The Simpsonwood Minute

[Guest guest]

" I want to say at the beginning that all of these exclusions had good

intent and good thought behind them. They weren't just randomly

chosen exclusion criteria. For example, the prematurity exclusion. It

is easy to see that these kids, certainly at the extreme values,

would be much less likely to receive HepB and other vaccines, but

especially HepB at an early age and they may be much more likely to

have some of these outcomes of interest. So especially if we are

looking at the analyses at one month, if we leave these kids in, we

are going to put high risk kids into the unvaccinated group, unfairly

raise the baseline rate and unfairly or at least miss an association

if one is there. "

- Philip , a Statistician in the National Immunization

Program.

One Translation: The data clearly indicates that something

significant happened to the premature infants who received the birth

dose of Hep B vaccine.

The Autism outcome sticks out like a sore thumb. If we don't exclude

this group people will notice the relationship between a birth dose

of Hep B and Autism. This could lead to less Hep B vaccinations in

premature babies.

We actually don't care how many premature babies become autistic.

We're only interested in what might happen to Hep B statistics as a

result of disclosing Hep B vaccine Autism backfire.

There's really no association between Hep B vaccine uptake and the

prevention of Hep B in babies. But if we stop vaccinating premature

babies we might miss an association if one might develop in the

future. We feel it's totally unfair to do this to the vaccine.