Andrew Wakefield speaks out

[babanouche]

Sorry if this has been done to death. I've never been to this part of MN before. This is a really interesting clip, worth watching to the very end. My LO is due MMR soon and I have my doubts now.

Previous to watching this I was sure he was a bad scientist. He says the measles outbreak in wales may be due to the vaccine not working. He also throws doubt on the people who approved the triple vaccine & challenges certain professionals to a televised public debate. Very thought provoking stuff.

Out of interest do Merck have a manufacturing plant in the UK?

I know they have one in China and are based in the US but I wonder where the vaccines they sell to the UK, are made. Maybe they have a plant in the UK...

and you found an infection rate of under 1% in a population mostly vaccinated 1x worth mentioning as an argument for what, exactly, if not the excellent protection even one MMR offers?

Um, yes CatherinaJTV it does.

I wasn't saying otherwise. I wasn't commenting at all on the efficacy of the relevant vaccine, which in that case was indeed excellent.

I was simply answering a question about whether measles outbreaks have happened in highly vaccinated populations. That is all.

Catherina, as I've pointed out to you already - it's the egg free version that's from India and Rouvax is from France. Do you think everyone should question which country every vaccine they give their child on the NHS schedule comes from?

As the mother of two children with autism I would always advise that a parent vaccinates as all my children have been. The MMR didn't cause the autism, they both had autism from birth. Ds contracted whooping cough at six weeks before he could have been immunised because someone somewhere didn't immunise their child. I suppose some would question whether the whooping cough triggered the autism but ds was odd before then.
Dd at twelve months had an episode that was identical to what parents report where their child makes a high pitched whine (for four days in dd's case) and subsequently their child is changed forever and they no longer smile, talk, wave, clap. This happened to dd, but she hadn't had MMR because the gp advised that because of dd we wait until nearer two. She had MMR a week after her autism diagnosis on her second birthday.

BEachcomber I hope it wasn;t my question you were answering because I don;t think I asked any questions about measles epidemics in a vaccinated population. I was asking about how many of the children in swansea were vaccinated because if it turns out that none or a small handful had MMR and all the others were unvaccinated then it would resolve once and for all that the outbreak is due to the vaccine being ineffective.

I find it slightly that Wakefield is prepared to blame the outbreak on the efficacy of the vaccine when there is no data at all available on this yet. It doesn't shore up his credibility in my eyes.

14 kids among 1806 is not really an outbreak though. The Salzburg Steiner school (vaccination coverage 20%) got 172 (all unvaccinated) of 300 a couple of years ago - that is an outbreak.

Insanity, sorry to hear your dS caught whooping cough so young. I do want to point out that the reason for all the WC outbreaks is not to do with poor uptake of the vaccine but rather the fact that immunity to WC wears off after a few years so many older children and adults are no longer immune.

FYI catherina, the clinic in question offers rouvax and m-vac (for children with egg allergy) - a quick phonecall confirmed that. Maybe you can stop the scaremongering about long-distance imports now?

For those who are interested the Schwartz strain of measles that is in the single Rouvax vaccine is also used in GSK's MMR vaccine.

that is not what's on their website

For those who are interested the Schwartz strain of measles that is in the single Rouvax vaccine is also used in GSK's MMR vaccine.

if that were the case, they'd be definitely lying when they claim that their singles don't contain the strains used in the MMR. However, the MMR2, which is the current Merck vaccine contains the Edmonston strain:

www.merck.com/product/usa/pi_circulars/m/mmr_ii/mmr_ii_pi.pdf

^M-M-R II is a sterile lyophilized preparation of (1) ATTENUVAX* (Measles Virus Vaccine Live), a more attenuated line of measles virus, derived from Enders' attenuated Edmonston strain and propagated in
chick embryo cell culture; ^

Iirc they just said 'international suppliers' - I think France and India fall
Into that category. :)

They said they don't use the same strains as in the MMR that was in the Walker study.

which we have settled they cannot know, because the Walker abstract doesn't give that information and the data never saw the light of day.

Did we settle that. I thought you just assumed it. I don't think you confirmed whether the children in the study were all from the US which would suggest that they'd been vaccinated with the Merck vaccine.

In any case, as Beach said, good luck with your reporting. They don't seem to be offering 'dodgy' vaccines from 'dodgy' suppliers in any case so perhaps you should consider withdrawing that accusation?

I have not watched it but I have not vaccinated any of my 5 children with MMR (my dd's will have single vaccine rubella though) and I certainly wont be doing it in order to protect 'other children'.. My choice. All this fucking hysteria about measles is incredible.

thanks for the good luck wishes Bumbley - I'll see how I can work the word "dodgy" into my complain to the ASA and will certainly not take back things I did not say...

Beachcomber you are indefatigable and you have my heartfelt applause.

I certainly wont be doing it in order to protect 'other children'.

really? perhaps we should all fiddle our taxes, sorry, use tax minimisation schemes and maybe we should all cancel our charitable donations, after all, if we are all looking after our own and screwing everyone else.....

is that really the world you want?

Oh that's right - it was the other thread where you called the French and Indian suppliers dodgy... :)

I agree Pansy. It's mad scaremongering. I wouldn't be surprised if one was more likely to die from flu than measles. I had it as a kid as did all my mates and family. No-one was scared of it in the 70s. All four of my kids had it at more or less the same time a couple of years back.

The worst thing for me about my informed choice not to expose my children to the jab has been the righteous fury of other parents who are almost evangelistic despite clearly having done little to inform themselves.

I normally keep off these threads because people get quite scarily vitriolic.

That's the point, Spider. We don't see measles anymore so have no idea how to deal with it.
If my child had measles, I could hardly go to my neighbours for advice because they wouldn't have nursed a child through it.
Me? I'd give vitamins A and C, keep the child warm and sling out the Calpol.

Nothing to do with Wakefield, but some of you may be interested in the following article:

www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2011/10/20/measles-quebec-vaccine-schedule.html

Some quotes from the full article:
"Measles cases have surged in parts of Canada and the United States this year [2011] , with cases among unvaccinated children and teens driving the high numbers. A still smoldering outbreak of measles in Quebec is the largest in the Americas in over a decade.

An investigation into an outbreak in a high school in a town that was heavily hit by the virus found that about half of the cases were in teens who had received the recommended two doses of vaccine in childhood ? in other words, teens whom authorities would have expected to have been protected from the measles virus.

It's generally assumed that the measles vaccine, when given in a two-dose schedule in early childhood, should protect against measles infection about 99 per cent of the time. So the discovery that 52 of the 98 teens who caught measles were fully vaccinated came as a shock to the researchers who conducted the investigation."

It goes on to suggest the problem was the timing of the vaccinations (different in Canada to the UK). However, another possibility - surely one worth investigating further - is that it might be due to declining efficacy of the vaccine.

Ah, so we'll need a third MMR. Then a fourth......

Fossilmum - the attack rate in fully vaccinated was 4.8% vs over 80% in unvaccinated pupils. Attack rate was 2% in students vaccinated for the first time at 15 months, so over 40 times lower than the unvaccinated students.

Spidermama - there were 44 measles deaths in 1970, 39 acute deaths and 5 from SSPE.

It isn't just death though is it? I looked after a teenager in 80's who had caught measles as a child and whose brain was damaged I think as a result of measles related meningitis (sorry don;t know the medical terms).