I think the last line in the article is the most important - such single-minded focus on vaccines has really taken away from the search for any other potential causes for autism. After all, autism exists in unvaccinated people as well. If there is some genetic susceptibility that a vaccine can trigger, let's quit arguing about the vaccine and dig into that question. Maybe there are other triggers out there we should be looking at. Meanwhile, has anyone dug deeper into historic info - is it true that kids develop autism symptoms around that age in the years BEFORE the vaccines or their ingredients were used?
And - what really upsets me is that NO ONE talks about the permanent damage that some of the diseases vaccines prevent can cause. Perhaps they don't sound as scary as autism, but sterility, brain damage, heart damage, and possibly cancer from lingering viruses are nothing to sneeze at. Not to mention that kids used to die all the time from diseases - a reason that the vaccines were developed in the first place (tho I guess you conspiracy theorists will say they were developed just so pharmaceutical cos. could make money - but tell that to Louis Pasteur). Would you rather have an autistic child, or a funeral for your child? Yes, the risk can be that real, particularly as fewer children are vaccinated and more become vulnerable.
Which brings me to my last thought, one that really gets me irritated. People who choose not to vaccinate their children only have the luxury to make that decision because most of these diseases (at the moment) are not widespread BECAUSE the rest of us vaccinate our children. You are using my child as a human shield for yours. Very nice.
Anatomy of a Scare
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But on April 6, 2000, Rep. Dan Burton did. Burton had previously distinguished himself by his support for laetrile, the quack cancer remedy. Now he was chairing a congressional hearing on the link between vaccines and autism. His own grandson, Burton told an overflow audience filled with antivaccine activists, was perfectly normal until he received "nine shots on one day," after which he "quit speaking, ran around banging his head against the wall, screaming and hollering and waving his hands." Witnesses testified about their own tragedies, such as a child's "journey into silence" soon after receiving the MMR vaccine. Wakefield, too, testified. Since his Lancet paper, he said, he had studied scores more children, identifying almost 150 in whom MMR had triggered autism. O'Leary, the Irish scientist who had confirmed Wakefield's finding of measles virus in the guts of children with autism, pronounced himself "here to say that Wakefield's hypothesis is correct." Now there were two explosive theories about the dangers of childhood vaccines: Wakefield's, that the MMR caused gut inflammation and the release of autism-causing proteins into the blood and brain, and the thimerosal theory, that the mercury in childhood vaccines damages the immune system and, possibly, the brain.
Burton's hearing was widely covered in the press, but the attention was nothing compared with the flood of stories that were about to be unleashed. That November "60 Minutes" aired a segment featuring children who "appeared normal" until getting the MMR. On Nov. 10, 2002, The New York Times Magazine ran an article on "The Not-So-Crackpot Autism Theory," about thimerosal. It included news of an August 2002 study by the father-and-son team Mark and David Geier, who combed a federal database of reported "adverse events" after vaccinations. They found "increases in the incidence of autism" after children got thimerosal-containing vaccines compared with thimerosal-free vaccines. The following spring, the Geiers published another study: the more mercury in their vaccines, the more likely children were to develop autism.
By this time, mistrust of the scientific establishment—and of anyone defending vaccines—had mushroomed into something decidedly uglier. When pediatrician Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, testified before Burton's panel, he said that he had had his own children vaccinated, and gave their names. At a break, a congressional staffer pulled him aside and said, "Never, never mention the names of your own children in front of a group like this." The following year he received an e-mail threatening to "hang you by your neck until you are dead." The FBI deemed it credible and assigned him an armed guard during vaccine meetings at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The first cracks in the vaccine theories of autism appeared in early 2004. An investigation by British journalist Brian Deer in The Sunday Times of London revealed that the children Wakefield described in the Lancet study had not simply arrived on the doorstep of the Royal Free. At least five were clients of an attorney who was working on a case against vaccine makers alleging that the MMR caused the children's autism. In addition, two years before the Lancet paper Wakefield had received £55,000 from Britain's Legal Aid Board, which supports research related to lawsuits. After meeting with Deer, Lancet editor Richard Horton told the British press, "If we knew then what we know now, we certainly would not have published the part of the paper that related to MMR … There were fatal conflicts of interest." On March 6, 10 of Wakefield's 12 coauthors formally retracted the paper's suggestion that the MMR and autism were linked.
Wakefield did not join them. Now executive director of a Texas nonprofit called Thoughtful House, which offers treatments for autism, he admits he was retained and paid by the lawyer for the parents of autistic children but denies that posed a conflict of interest. "At the time the children were referred to the Royal Free, none of the parents were involved in litigation, though some went on to do so," he says. The legal board's payment supported other vaccine-autism research he was conducting, Wakefield says, not that in the Lancet paper. "I will not be deterred from continuing to look after these children and research their problems," says Wakefield.
In 2005 Britain's General Medical Council, which licenses physicians, began a hearing in which Wakefield was charged with professional misconduct for, among other things, the alleged financial conflict of interest in the Lancet study. The investigation has since expanded, with new charges by journalist Deer that Wakefield or his coauthors misrepresented the children's medical records. In particular, Deer reported that the children's gut and autism symptoms appeared long before their MMR rather than, as the 1998 Lancet study reported, right after. Wakefield denies doing anything improper, saying he "merely entered the documented findings into the Lancet paper."
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