Jeremy Laurance: Is this really the best way to restore confidence in the MMR vaccine?
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Independent Minds
Professor David Salisbury, as head of immunisation at the Department of Health, has one of the most difficult tasks in medicine: restoring confidence in the MMR vaccine. Why, then, is he imperilling the enterprise by threatening legal action against a website that has published a few critical remarks about him?
On 26 February, solicitors for Salisbury |wrote to The One Click Group, an anti-vaccine campaigning organisation, demanding the withdrawal of two articles on its website. One |is a letter of complaint, originally sent to the General Medical Council but thrown out. The other is an article that suggests that Salisbury’s refusal to contemplate the harm caused by vaccination has parallels with Basil Fawlty’s doomed struggle to avoid mentioning the war in front of his German guests. “Our client is an extremely experienced doctor? To compare him to a comedy character and object of ridicule in this manner is clearly defamatory,” says the letter.
The website NHS Blog Doctor, and its correspondent, the menacingly styled John Crippen, drew my attention to this exchange. I agree with his verdict on Salisbury’s move: this is madness.
Dr Crippen throws light on a great mystery of the MMR scare – how it has been sustained for more than a decade, when most health scares subside after a week. As a GP, he tries to persuade mothers to have their babies immunised. The reaction he often gets is this: “We never hear the other side of the story. If any doctor tries to complain, the Government silences them. Look what happened to Dr Wakefield.”
For the head of a government department |to use the law to crack down on a little-known website confirms the truth of this. A short, sharp letter in response would have been enough. Instead, he’s stoked the flames. The Department of Health declined to comment on behalf of Professor Salisbury.
I fear this episode is symptomatic of a wider problem. The fault, if Salisbury has one, is not in what he says but how he says it. The tone in |a recent Radio 4 ‘Today’ interview, as measles cases hit a new high, was hectoring, with a note of irritation. “I think it’s irrational [refusing the vaccine]. I think it’s putting children’s lives at risk. I can see no shred of benefit,” he said. Is he becoming exasperated? That would not be surprising, but this is not the way to reassure parents anxious about their children’s safety
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Comments
The current argument does not seem to be medical, but political. It may well be seen as cheaper to use the 3 in 1 vaccine, and therefore preferable in administrative terms. Any ill effects (autism was quoted, long before the term was in common use) can be putdown to other causes.
The bottom line is, of course, that this is yet another case of the proles refusing to accept than an official decree is the Word of God.
http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.c
Laurence seems also to have missed a troubling story in the Sunday edition of this newspaper:
"Details of the rethink were revealed as it emerged that hundreds of 12- and 13-year-old girls have reported debilitating side-effects after receiving the new vaccination against cervical cancer. Doctors have confirmed that almost 1,300 British schoolgirls suffered reactions, from alleged paralysis to facial bloating, fainting, skin discoloration and rashes after taking part in a mass vaccination programme launched last year."
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s
If 1300 is the admitted number, how many more?
And might it also be, as Jeremy Laurence feared three years ago, that Andrew Wakefield will be exonerated at the GMC?
Very reminiscent of the "side effects" from the old rubella vaccine days, when a whole bunch of anxious teenage girls would get hyped up about their turn to get the vaccination.
News about vaccination over recent weeks has been quite awful, and if this news ever reached national papers like The Independent, and the Guardian, at least the debate would be open, and people could make an informed choice about being vaccinated, or not.
However, the Independent, like most other national newspapers, do not carry news that might be 'harmful' to the vaccination crusade. There is no debate, other than for those who look at the Internet. Jeremy himself says in this article that Salisbury has "the most difficult tasks in medicine: restoring confidence in the MMR vaccine". No debate there. We must all have our confidence restored. Those who oppose vaccinations must be put right.
Nothing there about the withdrawal of a batch of Gardisil from Spain! Nothing there about US courts awarding massive damages to families whose children have been damaged by MMR! No mention there about hundreds of serious adverse reactions to the recent Cerverix vaccination of young girls.
Indeed, no recognition about the concerns that anyone should have about injecting poisons, like mercury, into our bloodstream.
If the Independent is really concerned to have a debate about vaccination, why does it not organise one. This will involve putting both sides of the picture. Otherwise, don't expect anyone to be convinced bland re-assurances about their safety.
Jeremy - are you going to offer the right of reply to the growing lobby of people, like myself, who are convinced that vaccinations are dangerous?
Steve Scrutton
Homeopathy Media Group
We have had 10 years of media froth about the vaccine-autism link. It doesn't exist. Get over it.
Also, Basil Fawlty did not set himself up as an 'expert' over children with a broad range of already existing diseases and systemic weaknesses.
It seems obvious to any thinking person that a triple dose of any disease-causing agent, will have a more significant impact on a child whose immune system is already compromised.
The government/NHS has shown itself to be untrustworthy over and over again.
When parents queried why it was necessary for a baby to have three vaccines in one, they were told that they had no choice.
When they asked about the mercury content of this triple vaccine, thery were initially told that there was no mercury content.
When they opted for individual vaccines, they were not told that the individual vaccines also had a mercury content.
When parents insisted that mercury should be removed from the triple vaccine, the government 'experts' said that mercury had now been removed.
How was that possible, when the government had initially stated that there was no mercury in the previous vaccine?
As these years of lies went on, autism grew at an alarming rate, until it has now reached 1 in 80 of children born in the UK.
Autism is not a minor inconvenience to either the child or his/her parents. It is a life-long condition, for which there is still remarkably little help from any official source. The result is that parents spend all their lives fighting officials, who will not help their children, but state that they 'are doing so'.
Trust? What trust should any parent have in lying, scheming 'experts' or politicians? For that matter, what trust should any parent have in this person, Salisbury? Who is he? Would he force his own tender baby to have such a vaccine?
I write as a grandparent of three children. One is autistic. The parents of the other two wonder whether the triple vaccine gave their first child epilepsy - and they agonised over whether to give their second child the vaccination at all.
It is not that they are unaware of the complications of childhood diseases. They made tehmselves fully aware.
Idiots in prominent positions, need to understand that the truth matters - and people are not widgets.
From where I am standing, the piece in The Independent today, although very welcome, is in fact the Salisbury Response. The Head of Immunisation at the Department of Health has been caught throwing his weight around in a most unattractive manner and the only way to get out of it is to respond: Oops! Never mind me, just call me Basil Fawlty.
Although the satire potential of recent events is enormous and has been fully exploited by One Click in our litigation response to Dr David Salisbury (http://tinyurl.com/b8d8qg), let us not try to hide the ramifications of what Steve Scrutton has just written: "Salisbury's threatened action against the One Click Organisation shows how desperate the government, the NHS, the Big Pharma companies are to stifle the debate."
Joking won't fix this and neither will legal threats.
With best wishes
Jane Bryant
The One Click Group
All these years later we are still killing and damaging our children with these vaccines, some things never change. you may wish to pull this story out of your archives and re publish it. Or at least get your writers to read it. they may get a better understanding of the anti side of this arguement and stop daming us as child killing loonies.
I suspect you are one of those people who agrees with evidence only if it conforms to your own preconceptions - If a health care worker advises you to do something like get your child immunised, you'll say "Well what do they know?", but when you read of them not getting vaccinated themselves against flu, you say "Well they must know something the rest of us don't...."
No wonder the printed media is flailing with this sort of gossiping nonsense being printed as news.
Anyone with any interest over the allegations of legal threats and defamation should visit the One Click Group and get a sense of the "tone" of the site. Would you happily subscribe or be victim of it?
Do journalists look out for "their own" or is that something only them other authority figures are guilty of?
I advise concerned parents to pick up a copy, or get a loan of the book Bad Science which has a fantastic chapter on the matter of MMR. I've found it very measured and reassuring. Or just go read the blog, badscience.net.
Why misrepresent with conjecture instead of doing any investigative work? I'm so sad and disillusioned as I've always loved papers but you're giving me less and less reason to have any faith in journalism. I'm 26, I hope there's time in my life for newspapers to redeem themselves. And I can get away with simply doing a review, I'm not selling anything and will probably be dismissed for having the audacity to express an opinion without a press badge.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/335/761
Additionally his father, professor of public health at Oxford, co-authored a paper with Dr Elizabeth Miller on the effects of the Pluserix "urabe strain" version of MMR which had to withdrawn in 1993.
Vaccination is safe for most people but not for all. Instead of moving the deckchairs expensively round the Titanic, why aren't clever scientists like Professor (Sir) David Salisbury finding out who vaccines are not safe for - and why?
Excellent point. For example, there is evidence that at least some children with ASD are low - possibly due to a genetic polymorphism - in glutathione, which is the body's natural chelator. Thus these children are more liable to damage from vaccines with mercury/aluminium in them. Another example: At least some of the genes discovered to be associated with autism code for a substance called glutamate, which is an excitotoxin. Thus such genetically-predispositioned kids should be spared contact with this substance. Lo and behold: not only is it in foodstuffs (& thus a reason why a GF/CF diet has worked for some children on the spectrum, because wheat & dairy are high in glutamate), but it is in many vaccines, particularly live-virus vaccines (it is a stabilizer). So: one strike against the MMR right there. Another strike against it is the fact that it has 'chick embryonic fluid' as 'animal by-products'. This is/can be a source of myelin basic protein (MBP); and thus the body mounts an immune reaction to its OWN MBP from this vaccinal trigger. Result: brain damage (myelin is the insulation that protects the cranial nerve systems). This latter finding is beginning to be recognised in the US Vaccine Court as a vaccine-caused result. (They may call it PDD or PDD-NOS, or whatever they want to call these conditions; but basically they are all BRAIN DAMAGE.)
In short: Dr Salisbury is at fault for not letting the UK public know the full story about the MMR, and other vaccines. In the absence of such info, suspicions grow. The public deserves the right to 'informed consent' in this matter, as in any other medical matter. Let the TRUE risks-vs-benefits of various vaccines come out - and not from easily-manipulated population studies. We should be honouring case histories more. Parents are not dumb. They know what's been going on - for too long, now. It's time and past for the whole story to come out, in this matter of vaccines; the good AND the bad. Basically it's a scandal, that can't be swept under the carpet any longer.
However, you do have a problem. You see, ADEM occurs as a complication of viral infections in general including mumps, rubella and measles. It does so in one case in every 2000 infections or so. Since everyone would get these infections, then ADEM would occur naturally at this frequency. But since it only occurs in under one case in 100 thousand vaccine doses, so you have to agree that MMR vaccination is one very good way to prevent the majority of cases of ADEM. So it makes perfect sense to vaccinate with MMR to help reduce the incidence of this uncommon but important problem.
"The Independent has put its green columnist Julia Stephenson on to Panorama's Wi-Fi scare story: a charming beef heiress living in Chelsea on a trust fund, who believes her symptoms of tiredness and headache are caused by electromagnetic radiation from phones and Wi-Fi." http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis
For vitriol, irrelevant ad hominem, undeclared COI (the Institute of Psychiatry hosts the government wi-fi health unit), Goldacre's still the one to beat. Jeremy Laurance should watch out.
"For vitriol, irrelevant ad hominem, undeclared COI (the Institute of Psychiatry hosts the government wi-fi health unit), Goldacre's still the one to beat."
Of course, Goldacre is cloned from Professor (Sir) Simon Wessely, another dabbling psychiatrist from the Institute of Psychiatry in London, who meddles irritatingly in many medical conditions for which honest doctors have no answer. Here is an example of the abysmal level of research that Wessely and his clones indulge in ...
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/3
... and presumably at vast expense to the long-suffering British taxpayer.
In 1985 in the British National Formulary it stated that there was no justification to introduce a mumps vaccine in to the schedule as it is a benign childhood illness, rarely any complications.
when there were 16 cases of mumps in Wales in recent months it turned out that 15 had received two doses of MMR - the health officials admitted that the mumps component was not effective.
While MMR may be safe many parents want to use single vaccines if for no other reason than they are more effective vaccines than MMR conferring a higher level of protection. What is really important is that children ARE vaccinated; not that they are vaccinated by "brand x" MMR or by single vaccines. If parents want to use single vaccines then they should be supported. It's not as if they were refusing to vaccinate their children merely that they wish to use a different route.
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/mu
I believe it to be the most candid book on polical debate to ever hit the shelves. The book is available
at Amazon for $17.95. However, I am willing to donate this book to as many polical science schools as I can afford. Be aware that this book is pretty raw with minimal editing to portray the true eight hour gate in time, there is some vulgar language. - John Crippen