“This year, the U.K. has had more than 1,200 cases of measles, after a record number of nearly 2,000 cases last year. The country once recorded only several dozen cases every year. It now ranks second in Europe, behind only Romania.”
Also note:
“This is the legacy of the Wakefield scare,” said Dr. David Elliman, spokesman for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, referring to a paper published in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues.
That work suggested a link between autism and the combined childhood vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, called the MMR. Several large scientific studies failed to find any connection, the theory was rejected by at least a dozen major U.K. medical groups and the paper was eventually retracted by the journal that published it. Britain’s top medical board stripped Wakefield of the right to practise medicine in the U.K., ruling that he and two of his colleagues showed a “callous disregard” for the children in the study. Wakefield took blood samples from children at his son’s birthday party, paying them about 5 pounds each ($7.60) and later joked about the incident.
Wakefield is now working in the medical business in Texas.
The article reads, “Several large scientific studies failed to find any connection…”
Is this true? Well, after Thimerosal was removed from Danish vaccines in 1992, a Danish study was published in Pediatrics in 2003, ‘Thimerosal and the Occurrence of Autism: Negative Ecological Evidence From Danish Population-Based Data’ (Dr. Kristeen Madsen, main author), that proclaimed not only did autism rates not go down after its removal, they actually went up. This is the major scientific study that is cited to disprove the “Thimerosal cause autism” hypothesis. However, the data captured was blatantly fixed.
The study looked at data between 1970-2000. In 1995, the Danish registry added “Outpatient Clinics” to their count of autism cases. It turns out that Outpatient Clinics are where 93% of Danish children are diagnosed with autism, but the number of autism cases before 1995 did not include the clinics! More surprising, the authors even note this in the study: “since 1995 outpatient activities were registered as well…the proportion of outpatient to inpatient activities was about 4 to 6 times as many outpatients as inpatients…this may exaggerate the incidence rates.”