Autism by Any Other Name and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
By Louis Conte and Wayne Rohde
This article is the 3rd installment in a series investigating the NVICP
The Obscure Federal Court: National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program
Manifest Injustice – the End Result of Scientific Fraud
The Associated Press recently released a series of articles about the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) that focused on the delays in case processing, petitioner’s difficulties in proving claims and concerns that attorneys “churn cases” to increase billing. On 12/22/14 the New York Times ran one of the articles where the authors, Justin Pritchard, Mitch Weiss and Troy Thibodeaux, touched on the curious reasoning in decisions involving autism in children who also suffered encephalopathy, or brain injury. The authors accepted the NVICP narrative that a vaccine injury might cause severe brain damage but never autism.
Despite the use of verbal camouflage regarding autism in the NVICP, there are times when the truth leaks out. The following is from the case record of the US Government’s concession that vaccines triggered autism in the case of Child Doe 77 (aka: Hannah P.):
“Medical personnel at the Division of Vaccine Injury Compensation, Department of Health and Human Services (DVIC) have reviewed the facts of this case, as presented by the petition, medical records, and affidavits. After a thorough review, DVIC has concluded that compensation is appropriate in this case.
In sum, DVIC has concluded that the facts of this case meet the statutory criteria for demonstrating that the vaccinations CHILD received on July 19, 2000, significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder. Therefore, respondent recommends that compensation be awarded to petitioners in accordance with 42 U.S.C. § 300aa-11(c) (1) (C) (ii).”
That doesn’t mean that a government official can’t deny it anyway.
“Let me be very clear that the government has made absolutely no statement indicating that vaccines are a cause of autism,” Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Thursday.” [1]
Child Doe 77 has an autism diagnosis and Gerbeding’s statement glosses over the fact that the government conceded that vaccines caused it. The case was filed in the Omnibus Autism Proceedings (OAP) and was supposed to be a test case for one of the theories that Special Masters (Judges do not decide cases in the “Vaccine Court”) were to consider. Gerbeding’s verbal gymnastics received support from industry representatives:
“Gerberding's biggest challenge was defining the term “autism.” Because autism is a clinical diagnosis, children are labeled as autistic on the basis of a collection of clinical features…Indeed, features reminiscent of autism are evident in all children with profound impairments in cognition; but these similarities are superficial, and their causal mechanisms and genetic influences are different from those of classic autism.” Paul A. Offit, M.D. [2]
The same industry spokesman re-emerged when it was revealed that the NVICP regularly compensated cases of vaccine-induced brain damage featuring autism in the years before Child Doe 77. Here Dr. Offit responds to the finding of 83 NVICP compensated cases involving autism in the peer reviewed Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: A Review of Compensated Cases of Vaccine-Induced Brain Injury, 28 Pace Envtl. L. Rev. 480 (2011) [3]
“Dr. Offit said the study authors reach erroneous conclusions due to an erroneous definition of autism. A child with measles encephalopathy, he said, may have severe cognitive deficits that fall into the autism spectrum, but such symptoms themselves do not necessarily translate into a diagnosis of autism. A spokesperson for HRSA mounted the same defense — shared symptoms do not make 2 different conditions identical — in an email to Medscape Medical News. The spokesperson affirmed that while the US Court of Federal Claims has granted awards for encephalopathy, it has never granted awards for autism per se.” [4]
Pritchard, Weiss and Thibodeaux facilitate the re-writing of the history of autism in the NVICP, as we see here:
“On March 6, 2008, the parents of 7-year-old Hannah Poling revealed that the government had agreed to compensate their claim. Though the government never conceded that a vaccine caused Hannah's autism, that was the implication during a family news conference highlighted on cable TV and the evening news.
The court ultimately dismissed any link between vaccines and autism.
The court in December 2012 compensated two cases filed years earlier as autism claims. In both, Special Master Patricia Campbell-Smith ruled that vaccines injured the children's brains — but did not cause autism — and awarded their families more than a million dollars each in compensation.” [5]
Once again, the government conceded that the vaccines that Child Doe 77 received triggered a regression that left the child with brain damage and autism. Yet we are led to believe that none of that happened, none of this is true and that the link between vaccines and autism has been disproven.
It is remarkable that the distortion of parlance can work so well. It is remarkable that a Special Master can go on record saying that vaccines caused a child’s brain damage but, stunningly, didn’t cause the same child’s autism. It is even more stunning when previous NVICP case decisions said exactly that:
“As a sequela to the encephalopathy, Kleinert suffered complications for more than six months after the administration of the DPT vaccine, and he continues to suffer from these complications, which have developed into a residual seizure disorder and autistic tendencies.” [6]
It is bewildering that Dr. Paul Offit can declare “shared symptoms do not make 2 different conditions identical” when autism is defined by its symptoms in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Psychiatry.
When it comes to vaccine injury and autism, government and public health officials are like eels swimming in a murky pool of convoluted phraseology. The child with vaccine induced brain damage didn’t have autism just “autism-like behaviors.” The child compensated for vaccine injury didn’t have autism just “features of autism.” The vaccine didn’t cause the child’s autism it just “resulted in autism.” And besides all that, the child didn’t have “classic autism”, whatever that is, as Offit claims.
The NVICP is a place of dissembling language, denial and injustice. People who work in and around the program admit that a child can suffer a vaccine injury that leaves them with impaired language, social skills and developmental delays. If the child now walks on their toes, hand flaps, obsesses over objects and will require care for the rest of their lives, the NVICP will go with that because brain damage, or encephalopathy, is on the Vaccine Injury Table that the program uses.
But if you say that a child who suffered vaccine induced brain damage has autism, you get the Offiterian logic that if a vaccine caused it, then it’s not autism.
It’s Nautism.
It is remarkable that the AP’s journalists accept this nonsense and repeat it in their articles. To be fair, they are simply the latest in a long line of investigative journalists who seem unable to ask the next question and actually investigate this controversy as Anne Dachel points out in her book The Big Autism Cover-Up: How and Why the Media Is Lying to the American Public.
The AP concludes that attorney billing is the biggest problem in the program. Attorney billing may or may not be an issue, but the greater issue is that the “Vaccine Court” has failed the fundamental test of what Americans expect of any justice venue; that it be a place of truth.
The NVICP is a black box, a legal netherworld, kept in the shadows so that no one working there has to answer this one horrible question: What does a vaccine injured child look like?
Do such children often have “Autism” or Paul Offit’s “Nautism”?
And Special Master Campbell-Smith, if you believe that a vaccine could cause brain damage but not cause that same child's autism, then it is completely obvious that you believe nothing could. The 5,000 families who filed claims alleging their children developed autism due to vaccination never had a shot against this kind of thinking. The treatment they received at the hands of Special Masters in the NVICP’s Omnibus Autism Proceedings represents one of the saddest chapters in the history of American justice.
The Special Masters, the Division of Vaccine Injury Compensation and the rest of the players in the NVICP have denied reality, suppressed truth and enabled the autism epidemic to rage on. The NVICP was supposed to shed light on vaccine injuries to make vaccines safer. Instead, it has allowed more children to be injured from vaccine induced brain damage - by whatever name you give it.
Louis Conte was a co-author of Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury
Compensation Program: A Review of Compensated Cases of Vaccine-Induced Brain Injury, author of a novel, The Autism War and, along with Tony Lyons, author of Vaccine Injuries: Documented Adverse Reactions to Vaccines.
Wayne Rohde is the author of The Vaccine Court: The Dark Truth of America's Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
2. GAO Report on NVICP – The Lack of Public Awareness
[1] Gardiner Harris - New York Times (3/8/08)
[2] Perspective - Vaccines and Autism Revisited — The Hannah Poling Case. N Engl J Med 2008; 358:2089-2091, 5/15/08
[3] Available at: http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/pelr/vol28/iss2/6
[4] Medscape, 5/10/11.
[5] AP Article in the New York Times, 12/22/14
[6] Kleinert v. Secretary of Health and Human Services, No. 90-211V, 2/20/91.
Happy New Year Jim
Recently I came upon a book given to me years ago when I was too busy to look at it (or thought I was) by the founder of the UK yellow card adverse drug reporting scheme, Bill Inman 'Don't Tell The Patient' published in 1999. The book is almost too laconic but there is a key chapter about how the author in the 1970s had detected a rate of serious adverse reactions to pertussis vaccination above ten times the rate officially admitted, more than 1 in 30,000 cases (something which would have been compounded c.1990 when the accelerated DPT schedule was introduced). Already in the UK in the 1970s there was a huge infra-structure of time-serving committees ready to over-rule and intimidate anyone who called policy on any matter into question. At the end of the chapter, with Inman retiring from the Department of Health in 1980 he is told "You know Bill, you've blown your K", i.e. knighthood, for rocking the boat on pertussis vaccination and for associating early versions of the contraceptive pill with thrombosis. One person ,of course, who didn't blow their "K" in the end was Sir Michael Rutter.
We note also that before journalist Brian Deer got his teeth into Andy Wakefield he had published a smear job on a successful Irish DPT claimant Margaret Best when the British government machine knew perfectly well that there were potentially hundreds of perfectly valid cases pending and children still being injured. It is also a matter of history that when Deer launched his attack on Wakefield he did it with support of Chief Medical Officer, the Prime Minister http://www.bmj.com/content/328/7438/528/rapid-responses and the unrestrained glee of the Department of Health https://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/. National Health Service websites linked to Deer's.
One of the things to be learnt from Inman's book is that the systems become ever more adept at suppressing anything that conflicts with policy, and therefore the danger to real public interest gets ever greater. Fifty years ago Inman was able to blow the whistle on the early contraceptive pill and thrombosis from within the system: it seems very unlikely today. No matter how bad things gets the machine can deflect controversy and demands more and more sacrifice.
Of course, the great game is pursued by government and the state differently on either side of the pond but with same goals of suppressing knowledge, dissent and above all legal liability.
Posted by: John Stone | January 02, 2015 at 11:02 AM
Excellent analysis by Conte and Rohde as usual. However, the abuses in NVICP are actually much worse, a deliberate calculated obstruction of justice designed to conceal the true nature of and extent of vaccine injury, especially vaccine-caused autism, deprive those injured of the literally trillions intended by Congress to compensate these children for being injured veterans in the war against disease, and maximize uptake to preserve herd immunity in the face of CDC’s fear that the virtual elimination of death and disease from preventable infection might elevate public concern over vaccine safety and adverse effects. In short, CDC’s policy dilemma was that vaccine uptake may have become the unintended victim of its own success, with CDC making the diabolical choice to preserve uptake at the expense of honesty and ethics, sacrificing a generation (so far) of injured children in the process. This choice to ignore the intent of Congress led to the current policy of deliberate ignorance in science and to obstruction of justice in law.
As the quote from the 1991 Kleinert case, and so many others from the early days of the program illustrates, that vaccines could cause autism (or more technically brain injury leading to a dx of ASD) was entirely unremarkable to the masters. But that was when autism was rare and vaccines (and included toxins) were far fewer. Amidst the growing number of these early program cases awarding millions in compensation for vaccine caused autism came Professor Rutter’s (UK autism dean) 1994 analysis of the medical aspects of autism, noting, again unremarkably, a case of DPT-caused autism. In a lengthy review article on the biological basis of autism, Sir Michael described a genetic study of families affected by autism, from which some children were excluded on the basis that their autism could be explained by some known Amedical condition of probable aetiological [causal] importance.@ Sir Michael explained one of the exclusions: AOnly eight of the cases can be regarded as having a probably causal medical condition, a child with epilepsy and a temporal lobe focus on the EEG [Electroencephalogram] who had an onset following immunization.@
On this side of the pond, VAERS reports of vaccine-caused autism began to mount (see excellent analysis by Yazbak, http://www.vaccinationnews.com/20110301ThereGoesThatArgumentYazbakFE The defendant-governmnet’s response in 1996 was to narrow the Vaccine Injury Table (particularly residual seizure disorder and the definition of encephalopathy), targeting especially the injuries leading to an ASD dx. The conspiracy was well underway before the case series published in 1998 by Wakkefield et al, which was simply made the scapegoat for both causation and growing public doubt over vaccine safety.
Congress passed a Mandate for Safer Childhood Vaccines in 1986 which requires the Secretary to use his authority to reduce adverse events, which can only be done with baseline data on unvaccinated children for comparison. The heart of the conspiracy to obstruct justice was the refusal to conduct a study of comparative health of unvaccinated children vs. vaccinated children to get baseline epidemiology data for comparison, to secret VSD, and to delete unvaccinated children from the Verstraeten study.
The swift and just compensation required by Congress will remain denied until the government, or community, funds an ongoing program of credible accountable and transparent research on unvaccinated children or forces the VSD to go public. If the government and its vaccine-developer toady Offit want to play the game that there is a difference between vaccine-caused ASD and autism caused by other factors, then let them at least have the honor, decency, integrity and ethics to demand a study of the unvaccinated, the only way “science” will every be able to resolve how much ASD is being caused by vaccines. Vaccine court has accepted causation, over and over again, although the masters have sadly become engulfed in the conspiracy of silence, possibly seduced by repeated arguments by the government that ‘kids will die’ if autism cases are compensated.
The government types all sleep very well at night “comfortable” swaddled in their delusion that vaccines are safe, save lives, and don’t cause autism because the true extent of vaccine-caused autism (and other disorders) remains deliberately hidden, an unspeakable tragedy.
PS: the NYT article referred to by Rhode and Conte can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2014/12/22/us/politics/ap-us-vaccine-court.html. Another version of the email exchange sadly but hilariously illustrating the government’s deception (sophistry?) can be found at: http://childhealthsafety.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/attkisson-cbs-hrsa-email-exchanges-autistic-conditions-vaccines.pdf. I.F. Stone famously described the task of investigative reporting as to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. The plight of the uncompensated vaccine victims is so deplorable. Yet the inability or unwillingness of supposedly investigative journalists, like this AP series, to find and report the truth remains a mystery, as the truth about the vaccine injured remains the most important medical-legal-scientific-political story of our time.
Posted by: Jim Moody | January 02, 2015 at 12:51 AM
Encephalopathy that underlies the clinical features (neurological signs) of autism should be the most important focus of research. The “clinical features” can be described in neurological terms as: (1) language disorder, (2) movement disorder, and (3) diminished level of consciousness.
The language areas of the cerebral cortex are not fully developed at birth. Language develops as maturation of the cortex proceeds during the first four years of life. Too many medical interventions are mindlessly employed beginning at birth and through the years of early childhood. All can affect subcortical centers of the brain and derail the normal course of development. Children with classic autism (Kanner autism) are often especially beautiful exactly because they did not have a genetic defect or suffer prenatal exposure to a teratogenic substance.
I will continue to try to be heard by “experts” on this issue. Unfortunately the experts prefer to muddle around with imprecise talk about clinical features, social disorder, and encephalopathy. “Social disorder” is the term that most stands in the way of a precise neurological definition of autism. “Social disorder” is an unfortunate euphemism for diminished level of consciousness.
The precise encephalopathy must be described in terms of brain areas for language, motor control, and seat of the conscious state.
Posted by: Eileen Nicole Simon | December 31, 2014 at 04:04 AM
Autism is brain damage. Let's call a thing a thing...
Posted by: LB | December 30, 2014 at 06:19 PM
Webster's defines "sophistry" thus: misleading but clever reasoning"
Which means .. the routine use of "misleading but clever reasoning" of the NVICP is nothing more than "sophistry masquerading as science".
***********
I agree with you on the misleading part Bob, but clever is not a word that I would use to describe the non-science propaganda being spewed by these people. In fact, I would guess that most parents of vaccine poisoned children find their excuses to be quite insulting.
But none of that matters to them, because it's not our opinion that they're worried about. It's the masses that they're worried about, and they seem to understand that fooling them doesn't require a message that is clever…. it just has to be persistent, and completely unchallenged by the main stream media.
Here a few quotes from Joseph Goebbels, a historical figure who also seemed to have a firm grasp of that concept:
“Think of the press as a great keyboard
on which the government can play.”
“If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction..”
Posted by: Barry | December 30, 2014 at 05:59 PM
Dear Louis and Wayne-
Thank you.
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/vaccine_court_is_profitable_for_some_lawyers_who_get_paid_win_or_lose/?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=navigation&utm_campaign=most_read
Posted by: Ottoschnaut | December 30, 2014 at 03:01 PM
Julie Geberding's statement is symptomatic of the science of rebuttal - invented by President Clinton - but used routinely in elliptical language by UK Government Ministers and officials for many years. Even privately bragging of their skills in this medium.
Some years ago I wrote to many officials, Ministers, Research Heads, Medical Directors etc., asking for prevalence data for unvaccinated autistic people. None answered the question but those who did reply at all also sent reams of irrelevant information. One of these from a senior Government Minister did not answer the question but did send 66 pages of information that upon close examination revealed that unvaccinated numbers were up to three times greater than the Government had routinely proclaimed. Such commonality of behaviour tells more than straight lies.
Tony Bateson, Oxford OX2 6JJ, UK.
Posted by: Tony Bateson | December 30, 2014 at 02:34 PM
I heard this on the show supernatural, Sam ask Bella how do you sleep nights? Bella reply's, rolling naked in money! In their (NVICP
special masters) case, it's rolling naked in Tax dollars.
Posted by: Joe | December 30, 2014 at 01:44 PM
Louis and Wayne,
Thank you for this great article which explains and exposes the fraudulent, inhumane, and immoral behavior of those who are paid by taxpayer dollars, and entrusted with regulatory and judicial powers, to behave in the exact opposite manner.
I truly do not understand how these people sleep at night, look themselves in the mirror each morning, or pass by any child without feeling like truly despicable people...because that's what they are. And vaccine-pushing doctors, like Offit, and others who vaccinate their patients day in and day out with purposeful blinders on, and the media reporters who refuse to expose all those perpetuating this vaccine holocaust...they are ALL equally despicable.
Posted by: Laura Hayes | December 30, 2014 at 12:33 PM
Don't worry the next group of 8 years old the CDC will epidemilogize will show a reduction in autism.
That new DSM book is all set up and ready to go.
It will be a lot harder for a grandmother to explain on face book what has happened in one word.
Posted by: Benedetta | December 30, 2014 at 10:28 AM
It is not really the "Age of Autism" it is the "Age of Induced Brain Damage". As my son gets older, with puberty upon us, he has a multitude of brain issues with non-verbal autism being one of them. I have plenty of friends whose children's brains are pretty messed up without any signs of autism. All were fully vaccinated during those formative years. This is a crime against nature. I don't care what anyone calls it.
Posted by: Mark | December 30, 2014 at 08:44 AM
"When it comes to vaccine injury and autism, government and public health officials are like eels swimming in a murky pool of convoluted phraseology ... The NVICP is a place of dissembling language, denial and injustice"
Webster's defines "sophistry" thus: misleading but clever reasoning"
Which means .. the routine use of "misleading but clever reasoning" of the NVICP is nothing more than "sophistry masquerading as science". Indeed, according to Webster .. Offit is more "sophist" than "scientist".
Unfortunately,
Posted by: Bob Moffitt | December 30, 2014 at 06:37 AM
Another Gerberding quote:
"….. if you’re predisposed with the mitochondrial disorder, it
[vaccination] can certainly set off some damage. Some of the symptoms can be symptoms that have characteristics of autism.”
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0803/29/hcsg.01.html
Posted by: John Stone | December 30, 2014 at 06:36 AM