Wednesday, January 19, 2011
From
CBS News in September:
... occasionally, vaccines cause injury or death. Very
rarely, patients are left with what's known as
"encephalopathy", the medical term for brain damage. In
fact, CBS News has found nearly 1,300 cases in which
vaccine-related brain damage has been compensated in court
over the past 20 years.
The debate over any links between vaccines and autism - a
behavior problem triggered by brain damage - couldn't be
more contentious. The great majority of medical opinion
holds that vaccines don't cause autism. However, many of the
same experts don't dispute that vaccines can, in rare
instances, cause brain damage.
Our examination of federal vaccine court decisions over the
years reflects this. Children who end up with autistic
symptoms or autism have won vaccine injury claims over the
years-as long as they highlighted general, widely-accepted
brain damage; not autism specifically. But when autism or
autistic symptoms are alleged as the primary brain damage,
the cases are lost...
From today's
CBS News:
... government officials have said they have no plans to
study ... cases that victims are winning against the
government in the little-known
federal vaccine court...
... The former head of the National Institutes of Health,
Dr. Bernardine Healy, has said such study [identifying
children who are more susceptible to brain injury from
vaccinations ahead of time] would actually protect the
integrity of the vaccine program, rather than threaten it
(as she says many government officials fear). So far,
though, no takers...
What made these children get sick? Why couldn't they
tolerate their vaccines when most kids can? Unanswered
questions.