MMR hypocrisy and deceit. What is the story? (MMR Vaccination - Is it a Friend or Foe?)

Member Name: cabletow

Product:	MMR Vaccination - Is it a Friend or Foe?
Date:	10/01/02 (573 review reads)
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Advantages: protection

Disadvantages: risk

Every decade a medical headline seems to dominate our lives. So far this decade none has captured the imagination of Daily Mail readers more than MMR vaccines. This is to the naughties what the combined hormonal contraceptive pill was to the nineties.

The fundamental question here is whether the MMR vaccine has a role in the causation of two conditions that have been a scourge of parents from time immortal, Autism and Crohn's disease of the bowel. Autism is a complex clinical picture of a defect in socialisation in children of normal intelligence and Crohn's colitis is an inflammatory condition of the bowel.

There is an ever increasing number of parents who are turning down the MMR vaccine as the result of this and there is an ever more patronising response from the government claiming study after study showing no link but most government ministers are also turning down the chance to have their children immunised and the focus on this double standard has been heightened recently by the Blair's refusal to confirm or deny the immunisation status of Leo their 18 month old son.

The first issue I would like to discuss here is the state of our trust in politicians. We, the public, have shown time after time the lack of trust we have in New Labour. We didn't even bother to vote in the last election and the Orwellian doublespeak that has arisen from the spin that they call policy means that we no longer listen to them. If a minister says that MMR vaccination is good, we don't believe him in droves now. This is a sad commentary on the lies that now seem to make up government policy and says more about the state of political health in this country than the MMR uptake rate ever says about the state of the health of our children.

The second issue is the issue of safety about the MMR vaccine.

Crohn's colitis and Autism are rare but distressing illnesses. They are illnesses of two very different organs and ha
ve very different pathologies. Therefore it is unlikely that one agent would cause them both. It is a bit like saying smoking causes broken legs and schizophrenia. I am not saying there is no link. I am saying it is unlikely that one agent causes the two illnesses.

The current publicity has arisen from an early nineties paper that found all children in Australia with Autism and Crohn's had the MMR vaccination. This paper was written by a scientist, who has been discredited in other works, who manipulated results to prove a point. He omitted to mention that in Australia, MMR vaccination is mandatory for School entry so every child is vaccinated. This cannot prove any causality. But because New Labour is a government of lies we believe this study more than our own health department.

Parents of Autistic children are devastated. They need an explanation of how this happened. Socialisation skills develop in children from the age of 3 months but really come to our notice after 12 months, the age a child starts to express himself with language. Delays are noticed from the age of 12 months, therefore. MMR is given routinely at 12 months. So it is easy to see why people have focussed on this as a cause

Not withstanding these two great anomalies what are the relative risks of getting measles or rubella versus the risk of the MMR vaccine?
Well. In the 1950's 5 percent of children who contracted measles died or became severely disabled. Now 1 in a million might get Autism from the vaccine. It is still safer to out your child in a car to drive down to the doctors and get your child vaccinated than to let it get measles. The main risk to your child in this exercise is the car trip - by a factor of 100. So relative risk statisticians out there will immediately see that vaccination stacks the odds so much in your favour that even if there is a link with autism it is worth having the vaccine. Immunisation is 21st century medicine and gets muc
h better results than 50's medicine. If you are happy with 1950's outcomes then let your doctor practice 1950's medicine. It is unfair to ask him to ditch 21st century medicine but then sue him if he gets 1950's results.

Sure vaccination may not be totally risk free but surely, it is better than death or disability of a scale of 5 percent that measles can cause.

Now the argument that the health department uses against vaccinating your children against these illnesses individually is one I don't understand. If parents prefer this, then this is their choice surely. Why force them to have all the vaccinations mixed in one syringe. I can see the logic of giving your child one injection rather than three, but if three is a way of getting some parents to accept the MMR vaccine then that surely is a good thing. The refusal of this administration to accept that some would prefer to have the injections individually smacks of a hidden agenda. As I have pointed out we all have grown to distrust this government and we need to know what that agenda is. It is time Tony and Cherie came clean and put us out of this distrust misery. What are New labour doing? Why are they messing with the health of our children? And why are we so blind as to not see through their hypocrisy and deceit? Surely the Tories were never this bad?



Answers on a postcard please.

To answer the question posed by this Dooyoo category, Friend or Foe? My son is 5 months old. I am a GP and he will be immunised

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