Yeah, I can’t find that data anywhere either … no wonder pharms are so expensive seeing how many peoples’ silence has been bought !!!
It occurred to me today that without vaccines we wouldn’t have near as much jet airliner travel. With he rate of peoples traveling from place to place we’d have a continuous MMR outbreak world-wide … interesting …
Paying a researcher to look for evidence of something is not of itself encouraging them to commit fraud. One is entitled to assume researchers are going to be professional.
If you paid someone to go get you some groceries, would you consider you had encouraging them to steal?
In my work I pay experts to look for evidence to help my client’s case all the time. I’d be very pissed off if they “did a Wakefield”. Even leaving aside ethical issues (which I would not ordinarily leave aside) the end result is highly likely to be flawed work that gets blown away in court, resulting in my client spending a lot of money on a case that falls apart.
I’m a scientist with a great degree of expertise on vaccines. I work for a pharmaceutical company. My children are all vaccinated.
Either I’m a terrible parent and scientist, or vaccines are a good idea.
This is nothing like getting groceries. The lawyers were already looking to sue and needed a study to back it up. They went shopping for someone to do that.
This was not looking for existing studies but producing a new one.
Full story.
Indeed, with close to 25 years working “in the belly of the beast” I still have not yet gotten the memo on official Big Bad Pharma position on these pressing issues. I just see a whole lot of dedicated scientists going about their passion trying to make the world a better place.
You were already looking to get this new type of cheese and needed someone to get it for you. You didn’t know it was available but you spoke to this Guy who said he could get it for you. You specifically told him the whole point of the exercise was to get this new brand of cheese. Naturally you were not offering to pay unless he got the cheese. You went looking for someone to do that. You were not trying to get cheese you knew was easily obtainable on the supermarket shelf. You were looking for someone to get you the new type of cheese.
Not only that, you aren’t so unworldly as to fail to realise that it is conceivable that one way the Guy could get the cheese was to steal it, and that he would make a bigger profit if he did so. Not that he has said that’s what he’s going to do, but you have to admit it’s a possibility.
You’re practically a criminal.
If the lawyer knew there was no reason to think that there was any connection and he knew or suspected that Wakefield was just going to make shit up, that’s one thing. But IME it’s far more likely that the lawyer somehow came to believe the MMR was dangerous in some way, somehow ended up in touch with Wakefield and Wakefield told the lawyer that if he had funding for a study, he believed that study would produce evidence of that danger.
Ask yourself this: if there was a suspicion that something caused cancer, and a lawyer started trying to put together a class action and got funding for a study to be done that proved there was a connection (and the study was later replicated and confirmed and became established scientific fact), would you now be saying the lawyer had done something unethical?
Princhester: OK, in a somewhat narrow sense, it’s possible the lawyers were stupid enough to actually think the MMR vaccine was a plausible cause for autism. Leaving aside the fact the law frequently beats up on people for being “that stupid” (“I didn’t know that person was underage! They lied to me!”) the lawyers should have realized that Wakefield was alone in his supposed “concerns” (his only real concern being how rich and famous he wasn’t), and that science runs off consensus and replication, not people who suddenly show up to be saviors by trashing forms of treatment known to be effective. In short, the lawyers were guilty of being not only ignorant of a specific field of medicine, but of how science itself works. That’s over the edge into being willfully blind.
(And, yes, we do punish people based on the outcomes, sometimes. Running a red light is a minor offense right up until you t-bone someone and kill a kid.)
It certainly doesn’t erase the fact Wakefield performed unauthorized medical “experiments” including highly painful lumbar punctures (spinal taps) on children.
I can forgive a lot of things, but giving children spinal headaches for absolutely no reason beyond greed and lust for publicity is not one of them.
So you’re saying that lawyers should be more skilled in the scientific method and the science of vaccines than the editors of The Lancet?
If the editors of a prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal can be taken in, why do you expect lawyers without medical training to know better?
This is all hindsight. Look back at the situation at the time: to the lawyer Wakefield would have seemed plausibly authoritative. Go and read his CV while blanking out everything you now know post 1998. Would you really have said “Yeah, sure, here’s a guy with substantial medical and research credentials who has been appointed to senior roles by hospitals etc but I’m not going to use him because based on me being some sort of psychic, I actually assume he’s going to turn out to be a total crackpot who is prepared to endanger children’s lives and endanger public safety”?
Would you hell.
And your comments about consensus and replication are nonsense, in context. Everything starts somewhere. Is no one ever to fund research into a new area because there is not yet consensus and replication in that area? Seriously?
Northern Piper, Princhester: I expect lawyers, being laypeople, to be more cautious than a journal can afford to be, especially when they should have known that a lack of caution could cost lives.
Journals are meant to be cutting-edge. They’re meant to publish work which is, later, shown to be wrong. People who are actually doing things outside of legitimate medical research should have enough on the ball to know that and to not use research which doesn’t represent the current state of the accepted art to do things like build a lawsuit around.
OK, how about this: A plane company uses pre-alpha software in its autopilot system. Plane crashes, people die. Is the plane company liable? Do you expect plane company to understand the term “pre-alpha”? Do you expect it to do research until it does know?
Great Og on a pogo stick. You’re so off base here that what is required is a long post giving you an education on the fundamentals of the medical and legal systems. I’m not going to hijack this GQ thread to do it.
Of course there was already some concern that the MMR and autism might be somehow related because the diagnosis of autism happened to coincide with the MMR vaccination. We all know that “there is no such thing as a coincidence” so there seems to be cause and effect.
Wakefield tried to find some evidence that would stand up in court to support this theory and we all know what happened then.
Ha … see … paid to be silent … every pence over minimum wage is hush money … [giggle] … (my children are vax’ed as well)
The only way they’re related is that parents notice that their kids have autism at roughly the same age as they’re given the MMR vaccines. Other studies have shown that if you look at home movies of the first birthday parties of these same kids who “developed” autism as toddlers you can already see striking autism symptoms at 12 months, before they get the vaccine. Their parents either were in denial or simply didn’t have enough experience with children to realize that their children weren’t developing socially like other one-year-olds.
I never got my payoff. In fact, I was downsized what they moved Clinical Trials to New Jersey (and switched to a web based data capture system).
A friend of mine did recieve compensation from the Government over vaccine complications when given to one of her kids. I did not ask her too many specifics of the case, but was shocked to hear she had to sign a gagging clause before receiving compensation.
I don’t know all the specifics of her case, and I do not necessarily believe the drawbacks of vaccination outweigh the benefits, but since hearing her story I do not entirely trust the government, or vaccination industry over what we are told. I can very well believe that legitimate concerns are being minimized by some. Just as I suspect the same “concerns” are being over-blown in other quarters.
Shocking - except I’ve never heard of a vaccine court ruling that required that the injured party (or their family) not talk about the case. Settlements are part of the public record (and trumpeted, frequently dishonestly, by antivaxers).*
*Oddly, the same people are very quiet about certain vaccine court rulings - for instance, that vaccines do not cause autism.
Personally, I’m far more likely to trust the federal government (including the CDC) on this particular issue, than I am to put stock in the claims of antivaxers who are routinely caught lying about it.
Sorry, this was in the UK so the rules may be different to the US. I should have said this in my previous post.
There is a UK vaccine court too, that evaluates claims filed against the NHS and its providers. There are legitimate negative reactions to vaccines (though they are rare), including allergic ones. There just isn’t any link between vaccines and autism.
I have wondered about that. Have there been studies to show whether there are signs of autism even in very young infants. My youngest grandchild when he was four months old showed much more interest in people that feeding. In fact, everyone had to leave the room when he was being fed because he would rather look at people than suck. I remember thinking, well this kid could never be autistic. When he was 18 months old, his daycare moved him into the 2+ group because he was being too dominant already. Now he is 7, still skinny (rather talk than eat), and still tends to dominate every social group he is part of. This is purely observational but not that everything is photographed, it may be possible to actually study it systematically.
I wanted to add that they live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a hotbed of anti-vaxxers and the parents made damn sure he got all his vaccinations on time since some diseases are taking hold there.