In response to http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/328/7440/602-c
BMJ  2004;328:602 (13 March), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7440.602-c
News roundup
Authors reject interpretation linking autism and MMR vaccine

AND in response to
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/328/7440/602-c#52948
UNRELIABILITY OF SCIENTIFIC PAPERS AS EVIDENCE 12 March 2004
 Clifford G. Miller,
Solicitor & graduate physicist
**********
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/328/7440/602-c#54389


Re: UNRELIABILITY OF SCIENTIFIC PAPERS AS EVIDENCE 26 March 2004 Viera Scheibner,
Principle Research Scientist (Retired)
Blackheath, NSW 2785
Send response to journal:
Re: Re: UNRELIABILITY OF SCIENTIFIC PAPERS AS EVIDENCE


Email Viera Scheibner


 C.G. Miller correctly writes in his letter that according to the rule of
evidence in law, parents' videoed observations of their children's
reactions to the administered vaccines are superior to "scientific"
evidence. According to Miller the standard of scientific evidence is much
higher than the standard of evidence in law because "the scientific
standard of proof is the highest known requiring irrefutability, which is
too high a hurdle when decision-making in the public interest is concerned".

As a scientist I feel compelled to comment on four aspects in the
consideration of scientific evidence relating to medicine:

1. The basic method of scientific inquiry is observation. What is observed
with the eyes and other senses is fundamental and material to scientific
evidence, in the age of technology observation with the senses is augmented
by laboratory tests and instrumentation. The case history is the alpha and
omega particularly in medical research. Patients themselves are best
equipped to describe their symptoms and, in the case of small children,
their parents or other carers.

2. Orthodox medicine is toxic and harmful. It seems accepted that all
medications have side (undesirable) effects. However, this is only relevant
to orthodox medications. Correctly administered, homoeopathic remedies and
natural remedies have no side effects. One has to elaborate here that there
could be uncomfortable feelings after homoeopathics but they are desirable
effects. Elevated temperature, rashes and vomiting are signs of
detoxification and of a desired change of a chronic condition into an acute
illness leading to healing.

3. Orthodox medicine with its pharmaceutical industry has become a huge
money spinner and as such has become vulnerable to political interference.
Vaccination is the best example. To make a lot of money, vaccinators want
to vaccinate every child. The more children are vaccinated, the more
obvious are the serious side (undesirable) effects including brain damage
and death. Politically motivated medicine denies or plays down undesirable
effects. The word "obvious" has been banished even though it is considered
prudent medical practice that when a medication or a procedure is
administered and symptoms appear afterwards, then that medication and/or
procedure must be considered as the cause of the observed symptoms.
Temporal relationship is the number one condition to satisfy when
endeavouring to establish causality, but pro-vaccinators delegate temporal
relationship to coincidence despite tens of thousands of cases in which the
same symptoms have occurred repeatedly after vaccination.

4. The observed and measured symptoms are the facts and not the conclusions
of the researchers which often do not reflect the described facts. A
classic example is the observation of polio outbreaks occurring after
vaccination programmes:

In their paper on the polio epidemic in Taiwan, Kim-Farley et al. (1984)
wrote "Taiwan had been free of major poliomyelitis outbreaks since 1975,
but from May 29 to October 26 1982, 1031 cases of type 1 paralytic
poliomyelitis were reported to the Taiwan health authorities. Before the
outbreak approximately 80% of infants had received at least two doses of
trivalent oral polio vaccine (OPV) before their first birthday.
Vaccinations received in the 28 days before onset of illness were not
counted because they might have been given after exposure". The facts of
the matter are that the majority of vaccine-caused poliomyelitis cases
occur after the first and second doses (Strebel et al. 1992) while the
statement ".they might have been given after the exposure" is not a fact
but only an unproven assumption since there had been no major outbreaks of
polio since 1975 (for 8 years) and there was no reason to expect an epidemic.

Sutter et al. (1991) described the poliomyelitis outbreak in Oman. "From
January 1988 to March 1989, a widespread outbreak (118) cases of
poliomyelitis type 1 occurred in Oman. Incidence of paralytic disease was
highest in children younger than 2 years (87/100 000) despite an
immunisation programme that recently had raised coverage with 3 doses of
oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) among 12-month old children from 67% to 87%."
Despite? Moreover, "There was no correlation between vaccination coverage
and attack rates by region; the region with the highest attack rate
(Batinah. 117/100 000) had one of the highest coverage rates (88%), whereas
the region with the lowest coverage had a low attack rate." No correlation?
There was actually a perfect correlation between the coverage rates and a
number of cases, demonstrating that vaccine was actually causing
poliomyelitis in its recipients (and their contacts).

The fact of the vaccine causing poliomyelitis is further supported by the
events in Namibia. Van Niekerk et al. (1994) wrote "The last confirmed case
of poliomyelitis in Namibia had been reported in 1988. However, between Nov
8, 1993, and Jan 7, 1994, 27 cases of paralytic poliomyelitis were
confirmed in the country. The outbreak had been limited to the south health
region; at least 80% of infants in this region had received four doses of
oral poliovaccine (OPV) by the age of 1 year. Of the 26 patients whose
vaccine status was known, 14 had received four doses of OPV, 6 had one or
two doses, and 6 no vaccine." Hardly a great vaccination success!
Importantly, there was no vaccination programme in the north health region
and no epidemic. Despite such obvious facts to the contrary, the authors
wrote that vaccine efficacy for three or more doses of polio vaccine was
calculated to be about 80%. Since most vaccine-caused poliomyelitis occurs
after the first and second doses, then the "calculated 80% efficacy for
three or more doses" simply demonstrated that most of the cases in Namibia
occurred after the first and second doses.

Just like in Taiwan, mass vaccination in Oman was not only an abysmal
failure, but the vaccine actually caused the observed poliomyelitis
outbreak. Polio outbreaks closely following mass vaccination programmes
also occurred in Gambia, Albania, Romania and Brazil to mention just a few
of many examples.

Since 1996 I have been asked and written some 80 reports on shaken baby
syndrome, vaccine compensation and other vaccine related problem cases in
the USA, UK, Australia and Iceland.

The ubiquitous pathological findings in SBS cases are:

1. Central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) subdural and subarachnoid
and parenchymal haemorrhages and retinal haemorrhages separately or
together with brain oedema.

2. Diabetes insipidus accompanied by metabolic acidosis (low pH values)
polyuria, polydipsia and hyperglycaemia and in some cases by bizarre rib
and other bone fractures known to be characteristic of acute scurvy and
bizarre haemorrhages such as around the base of the scalp hair.

3. Lack of signs of external injury.

4. Blood clotting derangements (hypo- or hyper-coagulability) including
acquired von Willebrand Syndrome.

Medical "evidence" claims in unison that such injuries can only be caused
by shaking.

The truth is that there are dozens of research articles published in
refereed medical journals which link the above pathology to vaccines
(Scheibner 2001).

In many of my reports I now write that the accused parents are not
perpetrators of the observed injuries, in reality they are eye witnesses to
medical misadventure or iatrogenesis.

Medicine treats case histories as invalid and "only anecdotal" and the word
anecdotal has become a sort of dirty word in medicine. Medicine tends to
rely on diagnostic value of tests and instruments. In the SBS cases,
however, even though these tests themselves show clearly that the observed
injuries are a result of immunological injury rather than trauma, they are
ignored and the SBS diagnosis is made before any tests are done.

What about MMR causing autism? Even those researchers who found the measles
vaccine virus in the diseased gut of the autistic children denied that
their research represents the evidence of causality without defining what
they would consider the evidence of causality. When the wild and, later on,
vaccine measles viruses were found in the diseased brains of SSPE
sufferers, the causal link to these viruses was accepted without dispute
(Payne et al. 1969).

Many medical doctors have an alarming lack of understanding of laboratory
tests and particularly of x-.rays, one of the best examples being mistaking
typical bone changes (including bizarre "fractures") known to occur in
scurvy, as traumatic fractures caused by the carers. This devaluation of
observation and instrument and laboratory tests as diagnostic tools in SBS
started with Caffey in 1946 when he published his paper "Multiple fractures
in the long bones of infants suffering from chronic subdural hematoma". In
1965 Caffey admitted that he was not a formally trained radiologist: sadly,
these days the formally trained radiologists blindly follow the
misinterpretations started by Caffey. The result is a mess which will take
years to rectify. In my Letter to the Editor of "Vaccine" (Scheibner 2003)
I wrote that I do not delve into conspiracies, I rather talk about
ignorance and stupidity.

Most mainstream journalists have little to contribute.

I conclude that medicine has to an alarming extent become a system which is
neither based on case histories nor on science. As one lawyer put it,
medicine is devaluing the rule of evidence in law and, may I add, also the
rule of evidence in medicine and science.

Quo vadis, medicine?

Viera Scheibner, PhD.

References:

Kim-Farley RJ, Lichfield P. Orenstein WA, Bart KJ et al. 1984. Outbreak of
paralytic poliomyelitis, Taiwan. Lancet (December 8): 1322- 1324.

Strebel PM, Sutter RW, Cochi SL, Biellik, RJ et al. 1991. Epidemiology of
poliomyelitis in the United States one decade after the last reported case
of indigenous wild virus-associated disease. Clinical infect Diseases; 14:
568-579.

Sutter RW, Patriarca PA, Brogan S, Malankar PG, et al. 1991. Outbreak of
paralytic poliomyelitis in Oman: evidence for widespread transmission among
fully vaccinated children. Lancet; 338: 715-720.

Scheibner V. 2001. Shaken Baby Syndrome Diagnosis On Shaky Ground. J
Australasian College of Nutritional and environmental Medicine (ACNEM);
20(2): 5-8 &15.

Payne FE, Baublis JV, and Hidedo H. Itabashi. 1969. Isolation of measles
virus from cell cultures of brain from a patient with subacute sclerosing
panencephalitis. New Engl J Med; 281(11): 585-589.

Caffey J, 1946. Multiple fractures in the long bones of infants suffering
from chronic subdural hematoma. AM J Roentgenol & Radiation Therapy; 56(2):
163-173.

Caffey J, 1965. Significance of history in the diagnosis of traumatic
injury to children. J Pediatrics; 67(5) part 2: 1008-1014.

Scheibner V. 2003. Response to Leask and McIntyre's attack on myself as a
public opponent of vaccination. Vaccine 22: vi-ix.

Competing interests: None declared