(From the Schafer Autism
Report)
The New England Journal of Medicine will publish this study today or tomorrow,
and it will be announced today on NBC News, tomorrow on ABC. Its purpose is to
prove that there is no connection between vaccines and autism. Sally Bernard of
SafeMinds (an autism advocacy group based in New Jersey) received an advance
copy of the full paper and has had some time to digest it. She refutes the
contention that "this study provides strong evidence against the hypothesis that
MMR vaccination causes autism." One problem is they got the hypothesis not
exactly right.
Says Bernard, "this is basically a good study (and we’re happy that people are
taking the issue seriously and studying it), but it has a number of major
problems that prevent it from drawing conclusions about the relationship between
MMR and regressive autism which affects 10 to 20% of autistic children. It’s
important to note that Dr. Wakefield and his team have never claimed that
vaccination with the MMR was a causal factor for ALL cases of autism, only those
with the regressive form of the disease (children who develop normally and then
experience a number of medical problems and become autistic). Perhaps the most
important problem in the study is that it was unable to analyze separately the
children with regressive autism from all other children with autism. As a
result, the study’s conclusion that it “provides strong evidence against the
hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism” is most certainly overstated and
likely to be wrong as it pertains to children with regressive autism.