Validity of "studies" purporting to vindicate vaccination
Amazingly,
MMR manufacturer Merck has sponsored yet another safety study from Finland.
This latest work by Patja, Peltola and Associates, which was published in the
December issue of the Journal of Pediatric Infectious Diseases will
surely be used by Governments to rule out an MMR-autism connection.
It
should not.
The
study, which lasted 14 years, ended in 1996, before parents and physicians had
ever heard of an MMR-autism connection. The study never looked at autism and
H. Peltola publicly stated that the research was not designed to pick up cases
of autism.
Actually,
the authors could not have found any cases of autism, even if they tried,
because of the study inclusion criteria.
The
study, a passive surveillance, only included information reported by health
providers to the study’s central office. This method, somewhat similar to the
United States’ VAERS reporting, is notorious for its representation of only a
tiny proportion of actual cases (perhaps 10%).
In fact, a 1995 study, by members of the UK Public Health Laboratory Service which was published in the Lancet, stressed that passive surveillance is not successful and that active surveillance of adverse events associated with MMR and DPT is imperative
Rebuttal to Wakefield Called 'Weak' with 'Distortions': Shattock
Autism, MMR and 60 Minutes: Another Pediatrician’s Perspective
There
is NO long-term safety research proving that MMR does not cause autism.
There is a sole epidemiological study by Taylor et al, often publicized
as proving decisively that autism did not increase in the UK after 1988, when
MMR was introduced with great fanfare. This
study was financed and ordered by The Medicines Control Agency and The Public
Health Laboratory Service.
A
noted British statistician whose specialty is medical research, looked carefully
at the Taylor study. He wrote:
“A myth is being created that the Taylor et al study shows that MMR is
not triggering autism. The evidence presented in their Lancet paper is [in fact]
consistent with the MMR triggering a substantial proportion of autism cases in
this North London population. The
study does not find evidence to support an association between MMR and autism
onset because of a flaw in the study design.
This does not mean that such an association does not exist.”
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The reason for this
expert’s comments is that the “case series design” used in the Taylor
study is well known to be statistically unsatisfactory for chronic conditions
and inadequate for a small sample (293 confirmed cases).
Even the authors of the study themselves alluded to its methodological
problems.
Another
paper published in 1999 was deemed to demolish Wakefield’s hypothesis once and
for all. Taylor and colleagues [8] identified all 498 known patients with autism
spectrum disorders (ASD) in North East London who had been born in 1979 or
later. They failed to show any sudden increase in cases of autism with the
introduction of MMR vaccine in Britain in 1988.
Wakefield
[9] pointed out that although the MMR vaccine was introduced in 1988, there was
simultaneously a ‘catch-up’ campaign, targeted at all children, whatever
their age, who presumably had not received either monovalent mumps or rubella
vaccine. This would have smoothed out the ‘jump’ in incidence associated
with the first introduction of the vaccine that was expected. Another factor
that would smooth out the ‘jump’ is the variable delay between vaccination
and the development of autism mentioned earlier.
One
obvious weakness in the analysis of Taylor and coworkers that no one has
commented on, is in fitting exponential trends to the data, which is notoriously
unreliable. And separating the data into three groups, core autism, atypical
autism and Asperger’s syndrome as Taylor and coworkers did, makes it even
worse. It is virtually impossible to distinguish between an exponential
increase that began in 1979 or in the year of vaccine introduction, 1988.
The
time-trend in the increase in autism was confirmed by researchers in the Boston
collaborative Drug Surveillance Program, Boston University School of Medicine,
based on GP records in the United Kingdom [10]. They found the incidence
of newly diagnosed autism increased sevenfold, from 0.3 per 10 000 in 1988 to
2.1 per 10 000 in 1999. (Actually, the peak value of 2.2 was reached in 1997).
In 114 boys born in 1988-1993, the risk of autism in 2-5 year old boys increased
nearly fourfold, from 8 per 10 000 in 1988 to 29 per 10 000 in 1993.