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 To the extent that that ProQuad vaccine had to be withdrawn.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 Proquad has not been withdrawn.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.

Coorang,
You have an excellent point. Measles rates also fell in a manner which coincided with Puppet on a String winning Eurovision and a later UK entry coming second, I believe (the latter actually being more effective, probably due to our British love of a plucky loser).
Cheers.

You can think whatever you wish, Magdalen.

Oh dear, we are back to the basis of science.

I do trust science - but not science being funded by lobby groups and done by institutions withholding data and ignoring criticism.

I don't understand how you get from 'I have grounds to believe pharmaceutical groups are less than honest' to 'everything pharma says is the diametrical opposite of the truth'. If a Liverpool supporter tells you Liverpool are better than Everton, do you automatically conclude Everton are better?

I can see why you doubt if vaccinations are as good as is said, but how do you arrive at the conclusion that they don't work at all. And how come you can work out that pharma has an agenda without being able to see that the web sites you link to are themselves massively partisan. You appear to be selectively myopic.

JoTheHot, sure you don't understand, it is obvious.

But you have to consider that everybody is "selectively myopic". Being human, there is no other approach to reality than looking at the world through your own eyes.

Big pharma can be dangerous and nasty ( see Ben Goldacre recent book as an example), but you can't deny the role of vaccines in reducing diseases spread by viruses. Big pharma don't make huge money fro vaccines and the diseases are virtually wipe out, they would be much more interested now in spreading Myths if they could about single cpvacccines being safer because they'd earn more money that way.

JoTheHot - I do arrive at the conclusion that vaccinations don't work at all - because I look at nature and human beings not just on a physical level but also on an energy level.

The effect of vaccination on that level has never ever been taken into consideration by pharmaceutical companies at all - nor are most of the parents aware of it.

Coorong - "Big pharma don't make huge money from vaccines"

Is that a serious statement?

yes

See page 24 www.gsk.com/content/dam/gsk/globals/documents/pdf/Investors/quarterly-results/2013/Q1-2013-results-announcement.pdf

compare it to page 16

rosi

I do arrive at the conclusion that vaccinations don't work at all

Did I miss your explanation of how smallpox was wiped out?

PigletJohn, you did and you didn't. If you follow my earlier comments it should become clear to you.

As far as I can make out you refuse to accept the one evidence-based expanation and have no sensible one of your own.

PigletJohn, if you knew more about vaccine's effect on an energy level you would know that profits out of vaccines are much higher than the profits made from vaccine sales as you have to add profits made from medication used for long-term chronic diseases.

I think you talk pure nonsense.

PigletJohn - sorry, but it is not evidence-based. It is an assumption.

But this whole discussion seems a bit far away from Wakefield.

vaccine's effect on an energy level

I see the thread has moved on slightly but I would like to bring us back to the subject of the 5000 litigants in the US who became the Autism Omnibus.

Coorong makes the point that pharma doesn't make 'huge' money out of vaccines. Well, it depends what you mean by 'huge' but certainly vaccines are a multi million dollar business and it would be disingenuous to make out that pharma produces vaccines through altruism. They don't - they develop and produce vaccines to make money.

And what pharma (and public health officials) are most afraid of when it comes to vaccines, is litigation.

Litigation is bad for business because big sums of compensation have to be paid out and litigation is bad for the vaccine programme because it tarnishes its image.

And that means that vaccine litigation is adversarial and that it has two 'sides' both trying to win. And that is wrong from an ethical and social responsibility point of view. Children thought to have been damaged by a vaccine shouldn't have to take on big pharma and the government in a fight. Both pharma and the government are extremely experienced in fighting litigation and they have endless funds and they know all the dirty tricks. A child and their family shouldn't have to take that on.

Vaccine Court in the US where the Autism Omnibus was to be heard is supposedly not adversarial and the family should only have to prove 'beyond reasonable doubt' that the vaccine damaged their child. In addition the court of appeal states that 'close calls regarding causation are resolved in favor of injured claimants'. Which is they way it should be - better to compensate a borderline case than to fail in our duty, as a society, to look after the unfortunate who are the fall out of a public health programme known to carry a degree of risk.

Families are not expected to produce water tight scientific evidence thankfully, as given the nature of both vaccines and the human body, and our lapses of knowledge about both, to do so would be impossible.

Instead they are asked:

to show by preponderant evidence that the vaccination brought about her injury by providing: (1) a medical theory causally connecting the vaccination and the injury; (2) a logical sequence of cause and effect showing that the vaccination was the reason for the injury; and (3) a showing of a proximate temporal relationship between vaccination and injury.

The appeal court states that it is a field bereft of complete and direct proof of how vaccines affect the human body and that to require identification and proof of specific biological mechanisms would be inconsistent with the purposes and nature of the vaccine compensation program.

So far so good. So far so humane.

Except that in reality Vaccine Court doesn't work like that and the government and pharma have fought tooth and nail for children not to win their cases and families are held to an unattainable standard of biological evidence. The respondents have funds, a team of lawyers and expert witnesses at their disposal whilst the families have no funds and their lawyers and expert witnesses must be paid for. That is the reality of Vaccine Court.

That is nonsense, Beachcomber - all costs are obviously reimbursed by the court - all reimbursement claims can be seen online. That was one major motivation of the legal firms to push the issue in the first case.

Beachcomber,
very little in science is completely understood. it's merely about testing ideas with observations. Electrical engineers and physicists are completely at a loss to explain electricity (in terms of the movement of electrons) however, we can still use it.

Very little of medicine is truly understood, scientists observe correlations (e.g. jenner and cowpox). Same with just about every other drug.

Now, you could go on to say if we don't understand it, we shouldn't use it, but that would mean rejecting loads of different medicines - including anaethetics and pain relief. Now I don't know about you, but next time I have an operation, or a filling, I'd like to know there is pain relief available.

"field bereft of complete and direct proof of how vaccines affect the human body"

i mean that statement could apply to just about any drug

CatherinaJTV and Coorong - this is complete nonsense! It sounds too stupid to follow the conversation any longer.

If you want to know how Vaccine Court works read this written in the LA Times.

In the case of Dustin Barton, the government fought so long that the Albuquerque boy did not live to see the resolution of his claim.

As an infant, he had suffered seizures and brain damage after a DPT shot. But Dustin had a congenital neurological condition, known as periventricular leukomalacia, that the government blamed for his injuries.

His mother, Lori Barton, filed the claim in November 1991. The case dragged on for years. Barton told friends and family that she suspected the government was waiting for Dustin to die - noting that it would be cheaper for the program to pay the death benefit of $250,000 than to buy an annuity to cover lifetime care.

Dustin eventually did die of a seizure, nearly six years into the case, but the government continued to fight. Finally in May 2000, 8 1/2 years after the petition was filed, the family won a ruling that Dustin's injuries were vaccine-related.

Not ready to give up, Justice Department lawyers considered an appeal. Then they offered a deal: They would drop the challenge if the Bartons agreed the decision would remain unpublished. This meant it would not be sent to legal databases, such as Westlaw, where attorneys for other petitioners could see it.

Lori Barton, who has since died, described her reaction at a congressional hearing in December 2001: "To me, it was extortion." But Barton, who then was seriously ill and had borrowed thousands of dollars to pay expert witnesses, took the deal.

Vaccine Court was set up to protect manufacturers against the high numbers of DTP litigants. Now it is doing an excellent job of protecting them from thousands of MMR litigants.

CatherinaJTV Tue 30-Apr-13 16:53:04

That is nonsense, Beachcomber - all costs are obviously reimbursed by the court - all reimbursement claims can be seen online. That was one major motivation of the legal firms to push the issue in the first case.

They were reimbursed at the end. They had to fund the actual preparation and fighting of the case themselves and try to hold out to the end.

Lack of Equality between the Government's and Petitioners' Lawyers and Witnesses.

The lawyers for the Department of Justice, representing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), were privileged in these proceedings. This privilege was starkest in financial terms. The government lawyers work on salary and have almost unlimited budgets for expert witnesses and trial preparation. By contrast, the court pays petitioner lawyers' fees but generally only after proceedings are over. So, petitioners' lawyers must fund all trial preparation for many years on their own and pay expert witnesses after the court reaches its decision, which is often years later. In the OAP, petitioners' lawyers and witnesses were not paid for their services for years whereas the government lawyers and witnesses were. The financial playing field has a steep tilt in the government's favor.

Petitioners often borrow huge sums of money and legal teams and expert witnesses can wait years before they are paid in full.

Dustin Barton's case is published:

www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/lori-barton-parent-and-next-friend-dustin-l-barton-v-secretary-health-and-human-services-911594v