New Study: Substantial Number of Children Compensated for Vaccine Injury Also Have Autism.
Investigators and Families of Vaccine-Injured Children Released Study Revealing Clear Vaccine-Autism Link Based on Government’s Own Data
Report Demands Immediate Congressional Action
Washington, DC – Directors of the Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy (EBCALA), parents and vaccine-injured children held a press conference on the steps of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to release a study linking vaccine injury to autism. (To view the full study online, please click here.)
For over 20 years, the federal government has publicly denied a vaccine-autism link, while at the same time its Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has been awarding damages for vaccine injury to children with brain damage, seizures and autism. Coming out just after the prevalence study of autism in South Korea, this investigation, based on public, verifiable government data, breaks new ground in the controversial vaccine-autism debate.
The investigation found that a substantial number of children compensated for vaccine injury also have autism. The government has asserted that it “does not track” autism among the vaccine-injured. Based on this preliminary investigation, the evidence suggests that autism is at least three times more prevalent among vaccine-injured children than among children in the general population.
EBCALA board member and law enforcement professional Louis Conte said, “Government officials call autism a ‘national health emergency.’ Congress needs to find out what the VICP administrators knew about this vaccine-autism association and when they knew it. Why was this important association hidden in plain sight?”
In 1986, Congress created the VICP under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (1986 Law). This Program has original jurisdiction for children’s claims of vaccine injury. Because almost all children receive multiple vaccinations for daycare and school, it is critically important that the Program provides fundamental fairness, due process and transparency.
This empirical investigation, published in a peer-reviewed law journal, examines claims that the VICP compensated for vaccine-induced brain damage and seizures. The VICP has compensated approximately 2,500 claims of vaccine injury since the inception of the program. This study found 83 cases of acknowledged vaccine-induced brain damage that include autism, a disorder that affects social interaction, language and behavior. In 21 published cases of the Court of Federal Claims, which administers the VICP, the Court stated that the petitioners had autism or described autism unambiguously. In 62 remaining cases, the authors identified settlement agreements where Health and Human Services (HHS) compensated children with vaccine-induced brain damage, who also have autism or an autism spectrum disorder.
Parents reported the existence of autism in telephone interviews and supplied supplemental materials including medical diagnoses, school records, and completed, standard autism screening questionnaires to verify their reports. In 39 of the 83 cases, or 47% of the cases of vaccine injury reviewed, there is confirmation of autism or autism spectrum disorder beyond parental report.
This finding of autism in compensated cases of vaccine injury is significant. U.S. government spokespeople have been asserting no vaccine-autism link for more than a decade. This finding calls into question the decisions of the Court of Federal Claims in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding in 2009 and 2010 and the statement of Health and Human Services on its website that “HHS has never concluded in any case that autism was caused by vaccination.”
Using publicly available information, the investigation shows that the VICP has been compensating cases of vaccine-induced brain damage associated with autism for more than twenty years. This investigation suggests that officials at HHS, the Department of Justice and the Court of Federal Claims may have been aware of this association but failed to publicly disclose it.
The study calls on Congress to thoroughly investigate the VICP, including a medical investigation of compensated claims of vaccine injury.
Dr. Sarah Bridges, mother of a son compensated for vaccine injury who has autism, said, “This study shows a significant connection between vaccine injury and autism. It’s time for our government to treat this issue like the emergency it is and stop sweeping this issue under the rug. No more children should have to suffer what my son did. America’s children deserve better.”
To view the full study online, please click here.
"Anti-vaccine" is a label that makes no sense and is only intended to divide. Sure, the parents at the press conference said they were not "anti-vaccine," because it's a term with no legitimate meaning.
What every American citizen has to think about is whether the "public good" is best served by our current CDC-recommended vaccination schedule, given the costs.
In economics class in college, we learned about positive and negative externalities. A negative externality (as David Kirby discusses in *Animal Factory*) is when the negative consequences of a product or process are borne by an individual or a small group, and not the makers of the product or the majority of its consumers. For example, you have "cheap" dairy products because the people who live near dairy factories bear the burden of production (pollution, stench, illness, etc.).
If VICP were fairly administered--if we got rid of all the negative externalities by fairly compensating every victim instead of forcing these families to bear an undue cost--if every vaccine injury were compensated to the tune of Hannah Poling's ($1,500,000 lump sum plus $500,000 per year for life), then the cost-benefit ratio of the current CDC-recommended vaccine schedule wouldn't look so pretty.
Just to play it out a bit... Neurologist Martin Raff (who does not believe that vaccines cause autism; link here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/8/42) notes that 30% of autism cases are regressive. Let's just imagine that all of these cases of regressive autism are vaccine-induced. Autism Speaks (http://www.autismspeaks.org/whatisit/index.php) tells us that 1.5 million Americans have autism. So... 30% of 1.5 million = 450,000 people. If we give each of these people a $1,500,000 lump sum plus $500,000 per year for the next 60 years, then we'll spend over FOURTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS ($14,175,000,000,000). And that's just the current cases, not the kids who are being diagnosed at this moment, and will be diagnosed every day until we stop inducing these cases of regressive autism.
(Of course, this doesn't include the cost of the vaccine program itself: the cost of the products, the doctor visits, the R&D at drug companies, the insurance payments, etc.)
It makes you wonder, how much would it cost us if every kid in the US had the measles?
So, "anti-vaccine," whatever. I think we have to look at the true cost of the vaccine program, and whether the "public good" is really being served by giving some children a very expensive disease instead of letting most kids get a pretty cheap one. (And of course, the answer could be scaling back the vaccination schedule to include some diseases, but not all. The problem with the anti-vaccine label is that, like the vaccine program, it's one-size-for-all, whether or not it fits.)
Posted by: Theresa O | May 11, 2011 at 01:35 PM
Thanks Nick;
Thanks for the link, I had missed this!
But I am not sure what this means? Or more importantly what the CDC, NIH, EPA and all will try to make of it????
These kids are in regular classrooms but are doing okay and some are really, really smart - PDD-NOS - welllll I have a PDD-NOS and he is odd, has epilepsy, bad in math. Are they trying to say that autism has always been around just in milder forms???
Maybe this is why the school teachers have been accused of what they call (dumbing down the curriculum) or spoon feeding the kids with information - meaning students are told exactly what was going to be on the test word for word, or give test just on a small amount of the material - less talk and more hands on stuff (labs).
Maybe it is not a new way of approaching a student or teaching as much as in the last 30 years teachers have had to change their tactics.
So much for the basic R's.
Posted by: Benedetta | May 11, 2011 at 12:48 PM
We have known for a while that families were receiving compensation for vaccine-damaged autistic children as long as they did not claim autism as the disability. I don't think this study will change that because the vaccine court relies on the population studies to "prove" that vaccines don't cause autism (although conceding they can cause other serious disorders, e.g., seizures). Those studies need to be publicly discredited to make progress and that will not be done by government agencies (some of the guilty parties in this disaster).
Posted by: Theodore Van Oosbree | May 10, 2011 at 08:32 PM
Benedetta,
It is a study from a Korean population and how the numbers were arrived at and their meaning is far from clear. It is a high number, but way too early to draw anything from imo.
"The elaborate study searched for 7- to 12-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among 55,000 children in a community outside Seoul, South Korea. Largely funded by the advocacy organization Autism Speaks, the study was led by Young Shin Kim, MD, PhD, MPH, of Yale University."
http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20110509/study-autism-may-be-more-common-than-thought
Posted by: Nick | May 10, 2011 at 07:18 PM
Okay- This at least five times I have heard the 1 out of 38 stat.
Where is this comeing from?
What have I missed?
Posted by: Benedetta | May 10, 2011 at 06:35 PM
John, I know what they've said. Yes, this is HUGE. I agree. I'm just commenting that I like the approach they've taken. Making this about a legal process rather than a bunch of 'whackjob' (my word) parents who refuse to be sheeple.
I think vaccines can cause autism. I don't know if they caused my son's autism. They might have, they might not have. He does have Kreb's Cycle problems. My focus is getting him better (which he is - yippee!).
I have a problem though with the public image that non-vaxxers have, a la Jenny McCarthy, that despite her work in the autism community and in recovering her son, even turned me off when she went on Larry King and ranted like a lunatic. When we have that kind of public image, people think we're all idiots. For the record, I don't think Jenny McCarthy is an idiot, but, she doesn't come across as Mary Holland Esq does.
Posted by: SarahS | May 10, 2011 at 05:47 PM
SarahS
Just to point out what the HRSA has said at least twice in statements to journalists (Sharyl Attkisson and David Kirby):
"The government has never compensated, nor has it ever been ordered to compensate, any case based on a determination that autism was actually caused by vaccines. We have compensated cases in which children exhibited an encephalopathy, or general brain disease. Encephalopathy may be accompanied by a medical progression of an array of symptoms
including autistic behavior, autism, or seizures."
Posted by: John Stone | May 10, 2011 at 05:24 PM
I think the families represented here were very smart about saying they're not anti-vaccine. That, sadly, just shuts people down and they stick to their belief that non-vaxxers are a bunch of clowns. They kept it to the point - that the paper was a review of the compensation program, not of the science and that the compensation program has been compensating people for vaccine injury to their children, who happened to have autism, following brain injury. So, they're denying that there is a link, but their own cases appear to show that link.
This is a very shrewd way to go about reopening the debate, especially over the ridiculous semantics we saw in the Hannah Poling case, ie result vs cause.
Well done to the study authors. Look forward to hearing more.
Posted by: SarahS | May 10, 2011 at 04:55 PM
I have propagated the connection between inoculations and autism as an autoimmune disease, leading to an "attack on the intestines" and not a neurological entity. The intestines cause a breakdown of milk caseins to an opioid, casomorphine, and this gives the symptoms of the autism syndrome.
That is why I can explain why camel milk can "cure" children suffering from the autism syndrome
Posted by: Prof (emeritus) Reuven Yagil | May 10, 2011 at 01:44 PM
Gee, what coincidental timing: we're seeing front-page headlines that 1 in 38 are on the autism spectrum. 1 in 38--that's pretty close to 3 times the last official autism rate of 1 in 110.
How long do you think it's going to be before Big Pharm insists that the reason autism is seen three times more in vaccine-induced brain injuries than in the general population is because, oh, let me see--gee, we've got our rates wrong for the general population wrong! Yep, it's been 1 in 38 this whole time, we just never, umm, saw it before, yeah that's right!
Apparently, there are no lengths to which they will not go in order to hide the truth.
Posted by: Taximom | May 10, 2011 at 01:32 PM
So many children regress into autism after being vaccinated. They were developing normally and then suddenly everything changes. With retardation, there is usually a cause (Down syndrome) or an insult (birth injury, head injury, seizures). No one would question THESE. No one would say the mother imagined it. No one would say it must be something else. But with autism, science is happy to keep the cause illusive. I feel that it's a lot like if a child was "normal" before a bad car accident and head injury, they became brain damaged and no one wanted to look at the car accident!
This study compares to the general population and there are cases of autism there, so the conclusions could have been even stronger if they compared to unvaccinated. This study is a great contribution. If for no other reason, it paves the way for more families to speak out about their compensation.
We are still waiting for the vaccinated/unvaccinated study where the findings will point to vaccines as the major cause for the epidemic of autism.
Posted by: Cynthia Cournoyer | May 10, 2011 at 12:51 PM
Why did all the parents speaking at the press conference on the Vaccine Compensation Program say they're not anti-vaccine? Last night on the news they said that their most recent count reveals that 1 in 38 children is somewhere on the autism spectrum. Of course the fine print will say that 1 in 38 VACCINATED children is somewhere on the autism spectrum. Some children are more vulnerable than others to vaccine damage, but give them enough shots or enough risk factors like having recently had a cold or giving four shots at a time, and we are going to find that every living being is subject to vaccine damage. The thimerosol is dangerous (it's still in most flu vaccines), the aluminum, the formaldehyde, the pathogens themselves, and ultimately it's just plain dangerous to inject antigens directly into the muscle or bloodstream, bypassing the normal defenses of the immune system, this throws the immune system into pandemonium and into an autoimmune reaction (often or maybe always some degree of encephalitis). We need a lot more information, but maybe we should turn our attention to teaching parents how to care for children who have the measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, or chicken pox. They are NOT the killer diseases that parents have been taught to fear. Ask anyone over 55 or so, and they will tell you they had most or all of these diseases and they recovered just fine. Consider the source that tells us they are deadly. There are good homeopathic treatments for the more serious diseases when they arise. Try Umcka for colds or flu and you will be amazed at the potential of homeopathy. There is no safe vaccine, and there is no child immune to damage.
Posted by: ciaparker2 | May 10, 2011 at 12:49 PM