Teen’s win on MMR
Jackie Fletcher, founder and national co-ordinator of JABS, with her disabled son Robert
THE claim that the MMR vaccine is totally safe was in doubt again today after a landmark ruling for the Wigan boy who started the whole controversy of triple jab side-effects.
The Vaccine Damage Payment Unit has ruled that 18-year-old Robert Fletcher’s severe disabilities were caused by the inoculation when he was a toddler.
For most of his life, mum Jackie has campaigned for recognition that the “cocktail” of vaccines can pose risks, and she set up the national JABS (Justice, Awareness and Basic Support) group which represents thousands of families who feel their children have been left with conditions ranging from autism to Crohn’s disease by MMR.
But they have been routinely dismissed as “scaremongers” by the medical establishment who have produced rafts of research to demonstrate that the Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccination is not dangerous while highlighting the greater risks from measles.
Now, however, the Department of Health is having to face up to a legal precedent, plus the prospect of countless more damage claims.
Robert – who has the mental age of a 14-month-old, cannot walk unaided, is doubly incontinent and can have dozens of fits a day – will only be awarded £80,000, which his family say will be handy for disabled adaptations to the house in Golborne.
But Jackie and husband John point out that it is dwarfed by the US compensation system which awarded $32m to a boy left paralysed from the waist down by MMR.
They have called on a re-vamp of the UK system, saying it should be the pharmaceutical companies paying damages (as they do in America) rather than the taxpayer and that the payments themselves should be more realistic.
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Weather for Wigan
Saturday 04 February 2012
Today
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Temperature: -1 C to 1 C
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