It can reasonably be assumed that some vaccines do cause damage to children or we would not have the Vaccine Damage Payments Act 1979. [1] The list of diseases to which this act applies includes measles and rubella as well as diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.
There does not appear to have been a consolidated paper that attempts to show how vaccines might cause brain damage by a review of the scientific literature except for the one that I have published on various web sites including scribd. [2] It has been published for open access. This paper looks at the causative factors mainly from the effects of the whooping cough vaccine (pertussis).
However, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Immunization Program, promulgates that the risks from MMR vaccine can be permanent brain damage. [3]
Epidemiologists will probably say, and quite rightly, that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the occasional damage that is caused by some of them. The number of payments for vaccine damage in the UK is in excess of 1,000 and compared with the number of children who have benefitted, that number is miniscule bit not unimportant.
Over a thousand children will be living diminished lives as a result and their parents will be anguished that they were, in part, responsible for their child’s disability.
For this lifetime of inequality and the loss of; normal education, a job and a life that contains the expectancies that most of us have envisaged and possibly achieved, the maximum award is, If you are severely disabled as a result of a vaccination, a one-off, tax-free payment of GBP120,000.
It is this shameful situation that ought to cause concern rather than a continuing denouncement of Wakefield. He may have got his understanding of the relationship between MMR and Autism wrong but that does not prove that there isn’t one.
Source: BMJ Rapid Response, Alan Challoner, Retired, parent of vaccine damaged child.
