Family To Receive $1.5M+ In Vaccine-Autism Award 594
An anonymous reader, quoting from CBS News, writes "'The first court award in a vaccine-autism claim is a big one. CBS News has learned the family of Hannah Poling will receive more than $1.5 million for her life care, lost earnings, and pain and suffering for the first year alone. In addition to the first year, the family will receive more than $500,000 per year to pay for Hannah's care. Those familiar with the case believe the compensation could easily amount to $20 million over the child's lifetime. ... In acknowledging Hannah's injuries, the government said vaccines aggravated an unknown mitochondrial disorder Hannah had which didn't 'cause' her autism, but 'resulted' in it. It's unknown how many other children have similar undiagnosed mitochondrial disorders. All other autism 'test cases' have been defeated at trial. Approximately 4,800 are awaiting disposition in federal vaccine court.' How did this happen when all the scientific data points otherwise?"
Re:Legal outcomes include luck (Score:3, Informative)
FTFY.
Re:One more time... ...with feeling... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
The parent was modded troll, but sadly he has a point. The only research [wikipedia.org] linking MMR vaccines to Autism (or Autistic-like symptoms) was proven a fake, while countless studies have shown that there is no link (correction: no link was shown. I know the difference). Yet, now we have the government admiting that the vaccine resulted in what happened to the girl.
The girl had a mithochondrial disease. Although unspecified, many of them cause encephalopathy that can be aggrevated due to many causes. If she had not been given the vaccine, the same would have happened a week/month/a few month later due to the common cold/gatroenteritis/ear infection/ whatever. To say that without the vaccine she would have been fine to this day is naive at best and deceptive at worst.
So yes, it sounds like a bad April Fools story. Sadly enough, it ain't.
Re:Another great step backwards... (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting, but the kid's EEG was all over the place, which means that it wasn't a typical febrile seizure. It also lasted too long.
The pediatrician actually didn't know what was going on, only that it absolutely, positively, couldn't have been caused by the vaccine administered a few hours earlier.
Re:Another great step backwards... (Score:5, Informative)
Well apperently those sums can lump up to quite a fortune:
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services set up the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) in 1988 to compensate individuals and families of individuals injured by covered childhood vaccines. The VICP was adopted in response to a scare over the pertussis portion of the DPT vaccine. These claims were later generally discredited, but some U.S. lawsuits against vaccine makers won substantial awards; most makers ceased production, and the last remaining major manufacturer threatened to do so.
From: Vaccine court [wikipedia.org].
It seems, that if you open up the flood gate, you can get to the point where it is not financially possible to continue producing the vaccine. And then we have problems.
And another point, according to the above article, The VICP will compensate every case in which a condition listed in the Vaccine Injury Table is proven to have happened after a vaccine was given (by showing a casual connection). The table [hrsa.gov] does not list autism, so my question is: how did they get the claim to be accepted? I guess maybe it was by being regarded as encephalitis/encephalopathy and not autism, and it is only tauted as autism to draw headlines. So we may have another case of bad reporting? If any one has a link to the original ruling, it may be interesting to find out what is being compensated - encephalopathy or autism.
Re:Previous condition (Score:5, Informative)
It's called Herd Immunity [wikipedia.org]. While you and your children aren't well protected against the infections that moderns societies vaccinate against, everyone else is, providing indirect protection. The people around you aren't sick, so they can't pass on infection to you, even though you are vulnerable. You live in a country where the negative impact of you foregoing vaccination is minimised because everyone else did get vaccinated. Hardly a solid argument against vaccination.
Most vaccines don't provide total protection to any one individual anyway, so many people that think they are protected aren't, and get by, just like you, because of the immunity of the population as a whole. As long as enough people are immune, diseases won't spread. The problem is that some vaccines are only just barely effective enough to establish herd immunity. If enough people decide to forego vaccination, there could be a real problem. Diseases that have been nearly wiped out could make a comeback, imported by tourists or immigrants from the third world. Even people who been vaccinated might die or become paralysed by their thousands, because of a small, foolish minority of people like yourself.
Background on the case (Score:5, Informative)
The following article from the New England Journal of Medicine has a good summary of why the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program exists, and why some of its recent decisions, including the award in the Poling case, have been problematic. Basically, since 2005 the policy has been to concede cases where petitioners establish a plausible theory by which their injury could have been caused by the vaccine, rather than requiring proof or even scientific evidence that the vaccine caused said injury.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0802904 [nejm.org]
See also the Wikipedia article on the program, which also discusses the Poling case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_court [wikipedia.org]
Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Recently on Penn & Teller's Bullshit, how the anti-vaccination movement is bullshit.
Part 1/2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aky-sRri-NQ [youtube.com]
Part 2/2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnxci5tezZY [youtube.com]
I strongly suggest you have a look at it.
Re:Previous condition (Score:5, Informative)
You said something fascinating that caught my eye:
> So there is actually a higher chance that the vaccine could make you worse off than you were before you got it.
This doesn't seem to be correct. Applying any medication to someone who is already ill is riskier than applying it to a healthy person: between allergies, mistakes in dosage, infections from visiting a hospital or mishandling needles, and allergic reactions that are far more dangerous in an ill person, the risk seems higher.
The problem is in the "benefit" side. The risk of getting polio or German measles today is small, so for an individual to refuse the vaccine significantly reduces their risk of such negative consequences, and creates only a miniscule risk for them of infection. The problem is when enough personally cautious people refuse the vaccine that a threshold of vulnerability is crossed and the disease becomes far more common, and the risk is increased, and especially if the disease mutates slightly and becomes drug-resistant or requires new vaccines. We do not want to see polio or German measles become rampant again.
And we had the opportunity, several times now, to entirely eliminate polio. The vaccine was ready, the last active strains of it could have been wiped off the planet (with digital storage of the DNA, just in case a sample was hidden somewhere). The remaining nations with transmitted cases are Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to WHO. Why does the disease still exist there? Because of war and fear of poison, especially of sterilizing poisons administered by foreign governments to control native population. By the time natives who understood enough biochemistry to attest to the vaccine's effectiveness and safety could be gathered, the stockpiles of vaccine for Nigeria, for example, had expired and were a complete waste of UN money.
Parents in the US refusing vaccines are doing the same thing. They're actually extending the lifespan of the particular diseases by leaving infectable children as a significant part of the population, enough to keep the diseases active.
Re:Previous condition (Score:4, Informative)
1/5000 getting sick from a mass vaccine is pretty bad when you're dealing with millions or even billions of people.
It's still generally better than the alternative. For example, before smallpox was eradicated by vaccination, it was highly infectious, had a 30% mortality rate, killed more people in the 20th century alone than both world wars (and possibly more than every single war in the 20th century), and left most of the survivors permanently scarred. Or take whooping cough - sounds amusing, but it actually causes infants to cough so hard that they can't keep down food, and has lovely complications such as seizures and death.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
This money will actually come from a pool of money donated by the vaccine companies in order to pay for known or proven complications of vaccination that was set up so that they are immune from direct litigation. This is not taxpayer money. It doesn't mean it's not a bad decision, however. Or that lawyers aren't trying their hardest to break the current system of vaccination litigation awards so they can make more money in regular courts.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
This is not how vaccination rewards are decided. They are a part of the special VAERS program which is decided by a "vaccine" court NVICP (http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/). There are actually experts who decide compensation. This is all a part of an agreement that recognizes that vaccine makers would not make them if they were liable for litigation in the traditional sense. As a result, the US has set up a special system that pays patients out of a pool of money given by the vaccine makers so that they are protected from the litigation.
The trial lawyers would love to break this system - this is why you see so much misinformation on the internet. It is a potential bonanza for lawyers and patients and as a result there is a lot of pressure to allow open litigation. This would obviously drive up vaccination costs and possibly lead to shortages or incomplete coverage due to the higher costs of providing care.
Re:Previous condition (Score:5, Informative)
Or take whooping cough
Funny you should mention that... the vaccine for whooping cough does not prevent the spread of whooping cough, it simply allows the immune system to destroy the toxin it produces that attacks the lungs, so you don't whoop. Everyone skipping the vaccine for this one in hopes of the "herd" protecting them is in for a nasty surprise.
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
That and there is an utterly undeniable genetic component to autism.
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
I understand this is delicate, and honestly hesitate to ask, but what degree of care does your nephew require?
I've worked in special needs classrooms with autistic kids, and there's a world of difference between the kids who are mostly functional, but will randomly run off or make noises, and the kids who'll fly into a rage-like state and smash things and people.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, per se (the award might well be inflated), but depending on the child's actual condition, the cost of care could vary substantially.
Re:Another great step backwards... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
If she had not been given the vaccine, the same would have happened a week/month/a few month later due to the common cold/gatroenteritis/ear infection/ whatever. To say that without the vaccine she would have been fine to this day is naive at best and deceptive at worst.
Yep. It's like dying in an at-fault auto accident and blaming the car. Or having a heart attack while playing basketball and blaming the ball. You'd have to be fairly insane to propose outlawing cars and basketballs for those reasons.
This seems more in line with having an allergy to an antibiotic - there is no doubt that it's a life-saving drug, but unfortunately there are always rare cases where it makes things worse. Medicine is not an exact science, and if we keep blaming doctors and drugs that harm an occasional person despite saving thousands, progress and costs will suffer (and are already, clearly).
A doctor's perspective (Score:1, Informative)
An interesting blog on this topic - http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/09/cbs_news_resident_anti-vaccine_propagand.php
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
there's nothing that surprising or terrible about this case, actually.
Hannah Poling has a very very very rare mitochondrial disorder - so rare, in fact, that the usual anti-vax suspects have actually given up on claiming that maybe it's more common than we thought and thus causing this fake "autism epidemic". Winning this judgement is actually less likely than winning the lottery, if you compare the incidence of her condition to the chances of buyimg a winning lottery ticket.
Furthermore, proof means a different thing in this context. This trial's level of evidence was "more likely than not" - or in other words, if her lawyer could make the case that there was a 50+epsilon% chance that vaccines caused her autism, he won. What scientist accepts such low confidence levels?
So basically, it's not that bad in terms of the anti-vax wars.
Re:Motives (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Previous condition (Score:3, Informative)
A few things about whooping cough:
1) Some of my friends have recently had it.
2) Some of them were not vaccinated against it.
3) It's only dangerous for infants.
4) It is treatable with antibiotics and as soon as you start taking them you are no longer contagious.
5) My children have not been vaccinated against it, it's present in our small community and we have yet to become infected.
6) The cough sounds pretty nasty and goes on for months.
The child is not autistic (Score:3, Informative)
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/09/cbs_news_resident_anti-vaccine_propagand.php#comments [scienceblogs.com]
This sums it up
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
The keeping up on research is a large part of the reason for pharmacists. Pharmacists are experts in drugs. They are expected to be more familiar with drugs than even doctors. The doctor's job is primarily to make a diagnosis, and find possible courses of treatment, including medication. Ideally they should be consulting with a pharmacist in determining the best medication to try, but practically that does not happen, mostly because many conditions have one drug that generally works best, so that is the first one tried, and then a second one. If anfter several tries none have work, but the doctor is confident in his diagnosis, would a pharmacist likely be consulted by the doctor.
Do remember that the job of the pharmacist has evolved over time from previous jobs. It started out as a medicine maker, combining ingredients right there to produce the medication. These days most medications are pre-manufactured, although there are some remnants, like some particularly short-lived medications that the pharmacist creates on the spot by combining two or more substances purchased from a pharmaceutical manufacturer. These days though the pharmacist mostly dispenses medications prescribed by the doctor, and provides advice on OTC medication selection, and the taking of any medication.
Re:Vaccines are a great idea. (Score:3, Informative)
Uh, right. Here are the numbers for Polio. It went into sharp decline all right. Twice in fact. Once after the first vaccine was introduced, and again after it was refined.
http://www.post-polio.org/ir-usa.html [post-polio.org]
Re:Previous condition (Score:4, Informative)
"Only dangerous for infants" minimizes the nastiness of this.
Imagine coughing so bad, for months at a time, that you:
1) Can't sleep
2) Throw up regularly from coughing fits
3) Break your own ribs from coughing
4) Burst the blood vessels in the whites of your eyes, giving you a solid-red-eyes demon look
5) Can't work
Despite having had a childhood vaccination to whooping cough, I had 1) 2) 4) and 5).
Lucky for me I had more than a month of vacation + sick leave at my job, or I might have had some nasty economic side effects from having had the whooping cough.
Get your shots people, even though you probably won't die of whopping cough, YOU DO NOT WANT IT.
--PM
Re:Personal attacks have no bearing (Score:3, Informative)
That's putting it mildly. Not only did Wakefield conceal conflicts of interest, but it has been shown that the description of the work and how it was done was false. Your statement that it has not been duplicated "in humans" is technically correct--others have tried to reproduce Wakefield's claimed results and have gotten contrary results--but it could be misunderstood as indicating that it has been duplicated in nonhumans. This is not true.
And the study you cite was originally co- authored by Wakefield (although they demoted him to an acknowledgment when the extent of his scientific malfeasance and unethical behavior became widespread public knowledge), and also has major scientific problems. [scienceblogs.com]
False and false (Score:5, Informative)
False in two respects. First, it is not true [vaccineshoppe.com] that the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine only immunizes against the toxin. Second it is not true that immunizing only against the toxin does not reduce the spread of the disease [uchicago.edu]. (hardly surprising that preventing a symptom--coughing--that spreads disease would reduce the spread of that disease)
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
This is false. I have never seen a vaccine administered that didn't come with a form listing risks and side-effects that had to be signed by an adult. If you're getting shots without this form, then it's time to find another doctor. Just because you're too lazy to read the form doesn't mean you haven't been warned.