Back to Vaccine Court
The epic comment thread (as one long-time reader put it) about Adam Race and the parish of St. Joseph’s rages on. Goes without saying that it’ll be of more than a little interest when a hearing is held in June. But back to a legal, autism-related matter of a different kind:
Yes, the proceedings in the Autism Omnibus, aka “vaccine court.” Week 2 of the hearing just finished. Two 10-year-old autistic boys, William Mead and Jordan King, are serving as the test case to determine whether or not some 4900 families should be compensated: These families have all filed claims with the U.S. Court of Claims alleging that vaccines caused autism and/or other neurological problems in their children. Audio recordings of each day’s testimony are available from the Vaccine Program/Office of Special Masters.
The bloggers at Left Brain/Right Brain have been noting the testimony of various “experts”:
- Elizabeth Mumper, a expert witness for the Petitioners, the medical director for DAN/ARI and founder of the Rimland Center.
- Dr. Robert Rust, the Thomas E. Worrall, Jr. Professor in Epileptology and Neurology, and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Virginia.
- A Dr. Johnson (the post comments on why his qualifications are not specifically noted).
Mentioned in Dr. Rust’s testimony are some alternative treatments for autism that I had certainly never heard of. Both are apparently used by Dr. John Green III of Oregon for one of the boys: Earthworm eggs and a fecal enema. Mentioned in Dr. Johnson’s testimony was criticism of a study that found that thimerosal had neurotoxic effects in mice (the Safe Minds website has a pdf file of the study). Dr. Johnson specifically raised concerns about the poor quality of the tissue slides in the study; these slides were said to show abnormalities in mice injected with thimerosal.
Another study about thimerosal and neurological damage appeared this week and, too, there was more than a little to critique. The study has three co-authors, Heather A. Young, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, and David A. Geier and his father, Dr. Mark Geier. The Geiers have frequently been consultants in “vaccine-biologic cases before the no-faulty NVICP [National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program] and in civil litigation,” and Dr. Geier has also been an “expert witness,” as noted in the an Acknowledgment at the end of the new study. The new study received funding from the Autism Petitioners’ Steering Committee of the NVICP; this committee represents parents and is chaired by lawyer Clifford Shoemaker, who specializes in vaccine-injury litigation—just a few conflicts of interest behind a “scientific study.”
Further, questions were raised about whether or not the Geiers had received IRB [institutional review board] approval for use of the Vaccine Safety Database (VSD). B. Martin, MD, raised a number of questions and, later in the week, looked carefully at a letter by the Geiers to the IRB office of the Kaiser HMO (the Geiers were seeking approval to use data from Kaiser). Dr. Martin notes that the Geiers’ letter suggests
….a government conspiracy to keep the VSD data from the public, and more specifically from themselves.
This is familiar stuff in the vaccine-autism debate, in which various parties (in potentially paranoid fashion) have more often than not accused the government and government agencies like the CDC of withholding information about vaccines and other matters of public health. More analysis of the new study can be found at Epi Wonk, who—noting that the study has “a lot of problems” (enough for five posts, of which this is the first—specifically asks if this is a case of scientific fraud or just playing with data. (Go to Respectful Insolence for a further take-down of the new study.)
It was noted in the post about Adam Race and the restraining order filed by Fr. Daniel Walz that there was an impasse of sorts about Race’s “dangerous behaviors,” the decision to file the restraining order against his parents, and, too, his very presence in church; about whether he ought to be excluded. Generally in discussions about autism the question of whether vaccines or something in vaccines can be linked to autism is the cause of a lot of impasses in the conversation—-if you read the posts on the Autism Omnibus hearings at Age of Autism, you’ll see a different perspective.
But however much disagreement about what causes autism and how to “treat” it, there is some consensus about how parents of autistic children try and know they have to do the best by their children, and ven if it sets them up for public aspersion and accusations of “blame.” Frankly I am glad to be involved in the tumult of discussion. In the not too distant past, many—too many—children like my son Charlie would have been institutionalized at a young age and there’d be no discussion of how to teach autistic children to attend church services, or to be in school, to be in society. Sure, it’d be a lot “easier” for some if these questions of including autistic individuals did not need to be discussed, because the autistic individuals weren’t around.
For those who have been quite consistently arguing about the “unreasonableness” of a “dangerous” autistic child being in church—-I am grateful that we can discuss (argue) about these issues.
Tags: adam race, asd, asperger, autism, catholic, geiers, mercury, Parenting, pdd-nos, priest, Religion, restraining order, vaccine court, VaccinesRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Health, Junk Science, Legal Issues, Neuroscience, Science, Treatment, Vaccines
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