The first court award in a vaccine-autism claim is a big one. CBS News has learned the family of Hannah Poling will receive more than $1.5 million dollars for her life care; lost earnings; and pain and suffering for the first year alone. In addition to the first year, the family will receive more than $500,000 per year to pay for Hannah's care. Those familiar with the case believe the compensation could easily amount to $20 million over the child's lifetime. Hannah was described as normal, happy and precocious in her first 18 months. Then, in July 2000, she was vaccinated against nine diseases in one doctor's visit: measles, mumps, rubella, polio, varicella, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, and Haemophilus influenzae. Afterward, her health declined rapidly. – CBS

Dominant Social Theme: An unfortunate occurrence but one, thankfully, that is anomalous.

Free-Market Analysis: Earlier this year, we interviewed the courageous Dr. Andrew Wakefield who has claimed for more than a decade that a certain segment of the juvenile population may be overly-sensitive to vaccines and either ought not to be given them, or ought to be exposed with great care. Here we have a little girl who received a viral cocktail of NINE separate diseases in one dose. Wakefield, it should be pointed out was concerned over children receiving two or three separate vaccinations at once.

The CBS report (excerpted above) spawned a lively thread debating the pros and cons of the settlement. Here's how the article puts it, "In acknowledging Hannah's injuries, the government said vaccines aggravated an unknown mitochondrial disorder Hannah had which didn't 'cause' her autism, but 'resulted' in it. It's unknown how many other children have similar undiagnosed mitochondrial disorder. All other autism 'test cases' have been defeated at trial. Approximately 4,800 are awaiting disposition in federal vaccine court."

It is of course strange that America has a vaccine court at all. One would think that the straightforward mechanisms of American justice would suffice. But apparently they do not. Here's how Wikipedia describes the creation of the "vaccine court."

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services set up the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) in 1988 to compensate individuals and families of individuals injured by covered childhood vaccines. The VICP was adopted in response to a scare over the pertussis portion of the DPT vaccine. These claims were later generally discredited, but some U.S. lawsuits against vaccine makers won substantial awards; most makers ceased production, and the last remaining major manufacturer threatened to do so.

The VICP uses a no-fault system for resolving vaccine injury claims. Compensation covers medical and legal expenses, loss of future earning capacity, and up to $250,000 for pain and suffering; a death benefit of up to $250,000 is also available. If certain minimal requirements are met, legal expenses are compensated even for unsuccessful claims. Since 1988, the program has been funded by an excise tax of 75 cents on every purchased dose of covered vaccine.

To win an award, a claimant must show a causal connection; if medical records show a child has one of several listed adverse effects soon after vaccination, the assumption is that it was caused by the vaccine. The burden of proof is the civil-law preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, in other words a showing that causation was more likely than not. Denied claims can be pursued in civil courts, though this is rare.

We are not sure if this vaccine court decision represents the beginning of a trend, as the court has already thrown out lawsuits that link the vaccine preservative thiomersal to austism. Of course, in our interview with Dr. Wakefield, he did not mention thiomersal as the potential culprit for autism but was emphatic that the problems came from "viral cocktails." You can read the interview here: Dr. Andrew Wakefield Interview.

The vaccine court decision follows on the heels of other setbacks to Big Pharma, which routinely maintains that vaccines have never been proven to hurt children. But we recently reported on the suspension of swine flu vaccine programs in Finland and Sweden. After this report, it emerged that other countries including Nepal were suspending swine flu vaccinations because of suspicions that the vaccine was causing narcolepsy. You can read the story here: More Vaccination Questions.

During our interview with Dr. Wakefield, he mentioned a new book he'd written, Callous Disregard, which he called, "a story about what happened behind the scenes, the documentary evidence that has revealed the hypocrisy, the lies, the deception, and the double dealing that has lead to the circumstances of which I find myself now. It is a story also about the introduction by the British government of an unsafe vaccine in the late 1980s, which they knew to be unsafe at the time."

At the time of the interview (and for years before) we believed that the growing prevalence of vaccine medicine seemed at least questionable given various health controversies. Certainly, there seems to us to be no doubt that giving tiny children a "nine vaccine" cocktail might be detrimental to the health of some. But so degraded has Western medicine become that such practices are assumed to be appropriate because "experts" see no problems with it – experts unfortunately often employed by Big Pharma itself. Of course, there really is no such thing as an "expert," but industries will continue to try to promote certain people and bodies of work as infallible so long as they can get away with it.

The power elite, in our view, has a special affection for vaccine programs. The more emphatically efficacious it can make vaccines seem, the more ability the elite has to promote a variety of vaccine programs without significant push-back. We are also aware that population control is high on the elite agenda. We would not be surprised at some point if global-elite health organizations eventually promote certain kinds of vaccines as a population control device.