2,17 “Scientific Slight of Hand”

Harris Coulter (2003) comments on what he calls the “technique of the medical establishment to publish an article purporting to support certain conclusions and then refer to it endlessly in the literature as though it did support these conclusions.”

Coulter refers to the study by Griffin, Ray, Mortimer, Fenichel and Schaffner (1990).  They evaluated 38,171 children who had received 107,154 DTP immunisations in their first three years of life. They state only two children suffered encephalitis and onset was more than two weeks after the vaccination. They concluded it was not related to the vaccine.  They reported 277 other children had  seizures, 42 had a febrile seizure and 37 had seizures associated with other acute neurological illness. The study concluded that there was no evidence of a significant link to seizures and encephalopathy after immunisation with DPT vaccine.

The study is a retrospective study of patient Medicaid records and the National Vaccination Information Centre (NVIC) estimates that reporting accounts for only 10 per cent. of adverse events. In fact, in the study adverse reactions were identified in 1187 children, 3 per cent. of the group, a sizeable figure in view of underreporting. 

This figure was substantially whittled down for the conclusion. Of these 1187 adverse reactions, 526 were outpatients of whom 359 were excluded from the tally for lack of records leaving 828 adverse reactions in the study.  Of these, 470 were excluded as not meeting the “case definition”.  To wit, the “event of interest” had to be “the first non-neonatal seizure or episode of encephalopathy, hence 34 children were judged to have  had a “neonatal seizure” and excluded, 18 had “spells” that “were clearly not seizures”, 150 more were excluded because of an apparent  pre-existing neurological abnormality, 82  were diagnosed as failure to thrive, 121 had other non-neurological events and 65 had miscoded records thus leaving 358. Two subjects that developed encephalopathy  more than two weeks after the study were excluded reducing the cohort to 356  in the study for the conclusion that the prevalence of neurological defects is the same whether children are vaccinated or not.