The journalist Brian Deer has done as much as anyone to investigate the background to what Ben Goldacre describes as the MMR Hoax. In the course of his investigations he discovered undisclosed conflicts of interest by Andrew Wakefield that led to most of the authors of the original paper in the Lancet withdrawing their names and the editor publishing a retraction.
Then in February this year Deer published his latest investigation. The Lancet paper had already been dismissed as bad science. Now, if Deer’s findings were correct, it would seem that some of the data had been deliberately falsified. Wakefield responded by complaining about the article to the Press Complaints Commission. The Times stood by its story and also forwarded all details to the General Medical Council who are still investigating Wakefield over allegations of misconduct.
And that was it until this week, when Thoughtful House, the clinic that Wakefield has established in Texas, issued a press release announcing
Press Complaints Commission Orders Sunday Times to Remove MMR journalist’s Stories on Dr. Wakefield from Paper’s Web Site
It goes on to suggest that this “interim order”
appears to indicate there are questions about the accuracy of the Deer stories.
Of course it does no such thing. Thoughtful House even quote Stephen Abell of the PCC as saying that
Given the ongoing nature of the dispute the articles should be removed from the newspaper’s website until this matter has been concluded. This would not be an admission of any liability on the part of the newspaper.
The wording reveals what actually happened. The Sunday Times has not been ordered to take down the articles. The PCC decided to postpone its investigation until after the GMC reaches a decision on the allegations of misconduct. This makes sense. If Wakefield is found guilty the complaint will fail. Meanwhile the PCC has asked the Sunday Times to remove the article from its website until matters can be resolved and the Sunday Times has agreed. That tallies with the email I received from the PCC
The PCC has considered the matter initially and has elected to stay its investigation until the conclusion of the GMC inquiry. It has reached no formal decision on the substance of the complaint and there is no published ruling on our website.
The Commission has asked that the paper remove the articles temporarily until the conclusion of the PCC investigation. This is without any admission of liability on the paper’s part.
So no order was issued, no judgement was made and there is no suggestion of impropriety by Deer or the Sunday Times. All the suggestions come from one source, Wakefield himself. His friends on the web may try to pretend that this is further proof of the brave maverick doctor’s innocence in the face of a vicious campaign against him. I think they are clutching at straws.
Left Brain Right Brain 
I just love all the science in the replies. left brain, right brain, and … the responders to my post
At dedj
“That you would freely admit to having neither the (1)time or (2)knowledge to speak about this subject, yet still openly (3)make quite serious accusations agianst other people on (4)a subject you clearly cannot deal with rationally, then (5)that is all that has to be said about your lack of morality.”
What in the world are you trying to say?
1. I haven’t the time to deal with refuting the dozens of manipulated studies you folks rely on to “prove” vaccines do not cause autism.
2. I have the knowledge necessary to raise some questions which many of you are apparently unable or unwilling to answer and I have stated simple facts all of you are avoiding addressing
3. Instead of addressing the issues and information I have raised you choose to disingenuously deflect that I have made serious accusations against individuals here (maybe you mean the OCD comment, or the others I directed at no one in particular?)
4. Considering you refuse to address anything I have said regarding autism and vaccines you have no ground to state I am unable unable to deal with the subject rationally. Through that unsupportable statement you lead people to believe YOU are the one unable to deal with the subject matter rationally.
5. Claiming I am immoral is simply more deflection rather than addressing the issues before all of us which is the health of children. Condoning the toxic vaccine schedule while more than 1% of our children are being taken from us, mentally, is a heinous act possibly to go down in history as the most unconcionable act performed by people entrusted with the health and care of children.
No dedj, if anyone lacks morality here it is you (and others) by ignoring the information I have offered in this forum, thereby further condemning children and their families to endure more suffering without hope or help.
1. I didn’t say you don’t have the time. That was a statement by you.
2. You haven’t really asked any serious questions. Indeed, your orginal post contains no questions. As stated, your post was a bizarre mash-up of half related posts. You have no right to demand answers to issues that are not supported or even correctly phrased.
3. You called the participants of this blog ‘Big Pharma’ minions, and insinuated that the only reasons for participation on this blog were either pathological in origin or derived from financial conflicts. To deny that you freely made sweeping accusations is to lie.
4. This point is just bunk. That you are clearly incapable of properly verbalising your opposition to the multiple studies that you are already shown awareness of is your fault and no one elses. If you can’t properly and concisely state what it is your point actually is, then there is no substance to address.
5. Unfortunetly for you, your broad sweeping insults and accusations and overwrought emotional language, and your convoluted defence of said behaviour when called out on it, is evidence of lack of social morality.
If you cannot competantly verbalise exactly what it is you find wrong with the current scientific consensus then you cannot expect an answer. Your post is far from the quality you think it is.
Do not come back until you have something of substance and of actual relevance to the thread topic, and until you can learn not to cast aspersions like confetti. Deliberately targetting a month old thread for off topic trolling is not acceptable behaviour in any forum or blog.
Again, no scientific evidence, ignoring all of the evidence I have posted, using insults instead of reason, discussion or facts
The shills on this blog continue to contribute to the injuries and deaths inflicted on our kids by an unsafe, excessive and poorly administered vaccination program
It’s easy to do what’s right, admit the damage that has been caused, compensate the victims, stop the growing number of newly injured children happening not only in the USA, but worldwide
I bet not a single regular here or in any blog gets compensated for their “efforts.” That conspiracy theory gets old pretty easily. Who in their right mind would pay for people to post blog comments, and who would take that as their job? Why wouldn’t it be common knowledge that companies pay shills to post blog comments, as if they were regular commenters? That’s beyond ridiculous.
If some of us are able to spend a fair amount of time in blogs, it might be because we have flexible jobs and work hours, and we might be good enough at said jobs that we can goof off much of the time and still do what’s expected of us.
To Laury rex
“Here is my challenge to you.
(1)Just prove to me that water is safe, you can’t can you, it contains dihydrogen monoxide, never mind that fish fornicate in it.”
(2)”you know that a negative study can never be proven”
1. Laury compares the safety of water to the safety of vaccines. But she doesn’t really say anything about either. More avoidance and deflection and no science.
2. Negative correlation in epidemiological studies is all you folks have. You never quote a clinical study on the safety of vaccines. Blinded and deaf to scientific method you simply say, “We have found no evidence”.
Well no evidence is exactly that. the other problem with your “no evidence” is the way your researchers go about manipulating and falsifying data to get the “no evidence”. Where’s the honest scientific method? It doesn’t exist on your side of the fence.
I already challenged you to post your 2 best pieces of evidence that vaccines are safe, yet you attempt to trivialize what I post instead of addressing the facts or posting your own. You deflect and baselessly insult instead of trying to honestly reason and debate. While you may have considered some of what I said insulting, I didn’t address you or anyone in particular, nor were any of my statements false, misleading or deflecting.
Get a grip Laury and take a course in logic
michael is clearly just a troll trying to provoke or probably even a Poe (note his “Pharma minions” reference.) But I’ll bite.
OK. I’ll give you just one. Address Thompson et al. (2007). Note: Don’t just parrot out SafeMinds propaganda and such. Tell us, in your own words, why this study is invalid.
You can’t just give us a laundry list of limitations. Anyone can do that. You have to provide something of substance that the authors failed to consider and which explains away the results.
Or that:
we are at home as the primary care givers for an autistic person
we are at home due to incapacity
we have a interest in autism and make time to read blogs
The odd thing is, it took less than 30 seconds for me to find multiple results for clinical trials that look at the safety of various vaccines, including meta-studies.
This was without using any professional or academic database that I have access to. This was not including the well known studies that Micheal has admitted knowing yet still – bizarrely – demands we point out the existance of.
When a person fails to find such easy to find evidence – and fails to substantiate their accusations and dismissal of the evidence they have admitted knowledge of – then they are not in a very strong position to go around criticising other people.
So, Micheal, with your supposed love of science, perhaps you might get around to telling us exactly – with adequate references to peer-reviewed articles – what you think is wrong with the current state of science.
No more dodging now – you’ve already admitted to knowledge of the mainstream articles (whilst claiming to not have the time – it’s clear consistancy is not your strong point).
Tell us – as sciency as you like – what your actual objections are.
“Get a grip Laury and take a course in logic”
Aristotelian or Boolean? or perhaps you don’t know the difference.
Have you read, Popper, Kuhn, Goedel or Quine? there is a lot more to it than you might suppose.
I don’t know your academic background and you may well have a lot more going for you than appears in the odd posts in the blogosphere, but this much, I am not an agent of big Pharma, indeed I have much to say against big Pharma concerning the over medication of children. I am not funded by anybody (I wish I were not that it would compromise my dedication (obsession if you are you want to give it a diagnosis)
If you can give me sound mathematical proofs of error in vaccine safety research I will listen. I am sure we all will.
It’s a troll. Its opening gambit was that we are either rich kids using LBRB as a playground, mentally ill or pharma shills. Then it moans because we do not take it seriously! And its classical education is as lacking as its science education if it thinks Lauerentius Rex is a “she.”
That’s Laurentia Regina, which rhymes with … oh never mind ..
Hi Joseph –
Hehe. The day LBRB, Insolence, SBM and/or Lisa Jo Rudy get blocked by Websense is the day my employers get a ten percent productivity hike. Autism Speaks forums and AOA are already blocked.
– pD
dedj posts “The odd thing is, it took less than 30 seconds for me to find multiple results for clinical trials that look at the safety of various vaccines, including meta-studies.”
More deflection and no substance. Clinical trials conducted/funded by pharmaceutical companies… Of course that is what dedj would pretend is a satisfactory response to a call for independent clinical studies instead of epidemiological studies.
dedj should stop wasting everyone’s time, including the children and families affected by autism. To give such a disingenuous reponse demonstrates where dedj’s true allegiance lies.
the rest of dedj’s post is a litany of personal insults and inuendo, tactics of a person without intellectual ammo
Still not one aspect of my recent original post has been addressed by any of the responders here. Personal attacks and refusal to post anything except a blatantly manipulated study by Thompson. Just the abstract exposes it as a manipulation, as are all studies proposing to have found “no evidence” of an autism/vaccine link.
Far from being anti-science as dedj implies, I have been the only person insisting on using scientific method and proof. Everyone else’s efforts are apparently directed at burying my post with a mountain of deflection/insult rather than logical argument or facts. But this is what I have come to expect from leftbrainrightbrain. Although I do hold out hope that you folks will come around and draw on the humanity that is within you, genetically. I don’t understand how you can so effectively ignore the damage you are doing to others. Do you think you are simply superior and that those so easily trampled deserve their fate? Are some of you getting priveleged treatment for your afflicted family members in exchange for your blog participation on behalf of the pharmaceutical companies? Let’s face it folks, you are clearly supporting the pharmaceutical agenda here. That some of you decry things Big Pharma does, it is probably only those acts that have been undeniably proven that you will criticize. Your unfounded attacks against Dr Wakefield all these years are just another example of where your true allegiance lies. it is definitely not with autistic kids and their families. Your pushing solely for a study on a genetic cause is the most glaring exposure of your lack of conviction to find the cause, the triggers, for autism.
Try responding to my recent original post and the facts in it rather than making personal attacks and deflection from science and autism
Vaccines are the only proximate correlative cause of autism currently known. This relationship needs to be effectively and independently clinically studied using a toxin free vaccine schedule so that the truth can be known. This is a simple, this is logical, this would be true science.
It is always a hopeless endeavour trying to persuade the terminally misinformed and I doubt if Michael will ever change.
The accusations of OCD were below the belt, but I wonder what you call a dogged refusal to acknowlege error when it is clear.
The scientific method Michael appeals to is heavily dependent upon a branch of applied Mathematics known as statistics.
Even anyone with a most elementary understanding of statistics and probability must know that there are such things as “odds”
The fact that two or more things occur together (such as in an accumulator bet) do not indicate any causal connection between the two.
Given the odds of one event occuring and another occuring that both occur with regularity, there is bound to be co-incidence.
For example a certain number of crimes of violence will be committed when a national news show is on TV. Or a certain number of fatal accidents will occur at the same time as other people are giving birth.
That is the only connection between vaccines and autism, there is no other beyond that fact that autism occurs and people are vaccinated and that the maths will inevitably come up with the number of co-occurences.
In order for statistics to prove something there needs to be another element to the science, and that is a testable hypothesis, the hypothesis has to include a possible mechanism for the connection in order to prove it is greater than chance.
No such mechanism to connect autism to vaccines exists, it is scientifically not possible.
The problem is basic human psychology, something philosophers have been trying to get round for centuries.
First person observation allways scores higher in perception than any rigorous proof. In ancient Roman times, you took the augury and if you had bad luck on that day, you believe the omens were against you because you remember the event and give it significance beyond what it would have if the same augury had led to nothing.
It’s the principle by which y fortune tellers work, if you make it vague enough it is bound to happen to someone, indeed lots of people, and they will of course make good anecdotal witnesses to the truth of fortune telling.
Rigorous research and observation will show however that there is a greater number of times that the fortune telling is wrong, but those who are convinced will remain convinced because of that quirk in psychology.
To no one in particular
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…
michael0156 is all hat, no cattle.
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.
Joseph it depends what is meant by damage anyway.
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.
“Try responding to my recent original post and the facts in it rather than making personal attacks and deflection from science and autism”
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.
dedj says “If you cannot competantly verbalise exactly what it is you find wrong with the current scientific consensus then you cannot expect an answer. Your post is far from the quality you think it is.” And a lot of other tripe irrelevant to autism and vaccines
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
“dedj should stop wasting everyone’s time, including the children and families affected by autism.”
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.
Sullivan has gone out of his way to comment on other blogs where I have posted. The pile of lies I have witnessed him spew leads me to believe he doesn’t have an autistic child… not one who is regressively autistic, not one who is classicly autistic…
He might have a child with Asperger’s, if he has a child at all… and he has no hesistation using his child’s condition, whatever it may be, as a badge of authority attempting to support his nonsensical rant about regressive autism
In creating the new Autism Spectrum in DSM-V (replacing the “spectrum” of Pervasive Developmental Disorders in the DSM-IV), the APA had a conference in Feb 2008. Regression in autism was mentioned 25 times in the conference summary and was one of the hottest topics at the conference
Yet in the DSM-V no form of the word “regress” is used in the autism spectrum section
This is an attempt to dismiss that regression ever occurs
If regression doesn’t happen, then autism has to be genetic, has to always be there… and there are no triggers, like vaccines
The manipulation of the APA in this regard is blatant & insidious.
Any medical professional with an idea to point this out will remember Dr Andrew Wakefield, whose persecution has continued for 15 years, despite his being correct, despite his genuine concern for kids health, despite the fact that vaccines are proved to cause some autism.
Hopefully some of what I have posted will reach some of the sociopaths on this blog or others who may just feel pressured to post here by employers or other situations they may find themselves in.
No one should forget that ALL of the defenders of vaccinations & the drug industry, ALL of those who attack Dr Wakefield, ALL who use insults instead of facts… they ALL know the truth, but come here to lie deceive & deflect anyway… most without conscience, some through coercion, a couple may be duped (but I doubt that, it does take a measure of intelligence to craft the delusion they want you to believe, and a measure of knowledge to skillfully avoid those landmines of truth)
Told you so. All hat, no cattle. He thinks using the adjective “manipulated” is an argument worth considering.
Micheal, you have no idea whether I ‘address the issues’ or not, and you are still wrongly conflating taking issue with your attitude and behaviour as somehow refusing to deal with the issues.
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.
I have no time for Michael’s nonsense. I am too busy reading this. http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/node/5026
Michael
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.
“However, this litigation is very unlikely to prove their suspicions.” This is how Clare Dodgsen, in 2003, dismissed parents belief that MMR causes autism and thereby pulled funding from the investigation. This of course allows the statute of limitations to run out leaving Glaxo free and clear of blame, for that crop of victims.
The Legal Services Commission, according to Brian Deer (Big Pharma shill), has given over all of the investigative materials to the Medical Research Council. The MRC, in the latest report before the LSC decision to withdraw funding, is of the opinion the causes of autism “remain, to a large extent, unidentified” This decision to terminate funding was made by the LSC less than 6 months before the trials against Glaxo were to begin.
The solicitors appealed, remaining firmly convinced that MMR causes autism. First, the Funding Review Committee refused to continue to support investigation into MMR as a cause of autism, then Judge Nigel Davis dismisses the appeal to force the LSC to continue MMR research funding. Judge Davis is the brother of Glaxo director Crispin Davis, who was also CEO of Elsevier which owns The Lancet.
So with the solicitors ready to go to trial and the Medical Review Committee unable to offer any clue as to what causes autism, the LSC decided that vaccines are not the cause and cannot ever be proved to be the cause.
This kind of heinous illogical reasoning and behavior is what people like you on this blog support as the correct path to take. While millions more kids become victims of our efforts to protect them, the LSC denies the only obvious correlation to autism, which is vaccines.
Dedj once posted –
“Some of the people here are primary care givers for autistic or otherwise disabled children and adults.
Some of the people here are autistic adults, some with additional disabilities.
Some of the people here are professionals or paraprofessionals involved in autism care.
Some of the people here are academics or researchers in autism studies.
Some of us are, or have been some or all or the above”
Little of that is believable, as most of the people on this blog blindly support Big Pharma’s position on the vaccine autism issue and care little for the kids with regressive autism or those who will be rendered autistic in the future.
Toxin free vaccines should be used in independent clinical trials to resolve the autism issue. Anything less is unacceptable, unethical and unscientific. The mass of manipulated epidemiology used to hide the truth is well known by the people on this blog. In spite of their dishonest calls for the production of evidence, they know the evidence. They are practiced at denying it, disseminating mis-information, deflecting or merely lying. This defines their sociopathic behavior… The deliberate actions of avoidance and obfuscation that result in hurting and killing children while tens of millions are burdened to a degree I believe that most on this blog could not face.
I’m not going to change the minds of sociopaths. I was aware of that since the day I read the callous illogical rants and taunts from many persons here. I will stand and remind everyone of the pain and hopelessness to which you help condemn innocent children and their families. This will reach some of you, but not the majority, who will lash out with a vicious venom disregarding the lives lost to the shadow-world of regressive autism.
@michael0156: “I am not going to change the minds of Sociopaths”.
With that one remark, you show that you are not interested in debating the issue, and simply attack anyone with a different opinion.
“[S]ince the day I read the callous illogical rants and taunts…”
Hello pot, meet kettle.
You also attack the court rulings but fail to give Reasons why they are flawed. As to your comments about toxins, seafood is very good for brain development, but it contains mercury. Breastmilk contains aluminium. It is impossible to remove all toxins even from food. I don’t know what you mean by a “toxin free” vaccine schedule. I suspect that it would be impossible.
If you want to be taken seriously, do what dejd and Laurentius Rex asked you to do and back up your claims with EVIDENCE.
The decision to “terminate funding” by the LSC for the MMR claimants was based on the fact that there was no EVIDENCE to support a causal link between the MMR vaccine and ASD. If there had been, the lawyers would not have advised that they could not make a case, the LSC would not have removed funding, and the entire matter would have progressed to trial.
The arguments lodged by the claimants to support the claims that the MMR had caused autism had to contain sound scientific evidence to support the explanations for how the MMR when given to children, then went on and caused them to be autistic. Clearly that couldn’t be done.
If any party could be said to have left Glaxo “free and clear of blame” it was the experts appointed by the lawyers who used up public money on investigative research which failed the children miserably by not providing adequate proof of a link between the MMR and autism, allowing the case to go to trial. An article from the Sunday Times March 7 2004 by Brian Deer highlights how John O’ Leary of Unigenetics Ltd, hired by the lawyers to carry out the testing of samples, was forced to admit in a letter to the Sunday Times, that his findings “did not support the MMR/autism hypothesis”
It wasn’t the Court, the LSC, FRC or the Defendants who said the case couldn’t be brought to trial, but the Claimants own legal team when they admitted that as things stood, there was no prospects of success and with O’leary’s findings, it wasn’t hard to see why.
Faced with that unsavoury set of circumstances who would argue that it was unjust for the LSC to remove the funding or for the FRC to uphold their reasons for doing so? The FRC said by Michael to have “refused to continue to support investigation into MMR as a cause of autism” could hardly find the LSC wrong in their decision to remove funding when they had been advised by the claimants own legal team that their case had no prospects of success.
Lord Taverne hit the nail on the head when in 2004 he said of the MMR litigation “After 10 years and the expenditure of more than £15 million, not surprisingly, no evidence has emerged to provide a prima facie case. Earlier this year, the Legal Services Commission withdrew support and declared that the failure to find evidence meant that the case was very likely to fail. It also observed that aid should never have been granted , because the courts are not the place to prove new medical truths”.
Lord Taverne further stated that” From the start it was a disgrace that legal aid was ever granted. The so-called research was, and always was likely to be, a farce”. (Hansard 16 June 2004 Column 789)
“I’m not going to change the minds of sociopaths. I was aware of that since the day I read the callous illogical rants and taunts from many persons here. I will stand and remind everyone of the pain and hopelessness to which you help condemn innocent children and their families. This will reach some of you, but not the majority, who will lash out with a vicious venom disregarding the lives lost to the shadow-world of regressive autism.”
I wonder if you’ll ever realize how deep your hypocrisy is; you take advantage of the openness of this blog to spew your lies, trusting that the blog-owners will allow it to remain visible to all, while anti-health blogs like AOA boast that they censor all opposing views, to protect their readers from hearing any facts that might unsettle their preconceptions. I hope that when you realize how vile your behavior has been, that you can forgive yourself. Meanwhile, stay away from our children with your lies.
More fact-free lying hypocrisy
Get a conscience “Andrew”. go visit an autism treatment center and look into the eyes of a regressively autistic child or the family members who care for him or her
Wonder if anything you have done may have caused that child’s condition… think and have some compassion
We both know who has been on the side of truth in these posts
It is also obvious to any observers who can read and think
“More fact-free lying hypocrisy”
Thank you for summarizing your post upfront, so that normal people don’t have to waste time reading the rest. I do have an autistic child – and if I thought that pretending to believe that his autism was caused by vaccines would help him, I’d pretend with the best of them (I still wouldn’t accuse others of lacking compassion though – that’s just “fact-free lying” – and I’ll leave that to your ilk ). But since no one has ever been able to explain how fantasizing would help my boy, I stick with facts instead. Why do you think that facts are insulting you personally?