Dr. Andy Wakefield  Measles  Vaccine autism Court awards

The Washington Post Whips Up Fear And Blames Andrew Wakefield

 By John Stone

2015 Jan

In the US this week we are witnessing the replay of two years ago in the UK. The media whips up hysteriaabout a few cases of measles – which is usually not a serious illness - and casts Andrew Wakefield in the role of a popular villain who has caused the outbreaks to happen .  In order to get a perspective on these events it m ight not be necessary to recap the career and political trial of Wakefield because actually it would be impossible to locate any point at which he was in a position to influence popular US opinion against the use of MMR vaccine, whereas in the UK there was a famous TV press conference in 1998 when he offered the personal opinion that it might be safer to use single vaccines (an option at the time available through the UK’s National Health Service) rather than the triple vaccine containing three live viruses, measles, mumps and rubella.

All the present hullaballoo is not really about what Wakefield did. It is simply a ploy by a weak government and even weaker mainstream media to distract from the ever growing problem of vaccine damage and the expectation that the “CDC Whistleblower”  William Thompson will ultimately give evidence before Congress that the CDC have known all along that MMR can cause autism (which is what Wakefield feared in 1998). People should be concerned about measles like any illness, but they should be even more concerned about the ever increasing certainty of the toxic load on their children from vaccines and the sheer unaccountability of the system which mandates them while protecting the manufacturers for nearly these last 30 years from any litigation. What is really stake is not just a legislative situation which only protects the manufacturers  -  not the public, not the children – but the fact that the US’s sold out mainstream media will no longer even allow the matter to be discussed. Meanwhile the Supreme Court has pronounced vaccines to be “unavoidably unsafe”.  So they will harm you and your children but you have less and less say in the matter.

Worse, we know that the VICP (Vaccine Injury Compensation Program) has actually compensated cases where vaccines have caused autism while keeping the cases sealed so they cannot become legal precedents. HHS HRSA official admitted to both Sharyl Attkisson(at the time reporting for CBS) and David Kirby on Huffington Post:

"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."

While CDC director Julie Gerberding , who later left to become head of Merck’s vaccine division, told CNN of the decision to compensate Hannah Poling:

 “….. 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.”

However, the media have become amnesiac and none of them will report today what is matter of public record.

Further, several days into this story with the news media pumping away we have no statement from anywhere that any of the cases are laboratory confirmed. It was discovered some years ago in the UK that only about 1 in 40 reported cases went on to be lab confirmed. A newspaper story of the time (1997) discloses   :

"London (Europe Today). – "97.5% of the times that British doctors diagnose measles they are wrong", says a publication of the Public Health Laboratory service. The mistake being made by National Health GP's was found when the services tested the saliva of more than 12,000 children who had been diagnosed as having measles. Roger Buttery, an adviser on transmissible diseases at the Cambridge and Huntingdon Health Department, said that the majority of doctors "say they can recognize measles a mile off, but we now know that this illness occurs only in 2.5% of the cases." Buttery says that doctors classify as measles, many other viruses that also cause spots. He found eight different viruses during the survey in East Anglia. One of them, parvovirus, gives symptoms similar to German measles. The reason for the high rate of error puzzled Buttery. "Doctors are neither vague nor careless," he said. The solution is to defer the diagnosis until more detailed information can be got. There are 5,000 to 6,000 cases of measles registered each year in the United Kingdom, but these findings now call most of them into doubt."

But in the notorious 2013 “measles outbreak” in Swansea, Wales the local health official failed to follow the basic rule of not announcing reported cases as actual cases – in fact I found by consulting official records that at the time when they were claiming more than 400 cases they only had a single one  lab confirmed. In the end they admitted to about 200 cases when the media had been running with over a thousand, but it would be reasonable to treat the whole episode with scepticism.  Even in the UK it would be stretching a point to argue that Wakefield impacted on these matters greatly. Today in the US, for sure, something is catching like wildfire and it is not measles.

I am afraid that Age of Autism we have been forced to take a long term view of these matters, but in Washington and Atlanta they are trying to create public panic for political ends, and the once great Washington Post is a pathetic sight.

Posted by Age of Autism at January 24, 2015 at 12:01 AM in Dr. Andrew Wakefield, John Stone | Permalink | Comments