What “ended the UK MMR litigation” was an acknowledgement by the claimants QC’s that as things stood, they couldn’t bring a case to show a causal link between the MMR and ASD and the Legal Services Commission removed funding. Why do you and many others like you find it difficult to accept that ‘no case’ means ‘no cash’? How could any appeal judge irrespective of his family connections, order the LSC to reinstate funding for the child litigants when their own lawyers were standing there saying that they couldn’t make a case for them?. That’s just crazy.

What really ended the MMR litigation was the fact that despite the millions invested in the case by the LSC,the experts chosen by the childrens own lawyers could not provide the goods to support a claim that the MMR caused ASD, on their behalf.

The claims were dependant on individual experts, including Dr Wakefield, being able to provide research, evidence and sound argument to prove a causal link between the MMR vaccine and the childrens conditions. Clearly they could not do that since the legal team were forced to admit they had no case to bring and that’s what ended the MMR litigation.

With Dr Wakefield and many of his followers now trumpeting the fact that he never said there was a link between the MMR and autism,it’s questionable what possible merit there was in him being an expert witness for these children in the first place.He was clearly never going to implicate the MMR vaccine as causing autism in his expert reports. The claims were entirely dependant on experts being able to do just that, so it’s little wonder the litigation collapsed and the children lost out big time.

You still don’t get it. You have demanded a level and quality of debate that has been entirely absent from all of your posts. You have yet again provided us with a mish-mash post with zero substantiation and zero references, yet plenty of insults.

You have been asked – repeatedly, by several people – to put your money where you mouth is and meet your own imposed standards of debate. You have failed yourself at every turn, yet still demand we answer your issues, even though you have failed to substantiate them at all.

You have failed to address any of the concerns with the opening post being on a month old thread and woefully off topic, you have failed to addresss any concerns regarding your habit of freely casting about insults and accusations, and you have failed to address any of the concerns regarding your inability to meet your own standards of debate.

Just because you think you have a point, that doesn’t make it our responsibility to prove you wrong. Substantiating your claims is your responsiblity.

You have failed in that. You have no right to demand of others what you have failed – despite direct repeated requests that are derived from your own demands – to provide.

You will provide at least ‘2 pieces of evidence’ from peer reviewed sources for each and every one of your claims in your next few posts. No other response will be acknowledged. Failure will be pointed out.

Only one of you attempted to test the waters with a blatantly manipulated study from Thompson.

Told you so. All hat, no cattle. He thinks using the adjective “manipulated” is an argument worth considering.

Michael, I don’t recall giving you permission to speak for my autistic child.

That said, I will state that from my point of view, it is the vaccine-autism groups that have wasted HUGE amounts of time and HUGE amounts of money and HUGE quantities of well being for autism families.

If you want to go places and question the diagnoses of adult autistics, find other blogs. There are plenty that will welcome you.

There is no “regressive type” of autism. Regression appears to be a continuum—with some children undergoing much larger amounts of regression than others. And, yet, when they watch baby sibs closely, they find much less regression than when they rely on parent reports. Why is that, do you suppose?

If you want to make statements like “Asperger’s is not autism” be advised that it only demonstrates your own ignorance.

If you have a good argument for how vaccines cause autism, please contact the Petitioner’s Steering Committee. They spent millions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money and put together the best cases they could—and failed.

Where’s your science, where’s your response to a toxin free vaccine schedule, where’s your comment on the toxins we are introducing into our pharmaceuticals and food (toxins, some of which, are known to cause autoimmune disease when INGESTED), where’s your 2 pieces of evidence?

Instead of addressing any of those issues you simply attack me repeatedly, deflecting from your apparent inability to address the ideas or issues I have raised/

That you claim there is a scientific consensus is evidence of the color of your blinders (Assuming, by consensus, you mean that vaccines do not cause autism, though you haven’t clarified)

Without addressing anyone in particular the minions that I spoke of have come forward, without science, without compassion, without evidence, without empathy, without logic, without reason.

I did challenge the minions to post evidence that vaccines are safe and not the cause of autism. You all have miserably failed in that simple task. Only one of you attempted to test the waters with a blatantly manipulated study from Thompson. What next folks Fombonne or Madsen. If you want to see a prime example of why conflicted/industry-funded science cannot be used as you folks portray just read Walboomers re-study of cervical cancer samples where he concludes that virtually all cervical cancer contains traces of HPV. This corrupted piece of garbage is now used as the primary reason to vaccinate with gardasil or cervarix

Regarding Laury’s defense of statistics I wonder if it defends Walboomers, Bosch, Fombonne and Madsen?

You folks ever heard of paroxetine? Glaxo Smith Kline frudulently got that approved for use in kids using a ghost written clinical study and paying a prominent researcher to sign off on it. Merck used the same technique promoting Vioxx and tampered with data in both vioxx and pargluva studies. Peer review did not stop Vioxx from wading through loyal Merck customers creating a swath of 180,000 casualties (up to 60,000 dead). Merck, in spite of numerous peer reviews exposing the deaths and injuries Merck executives knew were being caused, managed to get Vioxx approved for use in children. They withdrew it one month later, not because of their own study showing cardiac risks, but because David Graham (Associate director of Drug Safety at the FDA) went against his superiors wishes and published his own exposee of the murders Merck committed.

Merck and Glaxo make over 25 vaccines between them, most pediatric. Merck is being exposed in Australian litigation. They and over 20 other pharmaceutical companies paid Elsevier to produce fake journals. 9 were published, including one by Merck promoting Vioxx among other of its drugs. Elsevier refused to voluntarily give out the other pharmaceutical companies’ names but sropped publication of those 8 other journals and stopped work on 13 more that were in the planning stages. Glaxo now has James Murdoch on its board. He controls a variety of media companies including The Sunday Times. You folks know about the Sunday Times, where Brian Deer works. It’s now called The Sunday Glaxo. Of course you folks are smart enough to know where I am going. Now we have come back to Dr Wakefield. Murdoch was appointed to the Glaxo board during the GMC actions against Dr Wakefield as part of the Corporate Responsibility Committee charged with “the regular review of external issues that might have the potential for serious impact upon the group’s business and reputation” he is paid £75,000 per annum for his participation. Glaxo has more connections. The judge who made the decision which effectively ended the UK MMR litigation, Judge Nigel Davis, is the brother of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) board director Sir Crispin Davis.

Now you good folks here want to ignore the individuals that run these two irresponsible companies that bribe, murder, fraudulently publish, manipulate data and people, and aid in malicious and false prosecution and allow them to do their own clinical studies of over 25 vaccines most of which will be injected into our children. You want this to continue despite the rise in autism that is in lock-step with the rise in vaccination load in these children?

You folks don’t merely have blinders on, you know you are wrong to support the pharmaceutical companies like you do. No one would do that without some sort of compensation. Of course your denials would be there is you were paid or if you weren’t paid. We just have to take your word for that, don’t we? As we have to take your word that you have family members that are autistic, yet you offer no real hope or evidence that anything you support will help explain, stop or help autistics and their families.

By the way for those of posting here and claim to be autistic… Asperger’s is not autism… Not yet anyway. It will be combined into autism in the DSM-V, a classification that most Aspies are fighting. We don’t have autism, regardless of any label the DSM may try to impose. That reclassification appears to be designed to water down the definitiveness of regressive autism and lend more weight to a genetic cause. There was some initial discussion of a higher importance put on to the regressive type of autism coming out of the February 08 conference, but that has now vanished

you folks go on fooling most people and patting yourselves on theback. there’s some of us that see right through you

I did. I pointed out that the quality of your posts is no where near the quality you demand in the responses. Far from delivering science and facts, you have merely repeated your opinions. This is so far removed from what you demand of us that it is no longer big, hard or clever. You may as well just spam some urls and be done with it, for you aren’t adding anything of value to this conversation (you have yet to explain why you decided to resurrect a month old thread with a off topic post that appears to serve no purpose other than for you to shout your opinion – I guess online social etiquette only applies to other people huh?).

I have asked you to live up to your own standards and tell us – with appropriate references – what your actual ‘facts’ are. You have thus far failed at all oppourtunities. You have been given several now, even though your aggressive behaviour and predisposition to making crass and insulting smears against people would have seen you IP banned from most autism blogs.

The fact that you continue to aggresively bluff and bluster and contiune to incorrectly assert that you have delivered ‘facts’ is a very good indication that you have merely cribbed your knowledge from some other source. Bear in mind, some of those people have been known to visit and discuss their beliefs here, in a much more civil and coherent way than you have.

Anyway :

“Aspies could be the product of 2 parents with superior intelligence and social skills that may have been a complete genius if she/he had not been adversely affected by some random environmental trigger degrading that intelligence and ability to socialize. Is that possible?”

First, you should be aware that autistic traits (including non-diagnostic traits) have been observed in a higher-than-usual rate in parents of people on the autism spectrum, and that this has been reported in peer-reviewed journals.

Secondly, Aspies can be geniuses, depending on how genius is defined. It is not unheard of for aspies to possess genius level skills in areas of special interest.

Thirdly, parents of people with aspergers have not been noted for high rates of superior intelligence, as pointed out by Joseph. However, that doesn’t mean that parents in reciept of services do not have a high rate of high intelligence. This imbalance in service provision to favour children of high earning, high education and high intelligence parents is well known throughout all conditions and all service areas, as was originally noted way back in the first few decades of autism service provision.

One can maybe surmise that a cerebro-vascular accident produces damage, or alcoholic poisoning causes damage, that is to say there is fairly widespread destruction, but can an insufficiency of neuronal growth in a particular area be called damage, fewer dendrites damage, or an unusual development in a particular cortex damage? All of those might be more or less dysfuntional but they are of a different order to damage.

Losing a finger could be called damage, being born with only four, or perhaps six would not be damage but difference, and in the right circumstances might even according to the Darwinian model be selected for as confering some advantage.

We have to get away from loaded notions of “damage” and realise too that difference can be either neutral, positively or negatively nuanced.

Enhanced performance in the embedded figures test is not damage, it is difference, for example.

The trouble is that people who place too much reliance upon words to convey meaning and explanation often fail to grasp the nuances of those words and how they get in the way of a proper understanding of anything as they carry all that social, cultural and historical baggage with them.

A scan of the brain, a model of a neural network, all these fortunately exist independent of words as descriptors of the world, and what is seen is not damage because for damage there has to be a stereotype, nay dare I say it with all the baggage and connotations “archetype” of the ideal that has been damaged, and it’s back to Plato’s cave again isn’t it or Kants “ding an sich”

Sorry to be so obtuse I can’t help it, my brain won’t let me think in other ways, and that the blessing of my particular autism, and the curse of those who can’t understand what and why I write from within that perspective of a personalised expression of neurological diversity.

Aspies could be the product of 2 parents with superior intelligence and social skills that may have been a complete genius if she/he had not been adversely affected by some random environmental trigger degrading that intelligence and ability to socialize. Is that possible?

I don’t think so. Someone would’ve noticed that the parents of Asperger children generally have superior intelligence.

More importantly, there are indications from cognitive science that autism is not simply “smart + neurological damage.”

See, when cognitive scientists study autism, they match groups of autistics and non-autistics for IQ (verbal or non-verbal, as the case may be.) Your simplistic explanation (‘’they would’ve been geniuses if not for autism’‘) just doesn’t cut it. To see what I mean, you can look up information on, say, the embedded figures test. Also look up “autism hyper-rationality” for some peculiar interpretations of certain findings.

Note that I’m not saying autistics never have neurological damage. In fact, it’s quite possible that neurological damage makes an autism diagnosis more likely. I’m simply saying that autism is not just that.

A child has autism with regression, asperger’s, or …

Autism with regression is the most difficult of all afflictions to face. Parents of average intelligence and social skills hoping to have children who are above average. They seem to be on their way to being a happy loving family when something happens and they lose all hope of the normal life they expected. Their child loses some or all skills she/he has acquired and never fully recovers, but does regain some skills. Like maybe being able to feed herself, or get dressed…

Aspies could be the product of 2 parents with superior intelligence and social skills that may have been a complete genius if she/he had not been adversely affected by some random environmental trigger degrading that intelligence and ability to socialize. Is that possible? Or do you think that one or both parents genes are not all what they thought they might be?

a matter of degrees…