| Average user rating |
 (0 vote) |
|
An incredible coincidence: in perfect synchrony with the opening of one of the most important legal battles in the history of medicine over the damages caused by vaccines, the New England Journal of Medicine of September 27th((Thompson WW ey al, N Engl J Med, 2007 Sep 27;357(13):1281-92) published an article denying any possible negative effects of vaccinations on the neuropsychological development of vaccinated children.
The American government has received over 5000 requests for compensation for presumed damages suffered after vaccination; the families of these children maintain that their children’s autism is related to the effects of the vaccination and in particular to Thimerosal which is one of the components.
It’s no wonder that it was important to “publicly announce” this news and the reassuring statement, and like many other newspapers, even The September 30th issue of ‘Corriere della Sera’ faithfully reproduced the news of the presumed harmlessness of a substance like Thimerosal when injected into children. However, some aspects of this news didn’t convince us, so we decided to make a detailed analysis of the scientific research.
A perfect little tale
Let’s imagine that we want to make a scientific study on the braking efficiency of a group of automobiles that have been treated with a new product to protect against corrosion during the long winter months. The automobiles are treated, and the results are gathered. Imagine that, while your mechanic is proposing that you treat your vehicle, he presents the results of the research to you in this way: If we exclude all of the cars that crashed against telephone poles or ran off of cliffs, all of the other cars showed good braking efficiency, therefore, the anti-corrosion treatment has no influence on the brakes!
Would you have your car treated for corrosion? Only if you were out of your mind, because no one guarantees that the cars that went off of the cliff didn’t do so precisely because of the action of the anti-corrosion treatment. Unfortunately the New England article makes use of an evaluation procedure similar to this one.
A perfect article
As a matter of fact, the article in question gives rise to a few critical considerations. It’s not our intention to always “nitpick”, but the experimental design of this research, geared towards revealing whether or not the vaccine could provoke neuropsychological damage, preventively excluded those children who had developed particular conditions from birth until the time of the study that could have led to a negative interpretation of the neurological tests that were performed, for example in the case of children who had had encephalitis, meningitis or hydrocephalus.
It’s extraordinary to realize that many of the pending cases for damages are related not only to autism but to precisely these types of pathologies that were obviously not taken into consideration during the analysis, much like the cars at the bottom of the cliff in our “story”.
This is not the only detail to be considered: of the 18 authors that were listed, as many as 6 authors, including the directors of the study, declared employment or collaboration affiliation with vaccine producing companies. What’s more, at the end of the study there is a sort of “insurance clause” stating that some members dissented from the conclusions that were drawn.
We have little to say about this study. The result is obvious: the children who were still healthy after the vaccination were all healthy. We are glad to hear it, but maybe, out of a strange sense of caution that urges us to be informed about our children’s health and that of children in general, we would like to know what happened to the others.
|
