[Sigh] unsubscribe.
Don't you look at my accountant.
He's the only one I've got.
And the other part is that his study was part funded by a legal firm whose interest was in a large class action if the link was established (I think they forked out about 400,000 pound, part of which went to the parents of some of the kids to get them to take part.) Could be wrong on the detail but I can't be arsed looking it up again. Whatever.
Grow older but never grow up
Grow older but never grow up
Well a few points spring to mind.
Andrew Wakefield isn't anti-vaccine. He has concerns over the safety of one particular vaccine.
There might be a whole lot more to Brian Deer's 'investigation' than we're aware of. http://www.ageofautism.com/2011/01/k...the-fraud.html
John Walker-Smith (a co-author of Andrew Wakefield's paper) won his High Court appeal to be reinstated after the GMC struck him off.
Andrew Wakefield's paper is by no means the only controversy surrounding the MMR vaccine.
There is no point responding to Katman's points on this forum as he lives in a fact-free zone. To consider Andrew Wakefield as anything other than a fraud who lied in pursuit of money, is idiocy on stilts. He doesn’t deserve the barest oxygen of publicity, after widespread panic in the wake of his lying paper led to a sharp drop in vaccination rates and thousands of avoidable deaths - and counting - from vaccine-preventable disease.
I'd urge any parents who question the risk v benefit calculus of vaccination to research widely online, make a list of questions, and sit down and discuss your residual concerns with a doctor you trust, one willing to take the time to review your concerns in your family's context.
Disclosure: I deal professionally with the effects of what we will call the McCarthy-Katman Effect when it sickens people and kills babies. Therefore, time for an ad-hominem commentary.
MKE consequences arise from anti-vaccination campaigners with closet-paranoid fantasies acting self-importantly and making enough noise to confuse worried parents (who were primed by the signal-to-noise problems with the Wakefield paper). Jenny McCarthy has zero medical training, but leads a massive movement against immunizations; Katman's medical training I leave to the reader as an exercise in mythology.
Parents and pediatricians alike want to protect children. GPs don’t get kickbacks from vaccine companies. Infectious disease specialists don't get rich selling millions of books urging people to follow the recommended immunization schedule. No-one enjoys sticking needles into babies and children.
Undeniable facts (undeniable unless you inhabit the M-K Intellectual Twilight Zone...):
Despite still relatively good overall immunization rates in NZ - and I don't give a flock whether you call it flock or herd immunity - we still see
- 2-3 in 1,000 children with measles, die
- 4 in 100,000 children with chickenpox, die
- 500 in 100,000 children are annually hospitalized with pertussis; 8 died in the last 10 years
For every child who survives, a considerable percentage are damaged for life
Considering such deaths are wholly preventable, considering every risk-benefit calculation ever carried out for mass childhood vaccination is hugely in favour of vaccinating the pediatric population, and considering that increased efforts to persuade people not to vaccinate their children will result in more dead children, it's hard to see what motivates anti-vaccination advocates, other than anecdote, hearsay, superstition, paranoia, and primitivism.
There are currently 9 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 9 guests)
Bookmarks