to think that there is a witch hunt against Andrew Wakefield?

[MagalyZz]

I just can't believe that they're still gunning for this guy!?

Whatever you make of his research, it WAS his research and he found what he found and he should be allowed to "suggest a link"

I have a child on the spectrum who had the MMR and I do not think the MMR had anything to do with it, but I do believe Dr Wakefield that a tiny percentage of people do react very badly to this vaccine.

Leave the guy alone ffs!!

Does anyone know why the hospital at the centre of the supposed research paid out £500,000 in compensation after legal action by the parents of a child left nearly dead and now brain damaged ? Could the answer be here ?

www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-500611/500-000-boy-left-fighting-life-used-MMR-guinea-pig.html

The landmark and conclusive ruling of the Autism Omnibus hearings in the US - Cedillo was that there was no link between vaccines and autism. But if you have no faith in or interest in its judgements, why follow them at all?

ps I am not a Daily Mail fan but the facts are still the facts or surely a certain someone would have sued them by now...

Neither the case nor the judgement suggests that any of the 3 doctors performed the surgery. The case was attempting to resolve whether the surgery should have happened at all.

leonie
As a paed s nurse of 20+ yrs experience,I have rarely seen a child sedated for a lumbar puncture,and if they were then the sedation itself would have risks attatched.
Most childen that undergo them are very ill,so are 'held' in position by nursing staff.

The Daily Mail story about Jack Piper was rather misleading though wasn't it cyberseraphim?

Dr Wakefield published a press release at the time from Thoughtful House in which he said the following;

"I was saddened by the story of Jack Piper in today?s Mail on Sunday, a national UK newspaper. Although I personally never had any dealings with Jack, nor any responsibility for or role in his care, I am aware of the fact that he suffered both a perforation during colonoscopy and a difficult post-operative recovery. Jack?s care was negligent and this fact was admitted by the Royal Free Hospital. Extraordinarily, the consultant paediatric gastroenterologist responsible for performing the colonoscopy (not Dr. Simon Murch) left the procedure in the hands of an inexperienced junior doctor while he went off to perform a similar procedure in a private hospital. Strangely, this fact finds no mention in the article. While perforation is a rare but recognised complication of colonoscopy, in this instance its occurrence was inexcusable, negligent, and the basis for Jack?s settlement.

Sadly and inaccurately, Jack?s story portrays him as a victim of ?MMR experimentation? and a picture of me accompanies the story. I am informed that Jack was assessed by Dr. Murch at his parent?s request, on the basis of his unexplained bowel symptoms. Dr. Murch clearly considered a colonoscopy to be clinically indicated. I had no role in any of these decisions, but have no reason to doubt Dr. Murch?s expert judgment.

The case was settled on the basis of clinical negligence. The issues of experimentation and lack of informed consent were not tested in court, nor should they have been since they have no merit. But what a perfect opportunity to weave another lie into the gossamer of this tragic tale.

Andrew Wakefield ?

If you read the transcripts of the Cedillo case it seems extraordinary that the court made the decision they did (especially in light of the Poling concession).

Parents cannot give lawful consent to procedures that are not clinically indicated in the first place - but as the above case shows, parents can be led to genuinely believe a procedure is necessary so no one is blaming the parents.

Why hasn't Andy sued then ? He's never been slow to do so before - never proceeded or succeeded - but still he usually likes to get things going?

If the Cedillo case is so unconvincing to you, why look to US cases at all?

What happened to poor Jack Piper was that a junior doctor ballsed up a procedure whilst the senior doctor who should have been performing the procedure was off doing lucrative private work.

Making out that Dr Wakefield is somehow to blame for this negligence is really scrapping the barrel. (But par the course in the systematic trashing of this man's reputation - just goes to show how much is at stake heh?).

What is at stake BTW is that the government gave indemnity to the MMR manufacturers after having to withdraw two of the early versions of the vaccine as they were shown to be highly reactive and cause meningitis. Oops.

Yes I agree in that I feel sorry for the junior doctor as things go wrong in all professions and all surgery is dangerous which is why it needs to be limited to necessary procedures.

But that the procedure was necessary was not even tested in court was it?

This was a clear case of medical negligence in the way the procedure was carried out. Why try to pretend it was anything else?

Anyway as was clearly shown in the GMC case, the fact that Dr Wakefield received money for working as an expert witness was known to the Lancet well before the publication of the case series. Dr Wakefield was not actually required to make this disclosure as the expert witness fees were not in conflict with the Lancet publication anyway.

The conflict thing rather fell apart when examined due to the fact that a)there was no conflict under the rules of the day and b)the Lancet was aware of Wakefield's expert work and fees anyway.

Actually the video I linked to has a section on this which is good value. What Horton was playing at by claiming he didn't know about the expert witness work despite having had lengthy correspondence about it with Wakefield I just don't know. Maybe he thought most people wouldn't bother to find out the facts for themselves and that he would get away with his false testimony - it would appear that he was right on that account.

The guy they wanted to oversee the GMC trial originally had an even bigger conflict of interest - what a farking charade.

"Prof Denis McDevitt, a clinical pharmacologist, once sat on the government
advisory committee that looked at adverse reactions to vaccinations and
immunisations and considered issues of MMR safety. He attended meetings
that discussed warnings from other countries about an early form of the
triple jab, using the Urabe strain of mumps virus, which caused
encephalitis and meningitis.......Some of the 12 children whose medical history featured in the controversial
1998 Lancet paper, drawn up by Dr Wakefield and his colleagues and which
suggested a possible link between the jab and bowel disease and regressive
autism, had received the Urabe-strain vaccine - as indeed had some of those
children in the high court litigation with manufacturers."

So a guy who played a role in deciding that a vaccine with a bad safety record would be used on British children was chosen years later to sit in judgement on the doctors who published a study suggesting a potential safety problem with the vaccine in question (a vaccine that had to be withdrawn in several countries).

And people swallow this shit?

Silverfrog: "And please do try to pick holes in the rest of my post too."

OK. You said "If you read the judgement it seems to centre around the way children were recruited into the research study. So in some cases parents contacted him directly after hearing about him. That doesn't seem particularly unethical to me."

You seem to have spectacularly missed the point regarding ethical approval.

In medicine, you are not allowed to have a hunch, get some patients with interesting symptoms and poke around inside them to see if you can find anything interesting. If you want to do medical research you have to:

1. Come up with a protocol detailing what it is you are investigating, the details of the types of patients you will be looking at (inclusion criteria) and the types of procedures you will carry out.

1. This protocol is passed to the Ethics Committee who will decide whether the study is reasonable, that any tests undertaken will be useful, at minimal risk for maximum benefit etc.

1. Once you have approval, you can start your investigation, according to the protocol, enrolling patients who meet the criteria laid out in the protocol.

What happened with Wakefield is that they came up with the protocol, put some children through the procedures detailed in the protocol for research purposes (as evidenced by correspondence surrounding the patients and the lack of specific clinical need for certain procedures), and only then got ethical approval for the research.
The Ethics Committee specifically said that any children investigated before 18th Dec 1996 were not to be included in the study (although they were) and the procedures that were carried out on them, that were clearly for research purposes (they followed the protocol) were done outside of a proper study, and therefore without ethical approval.
Also, children were enrolled into the study who didn't meet the specific inclusion criteria detailed within the protocol (type of vaccination), which you can't do!

"Ten years ago they were meeting standards laid down this year. And yet they were supposedly acting unethically. Maybe someone could explain it to me. "

You can't backdate ethical approval for procedures. You can't cut someone open, have a rummage around out of interest, then find out they've got cancer and try to justify the cutting open and rummaging by saying 'well, ten years later that's actually how they diagnose cancer'.

"Wakefield says btw that colonscopies were covered under a 1986 project ethics approval"

So if the colonoscopies were done for a particular piece of research, they'd have the appropriate paperwork, signed consent forms for the project...what? oh.

Clearly they were experimenting on children, running invasive tests and procedures without following the standards laid out to make the research ethical and conform to good medical practice. It doesn't matter what they found out as a result of it, they still did wrong.

tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html

Anyone who is a member of the scientific community has a duty to follow certain protocols when releasing research findings to the general public. It is really not appropriate to brainstorm, and he should have known better.

Yes, he seems to have a rather dry sense of humour. Did you know he has released a book about all this? Should make for very interesting reading as he certainly doesn't mince his words.

Am shocked at the treatment of Professor Walker Smith by the GMC and appalled at how the baying British public's attitude to these men. Accusing Walker Smith of experimentation is just stupid. He is one of the UK's most eminent and respected figures in his field. A truly noble figure for taking all this on at the end of a distinguished career. Shame on the GMC for treating him like this.

They have taken on the wrong man though in Wakefield I think - he knows he is right and he will not stop until he gets recognition for these damaged children.