According to court and medical records, Elias was born on
Aug. 23, 2000 and appeared healthy until Dec. 26 when he received his second
dose of diphtheria, tetanus, pertusis DTaP vaccine, developed a fever and began having
seizures, followed by epilepsy and death.
Elias' case becomes quietly filed away in vaccine court archives with nearly
1,300 other vaccine brain injuries-none of them apparently being pooled for
study. An undetermined number of them, like Elias', involving autism diagnoses. But to win a case in the Vaccine court, the
condition, autism, cannot be cited.
The debate over the links between vaccines and autism -which
is triggered by brain damage - is extremely contentious. The great majority of medical opinion contends
that vaccines don't cause autism. However, many of the same experts concede that
vaccines can, in rare instances, cause brain damage. For example, Dr. Brian Strom, of the University
of Pennsylvania, who has served on Institute of Medicine panels advising the
government on vaccine safety, says "the
prevailing medical opinion is that vaccines are scientifically linked to
encephalopathy, but not scientifically linked to autism."
If so, why is the medical profession--including and especially, government health
officials--so resistant to examining the problem and the evidence to ascertain
what may be the cause of sudden developmental regression--emergence of autism--
in previously healthy infants?
Surely, the charade of turning a blind eye by deliberately obfuscating the terminology--i.e.,
putting the head in the sand as if to protect against the evil eye--is
especially egregious within the context of legal proceedings whose purpose is
to determine the medical-scientific merit of the arguments set forth by two
parties to a dispute.
Posted by Sharyl
Attkisson
The tragic death of little Elias Tembenis is yet another
vaccine injury case you probably won't hear much about. Yet some medical
experts believe it could teach us something about how to make vaccination
safer.
It could also add to the limited body of knowledge as to why the vast
majority of kids are vaccinated safely, but a minority become seriously ill,
brain-damaged or even die. Still, government officials have said they have no
plans to study cases like Elias': cases that victims are winning against the
government in the little-known federal
vaccine court.
http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/LORD.TEMBENIS112910.pdf
According to court and medical records, Elias was born on
Aug. 23, 2000 and appeared healthy until Dec. 26 when he received his second
dose of DTaP vaccine. His parents noticed some swelling around the injection
site. According to court records:
"Early in the morning on December 27, 2000, Elias's parents found him seizing
in his crib and took him to the emergency room ("ER")...Within one
day, he developed a fever, which led to a complex febrile seizure.
Subsequently, Elias developed epilepsy. This fact pattern is commonly seen in
the Vaccine Program."
According to court records, after the DTaP reaction, the once-healthy baby
ended up with debilitating medical problems, including features of autism, ear
infections and developmental delay. His parents first filed their case as one
of the "omnibus" group of autism cases to be heard in federal vaccine
court.
According to those familiar with the case, the couple felt their chances of
winning with the autism cases was slim because the idea of a link between
vaccines and autism is so controversial. So they separated their case from the
autism group and filed on the basis of their son's epilepsy and seizures.
They recently prevailed in court. It's one more example where vaccine-injured
children who end up with autism are quietly winning their cases, but only
when they focus on the more general argument of seizures or brain damage rather
than autism.
Some victory. On Nov. 17, 2007 Elias' illnesses became too much for him. The
little seven year old boy died. If the right people bothered to study the
medical details of the case, they might learn something about why Elias got so
sick from his vaccines, and how to identify ahead of time what babies might
have the same problem. The former head of the National Institutes of Health,
Dr. Bernardine Healy, has said such study would actually protect the integrity
of the vaccine program, rather than threaten it (as she says many government
officials fear). So far, though, no takers. Elias' case becomes quietly filed
away in vaccine court archives with nearly 1,300 other vaccine brain
injuries-none of them apparently being pooled for study. An undetermined number
of them, like Elias', involving autism diagnoses.
What made these children get sick? Why couldn't they tolerate their vaccines
when most kids can? Unanswered questions.
Read
both sides of Elias' case, including the government's argument against it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vaccines have saved untold millions of lives, and the vast majority of people who get them suffer no major problems.
But
there's a trade-off: occasionally, vaccines cause injury or death. Very
rarely, patients are left with what's known as "encephalopathy", the
medical term for brain damage.
In fact, CBS News has found
nearly 1,300 cases in which vaccine-related brain damage has been
compensated in court over the past 20 years.
The debate over any
links between vaccines and autism - a behavior problem triggered by
brain damage - couldn't be more contentious. The great majority of
medical opinion holds that vaccines don't cause autism. However, many of
the same experts don't dispute that vaccines can, in rare instances,
cause brain damage.
Family to Receive $1.5 Million + in First-Ever Vaccine-Autism Court Award
Learning From a Previous Vaccine-Autism Case
Our
examination of federal vaccine court decisions over the years reflects
this. Children who end up with autistic symptoms or autism have won
vaccine injury claims over the years-as long as they highlighted
general, widely-accepted brain damage; not autism specifically. But when
autism or autistic symptoms are alleged as the primary brain damage,
the cases are lost.
That doesn't make sense to families who see autism as a specific form of encephalopathy. But it makes perfect sense to the University
of Pennsylvania's Dr. Brian Strom, who has served on Institute of
Medicine panels advising the government on vaccine safety. He says the
prevailing medical opinion is that vaccines are scientifically linked to
encephalopathy, but not scientifically linked to autism.
"The
fact that a person suffers autism and encephalopathy does not mean that
the vaccine caused both of them," says Dr. Strom. "Even if it caused
the encephalopathy, that may or may not have been the cause of the
autism--those are two different questions."
Still, some families
who believe vaccines caused autism in a loved one are circulating these
words of advice: use "encephalopathy" in vaccine court and you're more
likely to win. Argue "autism" and you're sure to lose.
"I
purposely avoided mentioning 'autism' in the claim," says the attorney
for a child diagnosed with brain damage and autism after her DTaP
vaccination at 18 months. The lawsuit alleged only encephalopathy.
"Using (the child's) autism diagnosis would have dragged out the lawsuit
for years. The point wasn't to try to win the autism debate, it was to
get this family the compensation they need to take care of their injured
child." They promptly won a significant award.
Sharyl Attkisson's 2007 Report on Michelle Cedillo
The case of Michelle Cedillo, now 16, couldn't have turned out more
differently. Her autism claim was a "test case" in federal vaccine
court. If she'd won, it
could have opened the floodgate for thousands more vaccine-autism
claims to be paid. Michelle's attorney argued that an MMR shot on Dec.
20, 1995 directly caused her severe autism. But the federal vaccine
court couldn't have been firmer in smacking down the claim last year,
saying there was no credible proof that vaccines caused her autism.
Michelle is also diagnosed with severe encephalopathy. Her mother,
Theresa Cedillo, feels they could have won if they had simply based
their case on encephalopathy. Mrs. Cedillo doesn't regret her daughter
being a landmark autism case, even though they lost. But for future
families, she says: "if you want to be compensated, I would say stay
away from the 'autism' word."
Since the late 1980's, more than
2,100 families have received compensation for vaccine injuries under the
federal program designed to help in rare instances of severe vaccine
side effects. And more than half of those awards are for brain injuries.
Total Number of Brain Injury Cases Compensated in Federal Vaccine Court
(as of May 2010 and including the newly-released settlement of the Hannah Poling autism case)
Encephalitis/Encephalopathy: 639
Seizure Disorders: 656
Autism 1*
Total: 1,296
Source: HHS-HRSA (Health and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration)
*In
this case (involving Hannah Polling), though the government conceded
before trial, it took the position that vaccines didn't "cause" autism,
but rather that the vaccines aggravated an unknown and previously
undiagnosed mitochondrial disorder the child had which "resulted" in
autism. It's unknown how many other children have similar undiagnosed
mitochondrial disorder.
Neither the court nor the government is tracking how many
vaccine-brain damage cases involve children who also ended up with
autism or autistic-like behavior. When we asked for the statistics,
vaccine compensation officials told us: "The government has never
compensated, nor has it ever been ordered to compensate, any case based
on a determination that autism was actually caused by vaccines. We have
compensated cases in which children exhibited an encephalopathy, or
general brain disease. Encephalopathy may be accompanied by a medical
progression of an array of symptoms including autistic behavior, autism,
or seizures."
When we asked why government officials aren't
looking for the rate of autism among the brain damage victims who have
been given compensation, vaccine compensation officials told us:
"Anticipating large numbers of claims, the Court allowed the filing of
'shortform' petitions, but without medical records. As a result, a very
small number of the pending 5,000 claims have medical records, making it
impossible for us to review and compare commonalities, patterns, or any
general trends among all of the petitioners. Over time, we may learn
more about patterns of pre-existing conditions and the role vaccines
play, if any, in their progression. As we have done in the past, the
VICP medical staff will look at the court findings and any new
scientific information, and may publish scientific articles as
appropriate."
Dr. Brian Strom adds that unless an association
between vaccines and autism is scientifically proven, it simply doesn't
exist, as far as scientists are concerned. "One can always hypothesize
that an exposure is linked to an outcome. The question for science is to
prove whether or not that truly occurs more often than one would expect
by chance. Absent that, a scientist assumes there is no association. It
is analogous to a courtroom, where you are innocent until proven
guilty. In science, there is no link, unless or until there are data
proving a link."
More information
Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
Special Federal Vaccine Court
The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP)
Vaccine Table of Injuries
