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Monday, June 24, 2019

1077 Measles Cases in 2019 So Far

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.  TwitterFacebook, and other social media platforms have helped spread this dangerous myth.

From CDC: "From January 1 to June 20, 2019, 1,077** individual cases of measles have been confirmed in 28 states. This is an increase of 33 cases from the previous week. This is the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1992 and since measles was declared eliminated in 2000."

 Pam Belluck and Reed Abelson at NYT:
There were about two claims of injury for every one million doses of all vaccines distributed in the United States from 2006 through 2017, the period for which the injury compensation program has dosage data. It says more than 3.4 billion vaccine doses were distributed during that time.
The rarity of claims is especially notable because the program aims to make it easy to file a petition. It frequently pays claimants’ fees for lawyers and expert witnesses, whether the claim is compensated or not, said Dr. Narayan Nair, who oversees the program as director of the Department of Health and Human Services’s division of injury compensation programs.
...
One condition that is not on the list of potential vaccine-related effects is autism. In the early 2000s, after a now-debunked study attempted to link autism to vaccines, the program received several thousand claims. The matter was exhaustively evaluated for several years by federal courts, which ultimately ruled that evidence showed autism is not caused by vaccines and is not a legitimate claim for the injury program. Autism-related claims were dismissed.
...
A growing proportion of recent claims, about half of all petitions since 2017, do not involve the content of vaccines themselves. Instead, they refer to shoulder injuries, usually in adults, that occurred because a health provider injected a vaccine too high on the shoulder, or into the joint space instead of into muscle tissue. That may cause an inflammatory response leading to shoulder pain and limited motion.