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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Under U.S. law, families who believe their child has been injured by a vaccine have their claims heard by a special "vaccine court." Since 1999 some 5,000 families had filed claims asserting that vaccines caused their child's autism. That is too many to try individually, so in 2004 they were combined into three test cases. One would represent the claim that MMR caused the children's autism, one that thimerosal in vaccines other than MMR did and one that the combination did. The last theory was tested with the case of Michelle Cedillo, a 12-year-old with severe autism; hearings began on June 11, 2007. Before it was over, the evidence would include 939 papers from journals and textbooks and testimony running thousands of pages. One of those testifying was Bustin, who explained that the finding of measles genes in autistic children rested on shoddy science. "Normally it hardly matters when a scientific paper gets it wrong," Bustin says. "But in this case, it matters a great deal."
On Feb. 12 Special Master George Hastings Jr. announced his decision in the Cedillo case. Every study conducted to test Wakefield's MMR hypothesis, he concluded, "found no evidence that the MMR vaccination is associated with autism." And the evidence "falls far short" of showing a thimerosal connection.
That is hardly the end of the legal cases. All three sets of parents in the test cases say they will take their claims against the manufacturers to civil court, hoping to convince juries—through the emotional power of tragically damaged children—of what they failed to prove to the vaccine court. And if those cases, too, absolve vaccines? In postings on antivaccine sites such as GenerationRescue.org and SafeMinds.org, parents have made clear that they think the system is rigged and that vaccines condemned their children to a lifetime of being barricaded behind the impregnable wall of autism. Perhaps it should not be a mystery why people refuse to believe science, with its tentative hypotheses, zigzag pathway to finding answers and a record of getting some things wrong before getting them right (see hormone-replacement therapy). On the day the court announced its decision, Offit pointed out that "tens of millions of dollars have been spent trying to answer these questions [about vaccines and autism]," but many people "refuse to believe the science." Perhaps, he mused, that's "because while it's very easy to scare people, it's very hard to unscare them."
And it's impossible to prove a negative such as "vaccines do not cause autism." The slim hope of finding a link—perhaps only children with specific genetic variants are at risk of developing autism as a result of vaccines; perhaps the vaccine is dangerous only in combination with other environmental triggers—keeps activists at the barricades. (They received some support in 2007, when the federal government settled the case of Hannah Poling, admitting that a vaccine had exacerbated a rare underlying cellular disorder and, as a result, brought on autistic symptoms.) Wakefield, unrepentant, slams the vaccine-court decision for "not being based on any definitive science." One powerful advocacy group, Autism Speaks, said after the decision that it will continue to support research into whether certain children with "underlying medical or genetic conditions may be more vulnerable to adverse effects of vaccines." Chief science officer Geraldine Dawson says they "owe it to the parents to listen and address their concerns. We don't want to close the door." Not even a door that, since it was opened 11 years ago this month, has let through such demons. It is bad enough that the vaccine-autism scare has undermined one of the greatest successes of preventive medicine and terrified many new parents. Most tragic of all, it has diverted attention and millions of dollars away from finding the true causes and treatments of a cruel disease.
With Jeneen Interlandi
© 2009
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