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Vaccine Debate Reopened With New Study

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Back in May 2007, Simon Fodden mentioned the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims dealing with the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. Alex Manevich followed soon after with decisions denying the link between vaccines and autism, and an insightful discussion on policy aspects of statutory bars to claims not fully grounded in scientific evidence.

More recently, Michael Lines raised the retraction by The Lancet and findings of unethical behaviour by physicians in the U.K. who claimed a link between vaccines and autism.

But just when you think a debate of this type is finally closed for good, the lawyers have to go and open it up again.

The Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy (EBCALA) held a press conference this week presenting a paper in the Pace Environmental Law Review by Mary Holland, Louis Conte, Robert Krakow, and Lisa Colin, Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: A Review of Compensated Cases of Vaccine-Induced Brain Injury.

Unfortunately for EBCALA, the paper does not provide a “clear link” to autism, as they claim in their release. What it does do though is state that there is enough information is available to warrant further investigation. Of particular interest are cases of VICP compensation for encephalopathy and residual seizure disorder that were not labelled as autism.

The conclusion states,

While there are likely many routes to “autism,” including prenatal neurological insults and toxic post-natal exposures, this preliminary analysis of VICP-compensated cases suggests that autism is often associated with vaccine-induced brain damage. It raises the question if the VICP’s decisions have been fair to reject all claims of vaccine injury that use the term “autism.” This preliminary assessment also suggests the possibility that other contemporary childhood neurological disorders, including attention deficit disorder and learning disabilities, might be less severe after-effects, on the same spectrum of vaccine induced brain injury.

Based on this preliminary assessment, there may be no meaningful distinction between the cases of encephalopathy and residual seizure disorder that the VICP compensated over the last twenty years and the cases of “autism” that the VICP has denied. If true, this would be a profound injustice to those denied recovery and to all who have invested trust in this system that Congress created. This preliminary study calls for Congress to investigate the VICP and for scientists to investigate all compensated cases of vaccine injury to gain a fuller understanding of the totality of consequences of vaccine injury.

Lisa Jo Rudy at About.com provides some additional and very important qualifiers about the study and the Pace Environmental Law Review.

Comments

  1. David Cheifetz
    May 13th, 2011 at 11:16 am

    To save people the need to follow the about.com link, one of the qualifiers is

    According to the Pace Law School, no one from the school was involved with the investigation, nor did anyone from the law school take part in the presentation. In addition, it is important to note, the Pace Environmental Law Review is a student run publication. What’s more, all of the investigators involved with this publication and presentation represent clients who have claims on behalf of family members in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

    On the other hand, as the blog article notes, the Pace Law School provided a statement ending with this paragraph:

    Established in 1982, the Pace Environmental Law Review (PELR) was one of the first scholarly journals in the then-new field of environmental law. It is run and edited by Pace Law School JD candidates. Since August 1, 2009, the law review has used an anonymous peer review process to select articles for publication. Submissions are reviewed internally, and then forwarded to a selected group of peer reviewers: academics, practitioners, and experts in the field, including members of Pace Law School’s world-renowned environmental law faculty.

    The first paragraph tell us:

    The article, titled, “Unanswered Questions From the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: A Review of Compensated Cases of Vaccine-Induced Brain Injury,” is authored by four board members of the Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy. It will be published in the Winter 2011 edition of the Pace Environmental Law Review, Volume 28.2. It will be available May 10 on the Pace Environmental Law Review’s website.

    Maybe the article was approved for publication August 1, 2009, or maybe not. Or, just maybe, somebody at the Pace Law School has no trouble with cognitive dissonance.

  2. David Cheifetz
    May 13th, 2011 at 11:18 am

    The first sentence of the last para. have “before” before “August 1, 2009”.