy wrote that Walters yelled at her before they went in front of the cameras. "I stood there again in shock that someone in journalism I regarded so highly was not only being vicious but also trying to alter what I would say in an interview," she wrote.

Another irony: Walters took six weeks off earlier this year after suffering from chickenpox. It is a disease that can be prevented by vaccination.

"This is my 40th year at my teaching hospital," Marcuse, the pediatrician specializing in public health and immunizations, wrote in an email. "Today's trainees can graduate without ever seeing measles, rubella, mumps or even chickenpox. I no longer give talks about bacterial meningitis or epiglottitis.

"The future potential of modern vaccinology to prevent and treat disease is even greater. We need to better understand how best to help parents make informed decisions."

This is the country that once put a pedophile in charge of their country, who would trust their judgment.

I don't care what country it is, if a court anywhere tried to make such a ruling, I'd question their knowledge of science and subsequently ask for their undeniable proof to be examined by a panel of experts in the fields of chemistry, genetics, biology, etc. in order to establish real fact in the matter.

What amazes me is that the Italian health officials didn't fight this more vigorously. But then Italy is in a big financial mess, so its possible that they simply didn't have the finances to fight this properly. As has been said, a court is not a scientific establishment, so you can't give scientific weight to what a judge says. Italy is famous for corruption too so you have to take that into account when reading these reports (you may not perhaps hear about this in the USA, but here in Europe Italy's political and legal corruption is very well known)

Arguments about America being more corrupt are pointless in this context anyway, since the whole controversy was originally caused by Andrew Wakefield and his scam research here in the UK. Our medical establishment has struck him off the medical register for his dangerous and corrupt statements. And some of the juniors on the project went public to expose his manipulation of the evidence to come up with his results. He deliberately falsified scientific evidence to support the results that the lawyers here were paying him to get - to prove their otherwise baseless litigation.

It is a matter of public record that Andrew Wakefield Took huge sums of money to falsify scientific evidence to discredit the MMR vaccine, yet there are still people who refuse to believe that he was corrupt.

The whole MMR argument is pretty weak anyway, since many of us were born long before the MMR vaccine even came out. If there was a sudden increase in Autism after the introduction of MMR, there might be a case, but there is no evidence to support that.

When I grew up we didn't have most of the additives that are abundant today either, there were no sweeteners in food for example. Most meals were cooked from scratch using fresh ingredients, if you wanted pie for dinner you didn't go out and buy one - you made one. Yet we still had autism - it was just not diagnosed, because the knowledge wasn't there to enable that to happen. Again there is no data to prove an increase in Autism in proportion to the increase in Additives in food.

I must point out here that I am very anti additive when it comes to food, so I am not trying to argue in favour of artificial additives. Even if additives don't cause autism they can seriously mess up people with ASD, sometimes causing symptoms to be amplified. I myself seem to be quite sensitive to sweeteners especially - they give me a sore throat and make me feel quite ill. But to assign a causative role to additives is like saying that because we are sensitive to noise then noise must be the cause of ASD.

A lot of these dubious theories in my personal opinion, are based on the misconception that Autism is a modern disease and therefore must have been caused by a modern factor. Going back a generation for example, my uncle almost certainly had classic autism, but was simply diagnosed as being 'backwards' and sent to a 'special' school for mentally ret*d kids. Autism has always been there, it just wasn't understood or known about, so we have no historical records of it.

And without historical records it is impossible to make comparative studies of correlative incidences in the pre - modern era.