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Kristina Skorbach
Epoch Times
05/24/2010

Britain’s General Medical Council stripped Doctor Andrew Wakefield of his license to practice medicine for linking autism to vaccines for measles and other diseases.

Doctor Andrew Wakefield was born into a family of doctors, after receiving his doctoral licence in 1981 in Canada, he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1985. He published many research papers in his field and became interested in the possible link between autism and vaccines reported BBC.

The research piece that Wakefield published in 1998 in the Lancet, a medical journal, provided sufficient evidence that vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella could produce autistic symptoms in kids. According to AP, after the paper caused a stir, the number of kids that received vaccinations went from 95 percent in 1995 to 50 percent in 2000, in the UK.

Even though many pieces printed in medical journals say that vaccines for measles are safe and could have prevented the recent outbreaks, Wakefield stood by his research results and opened up an autism center in U.S. in 2004.

Read the rest of the article.

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Lynn McTaggart
WDDTY
03/29/2010

The US and UK governments and the press are exulting in the recent highly public hanging of Dr Andrew Wakefield, found guilty of misconduct by the British General Medical Council (GMC). Wakefield, you may recall, is the British gastroenterologist who first raised the alarm bells over the measles–mumps–rubella vaccine (MMR).

In the minds of many medicos and in the press, the MMR vaccine now stands fully vindicated. The scientist who claimed that the MMR vaccine causes autism has been discredited. Order has been restored.

In our Special Report this month, publisher Bryan Hubbard set out both to investigate the Wakefield decision and to uncover any evidence purporting to demonstrate the safety of the vaccine.

Wakefield never maintained that the MMR vaccine caused autism. All he did was raise a cautious alarm after finding that a number of children with autism were presenting with the same gut problems that seemed to have developed right after their MMR jabs.

Now, he and his colleagues in America have carried out a subsequent study on monkeys, which demonstrated that the hepatitis B vaccine can cause neurological damage and progressively severe chronic inflammation in gastrointestinal tissue—exactly what he originally discovered with the MMR vaccine and autistic children.

Despite being exhaustively peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, Wakefield’s monkey study was subsequently pulled as ‘not suitable’ for publication after the GMC delivered its verdict. The pulling of the study ultimately became the centrepiece of our story. The more that Bryan dug into this issue, the more layers of deceit he uncovered in the form of censorship, data-massaging and burying of damning data.

He found dirty tricks at the heart of medicine that would have made Richard Nixon’s Watergate henchmen proud. He found journalism bought and paid for by drug companies.

But what has been most shocking to us as journalists is the misinformation spread about by our own colleagues in the press. Virtually no major newspaper, or TV or radio station (save the Huffington Post) has bothered to look beyond the official releases of the GMC or government agencies to learn the truth about MMR. Some journalists have even allowed themselves to get in bed with drug companies.

The safety of the vaccine is now beside the point. Wakefield’s error was to challenge medicine’s most sacred cow: vaccination is now in a sense a standard-bearer for a certain mindset. It represents the triumph of Science over the randomness of Nature. Most doctors look to vaccination as proof that medicine has conquered infectious disease.

Researchers, scientific publications, doctors, drug companies and even journalists are willing to do almost anything to maintain that assumption of a priori benefit. Vaccination is now performed for its own sake—whether or not it is necessary, beneficial or even safe. To attack anything about any jab has come to be viewed as treason.

What needs to be put on display is not an honest scientist like Wakefield, but the level of deceit that is now routine—among scientists, researchers and reporters—all in the name of the public ‘interest’

TAMAR KAHN
Business Day
03/25/2010

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi yesterday appealed to MPs to support the government’s vaccination campaigns, warning them not to stir up anxiety by propagating unsubstantiated claims of dangers associated with the shots.

The department will run a national measles and polio vaccination campaign between April 12 and 23, and a two-month H1N1 influenza vaccination campaign from April 5.

The minister said he had been alarmed by ill-informed questions in Parliament by an MP from the African Christian Democratic Party about dangerous side-effects of a supposed “tamiflu vaccine”, based on information the member had apparently read on the internet. In fact, there is no tamiflu vaccine: tamiflu is a drug used to treat influenza.

The UK and Nigeria had both run into major problems with vaccination campaigns due to unfounded claims about side-effects, he said. The UK had seen its vaccination rate for measles fall by 15% due to claims that the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine raised the risk of autism, while Nigeria had seen its polio vaccination campaign founder for similar reasons, he said.

Politicians wielded great influence among the public and should watch what they said, he said.

“The word ‘side-effects’ nearly destroyed this country,” he said, referring to former health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang ’s overemphasis of the side-effects of AIDS drugs, which deterred many patients from seeking treatment that could have saved their lives.

Motsoaledi made his remarks as he presented his department’s strategic plan to Parliament’s health portfolio committee. The plan includes ambitious targets for combating HIV and tuberculosis, increasing life expectancy, and decreasing child and maternal mortality.

These five-year goals were agreed to with the Presidency and include reducing the mother-to-child transmission rate of HIV from 10% to less than 5% and increasing the tuberculosis cure rate from 64% to 85%.

New HIV and tuberculosis policies aimed at these goals include providing treatment to more HIV patients, and a massive HIV testing campaign spearheaded by President Jacob Zuma that starts on April 15.

The health department also aimed to reduce the maternal mortality rate from between 400 and 625 per 100000 live births to 100 per 100000 live births.

“We know this is a mountain, but no woman ought to die in childbirth,” Motsoaledi told MPs.

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From a post on Neil Z. Miller’s Facebook page…

I received the following email this morning (my response follows):

The documentation of the reduced incidence of certain diseases is public information, and easily accessible. Here is a link to just one report http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5024a2.htm.

For anyone who does not believe that immunization has made a positive difference in the lives of our human population I would issue you this single challenge. Name one person under age 30 that you know that has had measles or smallpox.

Incidentally, I am a pediatrician who grew up in a third world country witnessing the effects of vaccine preventable diseases in my friends. When I am approached by parents who choose not to immunize, or may choose alternate schedules, I simply tell them I must recommend the ACIP recommended schedule because that is the standard by which I am judged, however I will respect their right to choose. I also make sure they know, they will get the same very brief statement every time shots are due. In this country where we have freedom of choice, it’s ironic that if I fail to make my statement, there is a lawyer out there who might successfully take advantage of my “failure to inform parents of the life saving benefits or vaccines that are recommended as the standard of care”.

My response:

Your “proof” of vaccine benefits is extremely simplistic. Reducing the incidence of a disease while increasing the number of autoimmune and neurological disorders is not positive progress. Your profession is excellent at burying its head in the sand, pretending that severe vaccine reactions are rare and essentially conning parents into mistrusting their own observations so that they can continue damaging their children even after they’ve experienced a life-threatening side effect from the shots. VAERS is underreported by a factor of about 100 (as are all passive reporting systems) yet by refusing to investigate or pretending they are merely anecdotal, you are able to continue promoting your product with impunity. You and your vaccine brotherhood live in a make-believe world where vaccine benefit-to-risk ratios are figments of reality. For example, the HPV vaccine is a dangerous scam that won’t protect a single young lady from cervical cancer yet this vaccine has already been linked to thousands of debilitating reactions, including 61 deaths. In clinical studies, the new rotavirus vaccine actually killed more babies that received it when compared to babies that were left alone. These deaths were statistically significant, yet this vaccine was licensed. We can save hundreds of lives by NOT vaccinating babies with this killer shot.

You may find it ironic that you need to warn parents against non-vaccination, but you fail to recognize that you are criminally negligent every time you successful convince a new parent to flood their developing infants’ little bodies with 8 different vaccine/drugs simultaneously at 2, 4, and 6 months of age, because this toxic overload is responsible for so many of their health problems. This has no affinity with true science; this is mad science. Yet, you brag about exporting this program overseas, where babies in Third World countries now have access to mercury-laced shots and all of the debilitating ailments our own children are experiencing as a result of this insanity. The U.S. is the most vaccinated country in the world yet our infant mortality rate is atrocious. Every time we add a new vaccine to the schedule, the U.S. actually drops a few more places in the international infant mortality rate standings. This should not inspire pride in rational people. For more information about overdosed babies, I recommend the following eBook: http://thinktwice.com/overdose.pdf

Please re-educate yourself about vaccines so that you can offer honest health benefits to your families. Although many pediatricians today are aggressive legalized drug peddlers for the pharmaceutical companies, it doesn’t have to continue this way. At least you allow your familes the right to reject vaccines, which is a step ahead of many other pediatricians, who are denying service to non-vaccinators. If you can stretch in your understanding just a little bit more, you will come to see, like several enlightened medical doctors today, that the current pediatric system — and the entire vaccine program — is dysfunctional and dangerous, in need of a major overhaul. You have lost the trust of the people, not because they are uneducated and irrational but rather because they have valid concerns and are starting to wake up.
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