Back specifically to answer the Generation Rescue point on the legal decisions. (And to point out that Beachcomber is fully aware my own brother is on the autistic spectrum, and my mother treated disgracefully by the medical profession when first raising concerns, hence my resentment of her constant insinuations that I don't give a monkeys about parents of kids with special needs, or that she is somehow more respectful of people like my own mother than I am. It's also distinctly odd to claim that I am in some way unprepared to consider the science, when my baby son is 8 months old and due to get the MMR in 5 months time - with him being firmly in the small subset at risk, if it exists. Hence my refusal to respond to her - a real and guaranteed exercise in futility, if ever there was one, especially as she is yet to link to any real science, preferring to link to misinterpretations of that science - one of her real gems was by a publication that also claims colonic irrigation is an appropriate alternative to vaccination. Genius at work. I may also point out that my familiarity with the minutiae of Halvorsen's website, more it appears than people following his advice, does not support the notion that I don't read or evaluate the opinions of those opposed to the MMR.)
Generation Rescue headline that the courts have found that several children were rendered autistic by vaccination. But when reading closely, they actually state that the courts "won't admit" that those children are autistic, despite their injuries having autistic features. So the courts have not, in fact, said that autism results from vaccination, in any cases other than the Hannah Poling one, when the courts agreed a condition with autistic features was triggered by a high fever due to her underlying mitochondrial disorder. Not in any way a risk for most children - and a high fever is guaranteed with measles, which is why parents of kids with her condition vaccinate on medical advice.
What has happened is that in some cases, children who've been vaccinated have developed encephalits, and some of them were so unwell they have been brain damaged - which can leave injuries similar to ASD. Now, it's in one sense totally irrelevant whether or not the damage is technically an ASD or isn't, under any medical definition. The parents have damaged children, with hugely curtailed life chances, who will never be able to reach their full potential and who will need various levels of parental care on a permanent basis. That's a horrible outcome by any definition. But it's actually, in purely medical terms, more complicated than that. Because the CDC has a page on this exact situation, and they discuss the fact that nobody actually knows if the vaccination caused the encephalitis, because it's too rare. 1 in a million vaccinated kids, iirc. They just don't know if the encephalitis would have happened anyway, or if it was a direct result of vaccination. The US system means that any possibility the damage was caused by vaccination is sufficient to find in favour of that child, and obviously that's right - the usual standard, that you have to prove causation, is totally unacceptable with a compulsory governmental vaccination schedule. But there's one other fact. Measles definitely (not potentially) causes encephalitis, with a 1 in a thousand ratio. So damage caused by encephalitis is a thousand times more likely in a child with measles than a child with vaccination, even if it is the vaccination that's at fault - something nobody knows.
The remaining legitimate worry is that of the small subset hypothesis - whether or not a small subset of children, probably with ASD relatives, are at risk of regressive autism after the MMR. The thing is, the only evidence is parents who've had that experience. There's nothing more than a suggestion. I don't, actually, buy that all of them had kids who were already ASD and they didn't face it until they were forced to, and then blamed the MMR. In my own experience, my father insisted in the teeth of much evidence that there was nothing wrong with my brother, for a very long time, so I'm sure there are a lot of parents that fit that category, yes. But I also saw my mother try to get my brother help and support from a very young age, and for a long time she was told she was just a neurotic middle class mother, he wasn't being properly stimulated and disciplined, and that divorce affected boys especially badly and he'd be fine when she remarried. She knew there was something wrong, and his behaviour wasn't normal, but she wasn't believed - they even refused to believe he was deaf, because he lip-read in tests set up badly enough to make that possible, and claimed his consequently uneven results were him trying it on. My brother is deaf, has Aspergers, is dyspraxic and dyslexic. So yes, I believe some parents are bang on correct when they say their developmentally normal, engaged, early-speaking child regressed. What I don't buy, really, is that that is caused by the MMR. I'm certain some regress around that time, I'm certain those parents' observations are correct, but I know from something else how desperate it is to want an explanation. Dad was in the Australian infantry, and he fought in Vietnam. He got a dose of Agent Orange, which definitely does cause birth defects in affected offspring, but not ASD. And yet there are quite a few campaigning groups who are insisting that ASD kids born to veterans are damaged by that. Their sincerity is total, but sincerity alone doesn't make someone right, and nor does having a disabled child make an untrained and unqualified person better placed to understand and present the science than someone with decades of training and research behind them. It makes them an expert on their child, not epidemiology, or scientific methodology in general.
Finally, it doesn't actually matter whether or not Wakefield is a saint or a fraud. He could have been totally genuine and his concern absolutely laudable. The fact remains that his research involved just 12 kids, all with health problems, so was observational and not in any way more than that - he himself said at the time it simply posed questions that needed more careful research, and the Cochrane report found that 31 studies, several of which were enormous in scale, were well designed and supported there being no link between the MMR and vaccination.
My hope is that when the final research on any subset is in, it'll close the door finally on the MMR dispute and people can turn all the research fire-power into finding what is happening with ASD children and why, and what can be done to improve life chances for them, and make things easier on their parents. I think the MMR is a blind alley, and the fact that so much of the arguments are so easily dealt with (no mercury in the MMR, higher rates of ASD in children who didn't get it in Denmark, higher rates when it was withdrawn in Japan, the Amish fallacy, mitochondrial disorder being a risk factor for fevers and thus more dangerous to affected kids who don't get the MMR, encephalitis being a known complication of measles but not definitely of the MMR,) does to me indicate that for the most part there are no better arguments. Or they'd be being used. The World Health Organisation describes the MMR as extremely safe. Every public health body in the world supports the use of the MMR, and very strongly. the overwhelming majority of scientists and doctors regard it as safe. My son will get it, because I think the risk, even in the small subset theory, is unproven and small, whereas the risk to him from measles and mumps and other people's babies from rubella is real and definite. I know some people say "well, it can't have been that bad, we all survived!" yet the other night, in paed A&E with my son as he was diagnosed with swine flu, the registrar said that 50,000 people die every year in the UK from flu - but it isn't something we can effectively vaccinate against, it isn't something we can get rid of, so people just live with that risk quite cheerfully and don't regard the flu as a big deal. You might as well say cars aren't dangerous, we all survived without car seats, as some grandparents do. For the vast majority, no, not dangerous. But that's little comfort to those with kids who were killed or damaged by the proven measles risks. The MMR is safe if we are to believe all the most recent and most reputable science, and all the world's public health organisations - and if we don't believe that, then what exactly are we basing our beliefs on?
All vaccinations carry small levels of risk, and some kids are contraindicated from getting them as a result - kids with allergies, for example. But the tiny, and in many cases theoretical and unproven, risks are minute compared to the statistical risks of the diseases they prevent. Several years ago, it was reported that some contraceptive pills increased the risks of thrombosis, and a lot of people abruptly stopped taking them. A lot got pregnant - and pregnancy carries a proven and hugely increased risk of... thrombosis. So they swapped a small risk for a far multiply higher one. I suppose I just have difficulty understanding why people would be so frightened of a risk without evidence, which even if correct would affect very few, that they opt for a proven and far higher risk instead. Especially when some children have compromised immune systems so can't be vaccinated, and rely on high vaccination levels amongst the healthy to protect them from lethal disease.
I'm now going to hide this thread, because there's never any point. People believe what they want, and all that happens here is fighting.