Graham Gudgin is a founder of Briefings for Brexit, and a research associate at the Centre For Business Research at the University of Cambridge and the Senior Economic Advisor with Oxford Economics. He was a special adviser to the Northern Ireland First Minister on economic policy from 1998 to 2002.

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You’ll remember that in the last podcast, I was talking to Steve Hinks from the British anti vaccine group, the UK Association of HPV Vaccine Injured Daughters about the Gardasil vaccine, and I’ve been in email contact with him since then.

Steve is a gentleman, and he’s sent me a lot of information, along with his analysis of it.

Some of the information is correct and relevant, but in almost every case, his analysis is flawed. I'm going to cover just a couple of points.

I made the point in the last podcast that in the UK and Ireland, any supposed ‘victims’ of Gardasil could sue for damages in the courts, as frequently happens with people who suffer medical accidents or negligence. It is notable that, in both the UK and Ireland, where the standard of proof is the balance of probabilities – 51 per cent, much lower than a criminal trial – not a single person of the supposed hundreds represented by REGRET and Steve’s organisation have even attempted a lawsuit, let alone been successful.

Steve countered this with a reference to a US case where, he said, the court had ruled that it was proven that the vaccine had caused harm. He’s just plain wrong. The case he referred to was in the United States Court of Federal Claims, Office of Special Masters. The US does not operate a common law system for people who say they were harmed by a vaccine.

For good or ill, the US has a system where people who can show that they have suffered illness are not required to show what caused the illness. The system is basically a bargain to prevent expensive lawsuits. Sick people can get financial help – far less than they would get in a lawsuit – and they don’t have to prove the cause. That’s specifically stated in the document that Steve sent me, so I find it startling that he takes the view that this shows that the court found that the cause was ‘proven’.

Also, in the last podcast, Steve said that the Ontario department of health study, which tracked hundreds of thousands of girls who got the vaccine, and found that they had no more illnesses than is normal in the population, Steve said that this study was flawed. You might remember that I fact-checked this, I checked the scientific websites, and not a single scientific objection has been raised against this study. In his email, Steve changed tack a little. He acknowledged that there was no scientific objection, but said that he personally didn’t like the study, and that’s why he thought it was flawed.

That’s not how science works. Just like I said in the last podcast that scientists have to present their work and have it analysed, it’s all done in public, objections must be public and open to scientific analysis too. You can’t just say ‘I don’t like these results so I'm deciding flawed.

Finally, Steve talked about an Alberta, Canada study, which again followed up hundreds of thousands of girls who got the vaccine, and investigated every hospital and emergency department visit they had in the six weeks after vaccination. That’s how much these things are checked out.

And what they discovered was that there was about 19,000 emergency department visits within six weeks of getting a vaccine. But the flaw in Steve’s thinking is to imagine that every teenager who sprains an ankle, or is involved in a car accident or some other mishap, if they’ve been vaccinated, then it must be the vaccine what done it. That’s nonsense.

The rate of going to the emergence department for those teenagers is once in every 164 weeks; more than three years. That’s just being a teenager. Teenagers visit the emergency department two or three times in their teenage years. That has nothing to do with getting a vaccination, which is exactly what the authors said in their conclusion – “Rates of adverse events after HPV immunization in Alberta are low and consistent with types of events seen elsewhere.”

There was also one other comment on a Reddit thread about the podcast, the writer wrote:

And the writer referenced an issue with the Pandemrix vaccine. And they’re right. That vaccine is no longer recommended for children because it was found to be associated with narcolepsy, a sleep disorder. And that case proves how wrong the antivaxxers are.

Why? Because the monitoring system that looks out for adverse reactions to drugs worked. That vaccine was withdrawn for children because of one case of narcolepsy in 20,000.

The clinical trials before a drug is released might test 10,000 or 20,000 people, so you can see how one case in 20,000 might be missed in the statistical noise. But after the drug is released, hundreds of thousands, or in this case millions of people, are followed up, and that level of adverse events, one case in 20,000 over what would be expected in a normal population was picked up. And on that basis the vaccine was withdrawn for children.

Now compare that to the claim by Anna Cannon of REGRET that one girl in 30, not one in 30,000, one in 30 suffers severe, life-altering side-effects.

Is it seriously plausible that a monitoring system that picks up a problem at a rate of one in 20,000 cannot detect much more serious symptoms that happen to one girl in 30?

OK, that’s all about vaccines for a while, I promise to go on to other topics, but I want to have time to research them in depth, that’s why I’ve set up the Patreon account, it’s basically a totally voluntary way to make a small donation to support the podcast and I hope to get it to a level that would justify me devoting more time to regularly research and produce the podcast at high quality. Think of it as penance for having to pay your TV licence. If you can make a small contribution, then please go here and sign up.

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