Hilary's Desk

A few days ago, I set my husband a task. To read Paul Offit’s book called, “Deadly Choices How the anti-vaccine movement threatens us all” By half way through he was unamused. Beguiled by his sighs of discontent, I decided to stop my current track of writing. and start reading. Naturally I started with the Prologue, where the first sentence read; “There’s a war going on out there – a quiet, deadly war.”  Read Full Blog

While the medical profession has finally caught on, that the more "educated" a parent makes themselves on the issues around vaccination, the more likely they are to chose not to vaccinate, they are utterly offended that people can chose not to vaccinate.  Furthermore, their take on the issue of "choice" is off the wall.  Their solution to parents not making the 'right' choice, is to back parents into the wall and take pot shots at them with "Refusal to vaccinate" letters (see bottom), which read like legal documents, but are not.  These "refusal to vaccinate" letters come out of such skewed thinking patterns as can be seen in this statement in May this year, from the biggest vaccine defender of them all, Dr Paul Offit: Read Full Blog

Following on from my previous two posts here, and here, I decided to dig just a wee bit deeper. Why? Because there was one sentence in Michael J Smith’s study which I couldn’t work out. It was this: "Finally, our analyses were limited to publicly available data from the original study. Future VSD studies without this restriction would be able to assess a wider range of outcomes. These include putative vaccine adverse effects such as neurodevelopmental delay, autism, and autoimmune disorders." Lets rephrase this. If Michael J Smith’s study wasn’t restricted to solely using the publicly available data from the original study, he would have been able to study neurodevelopmental delay? …… But hang on! Wasn’t that the WHOLE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY? To reassure parents that vaccinating on time wouldn’t cause neurodevelopmental delay? So….What exactly were these data limitations, Michael?  Why didn't you specify them in your study? Read Full Blog

Today, Pediatrics published a retrospective study with the above title, which purportedly provides the "strongest clinical evidence to date that on-time..." and that these results offer reassuring information" etc etc... I received an alert, and downloaded the study. And started reading. Most of the tables you can't make much of, since they simply tell you end-points and you have no way of knowing whether those end points are even accurate or not. I burst out laughing in the first paragraph of the results though when I read this: "A total of 491 (47%) of 1047 children met the study definition for timely receipt. An additional 235 (23%) received all recommended vaccines during the study period but not on time. The remaining 311 (20%) did not receive all recommended vaccines during the study period." Read Full Blog