31 August 2010 The MMR Scandal: Chickens Are Coming Home To Roost
by Ed Butt Over the past few years, blogging first as Little Nicky Machiavelli and then in The Daily Stirrer, Ian R Thorpe has followed the scandalous cover up related to problems surrounding the MMR vaccine. As well as a lot of support from concerned individuals, some of whom had personal experience of the adverse effects MMR vaccine can have on children, some who like Ian are simply objective, clear thinking individuals who did not get where they are today without being able to smell a rat, Ian faced a lot of hostility for vaccine fanatics. In fact there were some concerted attempts to shut him up and discredit him.

One of the lines used most often by supporters of the MMR vaccine and of the efforts by Big Pharma and big Government to bully parents by threat of legal sanction into accepting this very suspect medication is "You're not a scientists, you don't understand science." Some time ago I saw a comment on an unrelated topic, the use of ritalin in treating children with ADHD. A parent who had been told their opinions were "unscientific" replied "Life is not scientific." The MMR vaccine is perfectly safe for most children but in a very small number of cases it has to be said, can have such devastating consequences not only for the child that suffers the adverse reaction but for that child's entire family. Yes such an outcome is unscientific, likelihood of an adverse reaction cannot be measured or predicted by scientific techniques, if life was scientific all children would react in exactly the same way. The vaccine supporters then turn to another callous and self serving argument, the number of children who do suffer and adverse reaction is not statistically significant.

Well about one child in a hundred is said to be autistic to some degree although estimates vary considerably. Of these one in ten is reported to show symptoms of autism within a few days of receiving the vaccine. So that is one in a thousand of the general population or 0.01%. If that 0.01% of children includes your only child it is 100% of your family. When scientists start quoting percentages always ask percent of what?

That is the kind of scientific stubbornness and bureaucratic blockheadedness faced by parents whose previously normally developing children suddenly started to display behaviour associated with autism within two weeks of having the vaccine. Parents like the mother of Robert Fletcher

Brain damage is a term better understood in both a legal and medical context thus the court was able to ignore the usual defence that the onset of epilepsy and autistic symptoms shortly after the vaccine was administered was pure coincidence.

Read more of Ian's arguments on this topic. We are glad to see some points first put forward by The Daily Stirrer writer were employed in the prosecution of this case.

The Scandal That Will Not Go Away by ianrthorpe @ 2007-07-10 – 12:50:37

Do your remember the controversy over the MMR vaccine, how the sceptics who pointed to the number of cases in which children seemed to have developed symptoms of autism or autism related problems shortly after receiving the combined measles, mumps, rubella vaccination? And do you remember how the Government and Big Pharma dissed the doubters, ruining a few careers and producing a lot of very dodgy statistics to convince us that nice Mr. Blair was right when he told parents there was nothing to worry about and the reason he and Cherie were not up for having baby Leo treated with the jab were nothing to do with doubts over its safety.

The MMR scandal resurfaced this week as newly revealed figures showed that since the introduction of MMR the proportion of children affected by autism has risen to one in sixty.

Well the case that MMR vaccine did not contribute to autism was never convincingly made, we were fobbed off with “well you can’t actually PROVE beyond doubt that it is harmful” rather than the more ethical but less cost effective “we can’t prove beyond doubts it isn’t harmful so we will stop using it until we are certain.” Imagine the furore from the anti – smoking lobby if that kind of logic had been used to block the smoking ban. The fact is nobody can prove for certain smoking does cause lung cancer because many people particularly in France and the Mediterranean countries smoke all their lives and live beyond average age. There are very serious grounds to think smoking is harmful though and there are equal grounds for suspecting the MMR vaccine is not as safe as something being used on young children who cannot make their own choices ought to be.

Even those subversive lefties at The Guardian were taken in by the pro MMR spin, their correspondent Ben Goldacre using a weekly column to browbeat poor Gillian McKieth for her whacky but harmless theories. Ben must have become very rich on the backhanders he received from Big Pharma for using Bad Science of his own to discredit the Bad Science of the alternative health industry but his strongest venom has been reserved for those who question the efficacy of the MMR vaccine.

Now I cannot say the MMR vaccine causes autism, though its promoters will claim that is exactly what I am suggesting, but there is enough evidence to warrant an independent judicial enquiry. The statistics can be manipulated to support the government and Big Pharma case, but as long as children keep developing symptoms soon after the treatment we must keep asking the difficult questions.

Autism & MMR – The Evidence You Were Not Supposed To See by ianrthorpe @ 2007-07-17 – 17:55:40

Scientists In Denial. by ianrthorpe @ 2007-07-26 – 16:21:27 “You’re mad,” said the doctor.

“I’m not,” the patient replied.

“You’re mad and you’re in denial,” the doctor said triumphantly.

Its actually surprising how many doctors and scientists are in denial. Machiavelli has been involved in a tussle with the boy – scientists of “The Bad Science Forum,” over the Autism /MMR vaccine issue. They have accused me of saying things I have not said, questioned me and then responded to the answer they wanted me to give rather than the one I gave and even presumed to tell me what I can and cannot write on my blog. In short they are utterly in denial of the fact that I might be right. Once they accept that I might be right they can start to examine the facts scientifically and so will understand that I am right. Well I shall deal with the boy – scientists, slashing them with Occam’s razor another time. For now let’s look at another group of scientists who draw their pay cheque from the public coffers and are also in denial.

Most climatologists agree that unusual weather patters such as the recent floods are a consequence of climate change but there are a few who, like the boy scientists of Bad Science Forum, have turned the maxim “correlation does not prove causation” into a mantra. Perhaps like religious zealots they believe if they chant it often enough something magical will happen. But when things occur in sequence while not actually proving they are linked, is a pretty good clue they might be. We pollute the atmosphere at an accelerating rate for 200 years, the mean atmospheric temperature rises and weather patterns change in exactly the way most intelligent scientists predicted they would.

But there are a few who still insist that because scientific evidence cannot prove beyond doubts climate change is responsible for the floods we should dismiss it as a possibility. Well science cannot prove there is a link but cannot prove there is not a link. Even if they use statistical trickery to ignore the mountain of evidence, their case is still tissue thin. OK there is no smoking gun but look at newsreel footage shot in any industrial city in the 1950s and count the smoking chimneys. Look at clips of traffic jams in the 1970s and count the smoking exhausts. Then there are the red herrings. Scientists, particularly those who work for the government, for all their affectation of high minded detachment are better than Rick Stein at serving up red herrings.

“The current floods are not due to climate change, they are a simple anomaly in the weather. There were similar floods in 1947,” one group has said. Well there were floods in 1947 but they were not similar. The floods then occurred in winter, when water tables and river levels are higher, when trees and plants are dormant and not taking up water. The 1947 flooods also happened when a thaw set in after the heaviest snowfall ever recorded. The whole of Britain had been blanketed in snow. It was a different scenario altogether.

The problem with the kind of scientists who refer to themselves as “scientists” is they tend to be nerdy, a tad obsessive and absolutely determined to eliminate from the equation anything that cannot be easily explained. This leads them to view a problem from too narrow a perspective and disregard the very obvious evidence that is all around them. In short they are the kind of people who need to get out more.

Look at the pictures of the floods. Think how early spring was this year. Think how long the leaves stayed on the trees last year. Something is going on.

Should we do something now or can we wait until “scientists” have argued about it for another fifty years?

Well?

Its not rocket science is it?

A Bad Weekend For Medical Science by ianrthorpe @ 2007-07-30 – 16:52:47

Funny how just as I was thinking Machiavelli was in for a few quiet weeks during the silly season for news, Big Pharma and the medical care industry show their intention of keeping the old pot boiling right through to the day Gordon Brown calls the General election (October 24 – the announcement, not the election, is being hotly tipped.

And then in the course of five days we hear of four reasons to mistrust the medical industry.

First was the announcement of loony plans to put all men over fifty on cholesterol lowering drugs whether they have raised cholesterol levels or not. (Cue a raiding party of boy – scientists from Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science Forum to come storming in yelling that I am not a “scientist” and do not understand the science. Oh I just love winding them up.

Now I do not claim to have any understanding of cholesterol related problems in men over fifty, my LDL (low density lipoprotein or naughty cholesterol) is lower than average I’m told, while my HDL (high density lipoprotein level is healthy. So, having enough side effects from medication I do need, I do not want any more from medication I don’t need.

We do not need a medical qualification to understand that cholesterol is a vital component of human cells so to lower levels in people who don’t need their levels lowered might just cause more problems than it solves. But while that would be bad for us it would be good for Big Pharma, creating a vast new market for drugs to reverse the effects of the unneeded drugs we had already taken. And it would not be bad news for the senior doctors. More work for their teams would mean bigger budgets and bigger salaries.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to understand that, just capable of using common sense. But of course cholesterol is not the first problem that medical science has proposed wholesale medication for. Not so long ago someone was talking about treating the drinking water with anti–depressants.

Next out of the loony laboratory was the news that the until recently acclaimed diabetes drugs Avandia and Actos have been linked to increased risk of heart failure. Researchers say that as many as one in fifty patients put on these drugs have been hospitalized for heart failure in the 26 months since the study of side effects was launched.

Call Little Nicky old fashioned if you like possums, but I thought the point of medicine was to make people better not iller.

Third comes the news that Pharmaceutical companies and the medical establishment are refusing to sanction clinical trials of a drug which is widely used in the U.S.A. and other places to treat deterioration of eyesight in the elderly.

Over 20,000 people per year suffer some loss of vision due to macular degeneration. The drug Lucentis can halt deterioration and improve vision but is priced at around £750 per shot, way beyond the budgets of most NHS Doctors. Which is tough, or would be if a cheap alternative was not available. That alternative, already widely used elsewhere, is a drug called Avastin which was developed to treat bowel cancer. Avastin, in eye sized doses, would cost around £10 per shot. Very affordable, yet NHS Doctors cannot prescribe it because nobody will fund the clinical trials that must be done before the drug is licensed for such use in the UK.

Lastly comes news that Ritalin, widely prescribed for children affected by ADHD but suspected of having serious side effects including, allegedly, death in a few cases is about to become news again. Ritalin has been suspect for a long time, but as with the Autism / MMR issue, Medics have dismissed concerns as “associative fallacy” and said cases of serios illness are just coincidence. But isn’t that what they said about the diabetes drug / heart failure connection (I know it is because my friend who put me up to using Machiavelli to voice the concerns of who can’t reveal their names, is a diabetes specialist) It’s also what they said about the alleged Autism / MMR link, AND the harmful effects of seroxat, AND the addictive nature of many prescription painkillers.

So we can expect that one to run and run ... more

The Scandal That Will Not Go Away (redux) by ianrthorpe @ 2008-08-13 – 19:01:04

About a year ago I posted an item titled The Scandal That Will Not Go Away. It was about the alleged link between the MMR vaccine and Autism and the way that after ten years this controversy has not been resolved.

As anticipated I has a lot of hysterical and emotionally overwought responses from scientists accusing me of not understanding the issue because I was not a scientist.

Wrong on many counts. I was not coming down on either side of the argument, merely asking why the issue keeps resurfacing. I was accused of supporting Dr. Wakefield's research although I never mentioned him and one boy scientist even tried to tell me that "correlation does not prove causation" is the basis of scientific thinking. All he proved by that was he does not understand the difference between correlation and coincidence.

Well now the Labour government is launching another campaign aimed at bullying doubting parents into having their very young children injected with three potent toxins in a single dose and here is an article from Peter Wilby who claims he is a former editor of some crypto-fascist rag read by Ivory Tower dwelling Hampstead liberals showing us once more that the "scientific argument" supporting MMR consists of nothing more than mud slinging against sceptical voices.

Particularly interesting are the comments though, science fundies on one side and freethinkers on the other. Well I have said many times there are a breed of scientists who are seeking to turn their obsession into a religion. They should beware of coming here and complaining that I treat their irrational certainties with the same scant respect I give to the irrational certainties of Creationists preachers:

And Let them know that I am Machiavell,
and weigh not me and therefore not men's words...
I count religion but a childish toy, whatever label people put on it,
and hold there is no sin but ignorance.

UPDATE 11 Feb. 2009:
Mary Creagh complains that attempts to bully reluctants parents into having their children vaccinated with the MMR triple shot are met with stubborn resistance and suggestions that the vaccine should be compulsary are greeted with outright hostility and accusations of fascism (quite right too).In her article MMR: Why we should follow US policy she makes the usual Big Pharma approved defence of the MMR vaccine complete with lies, misrepresentation, dubious statistics and use of emotive language in an attempt at emotional blackmail. Her case rests on the fact that in the US parents must prove their children are vaccinated against certain diseases before they can enrol them in state run schools.

Fine, but what she omits to mention is in America's private healthcare system it is much easier to get single vaccines spaced over a longer perion. Creagh also takes a few swipes at "ignorant working class parents" although figures show it is more likely to be middle class people who are sceptical about the vaccine as (a) they are better informed (b) autism does seem more likely to affect children of middle class parents.

If that is the ony way its supporters can defend MMR then perhaps we should just do away with it and return to single vaccines, after all one of my biggest critics whenever I post on this topic, a man who is a great fan off vaccines, in defending the HPV vaccine which provides limited protection from cervical cancer at enormous cost to the taxpayer said recently even if the vaccine cost a million pounds per course, if a life was saved it was worth it. Is it not worthwhile by the same logic to return to single vaccines for measles etc. when the cost is no different. Or are the supporters of MMR more interested in protecting corporate profits than children?

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