Wakefield: Proquad claims. Liar or incompetent?

[noblegiraffe]

This just came up on another thread, and I thought it was worth wider publicity, given Wakefield's apparent continuing influence, and the current measles outbreak.

I was discussing whether 'vaccine overload' had any basis in science, or any evidence for it. (No, btw).

I was directed to the claim that giving a 4 in 1 jab against measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox (called the MMRV) doubled adverse reactions. I found an interview with Wakefield where he claimed this showed that giving extra vaccinations at the same time was dangerous. He said:

"If you just take for example, MMR and you add in the varicella vaccine, the chickenpox vaccine, MMRV as ProQuad what happens is you double the rate of convulsions as an adverse reaction. So just adding one and not 999,000 but just one extra vaccine in, you double the rate of an adverse, a potentially serious adverse reaction. To the extent that that ProQuad vaccine had to be withdrawn. So the notion that you could give a child a hundred thousand vaccine antigens on one day is utter nonsense. And what is extraordinary, what is telling I suppose is that no other immunologist or vaccinologist or any other person with any credible standing has stood behind Dr. Offit and said yes, you can go for it."

2 points need to be made

1. Proquad has not been withdrawn. It is still licensed for use. The advisory body in the US did amend their recommendation in light of the extra adverse reactions (4.3 extra febrile seizures per 10,000). ProQuad used to be their preferred injection for both initial and booster jab, now it is just recommended for the booster jab.
   www.merckvaccines.com/Products/ProQuad/Pages/recommendations

2. Wakefield suggests that it was giving an extra vaccine that caused the extra adverse events (vaccine overload), however the comparison of adverse events was not between the MMRV and the MMR (4 vaccines versus 3) but the MMRV versus the MMR plus the chickenpox vaccine given on the same day (4 versus 4). Nothing to do with an extra vaccine, and he is trying to use this to make a point which simply isn't valid.
   www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/ApprovedProducts/ucm123798.htm

Now Wakefield still has an agenda regarding spaced out single vaccines (as recent headlines show).
Was he lying when he made these easily researched incorrect claims about ProQuad, or was he simply too thick to correctly assess the information widely available?

Now if he wanted to discuss why there were more adverse events to the 4 in 1 versus the 3+1, he might have a point (I'm not sure they contain exactly the same vaccines) but he didn't. He made a completely false point, one which is proudly featured on an antivax website.

Please treat anything Wakefield says with the caution it deserves.

Magdalen, some people don't take the autism-vaccines-myth seriously, but others don't take the vaccine-success-myth seriously. People should be allowed to find their own understanding in life.

rosi7
Which "vaccine success myth" would that be?
Genuinely interested which specific one you have in mind, because I understand there are a few in circulation.
Cheers.

rosin,
Is it "vaccines didn't save us!"?
www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccines-didnt-save-us-intellectual-dishonesty-at-its-most-naked/
Or one of the others?
Cheers.

No specific one, magdalen - guess what - I mean the whole story.

Rosi,
But their are so many stories. Do you mean the eradication of small pox? The amazing reductions in incidence of polio?
Rather more tooically, the effect the introduction of the measles vaccine followed by the MMR had on rates of measles in the UK?
I mean, small pox caused about 300-500 million deaths in the 20th century, you don't see much of it about nowadays. As recently as 1967 the WHO estimates about 2 million people died.
What do you mean by the "whole story"?
Cheers.

The whole story, Magdalen, - the story telling us in so many words and in such a convincing way that vaccination is humanity's saviour.

Rosi - genuine question - what are your views in the smallpox vaccine?

rosi7,
Do you think people are still dying in their millions of small pox? Do you think the incidence of measles in the UK is at levels prior to vaccination?
The vaccine was introduced in 1967. In the decades 1948-1958 and 1959-68 measles cases were running at about 4 million a decade. The introduction of the single vaccine caused measles rates to fall from 4 million to just shy of 1.5 million in 1969-78 and again to 837,424 cases in 1979-1988. This is, however still 837,424 cases.
In 1988 the MMR was introduced, and what happened? The cases of measles plummeted from 837,424 in 1979-1988 to just 106,210 in 1989-1998, a fall of 87%. the measles deaths also fell from 140 to just 18. In the following decade measles cases fell again, to 29,694. Unfortunately the whole Wakefield debacle will make the figures for 2009-2018 interesting reading.

Which exactly is the story you prefer to believe?
Cheers.

CinnabarRed,
I stick with George Bernard Shaw:
"At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox."--George Bernard Shaw (August 9, 1944, the Irish Times )

Magdalen, I guess the story I prefer to believe is a different one than the one you prefer to believe.

he was wrong though

the result was, in fact, the extermination of smallpox

(being a playwright does not remove inability to comprehend)

That is what you believe, PigletJohn. I rather stick with Shaw's belief.

what? you sincerely believe that Smallpox has not been wiped out?

That's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact.

You are wrong, wrong, wrong.

Presumably the concept of herd immunity meant nothing to GBS.

PigletJohn,
Well, like Moynihan said:
"You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts."
I must admit that if you're going to throw all factual concerns to the winds and believe in anything that the ineffectuality of vaccines is a strange choice. Niche appeal, perhaps, but it sort of lacks grandeur...

Cheers.

PigletJohn, it's a matter of belief that vaccination was the cause that Smallpox has been wiped out.

Interesting viewpoint, Magdalen, - but doesn't mean anything.

rosi7,
That smallpox has been wiped out isn't a matter of belief. If you can demonstrate a single case of small pox in the last decade it would be eminently disprovable.
But there hasn't been one, so you can't.
Nor has one been diagnosed since 26th October 1977.
If it wasn't vaccination, then what on earth happened to this major killer?
Cheers.

Good question, Magdalen.

next week - are we really living on the outside of the round earth, or are MBT shoes the irrefutable proof that we are living on the inside of a hollow world?

rosi7,
I have an answer, how about you?
CatherinaJTV,
You're falling for the round earth story*, aren't you?
Cheers.
*It's not, it's an oblate spheroid ...

roughly round, compared to the flat earth theory ;)

I used to think IANAL stood for "I am really particular about details", but sadly it "only" means I am not a lawyer

It is a belief that vaccination was the cause for the eradication of some diseases. Nothing more than that.

Just because it happened after the introduction of vaccination does not mean that the one caused the other.

If most people believe it - fine with me.

Catherina,
I used to labour under a similar misapprehension..

Cheers.
PS I think rosi7 might be a very poor chatbot...

But there is another cause - small pox also reduced at the same time we apparently landed o the moon, and HIV arose almost the same time Halley's Comet reappeared (1985/86) .... I think we have overlooked the role of aliens and extra terrestrials in the spread of viruses.

Rosi7 you can never PROVE that vaccinations reduced incidence of small pox, but, you can compare epidemiology of vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, and what do you discover - measles remains high in the latter, but goes down in the former.

This same idea is the basis of all science.

No one knows how electrons actually behave in electrical circuits, however we observe the effect of electricity and draw conclusions. If you don't trust vaccinations, the you shouldn't trust any science - the food you eat (pasteurisation), the electricity you use (your phone, computer), the house you live in (Gravity - yikes - do you even trust that!)