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!!

Cyberseraphim the point of you linking to the Wakefield paper you are claiming is non science is that it might convince me that you have actually read it.

noblegiraffe, you are just blustering about the ethics, yet again.

Wakefield investigated gut issues in soem children. he did this inorder to treat those children, not as part of a research project. if you want to investigate gut issues, you usually need a colonoscopy at the very least.

he did not need ethical approval for this, just as, if you needed a colonoscopy, your doc would not seek ethical approval.

in wakefield's opinion (and the parents of the children's opinion too) there was clinical need to carry out these proceedures.

the gmc says there wasn't. there are denying that these children had gut issues. denying that watery stools, pinkish diorrhea (god, can never spell that!) and intense pain should be investigated, in fact. they think wakefield should have done as all the other docs who saw these children did, and just shrugged and said "oh yes. you often get gut issues with autism" and then sat back and done nothing.

once wakefield et al found a pattern, they applied for the ethics approval needed for a research study. this was granted, although the wording was a bit woolly. the gmc later had a field day with htis too, and ruled that wakefield had not followed proceedure on the basis of re-labelling a broad rnge of conditions (a fact that was then contradicted when the same witness who had said wakefield was wrong to include both dx's said himself there was no difference between the dx's)

the gmc ruled on technicalities alone. wakefield did not carry out unethical proceedures, nor did he experiment onchildren.

oh, x-posts, beachcomber

But everything that disproves Wakefield's theory is taken as proof in itself that people are lying about him because he has uncovered a murky conspiracy encompassing most of the world to cause autism.

Something that is utterly blatant bullshit about this apparent flouting of ethical standards is that only Wakefield, Murch and Walker Smith were hauled up before the GMC.

There was a whole team of doctors involved in both the clinical and research work.

Only those who refused to retract the interpretation of the Lancet paper which suggested a possible temporal link between the pathologies described and vaccination have been accused of gross misconduct (funnily enough).

Other doctors who participated in the research under exactly the same ethical approval are completely out of the picture. If this was about ethics all the doctors involved would have been examined by the GMC. Right?

Or are there different rules for the type of ethical approval one needs to have if one is going to pose inconvenient questions about the safety of a vaccine? I suspect that particular type of ethical approval doesn't exist in the eyes of the GMC.

And I repeat - do people really swallow this shit? Actually change that - why do people swallow this shit?

Cyberseraphim do you really find it so difficult to grasp the idea that discovering a problem with a routine medical procedure which has already been given to millions of people (most of them healthy children), of which the government is both responsible and liable for damage is going to make you unpopular.

There is no conspiracy here (as you seem so keen to make out I am trying to argue). What we have here is plain old fashioned arse covering.

The whole concept of vaccination is based on the concept of the greater good - what tilts the balance is when the collateral damage is considered to be too high. We know that vaccines maim and kill but we, as a society, accept that because they generally save more than they damage. It is hardly news that public health vaccination policy is based on the premise that a few kids are expendable in order to benefit the rest is it?

It is an unpalatable idea of course but that is the long and the short of it.

I was perfectly happy to selfishly vaccinate my kids secure in the idea that 'it would never happen to me' (and therefore logically must be happening to someone else). Except it did happen to us and just like the children Wakefield is treating we were told to kindly fuck off with our damaged child and stop being an inconvenience.

FYI wannabe I DID vaccinate my child with MMR as soon as she was 13mo - I don't say anywhere on here that I didn't
She's been vaccinated for everything going.

cyber you and I are outnumbered on this thread but I think we're in the majority generally, it's just most people (sensibly) vaccinate and don't bother with the politics. I should probs do the same, it can't be good for the blood pressure

Novicemama for the record, I did sensibly vaccinate. So did the parents of the children Wakefield is treating.

I haven't given my children MMR under the instructions of our very mainstream doctor who would rather mainline mercury than jab either of my kids again.

novicemama, I too sensibly vaccinated.

andnowhave a child with a damaged gut.

funnily enough, i declined jabs for dd2. and subsequent investigations threw up the possibility of mitochondrial dysfunction. boy am I glad I resisted (google hannah poling if you need ot find out why)

I really don't understand why, since you have stated that you understand that not all people can tolerate vaccinations,you find it so hard ot accept that wakefield wassaying the same thing.

cyber - please link to some research that disproves wakefield's hypothesis. oh, that's right. you can't. the only studies which "disprove" his work do not exist.

you are flipping between claiming his work canot be disproved because it is not science (andyou still haven't explained why you think that) to stating that anytime someone quotes somehting which disproves wakefield's hypothesis it is ignored. But you are not linking ot anything you have read which disproves this.

Claiming repeadtedly that whatever you link to will b dismissed without actually linking ot anything is starting to look like you don't have anything you could link to,tbh...

oh, and leonie - been there with the NT one lining up/sorting too. dd2 stands all the crayons up on the table first, in colour order through various shades etc.

Sorry to interrupt with a question kind of off topic but novicemama why did you vaccinate against a disease your dd already had?

oh yes, with you again there. dd2 has always been considered NT (skating a fine line imo)

she is now 3, and having issues. but they are, of course, the exact oposite of dd1 (who neverlined stuff up/sorted stuff out)

interestingly, she IS similar to dd1 in many ways - the main difference between them being language (dd1 severely delayed and disordered, dd2 advanced).

I wonder how much of the lining/sorting is coming from being able ot make so much more snese of the world to begin with

cyber, sorry, typo in my post to you - meant to say "the only studies which "disprove" wakefield's hypothesis didn't actually test it in the first place" - was distracted by the dds chatting away over the monitor...

But if research as in depth and as wide scale as was done in the Cedillo case can be dismissed as "Oh i don't know why they said that' What else can be said ?

Which of the many pieces of research which disprove Wakefield do you think is honest and genuine and not motivated by a 'witch hunt' ?

cyber, really, please do link to a study which, having actually tested wakefield's hypothesis, disproves it.

there areplenty of studies which claim to ahve disproved it, but since they are not researching the same thing, they cannot actually disprove it.

like the study novicemama linked ot earlier. it didn't study the right group of children (well, actually, one of htem was in the right group, but then, once that was discovered, never mentioned again ), so it cannot claim to have disproved the theory, as it didn't actually examine the theory

Well I put a link in earlier

But since it gives chapter and verse against Wakefield there was no response except 'don't know why they said that' and ' it proves there is a witch hunt'

YANBU.

YANBU.

He might have acted in a slightly unprofessional way, but IMO he's not been unethical. He tried to help his patients.

Cyber you linked to 28 pages of testimony in one of the most controversial cases in US medical history which can be summarised thus;

epidemiology has failed to detect a link between MMR and autism and doctors disagree over whether Michelle Cedillo had a bowel condition or was just a picky eater because she was autistic.

Well we know that epidemiology is about as useful as a chocolate teapot here and we know that there are autistic children who have had parts of their bowel removed and who have colostomy bags that we are supposed to believe have nothing more wrong with them than being picky eaters.

There is a bit in the middle which claims that the O'Leary lab's detection of measles in Michelle's gut must be flawed because the witness for the defence says so. We now know that O'Leary's methods have been entirely consistent and reliable with other labs as part of the Hornig study so I guess we can ignore that bit. He does hedge his bets a bit by claiming that even if Michelle does have measles in her gut that is irrelevant, but I lost interest in the whole unscientific and irrelevant dinosaur/fossil analogy so kinda skimmed that bit. Perhaps I missed something vital there but that just sounded like so much made up bullshit to me. Actually I think he lost me when he cited the Fombonne and Honda epidemiological studies as reasons to believe that Michelle's autism and bowel health could not be related to her vaccination.

Enlightening though this particular piece of testimony is in terms of one expert's opinion, I'm not sure why you think it sheds any light on Wakefield's clinical findings in the guts of autistic children.

I'm glad you are watching the conference presentations Leonie. I particularly like the bit where Wakefield says that he has not revealed the identity of the 'whistleblower' - yet. Gives a bit of an insight into the steely determination of this man.