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#54095
Paul Barbara
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Clark, here in pdf is one of your ‘Bete Noirs’, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, and your Cochrane Review:
‘…I have been blamed for causing, through the media, a vaccine scare. In defense of my position and in accordance with the precautionary principle, having reviewed all the available evidence for MMR vaccine safety, I simply recommended a return to single measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines in preference to MMR and encouraged further research. In the NBC interview, it was put to me that I was alone with a few parents in believing that the MMR vaccine was unsafe. I responded by saying that 15 years ago this was, indeed, an unusual opinion held by only a handful of physicians. I was able to say, however, that my position on the deficiencies in the relevant vaccine safety studies have now been reinforced by the systematic analysis of Dr. Thomas Jefferson and colleagues from the Cochrane Collaboration, an internationally respected body that provides independent scientific oversight. They wrote, “The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and postmarketing is largely inadequate” (Jefferson, Price, Demicheli, & Bianco, 2003, p. 25). In an interview with Richard Halvorsen concerning his 2007 book The Truth about Vaccines, one of the lead authors of the Cochrane review left no doubt as to his true feelings when he said, “The safety studies of MMR vaccine are crap. They’re the best crap we have but they’re still crap” (Child Health Safety, 2009 ~). With respect to my suggested return to the protection of children with single vaccines, Jefferson and colleagues wrote, “We found limited evidence of safety of MMR compared to its single-component vaccines from low risk of bias studies” (Jefferson et aI., 2003, p. 25). More recently, Dr. Lou Cooper, former head of the American Academy of Pediatrics, made the comment in Newsweek that “There’s been grossly insufficient investment in research on the safety of immunization” (2009 ~), and, to the Institute of Medicine, that “[Vaccine safety] research has been done on the cheap” (Wrangham, n.d. …’
So Dr. Wakefield doesn’t have horns, after all.