To think this takes not vaccinating to a whole new level

[Swanlaked]

DD has a child at school who has cancer. The school sent a letter home asking all parents to please think about giving their child the MMR if they haven't had it and also to inform them immediately if any child was in contact with chicken pox.

One of the mums at the school is still refusing to have her 3DC vaccinated. No health issues it's big pharma/poison/conspiracy theory crap

AIBU at this point to think the school should seek removal of the children and tell the bloody thicko to find another school for them?

We really only have to look at the GMC findings for ample evidence of the disgraceful way in which Wakefield behaved.

I've made too many points that you didn't respond to. I'll come back if you do.

Sorry - I've done my best. Which are bothering you?

Or is it that you don't actually have an argument against Deer except that he wasn't very nice about Andrew Wakefield?

Comments like nolonger has made is why these threads upset and disturb me. Had a so-called 'anti-vaxxer' had made light of and fucking lol'd about the concerns/feelings/situation of a kid damaged by measles she'd have (quite rightly) been ripped apart for the awful, unsympathetic nature of her post. But because its 'just' a vaccine,damaged one, its fine, eh?
Whatever your opinion on vaccination those are CHILDREN. people who were suffering and families struggling to make sense of their illness.

bumbley - but then he'd have been able to have replicated his findings wouldn't he? He was given the opportunity to do so and he didn't.

This is how case series work :
You , in the course of normal practice, observe a "group of people that are suffering with similar (unusual) symptoms and then look at whether or not they have anything in common".
You write this up and publish it, if its accepted.

You don't:

1. Come up with a theory that will make you money and talk to people about it (see first link).

2. Work backwards from the supposed cause (MMR) and encourage recruitment from groups that also have concerns about MMR (see third link). Actively pursue recruitment from this group.

3. Find the cases, chuck out the ones that really don't fit (first link). Change the timeline to make the others fit if they don't. Override the developmental
   expertise of a paediatrician and geneticist in establishing the so called "normal" development prior to the vaccines even though you trained as a gastroenterologist.

4. Be unable to replicate these findings on children selected by more conventional methods.

Greatfuckability - I was laughing at the assertion that JABS is not an anti-vax group. If it looks like a duck etc.

It's important that other people reading this thread realise that the cases Wakefield recruited were not random - they came to him from anti-vaccination groups "looking for answers'. It was terrible, terrible research and he couldn't replicate it later on because he made it up.

What do you mean by 'children selected by more conventional methods?' Are you talking about random selection from the population?

Am I right in thinking that all your links were articles written by the journalist Brian Deer?

What does this mean? Does it mean that doctors would not be wrongly accused so long as they had not resorted to fraud?

This is one I did miss. Again, not sure how you've extrapolated your conclusion from my statement which was, if scientists have acted in good faith and are open about their data and how they arrived at it, operated within ethical guidelines and produces results in line with scientific method (which of course Wakefield always declined to do even before his fraud was exposed), then I can't imagine that they would be unwilling to publish their findings.

After Wakefield I imagine any scientist operating in this field needs to be trebly careful over their methods and data, given the resounding impact of a cavalier attitude to checking whether a report author had told the truth.

However if they'd behaved as Wakefield did in arriving at those results, then yes, they should probably be concerned about meeting the same, merited fate.

We can all see for ourselves that nolonger's "lol" doesn't refer to the concerns of a vaccine damaged child, but to Wakefields so-called scientific methodology. You don't help your argument by misrepresenting her in order to come out with false outrage, GreatFuckability.

And, as people who were already concerned about "vaccine damage" they were very happy to accept and embrace that the "reason" their child(ten) had autism was the vaccine.

Bearing in mind that 3 of the 12 didn't actually have an autism spectrum diagnosis at all and only 1 of the remaining 9 had the "classic" presentation of autism with severe diarrhoea. One child actually had constipation which, although problematic, wasn't actually the "enteritis" he was seeking to prove.

Jabs is not (or at least was not) an 'anti-vax' group. Not least because at the time there was no such thing. It was simply a group of parents with children who were sick seeking a cause. I find it offensive to laugh at that concept. And more than a little stupid to not see the nuances of those two situations.

It really is ridiculous that people are trying to pick apart the criticisms of Wakefield, given that they have been found proven by the GMC and heavily supported by his fellow scientists, and his attempt to take defamation proceedings never got off the ground. He is completely discredited. Live with it.

LadyC- I don't have a cause, I'm not defending Wakefield. I really don't have enough knowledge or interest in him to form an opinion. Any thing I might say on this topic comes purely from the standpoint of knowing how utterly scary it is when your child is sick, and the gut wrenching thought that you allowed someone to do the thing that made your child sick. Whether you are right or not that vaccines caused that illness, I can 100% understand wanting to know if that is what did it.

bumbley - Ive read the propaganda about Brian Deer by Wakfield. I'm particularly fond of "The BMJ wilfully ignored this evidence and simply decided to destroy Dr Wakfields' professional reputation by any means necessary. As Dr Wakefield explains:"

Which part of the 3 articles that i posted from the British Journal of Medicine didn't you agree with? Apart from where it claims that Wakefield made up a whole heap of his research and couldn't replicate it.

The above quote is from naturalness.com which has also written the article "DEATH under Clinton, LIFE under Trump.. Which do you choose?"

Patients for the trial were mainly recruited through Richard Barr, the solicitor who was instrumental in claiming very large amounts of legal aid, including substantial payments for Wakefield, to pursue vaccine damage claims. If you can't see the nuances in that situation, you should not be accusing anyone else of being stupid.

GreatFuckability, I agree with you fully about the awful position of the parents who went to Wakefield. But think about what he was doing. He subjected their children to painful and intrusive examinations, including lumbar punctures which are extremely painful. He led them to feel guilty about having their children vaccinated, when the truth was that there was no evidence that the vaccination had caused their children's symptoms. He caused them to waste years going down the blind alley of hopeless legal action, and gave them false hope that their children could get compensation to help mitigate the effects of their conditions. And all the while he was making a very comfortable living out of what he was doing.

What he did to the children concerned and their parents is perhaps one of the most inexcusable aspects of what he did. He wasn't really interested in them, he was interested in his own glory and his own back pocket.

Nolonger, I don't think I've ever gotten any information from naturalness.com but I'm not a great fan of getting all my info from journalists either.

I'll admit that it's been a while since I read much about Wakefield (because I'm not really that interested in him) but some of the stuff you're saying doesn't tie in with what I remember reading eg. about the patients' histories etc (and no, I wasn't getting my info from 'anti-vax' sites!) So, if you don't mind, I'm going to go back and read over things again myself rather than just reading Deer's articles.

As I said, I really am not in any position to defend him. The little information I do have on him does not seem favourable at all.
My point was not about him. But about Jabs and the parents being labelled as some kind of nefarious people just out to prove that vaccines are evil. That's not how it was. Times have changed and whilst that may be the case now, you cant hold those parents up by todays standards and using todays information. That's all I'm talking about. Seperate issue entirely to whether AW is fraud or not. I knew nothing about the solictor for example. I'm ignorant on that subject, not stupid.

"Patients for the trial were mainly recruited through Richard Barr, the solicitor who was instrumental in claiming very large amounts of legal aid, including substantial payments for Wakefield, to pursue vaccine damage claims".

Exactly. You are not supposed to recruit for case series, the point is that they just turn up, during normal clinical work and you notice a pattern and write them up. You also don't just make up the stuff that doesn't fit and it's expected that if your work is robust it can be replicated.

Bumbley - the BMJ articles discusses the concerns of the other doctors involved with some of the cases about their prior developmental issues etc and discusses how their prior medial records were reviewed. It's disingenuous at best for Wakefield to claim that all of the children were developing normally prior to the MMR.

Nolonger, in a case series, the cases can come from multiple sources/institutions. If you're investigating very rare diseases/disorders, this is likely to be the case.

Yes bumbley but usually hospitals or medical outpatient clinics. Not lobby groups with an agenda. Wakefield didn't recruit from cases referred randomly - people asked their GPs to refer to him or he requested that the referral be made. That's enormous selection bias, especially as many were people who were concerned about vaccination.

And he still needed to down grade previous developmental concerns documented by other doctors and play around the time line.

And - as noted upthread - cases were recruited by a solicitor with an eye on a vaccine damages lawsuit.

When you say 'selection bias' what are you actually referring to?

The cases aren't representative of the population of children with "regressive autism and enteritis".

He was trying to establish that there might be a link between developmental regression, autism and the MMR vaccine. The mainstay of his assertion was that the development was normal prior to the vaccine and that the symptoms occurred shortly afterwards.

Instead of recruiting from say, a developmental paeds clinic whose parents were not predisposed to blame the MMR he selected (recruited) from a group of which many had a high level of concern about MMR and with a lawsuit already in mind. This introduces massive recall issues in that parents already believed that the MMR may have been the issue and were thus more likely to remember the common vaccine side effects and the decline thereafter. They also often recalled normal development prior in spite of there being previously documented other developmental concerns by doctors prior to the MMR (in about 5 of the cases). One of the children had seen a geneticist and had a genetic abnormality.