Part of the problem, as I understand it, is that M.D.'s are not trained as research scientists (Ph.D. variety in biological sciences). I’ve met M.D.'s who didn’t know how a t-test worked.
Good luck with lawyers.
Does the government actually prevent those compensated from talking about the case (as opposed to something that might occur as part of a private settlement)?
Given the extent of official clamps on the media in the U.K. I suppose that censorship of individuals might also occur in this manner, but would still want to see documentation of it occurring as regards vaccine claims.
But, why should we believe you? You’re One of Them. How do we know you even work there?
I am, after all:
Just Asking Questions
And quite happily vaccinated, though some did really hurt
My wife, a biologist, worked for a time getting clinical trial results for a drug company. She had to tell some of the physicians that they had to send all the data and not throw out the outliers.
I doubt it. IME, non-disclosure agreements of this sort are found only in releases. In other words, you only can’t talk about it if you settle your claims. There are a number of “alternative health” sources claiming the US VICP requires award recipients to sign gag orders to prevent loss of confidence in federal vaccine guidelines, but I can’t find any reliable source for this claim.
Yes. Most famously two groups study the infant siblings of children diagnosed with autism and found signs very early in the 1 in 5 babies who would go on to be pronounced autistic like their siblings. Other research shows decreases in eye contact between the ages of two and six months in children who will eventually be diagnosed with autism.
Thanks, that is exactly the sort of evidence I was looking for. That makes any connection between vaccination and autism even less likely.
Systems Engineering is an engineering discipline that arose out of the aerospace industry. They are (and I am) generalists and integrators. They are the ones who might be expected to understand structural, process, and cultural aspects of the specific engineering specialties at play in designing a large complex system, such as an airplane.
So yes, the plane company would possibly be liable, because established aerospace engineering principle requires system engineering to understand the risks associated with immature software.
On the other hand, law has no requirement (not even customary) for wide-ranging expertise in non-legal subjects. That’s why you hire actual subject-matter expert witnesses. Like Andrew Wakefield.
Yeah. sometimes it doesn’t work out. But please don’t pretend to be surprised that even ethical well-intentioned lawyers often hire crackpots to support their position. From my outsiders’ perspective, the process of Justice has nothing to do with uncovering truth and everything to do with declaratorily defining the truth, external reality be damned.
Yea the vaccine thing is long debunked, right now the debate seems to be between genetic or conditions in the womb with it seeming like some combination between them.
Another problem is autism is a bit of a catch all diagnosis, there are many different conditions that can mimic it like fragile X as well.
Well insofar as is relevant in this context the point is that one side tries to find evidence for a proposition and the other tries to find evidence for some contrary position and the hope is that the truth will out.
Ha ha ha! That’s an Emory University study, and Emory is involved in tons of collaborations with drug companies.The taint of Big Pharma permeates that place! Besides, any signs of autism in these infants have got to be due to the hepatitis B shots they got as newborns, or from their mothers’ vaccinations. Connect the dots, sheeple.*
*sorry, channeling antivaxer “logic” there. It wouldn’t matter to them that the researchers at Emory who conducted the eye contact study had no affiliation or funding from Big Pharma for that research. And there really is a school of “thought” among antivaxers that maternal immunizations somehow transmit toxins or other vaccine cooties to their infants.
Yes, but I think the sort of person who … well, who says “Big Pharma” without sarcasm would say even the studies not funded by Big Pharma are secretly funded by Big Pharma. And that you can tell when a study was funded by Big Pharma because it will conclude that vaccines don’t cause autism.
And if the position they support costs lives, well, that’s baseball, right?
It seems amazingly convenient that the lawyers are excused of all moral culpability for funding Wakefield when the same process they used to find him could have been used to discover that he was so far outside the mainstream that trying to use his work in court to prove anything should have gotten a horse laugh and nothing else. But no, they’re apparently extremely ignorant of such things, and ought to be, and so we can’t judge.
In the ordinary course, the positions of both sides will be advanced by experts with honestly held views, and the outcome will reflect the current state of the science.
Try to think about this prospectively and rationally. I know that the highly emotive nature of what Wakefield did makes this hard, but try.
A client thinks they have a case due to a particular medical treatment allegedly causing a negative health outcome. A lawyer briefs an expert to see if there is scientific support for this case.
You’re saying the lawyer should just say to their client “no we shouldn’t advance this case because we need medical evidence but if we commission a study with a well renowned highly qualified expert they may throw their ethics out the window and commit blatant fraud to support your case, and their fraudulent paper might get past peer review into the world’s most renowned medical journal, and go viral, causing people to believe something untrue.”
If your position was adopted, medical research would have to grind to a halt because of the chance of this sort of fraud.
Further, think about the opposite case. Imagine if some clients had come to the lawyers saying they thought thalidomide caused birth defects and the lawyers commissioned a study which seemed to support that and as a result thalidomide use was stopped. Would you now be saying “yeah, that’s all very well but really the lawyers shouldn’t have commissioned that study because what if thalidomide was a useful drug that didn’t cause birth defects and what if the experts commissioned by the lawyers committed fraud to produce a bogus study that showed the drug was dangerous when it wasn’t?”
Hindsight leads to smug irrationality, much of the time.
That’s not right. Not at all. Scientific and medical journals are meant to publish complete and accurate results with well reasoned conclusions. Those conclusions will, obviously, be modified as additional results are obtained from other studies, especially given that a common conclusion is that more data are needed.
Sometimes the additional results will show the original conclusion to be completely off-base; that’s humiliating.
Sometimes the additional results indicate the original results were fabricated; we call that “fraud”.
No-one wants to publish a study that is proven “wrong”.
Respectfully, does the t-test test for a disease or trauma, like a pap-smear or a pet-scan? I really don’t care if my primary care physician remembers what a t-test is.
Physicians should have a basic understanding of statistics, to the point of being able to raise a skeptical eyebrow when a study declares statistical significance for an intervention (but the numbers involved don’t really justify firm conclusions).
There are such things as journal clubs for various specialties in which articles are discussed and matters like this are supposed to come up. I suspect physicians in general are somewhat better off than the general public when it comes to evaluating studies and not jumping to conclusions based on breathless media reports. There’s probably considerable room for improvement though.
Physicians can be fooled just as badly as “laymen” when it comes to trusting personal observations (anecdotes) over solid research.
This post points out the whole reason for the controversy. the legal system is founded on the notion that SOMEBODY or something has to be responsible for a bad happening (i.e. autism). Therefore, the attempts to persuade juries that vaccines are responsible. the fact is, even if they were, the benefits outweigh the risks. Most jurors and lawyers are ignorant of science, siu using a courtroom to assess blame usually leads to bad results.
That is a gross mischaracterization. The legal system is founded on the notion that somebody might be to blame. If you file a lawsuit, the court doesn’t just bring in defendants one by one until they find somebody to pay you. In fact, (Anglo-America) courtrooms are usually good places for mainstream science because it’s very difficult to bring in new theories. Expert witnesses must be able to point to well-regarded journals and other tertiary sources that back up their conclusions.
Really? then why (in murder cases) are there well-paid “expert witnesses” who will testify that the accused was “insane”-and yet another that will testify that the defendant was sane?
Because psychology isn’t a science.