Tag Archives: vaccine court

How RFK Jr. could add $100B a year to the debt

31 Mar

If autism were a vaccine injury, i.e. if it was legitimate to add autism to the vaccine injury table, I would say, “change the schedule now and pay however many families deserve it, no matter the cost.” But autism is not a vaccine injury. I will note that if Mr. Kennedy truly believed autism is a vaccine injury, he wouldn’t have hired David Geier to do the studies. Having Mr. Geier run an autism study is the equivalent of using loaded dice in a game of craps. Mr. Kennedy is buying the outcome he wants to see. If he wants to do more autism/vaccine studies, let the science speak, to quote Mr. Kennedy himself. He’s not doing that.

Robert Kennedy is (rightly) getting a lot of attention for his vaccine related actions. Just last week he pushed out the FDA’s top vaccine official (Top US vaccine official forced to resign, reports say). I will suggest it’s past time to stop reacting and start looking ahead–ask ourselves what is going to happen and what will the fallout be? That said, if we’ve learned anything from Mr. Kennedy, it’s that one should be careful and not fall into the conspiracy theory trap. So I’ll be careful and conservative as I predict what I think Mr. Kennedy is planning.

One Kennedy goal that seems obvious to me (and many others): get autism recognized as a vaccine injury. Get autism added to the vaccine injury table* to allow families to obtain compensation from the vaccine program. Perhaps he’s made this statement outright. I wouldn’t be surprised. But even if he hasn’t, I doubt many who have followed Mr. Kennedy’s words and actions would argue that this is a likely goal for him.

Let’s say he’s successful. What would be the result? Specifically, what would this cost? The vaccine court, after all, awards monetary compensation. It’s a pretty simple calculation:

$17B is a lot, but it’s not the $100B in the title of the article. Where did I get that? The support needs for an autistic person vary greatly, but, I would argue, they are higher than the average vaccine injury recipient. Also, we are talking about very young autistic children here, so there will be a lot of uncertainty projecting the lifelong needs and the court may be convinced to provide payouts on the higher end of the scale. Often in the past, I saw payments of about $1m to provide support for a lifelong disability awarded by the court, so I chose that number when I wrote the title of this piece. If we take 104,000 autistic kids being awarded $1m a year, we get $104B a year in vaccine court awards.

Let’s state the obvious: that’s a huge amount of money. That’s about 8 aircraft carriers a year. If Elon Musk found $104B a year in savings, believe me, we’d be hearing about it.

To put this more in context, the vaccine program has a trust fund of about $4.3B. This would be gone in the first year (potentially the first month) of autism cases being handled as a table injury. Technically, the vaccine court would have no money after that, and the awards should stop. This would put congress in a tight spot: allocate more money, or tell their constituents that that they voted to deny compensation to disabled children. I suspect they would vote to allocate funds. So we are talking about somewhere between $17B and $100B a year added to the budget, which would be directly added to the national debt.

I will admit that this is a very rough estimate of the financial cost. We could argue how much the average award would be. We could argue that not all autistic kids would get awards, even if autism were added as a table injury. So, maybe the total would go down. However, I also would argue that more kids will be diagnosed as autistic should autism be added as a table injury. Many more. How that balances out in the end can be debated, but I think a reasonable person can see that the answer will be billions of dollars a year and very likely many billions of dollars a year.

If autism were a vaccine injury, i.e. if it was legitimate to add autism to the vaccine injury table, I would say, “change the schedule now and pay however many families deserve it, no matter the cost.” But autism is not a vaccine injury. I will note that if Mr. Kennedy truly believed autism is a vaccine injury, he would not have hired David Geier to do the studies. Having Mr. Geier run an autism study is the equivalent of using loaded dice in a game of craps. Mr. Kennedy is buying the outcome he wants to see. If he wants to do more autism/vaccine studies, he would let the science speak. To quote Mr. Kennedy himself. He’s not doing that.

As I stated at the outset, one has to be careful of relying upon conspiracy theories. I believe I’ve stayed away from that here. I’ve made assumptions of what I think Mr. Kennedy wants to accomplish, but I think those are valid assumptions. And the cost analysis is very simple and I’ve laid it out very clearly. No chance to hide some trick in the math. I could be off by a factor of 10 and the conclusion would be the same.

One could and should ask why I am focusing on the financial cost and not the human cost. First, because autism is not a vaccine injury, we aren’t talking about a real human cost. Second, the financial cost is what will get the attention of Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk and congress. Sad to say, but I believe that to be the case.

The most logical outcome of adding autism to the vaccine injury table, in my opinion, is that congress and the president would be forced to choose between keeping autism on the vaccine injury table and ending the infant vaccine program. End the infant vaccine program and many people in Mr. Kennedy’s community (possibly including Mr. Kennedy himself), will say “mission accomplished.”** Pull autism off the table and the net effect is pretty much the same. The idea that vaccines cause autism will be accepted and vaccine uptake will drop. Many states will stop mandating infant vaccines. The infant vaccine program would be effectively dead.

Either way, Mr. Kennedy will be able to say, “See, I’m not anti-vaccine. I didn’t direct the infant vaccine program to end. They just followed the “science” (that I directed be created when I hired David Geier).”

By Matt Carey

* The vaccine injury table lays out injuries that are presumed to be caused by a vaccine. For example, if one develops paralytic polio within 30 days of getting the oral polio vaccine, it is assumed to be caused by the vaccine. If you haven’t heard of this, that’s because the U.S. doesn’t use the oral polio vaccine anymore.

** Recall that one of the people at Mr. Kennedy’s “Children’s Health Defense” is JB Handley (Vice Chair in 2018). Recall that Mr. Handley once wrote: “With less than a half-dozen full-time activists, annual budgets of six figures or less, and umpteen thousand courageous, undaunted, and selfless volunteer parents, our community, held together with duct tape and bailing wire, is in the early to middle stages of bringing the U.S. vaccine program to its knees.”

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Thimerosal and Autism on Trial: Closing statement by Mr. Matanoski

31 Jul

This is a portion of the government’s closing argument given by Mr. Matanoski. It is found on the audio from Dwyer called Day02-PM3.

First I want to point out on the specific causation … lawyers are kind of slick they move things around, they kind of play a shell game. When I heard the comments about a specific causation case it made it sound like respondent has a burden here to show what actually caused it. Actually the burden is on the petitioners to show that the vaccine caused autism. And respondent doesn’t have to show that it’s genetic in origin.

And I think that the comments about Dr Leventhal’s testimony on that point are a little off the mark. What Dr. Leventhal was saying, essentially, that most practitioners, most folks who study autism as a profession believe that it’s largely genetic in nature at that’s where the research has been directed and in fact it’s been fruitful in that regard. There’s still much more to do. But everything that has come out has pointed to genetics as very strongly associated with autism and most of the research that has been done has shown that autism would have a prenatal course. That it can essentially be seen, that the preconditions, if you will, for autism are in place beginning before birth, in most instances.

I think there also is a little bit of a misconception about what the force of Dr. Leventhal’s testimony was. He basically was saying that Colin’s case really is sadly no different than many of the cases that he sees, where there is a gradually emerging picture of difference, perhaps delays, but at least difference in the quality of behavior in the child as the child develops. It’s not necessarily apparent right from the start. That’s very rare. Most of the cases it’s apparent later and it may seem that a child has reached certain milestones has subsequently had trouble keeping those milestones. As the condition progresses there often is an improvement. That’s the natural course of the condition. What Dr. Leventhal was saying is, as time has gone on, more and more of the researchers have realized that if you look back in cases, that apparently seemed to have a normal trajectory and then there seemed to be a loss, that you see earlier signs and symptoms that all was not on a normal trajectory from the beginning.
That was the force of his testimony, and that testimony was backed up by other testimony by other testimony that the court has heard before he took the stand.
Dr. Lord who has specifically studied regressive autism made that point quite clear, that as this has progressed the concept of regressive autism has become more encompassing, that autism itself seems to have a progression where it appears that there is a loss but when one goes back, one sees that there is unusual, or differences in development earlier on in almost every case. And what Dr. Leventhal was saying is that as they gotten better, folks who do this for a living, folks who make their lives studying about studying autism they’ve realized that more and more of those cases they can see earlier on. And in very few instances when they’ve studied quite closely do they see that there isn’t some sign that the trajectory or the course is not the same as other children’s.

Dr. Mumper’s testimony which really wasn’t really much of the focus in the closing argument here. She seems to be relying on isolated lab results to come up to a conclusion that vaccines are the cause here. She’s been asked in this case and in other cases what would that pattern be, what do we need to look at? And in fact there doesn’t seem to be a particular pattern. In the King case certain test results were relied upon to draw the conclusion that thimerosal in vaccines were associated with autism in that case, or caused autism in that case. In the Mead case other results were looked at and thought to be, by Dr. Mumper, indicative that vaccines were causing, or evidence that vaccines were causing autism. And now in Colin’s case, we see yet a different pattern of test results being relied upon to reach that conclusion.

In fact those test results, with really no pattern, how can one say that there is any kind of clinical evidence from these test results that one can rely on to make that .. to draw those kinds of conclusions that Dr. Mumper is relying on.

And as you’ll see when you go through the testimony, we believe that she largely moved away from relying on any specific test result when questioned about each specific one she said that essentially that the mercury test result, the positive provocation, was really the only test that she had that showed that the mercury was there, and she was relying on to implicate thimerosal as a cause in this case, but then she admitted that she really didn’t know what the normal range would be for that test.
How can one say that this is an abnormal result when one doesn’t know what normal is?
Her testimony seems to be formed largely by the Defeat Autism Now world view which is that toxins and heavy metals are implicated in autism. And to use the example that Mr. Powers used of Tycho Brahe I think that comes to bear with her testimony as well. It doesn’t matter which test results she’s looking at it always comes back to a heavy metal or a toxin, when it could be that the acidosis that the lactic acid build up could be because the child was crying when the blood was taken. (35 min 30 sec)

…

I’m going to touch now on the general causation because that was a matter of some discussion by Mr. Williams. I see that the glutathione theory which is where we started with this general causation case seems to have dropped out. It wasn’t in the opening statement, it wasn’t in the closing statement. It seems that the theory of causation now is neuroinflammation and largely seems to be neuroinflammation alone. That was a theory that Dr. Kinsbourne recently advaced in this case. It obviously wasn’t present until just a couple of weeks before the trial in May.
This is something after six years in the making, this seems to have come up kind of at the very end.

Mr. Powers and Mr Williams have focused on the causation burden, and say that the information they have given on neuroinflammation meets that burden, that would be the causation burden under Althen and Grant, the specific criteria that they need to meet under that test that the court has articulated, the federal circuit’s has articulated.

Respondent starts a little earlier than that if you will in the calculation and that is about what evidence feeds into Althen and Grant. We start out with the analysis under Daubert about whether there is good scientific evidence to even meet that burden. So obviously the evidence that you have or the evidence that is being offered does not meet the criteria of good scientific or reliable evidence then you have nothing at all to test about whether you’ve met your legal burden under Althen.

Our position has been throughout this that the petitioners’ evidence that they have offered, the testimony that they’ve offered, fails to meet that standard of reliability that is set out under Daubert and that this court applies. Daubert stands for the proposition that there are not multiple kinds of scientific evidence. A kind for scientists to use and a kind for judges to use. There is only one kind of scientific evidence. It is the kind that scientists use. That is the kind that judges are supposed to be looking for as well. …

Kathleen Seidel’s neurodiversity weblog has more from the Dwyer case, including audio excerpts.

Elizabeth Mumper – Autism Omnibus, Dwyer vs HHS

When I heard Mr. Matanoski say, “when one doesn’t know what normal is,” it occurred to me that it could be used as a slogan or strapline for the autism/biomed organization that is led in part by Dr. Mumper.

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Omnibus Autism testimony: Dr. Lord on what makes autistic kids improve

18 Jun

The following is transcribed by me from the first mp3 file for May 28th. This part starts around 41 minutes 24 seconds.

Ms. Ricciardella: Do children with autism, in general, improve?

Dr. Catherine Lord: Absolutely.

Ricciardella: What percentage? Do you know?

Lord: I mean I think that all children with autism improve in some ways, and how much is highly variable.

Ricciardella: Would that include children who have a regression in autism? Do they improve as well?

Lord: Yes.

Ricciardella: Do we know why?

Lord: No. I mean, some of the improvement seems to be getting back on developmental course. It’s like asking why do normal kids learn to do the things that they do. We can describe how they learn things but that process of how do kids learn to walk or talk when no one is really teaching them, we don’t know. And that’s the same for autism. We know that behavioral treatments make some difference but it’s a relatively small amount of difference compared to that force of development.

I’m not so sure that it’s only behavioral treatments that make “some” difference, but I agree that whatever therapy or teaching is provided, professional or parental, it’s the “force of development” that is the main thing that causes children to…. develop, which I believe is another way of saying, “improve.” I don’t believe there’s anything that one can do to speed up that force of development. Though I think it’s obvious that judicious use of reasonable kinds of therapies would probably help any autistic child make full use of what abilities he or she has to work with at any given point in time.

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