Major Media Outlets Focus on Today's Vaccine Safety Meeting and the Vaccine-Autism Debate
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In the midst of yet another controversy about whether vaccines cause autism, the federal government will hold its first ever public meeting on Friday to discuss a governmentwide research agenda to explore the safety of vaccines.Interestingly, while the Times article is a news item, US News and World Report actually chose to take a side on the issue:The meeting is intended to help defuse years of criticism from vaccine skeptics that the government is hiding what it knows about vaccine safety or failing to investigate the issue diligently.
But the gathering is unlikely to appease the government’s many critics in part because the latest notion to grip vaccine skeptics — that vaccinations trigger or worsen something called mitochondrial dysfunction, which in turn causes autism — will remain largely unaddressed.
“I think there could be real frustration,” Dr. Bruce Gellin, director of the National Vaccine Program Office, which is coordinating the meeting, said in an interview Thursday.
The Institute of Medicine in its last report on vaccines and autism in 2004 said that more research on the vaccine question is counterproductive: Finding a susceptibility to this risk in some infants would call into question the universal vaccination strategy that is a bedrock of immunization programs and could lead to widespread rejection of vaccines. The IOM concluded that efforts to find a link between vaccines and autism "must be balanced against the broader benefit of the current vaccine program for all children."Today's meeting certainly has the potential to be interesting, and with so many people paying attention it's likely to be highly political. The question I have is whether there will be any significant movement in any direction - or simply a fair amount of posturing on all sides.Wow. Medicine has moved ahead only because doctors, researchers, and yes, families, have openly challenged even the most sacred medical dogma. At the risk of incurring the wrath of some of my dearest colleagues, I say thank goodness for the vaccine court.
It seems incredible to me that the IOC, CDC and NIH are so absolute in their stance that they are unwilling to push forward a study comparing autism rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated children. I, personally, have never believed in the vaccine/autism connection as a major cause of a huge epidemic - but the fact that these institutions are so adamant in their refusal to dig just a little deeper worries me. At this point in history, I can't help but wonder whether the public health agenda would be better served by openness than by stubborness!
Comments
If meetings such as today’s prove to be unproductive, the parents of vaccine-injured children have few hopes indeed
They will lilely get no help from the federal public health agencies. Instead, the injured families will have to look for justice in the Vaccine Court, the oversight committees of Congress, the Government Accountability Office(GAO), and investigative journalists like David Kirby.
Lisa:
I was relived to hear you use the words “a major cause of a huge epidemic.”
I’m gald you feel we are dealing with a huge epidemic.
You must at least have a Top 5 list of reasons for a major epidemic. If vaccines isn’t on your Top 5, what is?
I appreciate your support for a vax/unvax survey - it is just such a reasonable thing to do!!
JB Handley
Good heavens, I hope you don’t think Gardiner “Citizen Kane” Harris’s article is unbiased.
And I hope that you had time to listen to the afternoon session, and will report some of the quotes — or post a link to the transcript when it becomes available.
nhokkanen - I did listen in to a portion of yesterday afternoon’s commentary, but what I heard were just a set of parent and professional statements supporting the mito/vaccine/autism theory, supporting research into the theory, supporting changes to the vaccine schedule, etc.
Mrs. Poling spoke; researchers spoke; leaders of autism groups spoke. In all, the tone seemed congenial and mutually supportive - but I didn’t get a clear sense that there was an actual conclusion reached.
My feeling at the end (which could be all wrong, because I only heard a portion of the proceedings) was very much the same feeling I used to get at the end of IEP meetings. That is, everyone in authority was lovely and supportive, and said my ideas were good and that they’d look into making all of them work.
Of course, once we adjourned, the school always went back to business as usual.
I’ve been scouring blogs and sites for more concrete info - but haven’t seen anything yet. Do you know more about the outcome of yesterday’s event?
Lisa (autism guide)
PS - tell me more about Gardiner Harris??
JB -
You said:
“I appreciate your support for a vax/unvax survey - it is just such a reasonable thing to do!!”
I absolutely support such a survey. I just HOPE that if it is done, it is done very, very well… even worse than no survey, I think, would be a poorly done survey that allows the agencies to say “see? we did it!” without actually shedding light on anything!
Lisa (autism guide)
Many parents who’ve had contact with Gardiner Harris of The New York Times have found him to be quite biased — myself included. In correspondence with J.B. Handley (link below) Mr. Harris reveals that he is working to stifle information about vaccine injuries.
http://www.ageofautism.com/2008/03/gardiner-harris.html
Harris has perpetuated some of the worst cliches, which help to assure that disbelieving parents continue to deprive their children of biomedical treatments.
Not only would I like to know the results of this: “I appreciate your support for a vax/unvax survey - it is just such a reasonable thing to do!!”
I would also like to know of the 15 case studies done on Autistic Children to rule out Vaccine injury, were done on children with Fragile x chromosome, or the other 80% that are JUST Autistic! If you are born Autistic, vs. triggered Autistic, I think this may play a huge part on test results.