A New American Medical Malpractice Celebrity?
July 14, 2004
As John Edwards, medical malpractice millionaire, runs for Vice President, America is welcoming another medical malpractice celebrity. Dr. Andrew Wakefield is being run out of Britain after claiming-without evidence-that the standard measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine causes autism in kids.
In Britain, largely due to his claims and the widespread media coverage they’ve gotten, the UK child vaccination rate has fallen below 80 percent. Sure enough, British measles cases have tripled since 1996.
Fear not for Dr. Wakefield, however. He’s already gotten a front-page story in the Washington Post that lauds him as a soft-spoken and charismatic medical pioneer. It also praises the depth of his caring for the guilt-stricken mother who feared she’d caused her son’s autism by getting him vaccinated.
Dr. Wakefield got into high-profile trouble, however, when UK reporters found that his original “research” on vaccines and autism had been paid for by parents-or their lawyers-who wanted to sue the vaccine manufacturers. He didn’t tell his scientific colleagues he’d steered all the clients’ kids to the same hospital to create an “epidemic” and trigger a “study.”
The editor of the medical journal Lancet says he should never have published Wakefield’s theory. The British equivalent of our Legal Services Corporation pulled the plug on his big lawsuit, but only after signing up hundreds of parents and spending $26 million on case preparation.
Now, Dr. Wakefield is bringing his vaccination scare to America. The director of his “non-profit foundation” says America is a much better place for Dr. Wakefield because of its private medical system, “entrepreneurial spirit,” and that donations are still coming in.
Not to mention that in Britain, anyone found to have brought a “frivolous” lawsuit has to pay the defendant’s legal bills.
The National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine has compiled 14 large-scale studies done in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, all confirming the safety of the MMR vaccine. Dr. Wakefield alone says all of them are flawed.
He claims it would be safer to give separate shots for the three diseases over 2 to 3 years. However, the British medical service says this would leave millions of kids unprotected for long periods, and lots of kids would miss at least one shot.
Most Americans are too young to remember going to a funeral for an 8-year-old friend who died of pneumonia as a complications of measles (Rubeolo), or had a deaf playmate whose mother contacted German Measles (Rubello) while pregnant. One generation free from fear is apparently all it takes to turn vaccinations from salvation into evil.
Autism is fundamentally a genetic disease, but the MMR vaccinations are administered at about the age many autistic kids are diagnosed. It’s not surprising that some parents would declare the coincidence of the timing as the cause. However, parents’ home movies of their babies often show that the autism symptoms were present long before the autism was diagnosed; the parents didn’t know what to look for.
Autism is a tragedy for the family and for the child. It usually means a withdrawn, angry, dependent life. But a return of the preventable epidemics-and childhood deaths-of my youth would be a national tragedy.
With every technical advance there seems to be a portion of public who see in it a lurking danger of some sort-even the reality of an end to childhood diseases, and GM crops to prevent blindness, must by human nature arouse fear of progress.
John Edwards was made a millionaire by convincing juries that doctors can prevent cerebral palsy (mostly caused by premature birth) by more Caesarean births, but an equal clamor is that today’s doctors are too quick to operate as Caesarean procedures skyrocket.
I suppose there is a buyer for almost all snake oil.
Posted in Commentary |