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But you won’t get the truth from the government or from the manufacturers, you won’t get the truth from the BBC, we now realise. You won’t even necessarily get the truth from your doctors; although there are many excellent doctors who acknowledge and stand up for their patients’ rights, there are many who are, as some of them will admit, afraid to put their heads above the parapet. They have learnt what not to say in order to get on, to have a career. That’s the NHS these days. How do you decide when you don’t know who to trust? You do your own research and make up your own mind. You know that when people or websites are selling something they may not be offering completely unbiased information — and that goes for governments of course. You know that medical research isn’t always pure and unbiased (see HYPERLINK on this website on how pharmaceutical advertising biases what journals publish). You know that you have to form your own judgment even about what we say — and we wouldn’t have it otherwise. So listen to what we say, then look at some of the links we provide, then exercise your vaccine choice. The official line; Vaccine-autism link disprovedThe frequently-repeated assertion at the heart of autism-denial is that research has proved that there is no link between vaccines and autism. Much of the time this refers back to one paper by a Danish group in 2003 — a group with a vested interest, working as they did for the state-run vaccine industry. The paper considered children diagnosed with autism between 1971 and 2000; thiomersal was removed from vaccines in Denmark in 1992, and the paper argued that because they found that autism cases continued to rise after that date, thiomersal could not have been a causative factor. |
But regressive autism typically manifests in the second year of life, but is not diagnosed for some years; 75% of affected children in Denmark are thought to be diagnosed and reported between the ages of 5 and 19 years, so the reporting rate would not be expected to fall significantly in the 8 years from the removal of thiomersal to the end of the study. This is not the most glaring problem in the study, however; that would be the fact that the authors moved the goalposts from 1995 onwards by including children diagnosed as out-patients; prior to that date only in-patients were included. Naturally, out-patients made up the vast majority — 93% of all cases in the analysis, guaranteeing a rise in numbers whatever the mechanism. The next favourite paper is by Andrews, Miller and others in the UK in 2004; again there are questions about both the ethical probity and the methodological soundness of the study. Ethical questions arose because the two main authors worked for the Health Protection Agency — so they were partly responsible for the vaccination policy which they were reviewing — and because they did not declare in the paper that they had received money from several vaccine manufacturers; multiple conflicts of interest in fact. The methodological issues included inadequacies in the UK General Practitioner Research database on which the study was based, and the fact that the authors, despite their affilliations, even got the dose of thiomersal wrong, throwing out their calculations. |