Why you should care about vaccines and autism

Opinion

Why You Should Care / Feb. 4, 2010 at 8:56 pm

Why you should care about vaccines and autism

In 1998, the British medical journal The Lancet published a study that, indirectly, led to the first outbreak of measles in the British Isles in decades. How could one study in a journal that’s mostly read by scientists and doctors have such a far-ranging impact? The study argued that autism symptoms could be explained by the use of the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine.

Since then, an entire movement of parents and activists sprung up — including, most notably, Jenny McCarthy — who were convinced that the cause of their children’s autism were nefarious pharmaceutical companies who were hiding the truth so that they could sell more vaccines. In 2005, activist and lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published a piece in Rolling Stone alleging that there was a conspiracy of pharmaceutical companies and the U.S. government to repress evidence of the vaccine-autism connection.

This past week, however, The Lancet retracted the study. Although the scientific community had rejected the study’s conclusions for years, The Lancet was finally forced to formally retract the study when Britain’s medical regulator, the General Medical Council, sanctioned the lead researcher behind the study, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, for not disclosing payments he got from lawyers representing parents whose kids had received the vaccines and for conducting unnecessary, unhealthful tests on children.

The study, which was based on tests done on all of 12 children and were followed up by a statement by Dr. Wakefield recommending that parents not get the vaccine, caused a plummet in vaccinations in the UK, well past the 95% threshold needed for so-called “herd immunity.” In England, vaccination rates for measles, mumps, and rubella cratered in 2004 when only 80% of children were vaccinated. Subsequently, there were 1,000 cases of measles in the U.K. Measles, of course, was previously thought to have been eliminated in the modern world. There were even more cases of mumps: in 2004, there were more than 16,000 reported mumps cases in England and Wales, a fourfold increase over the previous year. In 2008, “Fourteen years after the local transmission of measles was halted in the United Kingdom,” there was a measles epidemic.

The irony is that in the developing world, parents and kids would love to have access to a measles vaccine. In 2008, some 164,000 died of the disease despite a vaccine being available; 95% of those deaths were in poor countries where there isn’t the medical infrastructure to distribute the vaccine. Unfounded concerns over the MMR vaccine seem to be a first-world luxury.

The populist movement against vaccines, and more specifically, the totally bogus claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism, is not just another example of a great number of people misunderstanding science — it’s a real movement that has real consequences for the kids whose rights to health care are being violated by their sadly misinformed parents. The vaccine delusion has even seeped into politics. In 2002, Indiana Republican Dan Burton took up the cause, saying that “My only grandson became autistic right before my eyes — shortly after receiving his federally recommended and state-mandated vaccines.” But obscure Indiana congressmen aren’t the most prominent leaders of this movement: celebrities are.

Jenny McCarthy, who became famous posing for Playboy, has directly blamed vaccines for causing her son, who was otherwise developing normally, to develop symptoms connected with autism. Since then she has started a foundation (which supports Dr. Wakefield) and has become an advocate for untraditional treatments for autism such as chelation therapy. Chelation therapy is in widespread use among alternative medicine practioners and removes heavy metals — like mercury — from the body. There is, not surprisingly, no scientific evidence that chelation therapy does anything to mitigate the symptoms of autism.

McCarthy’s situation, minus the relentless and reckless self-promotion, is a perfectly representative example of why the vaccine-autism connection has such a powerful grip on so many. The symptoms of autism often first manifest themselves as missed developmental landmarks, such as not being able to speak. Parents often describe, or retrospectively “remember,” a radical shift in their child’s behavior. They go from functioning, happy and normal to distant, sick and alien.

That some parents become aware of their children’s autism at around two years, as in the case of McCarthy, means that they are more likely to attribute their child’s condition to the MMR vaccine, which is often given to children at 15 months. Up until then, their child appears to be “normal,” and then their expectations are totally upended and they look for explanations. And since many people just see vaccines as something they need to get their children without any understanding of why they’re doing so, it is easy for them to scapegoat the vaccine for such a dramatic apparent change in their child. Or, as McCarthy puts it, after her son was given the MMR shot, “soon thereafter — boom — the soul’s gone from his eyes.”

The widespread mistrust of vaccine has obvious victims in those children who get mumps or measles unnecessarily. But it’s also bad for autism research and advocacy. For one, the attention that goes into quack notions like the autism-vaccine connection and quack treatments like chelation therapy could go into research looking into genetic causes of autism and behavioral therapies. There is also an entire movement — the neurodiversity movement — that doesn’t see autism and related autism-spectrum disorders like Asperger Syndrome as diseases but instead as alternate brain wirings that should be respected and accommodated. To neurodiversity advocates, the autism-vaccine story is both wrong and offensive because it implies “that their condition is a side effect of poisoning.”

While The Lancet’s retraction of its original study will probably do very little to convince those who are blaming vaccines for their children’s autism, it is a step in the right direction. Maybe now people can have an appreciation of the good that vaccines have done and accept that a great change in the expectations for their children is not the fault of any conspiracy or great malfeasance, but like so many other of life’s disruptions, autism is something that just happens.

| Print

Also on NBN

If you're wary about vaccines, take other steps to avoid illness. Or you can return home.

Comments

Great piece. In a world lacking good science reporting in the media, this piece is a shining light.

Lonnie

February 4, 2010 at 9:50 pm
When you have a normally growing and developing grandson who receives the MMR shot and 36 hours later doubles up with a bloated stomach and doesn’t speak again for 3 years, until after chelation therapy, what would you attribute it to.

Show me a documented case where any child was afflicted with Mumps, Measles and Rubella at the same time under normal daily living conditions. A little common sense used would tell you that giving the vaccines one a time and separated would have much less chance of overloading a developing immune system. But now they want to give 5 and sometimes more vaccines all at once. This a totally impossible situation for children to contract in a normal existence.

Please use some COMMON SENSE.

Ben

February 4, 2010 at 10:14 pm
“like so many other of life’s disruptions, autism is something that just happens.”

Yeah,right. What a fraud. Who is paying these guys to cover up the connection of mercury in vaccines to autism as well as other conditions. Could it be big Pharma? Why yes…yes it could be. Face the obvious. Mercury is a neurotoxin and it is the last thing you want injected into your veins. Don’t believe thier BS. Big Pharma has plans to sell Billions of dollars worth of vaccines to the ignorant public and they cannot afford to have you know the truth about them.

Joe Smith

February 4, 2010 at 10:17 pm
Bravo Mr. Zeitlin, bravo. It is nice to hear a realistic opinion for once. My little sister has autism and it has been one hell of a ride. There is an answer to autism out there, but I believe these people were barking up the wrong tree. This is a classic case of the mob mentality. All it takes to put the majority of the people into a frenzy is false hope and a scapgoat for all of thier problems.

Thank you for the entertaining read. Have a good one!

Larry

February 4, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Another question. How many documented cases of autism are there among children who never received the MMR shot? Or have all autistic children received the MMR shot?

Let’s do a study on that!!!

Ben

February 4, 2010 at 10:26 pm
What, you dare to advocate an evidence-based approach to medicine?

You have the temerity to support the undeniable scientific fact that there is no evidence to tie MMR vaccines to autism?

Look out. Here come the crazies.

Lou

February 4, 2010 at 10:28 pm
Ben, great question. As far as I know there do not exist studies comparing health of vaccinated and non vaccinated children living in western countries and there are big communities of such children as for example in Europe families around the Waldorf schools and in the USA children in Amish community. I read the report of investigative journalist who was few years ago looking for autisms between Amish children and found out 2 cases between thousands of children. These both children were vaccinated what is otherwise in Amish community not usual. The problem is that big pharma is no interested to find out that non vaccinated children are healthy; there is nobody to support such a study.

Margit

February 4, 2010 at 10:50 pm
Well I would say that now since in Britain there are children who did not receive the vaccine it would be interesting to conduct a study with the perfect control group and see the prevalence of autism in them compared to the children whom have received MMR. I would agree that pharmaceutical companies want to make money and they may want results in their favor. The original study used only 13 patients, that would hardly represent the issue.

Aside, having stayed in a country that is still developing I would certainly guarantee that if they had access to these vaccines that these parents are against, they wouldn’t hesitate to get them.

Al

February 4, 2010 at 11:00 pm
To Ben:
since you can’t be bothered to look up the study yourself, here is a link.
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/347/19/1477
published in The New England Journal of Medicine
reviewing Danish medical records of half a million children, 82% of whom
got the MMR (18% did not)
The fraction of children with autism who got the MMR was the same as the fraction
of children with autism who did not get MMR

John

February 4, 2010 at 11:03 pm
Ben, have you done NO research at all? You apparently don’t realize the harm you are wishing on these children. Here are your studies:
http://www.immunize.org/catg.d/p2065.htm

Quote from one of the abstracts: “There was no difference in age at diagnosis between the cases vaccinated before or after 18 months of age and those never vaccinated. There was no temporal association between onset of autism within 1 or 2 years after vaccination with MMR”

Correlation of age at diagnosis and age of normal vaccination does not equate causation! There have also been video studies done of children at 4-12 months of age, where symptoms of autism were identified BEFORE children were ever given the vaccine.

Your experience has NOT been verified in millions of scientific trials, so either you’re experiencing a serious case of confirmation bias or you’re the only person I’ve ever heard seriously equate their child’s vaccination to a sudden-onset case of verbal regression. Congrats, you’re an outlier in the statistical field. Don’t push your misdirected anger onto my clients. The autistic kids I work with EVERY DAY are much better off being vaccinated against sicknesses since they can barely grasp the idea of washing their hands after using the bathroom, let alone keeping hands away from face and other “basic” precautions against getting sick.

It’s a parent’s choice whether to stagger the vaccines, put them on a delayed schedule or just follow the doctor’s regular practice, but for the sake of your child and of everyone else’s children (herd immunity only works to protect the unprotected when most of us have had the vaccine!), don’t deny your child a vaccination that could save their life, especially based on such faulty information!

Dawn

February 4, 2010 at 11:05 pm
I think a balance needs to be found. Some vaccines may be necessary but some may not be. The most important thing parents should do is to do real research based on real science and then decide what’s best for their children. This article gives a good point but it’s obviously biased. Equal quantities and quality of information from both sides of the story should be heard before a parent decides what is best for his/her child.

alx

February 4, 2010 at 11:13 pm
One in 166 children get autism in Ethiopia. No vaccines there. Also, the earliest documented case of Autism was in 1798, no vaccines back then either.

It’s difficult when you realize that your child has autism, but to believe the words of Playboy centerfolds over those that have doctorates who study these genetic disorders every day is ridiculous, and is a misdirected energy that could be put into full force towards finding ways to help their children integrate with their surroundings.

Autism, like Down’s is likely a genetic disorder, and as such there will probably never be a “cure” no more than there is a cure for mental retardation, or a sixth toe.

By rejecting scientific facts and ignoring 100 years of health research, the rejectionist movement is going to cause us all to get the black plague again. Those of you who argue that vaccines are “big pharma” at it again, are obviously not old enough to have seen what polio did to our brothers and sisters in the 40’s and 50’s.

It’s very sad to see some clinging to unfounded claims, witchdoctor spells and pure rejection of reality. Ask Salem how the trials went.

Concerned Parent

February 4, 2010 at 11:23 pm
Ben,

The MMR vaccine isn’t administered in Japan, and yet studies indicate a more common occurrence of autism in Japan than in other countries.

Dad

February 4, 2010 at 11:23 pm
This is the most insensitive article on the subject I’ve read since this journal’s revocation of the article. It is dismissive and insulting to the parents of autistic children. Whether or not they decided to blame the MMR vaccine for autism, they certainly don’t deserved to be mocked by some asshole like you, Matt Nazi Zeitlin.

Tricky Dick

February 4, 2010 at 11:26 pm
I don’t see how presenting the argument for vaccines is on par with murdering the Jews. That’s a bit insentitive.

Soup

February 4, 2010 at 11:37 pm
It’s reckless and irresponsible for aspiring journalists to report on subjects they don’t know much about. Has the author seriously considered the potential harm this biased and poorly researched article could cause? At least, the author should have done his homework and visited non-pharmaceutically funded sites like the National Vaccine Information Center, http://www.nvic.org, for data and statistics. As a professional working exclusively with children with autism, and as the mother of a documented vaccine-injured child, this superficial, smug piece is deeply disturbing. With the autism epidemic running at about 1 child in 150, does it have to happen to your son or daughter before you wake up and question the vaccine ingredients and vaccine schedule forced on American children? Mocking and making light of the terrible loss, pain and suffering children and their families endure as a result of vaccine injury is shameful.

Faith Ozan

February 4, 2010 at 11:41 pm
You can tell by the personal attacks on Jenny accusing her of being self promoting when she is concerned about her child, that this is a bogus article. Evil is so easy to recognize once you get good at it.
And the media is filled with corruption. Learn to recognize slime like this article. None of the US media even mentioned the mercury in the H1N1 vaccines, they just kissed big pharma butt. Look what the “peer review” process got us with climategate. The world is very corrupt right now people. Wise up quick!

busku

February 5, 2010 at 12:05 am
Mennonites have no autism

busku

February 5, 2010 at 12:08 am
Maybe the trick is to wait until after most children would have received autism diagnoses to give the vaccine. Then we can say that the vaccine mitigates autism symptoms, and a few lucky parents will see improvement, credit the vaccine, and start yelling that all children need to be vaccinated. Ignorance is a lifestyle choice; since we can’t eliminate it, we might as well use it to our advantage.

Mario

February 5, 2010 at 12:11 am
It looks that MMR vaccine is just a part of the picture, another load for already overloaded children and therefore it is not enough to compare children vaccinated with MMR and non vaccinated with MMR. We need independent studies comparing general health of vaccinated and non vaccinated children. But again, there is no interest to fund such a study.

Margit

February 5, 2010 at 12:24 am
Waiting subjects the child to risk of catching the diseases, most of which have higher morbidity and mortality under age one. Before the hib and prevnar vaccines, there were about 20,000 cases/year of bacterial meningitis in young children in the US. Since the 1990’s, that has dropped to essentially nil. Mortality rate approaches that of a case of leukemia, and survivors have 10-20% risk of permanent brain damage and deafness.
In 2001, thimerisol was removed from all the vaccines except the multidose flu vaccine given to children over 3. There is usually more mercury detectible in breast milk than vaccines; a can of tuna has 50 doses of thimerisol equivalent of mercury. There is just no scientific evidence that the tiny amounts of mercury in thimerisol caused harm. Jenny McCarthys son was born in 2003, after thimerisol was removed from vaccines. In her book, she writes about her son not smiling until 5 months of age (normal 6 weeks). She writes of being envious of how other babies at 9 months were more into cuddling than her son–signs of autism well before her son received mmr. Since the rate of autism has climbed since thimerisol was removed from the vaccines, the same logic would argue that thimerisol is protective of autism. Thousands of studies have been conducted independent of big pharma. I do not make money by giving vaccines, and my own children are vaccinated. I have devoted my life to pediatric medicine, and resent the idea that I am complicit in a great conspiracy to make money at the expense of children’s lives.

dr d

February 5, 2010 at 12:45 am
Added this to StumbleUpon with a thumbs up.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for this. It was everything that needed to be said, explained clearly and concisely. Absolutely fantastic article.

It speaks for itself, as much as any one piece of writing can without having to argue with every individual nutjob.

S.

February 5, 2010 at 12:50 am
You folks lining up for those vaccines… Thank you. We need more guinea pigs. Give the rest of us the right to refuse them, that’s all we ask.

And why do parents of vaccinated kids complain that the unvaccinated kids are a threat to them? If they really believe that vaccines work, they have nothing to fear, don’t they?

stan

February 5, 2010 at 12:58 am
Oh… and keep using those cell phones all day long. We need more data on those too!

stan

February 5, 2010 at 12:59 am
This was an opinion piece, not journalism. NO journalist uses verbiage like this. There was no neutrality, only sarcasm. It’s sad it comes up as a headline. The author (not jouralist- aspiring or otherwise) obviously has his own crusade going.
My best friend’s litter brother died as a direct result of receiving the MMR vaccine, just a decade ago. Have things improved? Hard to say and can you honestly expect a parent to worry and delay after tings like the flu vaccine fiasco of the 70s? Is there room for some righteous indignation on all sides, sure. I despise the herd term regardless. I am not a cow. And neither are any of you. Nor sheep.
I recently had my MANDITORY H1N1 vaccine and was made to sign a form that stated there was no mercury in it, but did not tell me what was used instead. And due to what I do, there was no deferral. But what I got out of that is that these groups do have an impact on our behalf. If we all just shut up and stuck our arms out would there have been mercury in it? You bet.

Balance people. If you take your children to a doctor regularly, keep them out of “herd” areas and want to delay vaccination that should be your right, and responsibility to ensure they don’t come in contact with things that could endanger them. You can’t have it both ways. Overall expect there will be bumps in the road of medical progression and that sadly it might be your child that is one that creates the pivot of change if something goes wrong. Either way.

Pally

February 5, 2010 at 1:00 am
Dr. D: “Waiting subjects the child to risk of catching the diseases, most of which have higher morbidity and mortality under age one.”

I don’t disagree, but for particularly demonized vaccines, waiting could increase the level of overall societal protection by avoiding the apparent correlation that feeds the opponents. You would be simultaneously increasing the risk from the disease while decreasing the potential to contract it — a trade-off that wouldn’t be worthwhile in many cases, but should be considered if the situation threatens to become dire.

Any information that violates people’s “COMMON SENSE!!!” will be hard to ingrain. It might not be worth fighting that fight.

Mario

February 5, 2010 at 1:06 am
Isn’t YOUR University home of The Feinberg School of Medicine? Didn’t YOUR University received a 1 billion dollar endowment in 2005? Didn’t YOUR University receive that endowment from the RAND Corporation? Isn’t RAND “predominantly financed by the US Government and pharmaceutical corporations?” You see Matt, it didn’t take long to find my way back to the truth.

Keep fighting parents, your CHILD will be the one thanking you for not giving up!

olivia shagsty

February 5, 2010 at 1:06 am
There is no need to attack the writer of the article. Just because some people disagree with the issues presented does not mean that the writer is a bad journalist. Keep in mind, these students are still learning journalism. Give them a break.

Lyn

February 5, 2010 at 1:21 am
Stan, Thank you. Yes, we do not ask other parents to vaccinate or not to vaccinate their children. We only want to have a right to decide for our children and to made decisions by using our own brains. We do not need journalist without proper education telling us what is right and what we should to do. By the way I am professionally pharmacist and decided not to vaccinate our children because I studied official versions of microbiology, epidemiology and hygiene as well as non recommended independent literature. Yes and our children are healthy, now 12, 10 and 5 years old without any use of antibiotics, analgesics, antipyretics or other conventional drugs in their lives.

Margit

February 5, 2010 at 1:24 am
the only sane actrion to take is to stop giving the vaccine in this form for several years and do it the old fashioned one at a time way, the extra expense is not relevant, period.

benson belyache

February 5, 2010 at 1:27 am
This “article” saddened both me and my husband. You should not write anymore. haha. Just kidding, you have your first amendment rights, but for the sake of all of the readers out there, you should not pretend that this is a non-fiction, non-biased, non-pharm-funded piece.

Sus

February 5, 2010 at 1:34 am
Journalist must first tell the truth, right? Isn’t that one of their guidelines? I am not attacking anyone. I am simply stating the facts. The truth is what all good journalists should strive for & what parents of autistic children need to hear. This is not about anyone’s journalism path…this is about autism. People, do your homework, please!

olivia shagsty

February 5, 2010 at 1:34 am
Just another pharma funded propaganda piece. These elites are so enamored with their herd control. The H1N1 jab was generally rejected by an increasingly suspicious public. Makes one wonder if “they” are preparing for their cull.

Ned

February 5, 2010 at 1:50 am
I agree with the above post of Olivia. I wish Mr Matt should also have listed any study done to compare the effects of
A) Early vaccination and delayed vaccination or
B) Early vaccination and vaccination administered in intervals. I have three kids. Middle one was diagnosed with autism at age 18 month. He did get the MMR shot around 16 months. After the shot in a period of 6-8 weeks, the words he used to speak, vanished away. There was some thing that has triggered all this. There are some studies suggesting these kids have hyperactive immune system. Does vaccines trigger this?

Dr. Atar

February 5, 2010 at 2:10 am
I just solved a sudoku in 3 minutes!

Scott

February 5, 2010 at 3:45 am
GREAT ARTICLE – THANKS!

There have been an abundance of excellent studies showing no relationship of vaccines to autism. To keep going would be a waste of valuable resources that could be used for other studies, including on autism.

And there’s no good reason for anyone to believe that a baby’s immune system can’t handle the current vaccination schedule, and more. From the moment a baby is born, his/her immune system is bombarded with foreign substances that activate the immune system. Most vaccines contain less than a hundred antigens, some only just one, and they are weakened or inactivated; while just ONE sneeze or cough projects thousands of droplets of saliva with MILLIONS of live viruses and bacteria, landing on everything in its path, including on your baby.

If you want to attack “big pharma,” you can start with Wakefield. He had secretly applied for a patent for his own measles single vaccine before doing his bogus study, and then used his bogus study to try to make people believe that a single measles vaccine is safer. Want to attack western medicine and doctors? Well, what do you think Wakefield was?! He is a gastroenterologist who did invasive colonoscopies and lumbar punctures on little children who didn’t need it.

The Lancet admitted years ago that the study was “fatally flawed” after investigative journalist Brian Deer showed them the evidence. I guess they didn’t want to formally announce their retraction until after the GMC made their 2.5 year long decision. Most of the other researchers involved in the bogus study distanced themselves from Wakefield’s suggestion of an MMR-autism connection years ago. Read Brian Deer’s blog if you want to know all about Wakefield.

Chelation for autism? It’s for the birds; ducks, in particular – QUACK! Look it up yourself. It’s risky; it has killed children; it’s invasive; it’s unnecessary; it’s scientifically unsupported and FDA unapproved except for removing metals in overdose victims (and not for the “trace” amounts that are found in some vaccines).

Missy

February 5, 2010 at 3:47 am
This writer has all the signs of great potential as a science writer. Avoiding drama and the idea that “every science story has two sides”.I will look forward to his work in the future. Some times the truth hurts and some times it is fully misunderstood. When you combine that with parental emotions, understanding of science gets nowhere fast. As a person who suffered as a child with an autism spectrum disorder i can understand how some of these conclusions are reached. For one thing we try our best to cope in a confusing world but when a big stress comes up we can regress to inside ourselves to a more profound expression of autism. For example, after a scary trip to a place of bright lights, strange smells and a stranger who uses needles on you . I have gone through that kind of regression many times over my 40 or so years with Asperger’s some times becoming nearly catatonic and definitely non-verbal. Autism spectrum disorders are classed as “developmental DELAY”; so we can progress all on our own in a loving environment. However, it takes practice and time to understand a social world that we do not automatically understand. As far as a big conspiracy with all health organizations public, private, charitable and capitalistic and nearly all health professionals the world over; you are asking too much of human nature, humans cannot be a part of large conspiracies nowadays for long with out the whole thing tumbling down. This also underestimates the true concern and care for people and their suffering that starts most health care careers. With these majority of health care professionals that have a heart for human suffering and a hatred of dishonesty and the swindling of innocent people, if Big Bad Phrama was hurting people deliberately these professionals would speak up and get the attorney general to investigate deliberately harmful vaccines. Get the emotion out of the discussion, then science educated people can get somewhere closer to finding the science behind autism.

julia

February 5, 2010 at 5:07 am
What the people promoting Amish and Menonite as PROOF of *lack* of autism concerning vaccines fail to mention is that they are a closed socity.
They not only do NOT use vaccines, they also do not USE the encyclopedia of common chemicals prevelant in our socity.
Chemicals, hormones, antibiotics are in our homes, food, water and the land we live on.

I would put the blame closer to our modern way of living and the Amish and Menonites more pristine and primitive way of living.

Bloodyheck

February 5, 2010 at 5:35 am
my kids aren’t vaccinated and they radiate top health. I would never EVER hand my baby over to a stranger in a white coat with a piece of paper on the wall thinking that they know more than I do about health and wellness and say : “here ya go, shoot him up. Please inject him with animal cells, formaldehyde, aluminum, mercury,fetal tissue and god knows what else-and guess what? I’ll PAY you to do this to my kid. And I am so happy you are shooing this sinister liquid into THE BLOOD of my child for a “just in case’ scenario that will probably never happen”
Just in case he gets mumps or measles?? Mumps and measles are not life threatening diseases! To risk a lifetime of autism?—Think about it: take a child, load his system with a completely foreign liquid full of poison, and if he can’t deal with the toxicity—it may indeed lodge in the brain and interfere with the whole organism. Would you drink a vaccine? Rub it in your eyes? Gargle with it? If not, why the hell would you ever shoot it into your blood or worse, the blood of a new born baby all in the name of prevention of something that hasn’t even happened? INSANITY!

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Both my kids had whopping cough, chicken pox and are healthier for it. Research the diseases before you research the vaccines. Generally, the disease can be easily treated with excellent food, hygiene, sleep, and TLC.

Logic

February 5, 2010 at 6:10 am
“In a world lacking good science reporting in the media, this piece” just joins the club. The assertion that “autism is just something that happens” is unbelievable, and ignores the obvious increasing epidemic rates in our society. It is clearly environmentally or ingested, and it is spreading. You can manipulate studies to say anything you want, but parents can see it happening right before their eyes. Mr. Zeitlin sounds like one of these “scientific” persons who is also waiting for a definitive study that confirms for him that global warming is happening, while our climate is being sent to a dismal state because of our behavior as humans right before our eyes. I don’t buy your opinion Mr. Zeitlin, and I pray that whatever it is that is causing autism, never touches your family like it has touched mine.

tony

February 5, 2010 at 6:12 am
The problem here is one of common sense and parental choice.

1) Certainly vaccines save lives and the also can kill. That’s why the gov’t formed the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, to give people money for children are injured or died from vaccines.

2) How can the medical profession justify a 7 in 1 vaccine, and say that the stronger reactions mean more resistance but don’t cause anymore harm.

3) And the final problem is one of a lay people who are looking for an answer and a medical profession who can’t admit that they MIGHT be wrong. Look at the news, a few days ago they said that SOME brain dead people might actually have consciousness. So MAYBE we shold let parents decide if their children should have vaccines.

ty

February 5, 2010 at 6:17 am
“…and FDA unapproved except for removing metals in overdose victims (and not for the “trace” amounts that are found in some vaccines)”……….Missy , if chelation is used to remove metals from persons with large doses , why not for small ? Your (their?) premise seems to be contradictory . Sodium ethylmercurithiosalicylate and and piggy-backing multiple vaccines into one shot is now deemed healthy for developing immune systems and very young brains ?

alan

February 5, 2010 at 6:20 am
A measles outbreak! Horrors then the body develops a natural immunity. 1. However when given as a child the vaccines wane and then as adults get a strain of measles the body is incapable of fighting. 2. Immunity disorders are a huge problem in medicine; could over immunization be a cause? 3. Does anyone know how many “shotgun” immune shots are given to infants within a year of birth? Try 30 to 50.
Responsible medicine my foot. (I was being polite.) Now H1N1 an international pandemic? Medicine is out of control. Number one advertisers on television are pharmaceuticals. Big Business, big problems – try our city drinking water with traces of various pharmaceuticals… but I digress.

Bob

February 5, 2010 at 6:26 am
Mario, you are a wise person. Ben, you are not. As father of a Down child I am aware some parents cling to false hope but I don’t blame them. “Why” is the “never goes away question” and when a corrupted scientist’s paper in Lancet offers a spurious relationship for an answer, such a parent will be tempted to grasp it with a deathgrip. That there is no answer is very hard to accept and requires the courage and intelligence I have often found among parents of handicapped children who have resisted the temptation of false hope and scapegoating. These parents accept their children as the gifts they are without blaming others or their own actions for the challenges their children face but still fight everyday to give their children the best life they can.

jim breckenridge

February 5, 2010 at 6:29 am
Living this issue daily and maybe having a life-long dependent child, let me say to those of you who have the luxury of simply commenting how crazy “we” are for thinking this way or that….please come down from your thrones. Offer to help a parent who is having to drag his/her son off the floor of the grocery store b/c of a meltdown as he sees his favorite item in a different place. Please.
After all the pontificating from talking heads and those who have not been touched personally by autism, I am beyond angry.
My son had 3 sets of vaccines, and yes sometimes 5 in ONE LEG. We had open, oozing sores, 105 temperatures, then a complete loss of developing language. And it was not the MMR, which he hasn’t had. I believe the vaccines may not cause autism, but it pulls the trigger of a gun that was already loaded.
We have a problem that IS…a simple “can I help” would do wonderous things for us “crazies.”

greta

February 5, 2010 at 6:43 am
“their expectations are totally upended and they look for explanations.”

Wow. So autism is nothing more than parents’ misguided expectations. You are suggesting that autism happens to the parents, not their children.

While I would agree that McCarthy might not be the most convincing of spokesperson, you are playing right opposite of her in the same measure. She did not become popular for posing for Playboy, as you attempt to discredit her suggests. I bet most people that have heard of her did not know that – I certainly didn’t, or care. Its clear that your only intention with this article was to be controversial and self-promoting, so in that respect, job well done.

There have been numerous – maybe not enough – court cases that have demonstrated the ill effect of MMR on children predisposed to autism.
I can assure you that many of these kids stop talking, looking straight to your eyes, interacting with others and struggle to communicate even the most basic needs. This coincides, not with parents expectations, as you suggest, but with the application of vaccines. Perhaps its nothing more than coincidence and children were would have started showing symptoms regardless, but it surely is suspicious.

In my opinion, most of the issue stem from the loss of communication skills. There seems to be agreement about how certain part of the brain becomes disconnected. Have you noticed how famous and rich people’s children all are “cured” after 40 hours a week intensive, one on one, speech and language therapy? They are the only ones that can afford such therapies because insurance won’t cover it for the rest of us. These intense therapies force the brain to concentrate and make alternate connections which in turn connect the rest. Most privilege kids recover within a year. Think of this fact when you decide to oppose health care reform.

JR

February 5, 2010 at 6:54 am
There is no science in vaccinations, pharmaceutical companies, or journalism. The first two are investment industries, the last one is marketing for the first two.

Stuart

February 5, 2010 at 7:00 am
The earth is only 6000 years old. I know so because a magic book told me. That argument is about as silly as saying vaccines cause autism. How about we look at the overall rate of mental retardation and see it is about the same as it ever was, and vaccines have nothing to do with it.

VACCINES HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH AUTISM. Next just blame the CIA for creating AIDS.

shaman

February 5, 2010 at 7:05 am
THermasol mercury preservative is in some vaccines & your not giving that to my kid.

Dr.Ron Paul

February 5, 2010 at 7:13 am
This was OK, till the bitter end: “but like so many other of life’s disruptions, autism is something that just happens.”

Cancer “just happens” too. It, like autism has a cause, as do all things. Like cancer, there is an environmental component to autism, thus the increases over time (not all due to increased monitoring). Just because salt does not seen to cause cancer, we don’t stop looking for the cause.

Lets get real here.

Jim Moss

James I. Moss

February 5, 2010 at 7:33 am
stan writes: “And why do parents of vaccinated kids complain that the unvaccinated kids are a threat to them? If they really believe that vaccines work, they have nothing to fear, don’t they?”

They do have something to fear. While vaccines greatly reduce (by a factor of 35) individual risk of the targeted disease and its transmission, they do NOT eliminate it. Taking measles as an example, the percentage of vaccinated people who achieve immunity has been measured in populations throughout the world, with results varying from 85% in developing countries (perhaps because of suboptimal storage) to 95% and even 99% in the developed world. That’s good enough to achieve “herd immunity” if enough people are vaccinated. But if herd immunity isn’t achieved, the community is vulnerable to an outbreak. If there’s an outbreak, while the unvaccinated are at highest risk, 1-15% of the vaccinated will also be vulnerable.

In fact, you are generally safer being the lone unvaccinated person in a community where everyone else is vaccinated than you are being a fully vaccinated person in a community of mostly unvaccinated people. That may seem counter-intuitive, but that’s the way it works.

The public health goal is properly herd immunity, not individual immunity.

John F.

February 5, 2010 at 7:39 am
I would like to forward my views regarding this,the fact is that science can’t be challenged without proper evidence. One can’t make haste decision for science that too at the time when its achieving new heights. I’m shocked.

Shawn Smith

February 5, 2010 at 8:08 am
The question should be, how come you never heard of anyone who had autism until the past thirty years or so? What has happened since then to make this so prevalent now?

Robert

February 5, 2010 at 8:11 am
Agreed that the article was biased but when you remove all the inflamatory language, there is truth here.
Vaccines are a red herring. Everyone wants a single root cause and big, bad pharmaceutical companies are a perfect foil. Stop diluding yourselves and look beyond them. The more that the scientific community spends debunking this stupid notion, the longer it wastes funds that should be used towards securing a real cure.

Heidi

February 5, 2010 at 8:26 am
Wow, just wow. The awful comments in response to this article just show how terrible and wide-reaching that deeply-unscientific paper was.

To think that there are still to this day people calling others “Nazis” just because they explain why it is that vaccines save lives.

It’s amazing how all the statistics in the world aren’t able to dissuade people who heard about someone’s uncle’s friend who’s kid was vaccinated and then developed autism. Why aren’t statistics and science taught better in schools? How has the western world failed so miserably in eduction that there is now a large proportion of the population who actively distrust the very notion of “evidence-based research?”

Sam Fent

February 5, 2010 at 8:39 am
@robert: sure, that is indeed the question. And quite a few researchers around the world have been very interested in trying to find an answer to it. To the best of my knowledge, we don’t have an answer yet. One thing that the research has revealed quite clearly, however, is that there appears to be zero statistical correlation between vaccination and autism, as made clear by the Danish and Japanese studies. We still don’t know why there has been such an increase in the appearance of autism. We do know that its not MMR vaccines that are responsible.

As someone with Aspergers Syndrome quite present in my family (possibly even myself as a young man), and two friends with severely autistic children, I do feel the pain of those who have observed their children’s switch to autistic behaviour shortly after an MMR vaccination. I think that is important for us to understand how statistics works. The research on this has not ruled out that there may be some subtle effect related to MMR that affects a tiny number of children. What is has ruled out is that is there any observable statistical increase in the onset of autism related to MMR vaccination, so that from a public health policy it is reasonable to continue administering and encouraging the use of the vaccine. If people are offended by my use of the word “a tiny number”, please recall that when something impacts 3 million people in the USA, that is just 1% of the population. The number of cases of autism onset post-MMR that are claimed by even the most passionate believers in the link between the vaccine and the condition is very, very, very much smaller than that. There isn’t a contradiction between saying that there is no statistical increase in autism in children who received the MMR vaccine and the possibility that some children were indeed impacted by it. However, even there (as the article notes), we know so little about autism, and it has such a complex manifestation, that its very hard to rule out the possibility that parents are seeing correlation and not causation. Researchers have tried to do this (as hard as it is) and the evidence to date suggests that there is no causative mechanism.

Finally, to the person who asked why, if something works to remove overdoses of heavy metals it can’t work for tiny amounts … you need to learn more biology to understand this. I know that common sense might make you think that this seems obvious, but our bodies, like the world at large, are only vaguely understandable if you insist that everything must meet your common sense view of the world.

Thanks to the author for a great article, although its true that the focus on Mccarthy’s playboy background is a little overdone and a little mis-used.

paul

February 5, 2010 at 8:40 am
While the information in the article is deceptively scholarly in some areas, it lost whatever authoritative voice it had when the author inserted sly personal attacks on Ms. McCarthy and other parents of autistic children. To imply that all parents of autistic children retrospectively FALSELY “remember” (author’s sarcastic quotation marks–not mine) their children as healthy and developing at a typical pace in order to lay the blame of their child’s diagnosis at someone else’s feet is incredibly insulting. Does the author have a child? Ever held his own newborn? Ever marvelled at the daily progress of an infant’s mental and physical growth? Ever had daily intense social interaction with his own baby, only to find a sudden completely different (and much reduced) level of interaction and emotional reaction with the same child? Ask a pediatrician. Parents can be very obsessive over every milestone and development in their child’s life. Does he honestly believe that every autistic child’s parent creates for themselves a false memory of a pre-vaccinated neurotypical, developmentally average child? Believe what you wish about the source of the condition, but do not mock and insult the families who are affected by autism.

OrigamiB

February 5, 2010 at 8:48 am
Ah–and one more thing. There is great wisdom in halting when you hear the ubiquitous phrase “studies have found” and immediately demanding to know who funded the study in question. People who routinely use and discuss statistical evidence need to remember these two quotes:1) “The individual source of the statistics may easily be the weakest link.”;
Josiah Stamp

and, 2) “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”;
Benjamin Disraeli

OrigamiB

February 5, 2010 at 9:05 am
I like how every research paper that finds no link is obliviously in the pocket of the pharmaceutical companies. Can you say “Conspiracy Theory”? Has all reasonable thought gone out the window?

Mike

February 5, 2010 at 9:11 am
These parent that do not get shots are the only intelligent persons in this article all the rest are brain dead sheep following the Sheppard BIG PHARMA to their ruin. Statements like “the totally bogus claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism, is not just another example of a great number of people misunderstanding science” proves my point. Please sheeple get informed before your child drooooools in the corner visit http://www.drtenpenny.com as a start of a more informed life.

Frank

February 5, 2010 at 9:11 am
First of all, vaccines are injected under the skin or into muscle, not into veins. Second, after mercury was removed from vaccines, there was no corresponding decline in new autism diagnoses. Third, the amounts of virus in the vaccines is tiny; the child doesn’t ‘become infected with all 3 diseases simultaneously’. Finally, to address the question, how many unvaccinated children have developed autism? ALL of the autistic persons born before the age of vaccines would fit that category.
Autism is not a new syndrome. Persons have had it long before the 1940’s when the term was coined. Before Kanner, they were simply called “defective persons, mental retardates, epileptics” or similar terms. Before Asperger’s became the cool disorder to have, (and now everybody WANTS to be called aspergers or have a kid with that label), persons were labeled as eccentric, pedantic, inflexible, or “nervous”.

Old wine, new bottles.

BHV

February 5, 2010 at 9:12 am
This is an intriguing article. A 6-ounce can of tuna fish contains as much mercury as the thimerosol in a vaccine. Granted, children and adults should not eat fish in today’s polluted world, but that is just one example of an endless line of environmental factors. It seems much more likely that the chemicals and junk children consume on a daily basis are contributing factors than a shot with as much mercury as a single meal.

matt

February 5, 2010 at 9:13 am
This ‘journalist’ is a total schmuck. Attack parents of children with autism. I’m glad your mommy and daddy spent good money sending you to school so you could belittle sick children. And yes, in a round about way that’s exactly what you’re doing you corporate schill.

Ben Tuominen

February 5, 2010 at 9:13 am
The level of scientific ignorance among the general population is shocking. Why is it that although all of you use microwave ovens, cell phones, flat screen TVs, MRIs (as soon as you think it might save your life), drive a car, watch the weather radar, etc… you STILL don’t trust the process of science. The process of science has evolved to protect us against the inevitable failings of individuals (and individual experiments) and it works, it’s the reason most of you are alive today. Mistakes are sometimes made (of course) but the process itself is robust. Unfortunately it seems to be a deeply ingrained part of human nature for the masses to occasionally drive those among them who have dedicated their lives to improving the human condition up against the wall.

Peter

February 5, 2010 at 9:36 am
Good article…there are not many places left to hide for this excretious idea, that vaccines are the cause of autism, an idea that has harmed so many children; one of the only options left is to discredit or intimidate the speaker, rather than the facts. Ben has taken this approach. It is especially telling when one confuses a clear discussion with an attack on sick children. The anti-vaccine movement has been an attack on children, as far as I can assess, judging by the number of children that have been damaged. The movement’s first prophet, Wakefield, is a criminal by my standards. The only corporate “schill” here was Wakefield.

John

February 5, 2010 at 9:45 am
The MMR vaccine did not contain mercury. The theory was that a live virus in MMR was the problem. While that may not be an issue, the mercury containing vaccines and link to autism has not been disproved. The fact that the media is trying to disprove the link by this one vaccine without mercury is a big lie. There were 2 theories at the time, live virus vs. mercury in vaccines. The mercury link remain irrefutable and yet the media pretends this retraction vindicates all vaccines. It would be nice to see some real reporting on this issue but I suppose that is not where the money is.

Dan Laks

February 5, 2010 at 9:47 am
Regardless of where you fall on the vaccine debate, you have to admit the last line of this article is inane. Autism is not something that “just happens.” Rates have been skyrocketing, and scientific studies have been done that show that the rapidly rising rates cannot simply be attributed to better diagnosis and reporting of inherited cases. Frankly, the real story here is the medical, and media, establishment’s utter disregard for addressing this crisis. In the United States we have been left with communities all over where people see autism rates jumping in their schools, in their families, and the message they have gotten from medical authorities has been “autism just happens.” Frankly, what do you expect them to do? Parents are going to do their own research. They are going to look outside the institutions that have, quite literally, failed them. And they are going to look at history, and see that this isn’t the first time that medical authorities have failed the public. They’ll read about the Tuskegee experiment, they’ll read about thalidomide, the radiation testing done on Korean POWs and the psychologists participating in torture at Guantanamo Bay, and doctors asserting to consumers “not one case of throat irritation caused by smoking!” and this gross conspiracy that you paint at the beginning of your piece doesn’t look so absurd after all. “Autism just happens!” You couldn’t possibly be a parent. What do you expect parents, desperate for answers, to do???

inane analysis

February 5, 2010 at 10:05 am
The Lancet article never said that vaccines cause autism. The “studies” that are touted to disprove the link do not disprove it. Vaccination is truly a sacred cow. When Congress called for serious studies on safety, only “metaanalysis” of existing papers was undertaken. Even the “Vaccine Court” is used primarily as a forum to prove that there is no such thing as a vaccine injury.

The “flaws” in the Lancet article are not methodological, they are moral judgments about the authors’ motivation. Thus, if Jack the Ripper did a scientific paper, valid or not, they would withdraw its publication as well.

Attack the messenger!

Robert

February 5, 2010 at 10:07 am
The fact remains that Thimerosal contains mercury, and that Thimerosal is only needed in cases where vaccine is distributed in multi-use form and so requires an extra “preservative”. Individual vaccine doses don’t need Thimerosal. Mercury is a toxin, plain and simple. Autism link or no autism link, there is no reason to have Thimerosal in vaccines given to children, except that the Eli Lilly corporation makes a good bit of profit from it.

While it may be true that an outbreak of measles resulted from parents distrust of Timerosal-preserved vaccines, it could’ve been mitigated by shipping vaccines in single-use dosage containers instead of in bulk.

This story’s author infers a measles outbreak is indirectly linked to some sort of Thimerosal hysteria, but the vaccine industry had a Thimerosal-free solution in hand the entire time but refused to implement it.

More to the point, the medical community has succumbed to being glorified prescription and vaccine prescribers for the drug manufacturers; it should be no surprise that parents’ suspicion of the major drug companies was transferred to their family doctors. For this reason alone, family doctors probably shares some culpability in this as well, if only in aggregate.

John

February 5, 2010 at 10:19 am
I am an NU student, and for those who are complaining about this article being funded by “Big Pharma”…no, it is not, this is an entirely undergraduate run production, there are no pharmaceutical companies endorsing North By Northwestern (try checking out the rest of the site). It’s not connected to Feinberg, and it’s not connected to the professors that do research. It’s not even connected to Medill-this is an independent website (notice the lack of a .edu).

Matt’s still a student and we all make mistakes, but that’s no reason to jump on him like many of you have been doing. He’s not getting paid money to write this article and he is writing an opinion piece. It’s not like he’s trying to get this published in the New Yorker or something. Also, keep in mind that his editor might have given him this topic and asked him to write about it, and that his editor might have made some changes to what he initially wrote. In fact, one of my friends once wrote an feature article that her editor changed the title of, and in the process misconstrued the message she was trying convey to the readers. But my friend had no power over the final title. That was her editor’s call. Articles on sites like these are never a one person production.

And again, we’re still students- we’re still learning!

Priya

February 5, 2010 at 10:22 am
First of all, this article is on the OpEd section. It is meant to generate thoughts and discussion as well as present the writer’s opinion on current medical oversight. It is not in the Science section.

Second, the rise in apparent occurrence of Autism may be due to the inclusion of other developmental delay syndromes into the spectrum of autism. Something that may have been classified as a ‘learning disability’ a few years ago may now be lumped under the tag of Autism. There is a very wide sliding scale applied to Autism that goes all the way from being functional in society to being totally closed off and unresponsive.

Third, it has always been a given that there will be reactions among the population to any given drug. Whether that population is horses, cows or people, some individuals will have a bad reaction.

Fourth, medical science is not infallible. It’s only been about 65 years since the development of penicillin. In those 60 years we’ve come a long way. A really long way. But there is still much room for improvement and scientific understanding.

I’m not dissing any parent of an autistic child. A couple of my friends have autistic children and I envy them their capacity for love and patience. They are worried however that not enough is being done for the sufferers of Autism after they reach their 18th birthday. These parents wonder what will happen when their children are no longer children and fall out of the child-oriented care and tutoring systems, what will happen as these become adult dependents in the eyes of the tax systems, and what will happen to the children when they themselves are gone. There is far more to be done in the field of autism study than pointing fingers.

Tony Co

February 5, 2010 at 10:26 am
Robert, my understanding is the reason that only a meta-analysis (often to full of bias to be valid) is the fact there would have to be a definitive study. The only way to do that is to “pretend” to vaccinate children of parents who wanted to get vaccinated. This would leave them exposed to potentially deadly diseases they believed they were vaccinated from. Yes you could test each component one at a time as was suggested by Ben. The problem I see is that it starts with a premise that the mechanism is the immune system is over loaded with to much stimulation or that somehow the combination of the viruses is the mechanism(assuming they are active and not dead, I have not researched the type of vaccine).

When or if that study does not change the output of autism cases, the goal post will move and proponents will say that you still gave them part of the vaccine, and whatever part was common is causing it. Sacred cow or scapegoat, vaccines are a public health boon and even if they caused autism it would be a serious moral dilemma that outrage and finger pointing will not help.

Dustin

February 5, 2010 at 10:35 am
If thimerisol (the mercury preservative in vaccines) was so good, how come the FDA ordered the drug companies to STOP using it. I believe that the total amount of mercury in the many, many shots that an infant receives in the first two years – overloads a weak immune system. I also believe that there is a predispositioning in the genetic makeup of children that makes them more prone to autism.
the big problem is how these children are going to be taken care of in adulthood.

Alan

February 5, 2010 at 10:41 am
It seems to me that autism can be attributed to a combination of several causes. First it might need a genetic tendency, but when as it happened to my grandson it was at 18 months just after his MMR shot that he stopped talking completely, had been walking and running and then started walking right into the walls etc. it had to be the shot that caused it. Now I really believe it was the mercury that was in the shot. Yes they probably need to have immunizations, but not hib while still in the hospital, and why not give the shots individually so that mercury is not present. Even if the doctor says mercury has been taken out, is it? Flu shots still contain it! How many shots do kids have before going to school. Way too many! As for rich kids being the only ones treated, get them put on Medicaid and then have around the clock teaching right in the home as my daughter and son-in-law did for their son. He had teachers 33 hours out of the week. Now at age 9 he is beginning to read. Yes, he has an aide in school. When you see it first hand you know there is a cause, but maybe it is more than one cause. Rich kids do not get well in one year I can verify.

Berniece

February 5, 2010 at 10:43 am
To those of you still blaming mercury for this disorder and the MMR shot, the MMR has never contained thimerosal. There is a table that shows you the vaccines that did at one point and still do at any dosage. Please follow the link bellow for the information.

http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/ucm096228.htm#intro

“Thimerosal has been removed from or reduced to trace amounts in all vaccines routinely recommended for children 6 years of age and younger, with the exception of inactivated influenza vaccine (see Table 1). A preservative-free version of the inactivated influenza vaccine (contains trace amounts of thimerosal) is available in limited supply at this time for use in infants, children and pregnant women. Some vaccines such as Td, which is indicated for older children (? 7 years of age) and adults, are also now available in formulations that are free of thimerosal or contain only trace amounts. Vaccines with trace amounts of thimerosal contain 1 microgram or less of mercury per dose.” -FDA Website

Dustin

February 5, 2010 at 10:44 am
Vaxxers, why the tunnel vision on just the MMR vaccine? ALL vaccines contribute to autism. Think CUMULATIVE, RESIDUAL and SYNERGISTIC effects of all of the unnecessary, illogical poisons that the drug companies sinisterly dump into their toxic vaccines with the intent of inflicting diseases on the victims which will require more drugs and push the populace into the profiteering mainstream sick care system, all for money. Certifiably pathetic…

Jeb

February 5, 2010 at 10:48 am
I’ve researched how vaccines have introduced animal viruses into the human population related to culturing the vaccines in animals like monkey kidneys and using other “biblically unclean” animals to culture them. Up until AIDS, we didn’t understand the delayed impact of retro viruses on humans. Go back and read the two independent sources that linked HIV to polio vaccines in Africa. Now if certain monkey’s can have retro virus’s that infect humans (taking a long period of dormancy) why wouldn’t it be possible for other culturing flesh like swine, hampster, shark and the two legally aborted human fetuses from the 1970’s also pose a risk of transferring currently unknown viral material that could take weeks, months or years to impact their new hosts life (Rollingstone’s article on the source of AIDS pointed to a correlation of increased brain tumors 4 fold in the unclean vaccine population). Even if you don’t believe hampsters, monkeys and swine are unclean food, but you claim to believe some of the bible, you might find it interesting to note that the old testament and new testament uphold a stand against the flesh that contains the life blood. Take a look at what the Almighty told Noah after the flood and then look again at what the apostles decided in ACTS. The Rollingstone article said Dr Kaprowski pulled the monkey kidneys out of the animals while they were alive in order to culture his polio vaccine used in 1950’s Africa where AIDS first crossed over to the human population. So are we still using flesh with blood for culturing vaccines when at least some period of more than a thousand years the Creator had directed His chosen people, His children, to avoid consuming, so the plagues of Pharaoh do not come upon you. Even if you claim the Law doesn’t apply to you as a child of the Almighty, the Apostle’s decided otherwise regarding the life blood. Until the industry comes clean as to what their standards for making vaccines are, how can we trust that they are safe. The process for making them seems to have a total disregard for the word of the Almighty in the bible.

David

February 5, 2010 at 10:48 am
@ Peter: You are confusing science and technology. Big pharma science is not science like the knowledge needed to build a microwave. Science means to know, and there are many ways to know. Our biomedical model is one way to know, and it isn’t that accurate at all. Basic science is relatively accurate. Medical science and the use of big pharma products, not accurate at all. If microwaves heated food as poorly as pharmaceuticals cure chronic disease, nobody would buy one. So yes, science is ok, science applied to technology is allright, pseudoscience masked as science to help heal one, not good at all.

Lee

February 5, 2010 at 10:50 am
The compromise is Titer testing. It angers me and I don’t understand why doctors don’t offer this option to patients that are concerned about vaccines. It makes me also believe in the cash value of vaccines for Doctors and big pharmacy.
Vaccinate, but do not over-vaccinate! A simple blood test will show if your child needs the (rarely needed) booster shots. I stopped my child’s vaccines after 9 months due to illness. When she started school I need to catch her up on her shots. Before I let the (insistent) DR start jabbing her with needles…I had her blood drawn and tested to see which booster shots she might actual need. Blood test results indicated she needed….NONE!!! Immunity to everything that she had been vaccinated against. She did not need the countless other vaccines that she had been scheduled for and “missed” She had ONE polio vaccine as an infant. Her blood test (at age 6) showed blood titers indicating a LIFETIME immunity. Therefore she did not need the other 4 or 5 scheduled booster shots or any other booster shots!! NOT ONE. She was immune. She did get her MMR because she had never had one. I can tell that my doctor was not all that pleased. I have switched.

jo

February 5, 2010 at 10:50 am
Alan, The link above directly addresses your concern over why the FDA stopped using it. Please read the “Recent and Future FDA Action” section. If this was the cause of autism then you would have seen a leveling or decrease in diagnosis once you accomidated the broadened definition and improved techniques (which eleminates most of the significant increase in diagnosis). In short I will use some here:

“Conducted in 1999, this review found no evidence of harm from the use of thimerosal as a vaccine preservative, other than local hypersensitivity reactions (Ball et al. 2001)… At the time of this review in 1999, the maximum cumulative exposure to mercury from vaccines in the recommended childhood immunization schedule was within acceptable limits for the methylmercury exposure guidelines set by FDA, ATSDR, and WHO. However, depending on the vaccine formulations used and the weight of the infant, some infants could have been exposed to cumulative levels of mercury during the first six months of life that exceeded EPA recommended guidelines for safe intake of methylmercury…As a precautionary measure, the Public Health Service (including the FDA, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics issued two Joint Statements, urging vaccine manufacturers to reduce or eliminate thimerosal in vaccines as soon as possible (CDC 1999) and (CDC 2000).”

Dustin

February 5, 2010 at 10:51 am
Autism aside, vaccines are known to cause serious side effects including death, this is not science fiction it is science fact. The US government has a fund set aside to pay damages to victims of vaccine related complications, the VICP.

It is the dishonesty of the medical community that is most troublesome. Yes measles, mumps and all those communicable diseases are far more dangerous statistically that the vaccines that prevent them, but the medical community continually discounts any vaccine related complications.

Guillain-Barre syndrome is the classic example. Hours after getting a vaccination, a person suddenly develops this syndrome, and is told “they would have developed it anyway even without the vaccine”, how convenient. You can find dozens of reported cases like this all over the world, and God knows how many more go unreported to the media. This is the type of dishonesty displayed by the medical community that keeps people nervous and unwilling to trust, and rightfully so.

Present all the information and let people make an educated choice.

“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” ~Thomas Jefferson

detroitjoe

February 5, 2010 at 10:53 am
Several years ago two autistic kids traveled from Minneapolis to Illinois and both came back much improved. One went through an intensive “intervention” for autism that is generally regarded as a quack remedy. My kid toured the Sears and Hancock towers, went through the Chicago waterworks and visited the Museum of Science and Industry. The parents of the other kid swore by the quack remedy. I suspected that the extra attention and the change of scene were responsible. Certainly the museum visits (despite the stress of doing it with an autistic kid) were more fun. You just can’t draw conclusions from anecdotes, because you can’t really tell coincidence from causation.

Mary

February 5, 2010 at 10:54 am
All anyone needs to know, in evaluating the accuracy and intent of this article, is to note the advertisement on this page. An ad for an ADHD medicine. Really, folks, can it be more obvious?

Pay attention. Be alert. And trust your instincts. Don’t be manipulated by ever refuted statistics and jargon.

Elizabeth

February 5, 2010 at 10:54 am
Jo, I will have to read up on this. It sounds like the happiest compromise you will get with this movement. =)

Dustin

February 5, 2010 at 10:56 am
detroitjoe, I agree the risks should be laid out. The fact is that if Titer testing is as effective as Jo said, you should use it more often. The reason that fund was set aside was an acknowledgement of the risk that manditory vaccinations present vs the benefits gained as a society. It is hard to put a value on a human life, but it is the only function the government has to make resititution for the relatively tiny amount of the population that have severe complications because of this.

Dustin

February 5, 2010 at 11:01 am
It is easy to find vet studies on this, lots of research on the unnecessary vaccination of our pets….not as easy to find for humans. What does this say?

Wanted to add that titer testing is accepted by all schools as “vaccinated”.

jo

February 5, 2010 at 11:05 am
Below is an example of conspiracy mongaring. The premise is that any company that places an ad on a website that randomly or targetedly places ads controls all content on the site. All that it means is they do not have any extreme opposition to the content. This is a nonsequitor or a false corelation.

“All anyone needs to know, in evaluating the accuracy and intent of this article, is to note the advertisement on this page. An ad for an ADHD medicine. Really, folks, can it be more obvious?

Pay attention. Be alert. And trust your instincts. Don’t be manipulated by ever refuted statistics and jargon.” – Elizabeth

Dustin

February 5, 2010 at 11:06 am
Elizabeth~whatever ads you see on a given page will inevitably be related to the topic at hand. Go to the section where they review Gossip Girl episodes and you will probably see an entertainment ad related to that. Go to the Sports section and you might see an ad for Gatorade. Once again, this is a ~student run~ publication. Not some mouthpiece for Pfizer or Merck.

Priya

February 5, 2010 at 11:07 am
Priya, it won’t actually matter what you say to people that think in that fashion. You will be considered part of the conspiracy. I find the best thing you can do is point out the flaw in the logic to the “audience” and hopefully avoid them being sucked into the grand conspiracy.

Dustin

February 5, 2010 at 11:12 am
Logic, you really need to travel developing countries to see what happens to children who have not been vaccinated. Living in the US where most children are vaccinated protects your children from fatal and crippling illnesses.
I have cared for children who died of vaccine preventable illnesses and know the agony of the parents.
The big Pharma companies are made up of people like you and me that have children and do vaccinate them. You can hate their corporate profits (and I do too) but the scientist who develop vaccines do not come to work everyday to try to figure out how to poison your child.
Most children survive whooping cough, chicken pox and flu however, it is impossible to predict which child will succumb and most parents don’t want to risk that. I am glad that your children are safe because most parents in your neighborhood have chosen to immunize. You obviously have not lived through an outbreak of polio or watched a child die of complications from vaccine preventable illnesses. Had you done so, you might have a different opinion about how to protect your young.

Some logic!

February 5, 2010 at 11:13 am
Jo, I thought I had said this. I don’t see it above so I will try it again! Thank you for the reply. I will see if I can find any peer reviews on the subject. That is great to hear an alternative to the quick and dirty shot gun approach. Maybe we can get they rolled into the popular awareness as an option. It is an option, but obviously not a heavily voiced one. It might even improve the doctors reputation with the young ones! You won’t be getting a big needle everytime you go.

Dustin

February 5, 2010 at 11:16 am
I know, it’s true, but it just strikes me as so ridiculous that people are jumping on this piece. People, click on the author’s name, he’s done a whole set of “why you should care” articles, including “Why you should care about Jessica Alba’s Muzzler 2008″ and “Why you should care about Mississippi’s fat people”. Jessica Alba. And overweight Mississippians. Yeah, that’s a conspiracy right there, that is.

Priya

February 5, 2010 at 11:17 am
Thank you Dustin. I feel like screaming this option from the rooftops. Even when I tell people about titer testing they always ask “why doesn’t my Dr tell me this”. Or, it just seems too hard or different for them to even look into. I would love to raise awareness!

jo

February 5, 2010 at 11:21 am
The reason we need herd immunity is for children who do not respond to vaccination. Such children have compromised immune systems and do not develop immunity to diseases with exposure. These children rely on the rest of us to get vaccinated so that the disease is not prevalent. That is a major reason why everyone should be vaccinated. Yes, they are not without risks, but neither is the ibuprofen and aceominophen that we take without a thought when we have a headache or give when our children have fevers. However, that risk is not autism. It is so unfortunate that the early symptoms coincide with the MMR vaccinations, because it makes it easy to see the correlation as causation, when in fact it is not.

I have 3 children. All were vaccinated on schedule. My youngest was born in 2005 and has symptoms common to autism (specifically he has receptive/expressive communication disorder) and falls on the spectrum. My concern is with how to help him function in society.

We need to move on and continue to seek the source of the world wide increase in autism. As Tony mentioned part of the increase is due to the more inclusive diagnosis. Unfortunately I do not have the study at hand, but there has been work to determine if the increase is only due to the umbrella diagnosis and it was found that there was a real increase when the umbrella is narrowed to a more traditional view of autism. We’ve already changed the vaccinations to lower mercury exposure and studies have found that there is not a causal relalionship between vaccines and autism, so we must continue to look elsewhere.

I feel a great deal of compassion for other parents dealing with autism, but laying blame does not help your child. I know from experience. Focus on what you can do for your child and fight to uncover the real causes of autism (it’s likely rooted in some combination of genetics and the environment). Fight for improved diagnosis and treatments to improve functioning. Continuing to wage a useless battle against vaccinations helps no one.

Nancy

February 5, 2010 at 11:24 am
For anyone who asked why there were hardly any documented cases of autism until about 30 years ago, you can read the history section for Autism on Wikipedia, or any other web page about the history of autism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism

According to the article, term “autism” wasn’t even used until 1938, and it wasn’t defined as its own syndrome or disorder until the 1960s. There could not be documented cases of Autism until we established its modern definition. However, there are documented descriptions of what we now recognize as symptoms of autism going back far before we ever recognized it as a disorder.

It is not that children have only recently developed the disorder, it is that we made it possible to diagnose it as a disorder, resulting in a large number of documented cases occuring suddenly in the last 50 years.

Sophie

February 5, 2010 at 11:31 am
Dustin:
I just went back and read what I missed while typing and caring for my son. Thanks for all of your posts and sources. I’m going to go do a little more reading.

Nancy

February 5, 2010 at 11:40 am
Regarding the prior mention of some children having compromised immune systems, a well suppressed and therefore little know but proven fact is that vaccines cause autoimmune disorders. Just google it, you will find MILLIONS of hits on the subject, about half of which are pertinent and credible. The more vaccines a person is injected with is directly proportional to their lowered immunity and therefore increased susceptibility to illness and disease. Vaccines, “the big lie”…

Jeb

February 5, 2010 at 11:42 am
Please please do not do your research on a wiki site. Anyone can post there and the information may or may not be accurate. Please go to sites by organizations devoted to whatever topic your are researching. For cancer, see the American Cancer Society..etc. Not only will the information likely be more accurate and current, but YOU will also know the bias of the organization/person providing the information. You need to know that in order to evaluate their arguements/claims on the issue being discussed.

Nancy

February 5, 2010 at 11:45 am
Regarding the prior reference to a Wikipedia link: once upon a time Wikipedia was a fairly credible source of information. However, it has been slowly taken over by various profiteering groups that do not always have your best interests in mind, with their intent being to mislead the populace to their own monetary gain. Think drug companies and their hired shills and well paid ghostwriters. NPR recently did a piece on this, also pointing out that the “owners” of Wikipedia disinformation suppressed any attempts to correct it, and also altered content of submissions to state the opposite of the intent of the submissions…..

Jeb

February 5, 2010 at 11:50 am
To see an even discussion on this topic, I suggest that you read European Journal of Dermatology. 2004 Mar-Apr;14(2):86-90.

Autoimmune diseases and vaccinations.
Vial T, Descotes J.

or read:

Journal of Autoimmun. 1996 Dec;9(6):699-703.

Vaccine-induced autoimmunity.
Cohen AD, Shoenfeld Y.

The Lancet provides a great background article:
http://image.thelancet.com/extras/02art9340web.pdf

While there may be some link between vaccinations and autoimmune disorders, my previous post referred only to children born with improperly functioning immune systems that do not allow them to benefit from vaccination.

Nancy

February 5, 2010 at 11:58 am
As the grandparent of a child with Autism, I have concerns about the matter and reporting of the potential link between Autism and vaccinations in general and currently as it relates to the recent retraction by the Lancet of Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s article in 1998 and how he is being portrayed.

I first want to say that I feel, as I’m certain many people do, that the pharmaceutical industry has provided us with great advances in medicine and most doctors are dedicated to their cause and completely ethical in their practice of medicine. I also feel that physicians have a right to earn a living from their profession, especially considering the importance of their work, years of study and great expense they incur before they become licensed to practice.

It is curious that an article written by a doctor 12 years ago that merely suggested a possible link between the MMR vaccine and digestive tract problems in children would cause such alarm in the pharmaceutical industry and medical fields today. From any factual information that I can find, Dr. Wakefield did not say there was a link between vaccines and Autism, he simply suggested that further studies be done, and in the interest of precaution recommended considering single vaccines, and that they be spread out over time instead of multiple vaccines at one time, until his recommendation for scientific studies could be undertaken and reviewed. This seems to be sound advice, especially in this age of misleading advertising that touts new miracle drugs, many having dangerous side effects.

I realize that in all likelihood, most reporters of medical news designed for general consumption are not science or medical experts themselves, but I find it hard to imagine reporting on a medical article without reading the article in question, which is apparently happening in the Wakefield case. Here are two very telling quotes from Dr. Wakefield’s 1998 article on the matter of Autism and any vaccine connection. “We did not prove an association between measles mumps and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described.” “Further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome and its possible relation to the vaccine.” In light of the facts, perhaps an investigation into the ethics and professionalism of some news reporters in order.

A primary principle of the Hippocratic Oath is “first do no harm”, not “first make a profit and remember not to upset the powers that be”. And no one wants to hear the phrase, “the cure is worse than the illness”. In the case of Dr. Wakefield, and apparently any other proponent of research into vaccine safety, the appearance of the old tried and true method of publicly attacking, ridiculing and disparaging someone to diminish their credibility and standing in the community while strengthening an opposing position only leads me to believe that his call for scientific research and safety precautions must be threatening to some powerful interests. Statements by “medical experts” who are proponents of vaccines but also may be consultants to the CDC, who are funded by pharmaceutical companies or derive a large portion of their income by administering vaccinations, should be carefully scrutinized. These people may be confronted with interests that conflict with the truth or their income, which in turn may interfere with the concept “first do no harm”.

How did it come to be that a group of doctors and parents simply concerned about the safety of their children could be verbally attacked, demeaned, ridiculed and depicted as hopeless souls grasping at straws? Why is it that calls for scientific research and open honest questions about vaccine safety and Autism are sidetracked into conversations about measles, chicken pox or some other diversion, which is often the case? In this current news event, how can it be that no major news organization has bothered to check the content of the Wakefield article and yet allows false and misleading remarks to be made by his detractors in an uncontested fashion? Has this case been turned into a platform to once again discredit the questioning of vaccine safety and get the pro vaccine word out?

In the case of Autism, a documented major medical health crisis that affects 1 in 110 children born in this country, we need independent, unbiased scientific research – research that is not funded by pharmaceutical companies or government agencies. This may be a difficult task as even many large charitable organizations that help fund research are themselves funded in part by some of these special interests. Will anyone be willing to bite the hand that feeds them in order to get to the truth? We need honest studies on the affect of the large amount of vaccines that infants and young children are receiving. If we have the scientific research, the public will embrace the findings. If vaccines are truly proven safe for infants and young children, almost all parents would not hesitate to make use of them. The families dealing with Autism are starved for answers. They realize that they know very little about the possible causes and treatments. They just need answers that science may hold. There have been studies that have shown a genetic link in about 15% of Autism cases. Where are the independent vaccine studies? While there are many variables in Autism cases, by far the most common link families across the country have with each other is that almost all have had vaccinations. Isn’t it logical that this would raise concerns? Is it a mere coincidence that Autism arrives at the same time that multiple vaccinations are being introduced to infants developing bodies? Let’s have definitive studies. Are other environmental factors or epigenetics playing a role? We need research here too. It would that seem that some in the medical community, as well as pharmaceutical companies that manufacture vaccines are suffering from two conditions: They either don’t realize what they don’t know or they know more than they are willing to admit. And what they may know may not be beneficial to their interests. Either condition is not very good.

Obviously, there are thousands of parents choosing not to vaccinate, regardless of the CDC’s recommendations and urging by pediatricians. Just as obviously, there is a lack of trust. This lack of trust seems to be growing in spite of what appears to be a well organized effort promoting vaccines, backed by powerful concerns, with open access to major media outlets. If a so called expert appears on television and says 20 studies have been performed with no evidence of a link between Autism and vaccinations, should we believe it at face value or are we right to question it? What are these studies? Who performed them? Who funded them? Were there conflicts of interest in any of the studies? Were the results colored to show a pre determined and desired result? Were there any studies done on the effect of combinations of vaccinations over a short period of time? Has any study compared vaccinated to unvaccinated children? Are 36 vaccines necessary? Are news reports on this subject colored to achieve a desired effect, perhaps unwittingly in some cases or by way of carefully composed material fed by special interests, and the inability to check facts in a timely fashion? Let’s not be naive about this world. When power, control, politics and profits are challenged, there will be great repercussions.

Whether it is families affected by Autism or any other important issue, people need something concrete to believe in. Journalists can fill that need by safeguarding and reporting the truth. We have lived through many mistakes and misdeeds that were covered up over the years. Political, financial, military, social, environmental issues and many more have all been subject to wrong doing, corruptions and cover ups and many have ultimately been exposed as being wrong, unfair and unjust and usually corrected after exposure. I could see the great movie director of the 1930’s and 1940’s, Frank Capra, having a field day with this case of a small group of families and doctors fighting the big, powerful multi billion dollar pharmaceutical machine as well as some questionable positions of the CDC and the NIH, simply to find some truth for their cause. Reporting the news accurately is arguably one of the greatest responsibilities and privileges any person or organization can have in this country. Truth in news is our last line of defense in dealing with so much information and so many things that impact our lives, but it cannot be the truth that a special interest wants us to believe. Taken from the book The Elements of Journalism, journalism’s first obligation is to the truth and its first loyalty is to its citizens. Let it be so.

Paul C

February 5, 2010 at 12:02 pm
For me, father of a child on the autistic spectrum and uncle to a child with severe autism, it is not the single time-proven Measles shots that I have issue with, it’s all the other multi vaccines.

Until you have witnessed a child go from talking, hugging, laughing, engaging and full of life change within 3 weeks after the shots and before your very eyes, stop talking, hugging, laughing and engaging – how can you form an opinion? Are opinions being based from articles and reports that come from the very industry that would loose billions if they are the cause? Are they truly that trustworthy and noble?
When the change occurs in the child, it is the most heart-breaking and totally helpless feeling you can imagine. We have before and after video (as do most parents who have experienced this horror) that is undeniable in its link to when they received the vaccines. With the thousands of autism cases out there with this same story, how can this be coincidence? I have NEVER heard of this sequence of events occurring BEFORE they received the shots. Statically, the odds of this being a coincidence are staggering.

Despite the cause, I have witnessed one consistent positive in the families of autistic children though – the parents and siblings of the child through the suffering of condemnation (i.e. in public the stares, judgment, and ridicule of a world that doesn’t understand and has little patience for parents that cannot control their child’s behavior), have incredible grace and love for others. They are the first to give encouragement and help to the parents of a child throwing a fit. They have given up the fear of not appearing “perfect” and in control to a judging world and replaced it with selflessness and love.

I don’t know exactly why this horrific disease is occurring at such a rapid pace, but there is too much evidence for this not to sound major alarms to oversight agencies and would be parents.

I do know that in the meantime, the byproduct is an army of parents whose character, humility and love is forever changed for the better – and I pray this character change is contagious.

Joe

February 5, 2010 at 12:34 pm
First of all, parents GOOD JOB for caring enough to not give up on your children. Believe that you can “recover” these kids, believe it…I did. The investment you put in now, will forever change the lives of these kids and yours as well. Do your research, don’t believe (blindly) that these drugs (and they are drugs) react the same in each child. It is one of our greatest challenges as parents. We are told we’re crazy, we’re misinformed, nothing’s going to help, and that it’s genetic. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A GENETIC EPIDEMIC! Stay strong & focused. There are many ways to help these kids. Start with a doctor that believes you & wants to explore every angle of your child’s health. You can do it.

Second, I didn’t say the article was funded by “Big Pharm.” I said “YOUR University.” Again, if “it’s not a one person production”, perhaps that highlights the incredible lack of integrity this piece illustrates. How do we know the editor doesn’t have a conflict of interest if “they” are putting their two cents in as well?

We can all go back n’ forth a billion times about this issue, and at least we’re talking about it. We have traded these “life threatening” diseases of yesterday for the chronic, life-long conditions that plague our children today. There is a connection between vaccines and autism. It may take another decade, but it will be uncovered in time. Our children are sick, time is critical, and there are resources out there for you…seek them out!

olivia shagsty

February 5, 2010 at 1:31 pm
Mr Zeitlin,

I thought you may want to know that it is not only parents and “activists” who are questioning vaccine safety. If you spent sometime doing research you would find there are numerous scientists as well. Here is one example. Attached are public comments made by Geraldine Dawson, Ph.D. Chief Science Officer of Autism Speaks to the National Vaccine Program Office on 1/25/2009.
http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/nvac/documents/ASPAPublicCommentsFeb2.pdf

I have included the link if you would like to read in it’s entirety but here is an excerpt:

1. “In the past several years, the prevalence of ASD has increased dramatically, underscoring the potential role of environmental factors in its etiology.”
2. “Recent studies point to a key role of the immune system in the biology of ASD, raising questions about the effects of the significant immune challenges associated with vaccinations, particularly when delivered in combination and early in life.”
3. “We believe that the question of whether immunization is associated with an increased risk for ASD is of extremely high priority.”
4. “Still other studies point toward subgroups of children with ASD with genetic vulnerabilities than can amplify the adverse effects of environmental exposures, including vaccinations, on brain development and function”
5. “There is a need to describe the nature and prevalence of vaccine adverse events in children with metabolic disorders and assess risk factors for these events.”
6. “As mentioned in the draft scientific agenda, many key questions have not yet been adequately addressed. Many of the studies to date have relied on data from the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System (VAERS). While this system has clear strengths such as its broad coverage, it nevertheless has substantial limitations (Ellenberg and Braun, Drug Safety, 2002). Because the system relies on passive self?report, a major limitation is under? reporting such that only a small fraction of adverse events are reported. Furthermore, events that occur weeks following vaccination are less likely to be reported than those that are proximal to the vaccination.”

7. “Many fundamental questions have not been addressed, such as whether the use of combination vaccines confers increased risk for adverse events and whether there are subgroups in the general population that are more vulnerable to serious adverse effects of vaccines, including ASD.”
8. “Research has shown that children with metabolic disorders, including mitochondrial disorders, may experience neurological decline when physiologically challenged. There have been reports of metabolic crisis after receiving vaccinations”
9. “As noted in the draft agenda, preliminary results from a VSD study underway found that children aged 12?23 months who received MMRV vaccine were about 2 times more likely to have febrile seizures during the 7?10 days after vaccination than children who received separate MMR and varicella vaccines at the same visit (CDC MMWR, 2008). In a population?based study, there has been a report of an increased risk for ASD after infantile seizures during the first year of life”
10. “Studies that can address the current questions raised by parents are feasible. Clinical studies of individuals with ASD can address whether certain metabolic conditions associated with ASD are correlated with increased risk for serious adverse effects. Case?control studies and randomized clinical trials can be conducted to address whether there are differences in adverse effects associated with a combination vaccine versus individually administered components”
11. “Fever after vaccination is common and can induce seizures in vulnerable children”
12. “For example, a recent study identified mutation in a sodium channel gene in children who developed encephalopathy after pertussis vaccines, suggesting that genetic factors may influence the risk for neurological deterioration after vaccination”
13. “Children with metabolic diseases are at higher risk of health complications from diseases that are prevented by immunizations”
14. “Such research could have wide?ranging effects on clinical practice/vaccination policy. For example, it could allow pediatricians to identify subgroups of children who may benefit from a different vaccine schedule or for whom careful monitoring of adverse effects is warranted.”
15. “Over the past decade, parental concerns, both in the general population and the autism community, over the possible link between immunization and increased risk for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have only increased despite concerted and persistent efforts by the medical community to reassure the public about the safety of vaccines.”
16. “It is Autism Speaks’ position that the best way to ensure that parents are confident in the safety of our vaccine program and, at the same time, protect the minority of children who may be at increased risk for serious adverse effects of vaccinations, is to foster collaborative, trusting relationships among the general public, the medical and scientific communities, and the federal government whose mandate it is to conduct research on the safety of vaccines.”
17. “Establishing and maintaining a trusting relationship and providing answers to parents’ questions cannot be achieved by one set of studies addressing one set of questions, but rather it will require an on?going process of scientific discovery as medical science continues to uncover individual differences that predict differential responses to vaccines and other medical interventions. We need to embrace our obligation to address new questions with an open mind, adequate resources, and renewed commitment.”

Mr Zeitlin,

This is not an issue of parents vs science but rather parents asking for the science. I find it interesting that you would say autism is something that just happens as if that is the end all and be all. What a sad world it would be if science said that to everything. These are children Mr Zeitlin. Today 1 in 110 children are affected and the vaccine schedule has 36 shots. In 1983 that number was 1 in 10,000 when the schedule had 10 shots. Show me the studies that show the effects of this increase in vaccinations and the studies that show the safety of combining vaccinations at one pediatrician visit. You can’t because they do not exist.

Bill S

February 5, 2010 at 1:32 pm
Olivia, you should have read my comment again. It is neither funded by Big Pharma nor my university. It is an independent publication. The university, as an entity, neither funds it nor endorses it.

Priya

February 5, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Two days after my son’s last round of vaccines, he showed me two of his trains and said one had four cars and the other had three and when he put them together, he said he had a train of seven cars. Then he took away two cars to make another train and pointed out that there were now a two car and five car train. As best as I can tell, those vaccines caused my son to develop arithmetic skills. I am optimistic that his next set of vaccinations will have him reading.

I come from a family with some HFA/Asperger’s members. My HFA/Asperger’s sibling may be able to communicate well, but there are still troubles– can’t really ever get past a preconceived notion of people, buys me clothes for birthday presents but no matter how often I say that I wear a small, I get XL from my sibling (and of course, the t-shirts feature tv-shows or movies my sibling is really into, but which I am not).

I doubt vaccines have anything to do with the HFA/Asperger’s in my family. I know my ancestors were not diagnosed, but hearing family stories of my ancestors’ quirks and foibles I am sure HFA/Asperger’s has been in my family for generations. My sibling and I are were vaccinated before the combined MMR. (And what is this claim you can’t get a straight Measles shot? I got one when I was traveling to the third world). My sibling is older, so I am not in an observational position to say that there was ever a sudden change– frankly, from the stories I’ve heard of my sibling’s infancy and toddlerhood, my sibling has always been this way. Growing up in the 1970s, my sibling was just one of those “odd kids”.

Much of the increased diagnosis may come from looser diagnostic criteria, pediatricians paying more attention, the availability of special educational programs under the ADA (Parents of autistic kids, your child is entitled to special services at whatever age your school district begins providing school), and changes in range. My HFA/Asperger’s relatives who have a farm are quite happy and functional when they are out there with their horses, but bring them into a city and they are total wrecks. I know that one of my older HFA/Asperger’s relatives went to normal school, but a year late– My grandmother’s solution was just to pretend her child was a year younger than he really was (fortunately, he was small of stature).

I am not so sure that privileged kids “recover within a year” as JR said. I grew up on Fifth Ave in NYC and there is a kid in my parents’ building with autism and for all the therapy he is still the same. I do know of other privileged kids who have done well with early intervention. But I also wonder if some of the privileged kids who “recover” with intensive therapy have parents who have just totally dropped the ball– you know the parents who constantly shush their babies and never talk to them, a deeply withdrawn and angry child who has not had parents working to develop his mental and physical skills could seem autistic: uncommunicative, avoids eye contact, and lashes out. In the sense that many privileged kids are just a fashion accessory for their parents, I suspect that many of the privileged kids who “recover” are actually recovering from an infancy and toddlerhood of emotional privation and abandonment (they are well fed and clothed, but barely loved).

I have the deepest sympathy for parents of a child with any disability– as parents we feel responsible for our children, but when a child has a mental disability you know there will come a day when you are dead and gone and won’t be there for your child and you worry about what their life will be like when they have no family to fight for them.

Unfortunately, the focus on vaccines is preventing newer research from moving forward. Amazing things are going on with brain imaging, stimulation with implants or by reversing the magnet on an MEG. Neurology has come a long way in the past fifteen years in understanding and even being able to cure diseases like Epilepsy. It is a shame so much funding and focus has gone to vaccine research when brain science is actually reaching the point where non-invasive MEG scanning will allow neuroscientists to see what goes on in an autistic child’s brain that is different from a “normal” child. With this additional feedback, it is likely that intensive therapies can be improved and tailored to each child and that in some cases there may be an opportunity for effective surgical or gamma kinfe intervention as neuroscientists have found with epilepsy. Do not give up hope, do not become hyper-focused on one angle of research, cast a wide net… While it is little consolation to those who suffer today, I am betting that in ten years we will have a cure for at least some forms of autism.

joe

February 5, 2010 at 2:06 pm
Can anyone verify the accuracy of this information or care to comment?

“The graphs are based on the official death numbers as recorded in the Official Year Books of the Commonwealth of Australia, are taken from Greg Beattie’s excellent book “Vaccination: A Parent’s Dilemma” and represent the decline in death rates from infectious disease in Australia.”

http://www.harvestdream.org/index.php?/archives/431-GRAPHICAL-EVIDENCE-SHOWS-VACCINES-DIDNT-SAVE-US.html

detroitjoe

February 5, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Priya,

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”, “guilty by association”, and several other little sayings come to mind when I think about your comment. The connection is still there. The University has received HUGE money from RAND. I noticed you didn’t respond to the second half of my comment, which is a really important point that gets lost in all of this. How do we know & how can we rely on good reporting if the article is “influenced” by others, like the editor? I’m sure if you dig deep enough, you’ll find that thread somewhere either with the author, the editor, etc..that leads back to an agenda.

The bigger point is in good reporting, truthful reporting that helps people understand the truth, especially when we’re talking about the health of children. Why don’t you encourage Matt to do a piece on BIG PHARM lobbying! Oh, and make sure that ends up on Google’s front health page.

olivia shagsty

February 5, 2010 at 2:40 pm
I found this article infuriating and insulting. Let me state at the outset that I am a parent of a child with severe autism. I have chosen to get him vaccinated and I have also gotten vacinations for my other children. However, it is undeniable that he suffered not one but two regressions in his development. The first regression was linked closely in time with an illness (and a chickenpox vaccine). The second regression can right after he got strep throat. This was documented by myself, his doctors, other family members, and his teachers at school. According to this article, I am somehow “remembering” incorrectly. Excuse me, but I know a regression when I see one. I don’t know whether the vaccine played any part in my son’s autism. I know he tends to get sick easily, and therefore, I felt it was important for him to receive all of his vacinations. However, I find the attitude in this article towards parents’ concerns and observations extremely patronizing and dismissive.

Linda Gafford

February 5, 2010 at 2:54 pm
Olivia- If you really want to know the history of North By Northwestern, you should know that it was developed as an alternative to The Daily Northwestern, which is the oldest university paper on campus and is actually much more connected to the NU Administration. NBN was developed as a less stuffy and more “fun” alternative to people who didn’t want to read articles or deal with the stuffy politics or semantics that often go into being a part of an old, “reputed” student publication. A lot of people I know like reading NBN more than The Daily because it’s not tied to NU admnistration politics the same way the Daily is.

How is the connection there at all if the university has no part in NBN? RAND funding has nothing to do with anything, and I’m sure that the guy who wrote the article, like me, has never heard of it either.

He’s an undergraduate sophomore in Weinberg, for crying out loud! The thread that leads back here is no conspiracy connected to RAND or anything (I doubt Matt has even talked to anyone who knows anything about it; I’ve certainly never heard anything about where the university gets money from, and I’m a sophomore as well, it’s not exactly information that you go seeking out, especially if it’s irrelevant to the article at hand).

The agenda is: ENTERTAINMENT. Nothing else. ENTERTAINMENT. Because we are bored college students who want something sensational to read.

Honestly, this article probably wasn’t even written with the intention of reaching an adult audience with children- look at the other articles on this site. In fact, most of the people commenting here aren’t even students and that’s why they’re reacting the same way they are. Most students are totally indifferent to the whole article, as is what happens with most articles that are not related to NU in some form or fashion. It’s not as entertaining as Gertonberg, the web series, or Carnal Knowledge, a funny sex column that sporadically appears, or even the multimedia presentations that help us figure out fun places to go on the Red Line.

In essence, this isn’t the Daily, it’s not a place where you should go to find solid, reliable journalistic endeavors. It’s a fun little site that has opinion pieces like this one, blogs that cover what happen to the Rock, what happened on Ugly Betty last night, and how to make cute pillowcases for your dull dorm room. If you’re looking for a hard-hitting journalistic piece that takes everything into account, then you shouldn’t be here. There’s no propaganda here, no hidden promotion, just people saying what’s on their mind.

And btw, Matt isn’t even a Journalism student, he’s a Liberal Arts student in Weinberg.

Priya

February 5, 2010 at 3:30 pm
For those old enough to remember, children of 40 plus years ago were exposed to significantly more mercury than children today. We constantly were painting the old antiseptics, mercuracrome and methiolate all over ourselves, thermometers had real mercury in them (super fun to watch if it broke) and yet the autism level is supposedly getting higher? Of course when I was in college, autism was a very specific diagnosis, reserved for completely unapproachable children. The children who are now diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders would have been in other catagories, such as mild retardation, developmentally delayed, learning disabled, or social delay. Why are the above facts never brought into discussion?

mom of eight

February 5, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Priya,

“Entertainment!” Thank you, you’ve made my point. There is no truth in anything he’s reporting, and the connection should have been at least disclosed…I’m talking about the fact that the University received endowment money & that others had a role in this article. It’s the misleading part that frustrates parents. It’s a misleading article that’s plastered across Google’s front health page, it’s an article that people place value in, that gets attention as being “credible”, that (frankly) should be on the inside of the Weekly World News if it’s “entertainment.” Sophomore or not, your “fun, little site that has opinion pieces” should be ashamed because children with autism have been dealt yet another blow by uneducated people spewing awful information! Do a better job of presenting the information as “FUN” and then maybe you won’t get the reaction from parents that are outraged by this article. Terrible job all the way around! Terrible.

olivia shagsty

February 5, 2010 at 4:15 pm
A great man once said “The Truth Will Set You Free”

Priya – Thanks. I did not know this was just a “college newspaper” Amazing, the author’s logic and use of the FACTS makes him a lot better than 99% of the articles I have read on this subject, all opinion pieces. I am excepting the Daily Guardian (UK) who all but lambasted the study and the doctor when the Lancet report first came out and then did it again this week.

As there is yet 1 study to prove a link to Autism and Vaccines, I am very sorry for people who need to know the why’s and how’s of what had befallen their child. However, there is no there there. In the next 5 year science will prove that Autism, like all other developmental disorders is linked to genetics. It took over 30 years and millions upon millions to determine where “Down’s Syndrome” came from. This is not meant as a knock to Linda who is obviously an upset mother looking for answer. I too hope that an answer is found. That way, kids won’t get sick because their parents refuse them vaccines, and that science can provide more understanding of autism once the cause is known.

Kudos is deserved to Matt. I am bookmarking your thread and hope you keep up the great work.

**And for the idiot who posted that there was no such thing as a “genetic epidemic”
What is schizophrenia ?? Is not a genetic epidemic
Please prove there is an “epidemic”, because the only thing sadder than frustrated parents grasping at straws, IS INTENTIONALLY MISLEADING PARENTS WITH BOGUS SCIENCE AND BOGUS CLAIMS AND THE LOWER OF THE SYSTEM FOR WHAT IS CONSIDERED AUTISTIC

JENNY MCCARTHY I MEAN YOU AND THE TRIAL LAWYERS WHO ARE THE ONES LOOKING TO MAKE MONEY OF THE “BIG PHARMA” THAT KEEPS MOST PEOPLE ALIVE AND WELL.

THERE IS NO PROOF, NONE, ZIP-ZERO-ZILCH-NADA THAT VACCINES (ANY OR ALL) ARE LINKED TO AUTISM. NONE. I AM SORRY FOR YOUR PAIN, BUT DEAL WITH IT. STOP BLAMING AND TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR CHILD AND ASK WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP THEM. WHAT YOU ARE DOING ON THIS BOARD IS NOT HELPING THEM. ALL YOU ARE DOING IS LINING TRIAL LAWYERS POCKETS IN YOUR DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO VALIDATE SOMETHING THAT ISN’T TRUE AND CANNOT BE PROVEN.

halo

February 5, 2010 at 4:39 pm
@olivia shagsty
Where is the proof??
There is none
What trial law firm do you shill for??

The only UNEDUCATED PERSON HERE IS YOU, olivia shagsty
You are again spouting misinformation.
IT CANNOT BE PROVEN BECAUSE THERE IS NO LINK.
QUIT FEEDING FALSE HOPE TO PEOPLE
WHAT NEXT??? BIPOLAR IS ALSO VACCINE’S FAULT TOO????

halo

February 5, 2010 at 4:42 pm
@Mom of eight
you are 110% right. I was diagnosed with “spectrum disorder” at 15 months. Mainly due to hypersensitivity. The only thing my mom could do was swaddle me and be very careful with who could hold me.
I still have issues with being touched but I’m not autistic. Rather I have a “spectrum” disorder. Nothing more, nothing less.
If I were born today, I would be diagnosed as autistic.
Which would be a shock to my employer, boyfriend and the people I work with who have no idea.

halo

February 5, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Autism is an epidemic. There is no such thing as a genetic epidemic…do your homework! If you’re going to call me the idiot, provide proof as to what you’re saying so you don’t look like the fool. First, how is an epidemic defined? Autism fall in this category. Second, show me (with figures & facts) ONE genetic epidemic from a reliable source. If you’re going to spew, spew with something to back up your hate!

olivia shagsty

February 5, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Olivia-What aspect of NBN being independent from the university do you not understand? The funding NU does or does not receive does not influence the content of this publication one iota.

David

February 5, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Priya-Don’t waste your time with the truth. Olivia wants to see a conspiracy, therefore one must exist.

David

February 5, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Christ, I didn’t know anybody who doesn’t go to NU even read NBN.

Dan

February 5, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Dan- I know, right?

Apparently it made Google’s health page or something, though, and that’s why people are here complaining about it not being a serious article, they think that just because it made Google it has to be the same quality as something from the New England Journal of Medicine. Have they ever heard of an Op Ed?

Priya

February 5, 2010 at 5:58 pm
I’m a real live grown up journalist, and I’ve about this issue several times in the past. It’s a broader and more complex issue than most partisans on either side are willing to admit, but the first thing that jumped out at me about Mr. Zeitlin’s piece was this: any article containing the phrase “Jenny McCarthy, who became famous posing for Playboy, has directly blamed vaccines for causing her son…to develop…autism” is a hatchet job.

A public health physician at Johns Hopkins once told me, on the record, “Public health is about protecting the overall population. Sometimes, to achieve that goal, a certain number of individuals must be scarified.” Rational from his perspective? Yes. But did your family doctor tell that to your parents when administering childhood vaccines to you and your siblings?

Here’s just one of many examples:

Whooping cough is a terrible disease in children three and under, and a serious disease up to about age seven, but not fatal. Are you aware that virtually every undergraduate at Northwestern today (Americans born from the early 1980s-2001) received a mandatory whooping cough vaccine that causes severe neurological impairment lasting up to a year in one out of every 100,000 children, and permanent brain damage in one out of every 250,000 children – to prevent a disease that’s awful for a few days, but is never fatal and leaves no lasting harm? How many parents would have agreed to that vaccine if they knew the truth, and were given a choice? The pertussis vaccine was never administered in Britain, Sweden and Japan because those counties considered it too dangerous. But your parents were never told there was any danger at all.

Here’s one more:

What’s the probability of an American contracting wild paralytic polio? Zero. Not a single case in this country since 1979. But what’s the probability of contracting paralytic polio from the Sabin vaccine (the stunned virus vaccine most of us were given, as opposed to the much safer, killed virus Salk vaccine)? One out of 500,000. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but we’re talking about giving healthy children one of the most horrific diseases ever to strike mankind, and that’s seven cases here in Chicago, seven more in Los Angeles, and another sixteen in New York. Compared with zero for unvaccinated people (or people given the more difficult to administer Salk vaccine). Did your parents know that before agreeing to give you the Sabin vaccine? Would they have agreed if your doctor told them?

Every reasonably informed American is aware of the influence big pharma has on regulation and legislation in this country. And the dangers of some vaccines have finally become public (the whooping cough vaccine you were given has at last been replaced). In America today, blanket ridicule of parents who suspect that vaccines have harmed their children is itself suspicious.

Perhaps Mr. Zeitlin is just a journalism student with the condescending self-assurance of youth, but his demeaning and sometimes ad hominem attacks on parents of afflicted children is redolent of the attitude we’ve all seen too often from pharma flacks and their lackeys in Washington.

Richard

February 5, 2010 at 6:02 pm
No, I’m not looking for a conspiracy in all of this…I’m looking for the truth! Richard, beautifully stated. Finally, an educated, sound comment!

I am concerned about the “others” that also had a role in this article. Do any of them have ties to anyone with an agenda? Again, go back & look at the post. If you’re going to write a piece about autism, you’re going to be examined from every angle…just like Jenny McCarthy is attacked at a microscopic level. We are parents that have fought for years for our children, in every area, this is just one of the battles (of misinformation) in the war on autism!

olivia shagsty

February 5, 2010 at 6:33 pm
Richard, you are an idiot. Whooping cough lasts several weeks and can be fatal, especially in infants (check the URL). You can easily verify this information in a few minutes using Google, but I guess a real live grown up journalist such as yourself doesn’t have time for trivial matters such as facts, truth, and reading what you write (“I’ve about this issue” and “scarified”? Really?).

Vaccines prevent diseases from spreading. Even if they did cause autism (which seems unlikely given the data), the dangers posed by the diseases they prevent would outweigh the risk. Refusing vaccines for your child endangers not only the child, but everyone the child comes into contact with since they can now spread the disease in addition to contracting it. It’s irresponsible and stupid not to get vaccinated.

try harder

February 5, 2010 at 6:48 pm
Jenny McCarthy did not start a foundation, Generation Rescue was started by JB Handley several years before Jenny came along.

Ben

February 5, 2010 at 7:28 pm
For Try Harder: “Richard, you are an idiot.” Sadly, that’s the level of discourse on this issue. I submitted without proofing (one of the pleasures of a blog for an old school guy like me) so there are probably a lot more than the two typos you gleefully pointed out. As your goal seems to have been to write a snotty, scorched earth response to me, you should have read more closely.

As for my comments on whooping cough, you scold me, “whooping cough lasts several weeks,” as though I said otherwise. I know perfectly well how long whooping cough lasts. My friend’s sister had it (in Sweden, where the vaccine we took was never given). I correctly wrote that it’s “awful for a few days,” not that the duration is a few days. In fact, it’s a slowly developing condition and young children are often sick for two weeks before their parents even realize they have whooping cough. It’s a bacterial infection and antibiotics typically contain the hacking cough, followed by a high-pitched “whoop” on the next inhale, to three to four days. I’ve seen whooping cough, and the doctors of my friend’s sister told her parents that pertussis is absolutely not fatal for a reasonably healthy child in a hospital setting. (In the US, with 45 million uninsured people, there are between 7 and 14 pertussis deaths per year, but that’s a health care delivery problem; antibiotics kill the pertussis bacteria just fine.)

You close your screed with the calm, temperate phrase, “It’s irresponsible and stupid not to get vaccinated.” I never said people shouldn’t get vaccinated. I simply said I’d researched the subject in the past for several articles, and it’s a “broader and more complex issue than most partisans on either side are willing to admit.”

You just made my point. So thank you, Try Harder.

(But I will proofread it this time, so any typos in this post are on me.)

Richard

February 5, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Try Harder,

Did you get your adult DTP booster? The reason why we still have Pertussis in the community is because of adults & teens. By the way, the fatal side of whooping cough is MOSTLY due to respiratory complications like pneumonia in infants under 6 months of age.

olivia shagsty

February 5, 2010 at 10:19 pm
Richard,

Do you know why polio is nearly non-existant?

Because of the vaccine. Wow, what a coincidence. A precipitous drop in the occurrence of Polio after the vaccine became available. Polio didn’t diminish on it’s own, vaccination made it happen. If we disrupt herd immunity, it will come back.

To the anti-vaxxers: no matter how many times you shout “there is a link, I just know it, I’ve seen it! Look at all these anecdotal data!” it doesn’t make it true. Reality is not determined by those with the shrillest voices. Anecdotes are not scientific data, and important health decisions should not be made based on such. Conformational bias and the powerful human tendency to see connections were none exist skew beliefs in erroneous directions.

There are no–zero–peer reviewed and accepted studies showing a link between vaccinations and Autism. None. There are numerous studies, peer reviewed and published, showing no link in the data. Sticking your fingers in your ears closing your eyes and pretending that you haven’t been shown the conclusive data won’t make it go away.

How long shall we pretend the jury is out? The anti-vaxxers just move the goal post whenever confronted with real facts and data. Scientist and responsible journalists have no responsibility to provide a false illusion that there is any need for balanced reporting. The anti-vax community has failed to support their claims. It’s the equivalent of giving balanced treatment to flat earthers or young-earth creationism. Not all points of view deserve serious consideration, particularly when they have NO DATA supporting them.

James

February 6, 2010 at 11:44 am
Ugh. Let’s get down to brass tacks. Please stop heaving stupid epithets at one another. We are, as a people, not simply made up of “vaxxers, anti-vaxxers, Dems, Libs, Neo-cons,blah, blah blah,” Ad Nauseum. We are all children of parents, and some of us are also parents of children. We are ALL concerned about the safety of the medicines and vaccines we take and have given to ourselves and our families. Fact: there is profit (of many types–monetary being only one–but a big one) to be made in developing, manufacturing, marketing, and distributing pharmacuticals. Not every human being is an altruistic beacon of shining principles and moral integrity. Self promotion and preservation is built into the species. People have very valid reasons for being wary of studies and statistical information from any source that possesses a navel. Think I’m a “big pharma” conspiracy theorist? Not entirely. But cynicism abounds in a world where pharmacuetical companies spend money to ensure that the cute hispanic accented animated bee featured in their television ads will make a large enough impression on children viewing it that they will eventually request the advertised medication when they, some years down the road, reach an age to become the targeted age consumer of the product. See him in your mind’s eye? So can your four year old. And he’ll remember it. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Go ahead and call me paranoid, but I’m right and you know it.

OrigamiB

February 6, 2010 at 1:31 pm
wow. seriously people need to stop treating this as real journalism. ok, it somehow made google because they have some weird system of following popular links that somehow put this on their site. the reason im on this site right now, as well as the main reason for its existence, is that us drunk college students find entertaining articles on greek life and sex. i check this site with the same regularity as college acb. sometimes they do put interesting, relevant articles on this site, and we often find them interesting because along with being drunk college kids were also pretty smart and interested since were all somewhat nerds since we go to northwestern. but to treat this as if it were written in the new york times is ridiculous. north by northwestern is a great site, i love it, it often has great stuff, but in my mind and the mind of most of my fellow students a lot of the content isnt much different from nuintel. oh, also, im really hungover and high right now so if my post doesnt really make much sense i apologize. ive just been reading all these posts in my stupor and laughing to myself

hungover sophomore

February 6, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Didn’t the medical professional substantially reduce or eliminate the use of thimeresol in vaccines some years ago? If this is the case, and if mercury were indeed the main culprit in autism, we would have expected a sharp reduction in autism cases, no?

Millionaire

February 6, 2010 at 8:38 pm
just a comment to make sure people realize that this is an OPINION PIECE of an entirely student run online newspaper…

i mean i love nbn but it isn’t the new york times.

friendly

February 6, 2010 at 10:49 pm
Thanks to all the friendly, articulate, and occasionaly hungover/high students who have stepped in to advise/remind us that this article is an opinion piece in a student run online newspaper. Here’s some advice from the fully adult, no longer enrolled in college world: You write it. It gets published (or posted, in this case). People (not just your fellow students and/or professors)will read it. If you do not wish to be critiqued, do not write in anything but personal (unpublished) diary. Put it out on the web and it (and the opinion you put out there) open to be blasted by critics. When your opinion piece blatantly insults the parents of autistic children in the manner that this particular piece did…well, you get the point.

OrigamiB

February 6, 2010 at 11:19 pm
Sorry, OrigamiB, but if parents of autistic children reject actual science and start subjecting their children to any number of the pseudo-scientific “treatments” being pushed, then the deserve all the insults they get. Frankly, I found this article way too kind to the Jenny McCarthy’s of the world.

TD

February 7, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Sorry, TD, but if you look back at any and all of my posts,you will see that I make no mention of “treatments” for autistic children whatsoever. Nor do I profess to know the cause of autism. My point remains that the author of this piece went for the cheap shot–and in doing so lost any serious credibility for the arguments he makes about vaccination and autism not being linked. That you can unabashedly make the statement that parents of autistic children (again-your own words)”deserve all the insults they get”, renders any further statements from you about this topic suspect and immaterial.

OrigamiB

February 7, 2010 at 2:40 pm
This is one of the better articles I have read on the topic, and I think its a damned shame that the rhetoric around the topic is so inflammatory that someone would actually call the author of it a “Nazi” (see comments, above). Adults, keep a civil tongue in your head, for Chrissakes – this is someone’s college aged son you are calling a Nazi.

Equally shameful is that all the focus on “its the vaccines!” keeps anyone from finding the real reason why autism is on the rise. I personally suspect environmental pollution (non-vaccination related), because there are tremendous numbers coming out of developing nations that do not have environmental policies in place, coupled with the rise of plastic toys in larger and larger numbers – the off-gassing of baby mattresses, for instance, is so bad that the manufacturers suggest opening the plastic they are wrapped in and airing them out for at least 72 hours before placing them in a closed nursery. The more non-scientists insist on focusing on anecdata, the less likely it is we can figure out what is really happening.

An NU parent

February 7, 2010 at 10:22 pm
I don’t think Matt’s goal was to insult parents, although I can see why people are interpreting him that way. I think he was trying to explain the obvious question: if you’re going to say that countless parents are wrong and might unintentionally be harming their children, why would they do such a thing?

He never said that these parents don’t love their children or pay attention to every milestone. Of course they do. But that doesn’t mean they know much about autism before their child is diagnosed. If early signs of autism are subtle–less eye contact and fewer social smiles–then the parent might notice, be upset, but not interpret them as autism. Autism may only become unmistakable when there is an obvious speech delay–around 12-15 months old. (If you think it’s odd that parents could miss that their child has autism, keep in mind that people with high functioning autism/Asperger’s are sometimes not diagnosed professionally until adulthood. Severity plays a huge role).

The fact that parents, like the rest of us, assume that correlation equals causation does not mean they are bad parents or don’t love their child. Can we please stop assuming that if parents really love their children, they must be perfect? Doesn’t that assumption put a lot of stress on parents, who are just doing the best they can?

(BTW–the reason that “pro-vaxxers” focus on the MMR vaccine is because “anti-vaxxers” have always cited it as the cause of autism. They talk about mercury and thimerosal because many “anti-vaxxers” say it causes autism. It makes no sense to call people myopic or tell them they’re missing the point when they are responding to your own criticisms. Sure, one can change the argument and say that some not-well-enough-defined-to-be-tested factor about vaccines–their quantity, their spacing, the animals used to make them, whatever–causes autism. But that constitutes moving the goal posts so as not to be out-argued.

All in all a good piece, except for the Jenny McCarthy bashing. I especially liked the mention of adult autism and Asperger’s advocacy organizations, which are so often left out of the debate. Kudos.

Oh, and full disclosure, I have a sibling with high functioning autism.

just a psych student

February 10, 2010 at 11:51 am
One additional thing to consider. Parents of children with autism have been subjected to heaps of abuse years before the vaccination issue ever came up. Mothers in particular were blamed for their children’s condition. When my son was diagnosed thirteen years ago, mainstream medical providers no longer subscribed to the idea that the mother was at fault. However, I do remember having my observations about my son’s behavior dismissed by medical doctors. I also had to struggle to get him basic medical care. One time my son fell and sliced his face open and the doctor did not want to give him stitches, because of his behavior. It was only when I pointed out that he would get stitches if not disabled and that he was being discriminated against that the doctor agreed. I could list many many other examples. I certainly have dealt with great doctors as well; however, I will readily admit to having a distrust of the medical profession. This distrust is based on years of negative experiences. Luckily, we have now found a very thorough and excellent doctor for my son. But it wasn’t always the case. I have chosen to have my son vacinated, based on my best review of the evidence. I feel that vacination is the lesser of two evils for him. But I don’t accept without question everything that is suggested by the medical establishment. Finally, remember when you dismiss parents of children with autism as idiots who deserve all insults heaped upon them, you have not had the same experiences.

Linda Gafford

March 2, 2010 at 5:47 pm

Why you should care about vaccines and autism

Comments

Lonnie

Ben

Joe Smith

Larry

Ben

Lou

Margit

Al

John

Dawn

alx

Concerned Parent

Dad

Tricky Dick

Soup

Faith Ozan

busku

busku

Mario

Margit

dr d

S.

stan

stan

Pally

Mario

olivia shagsty

Lyn

Margit

benson belyache

Sus

olivia shagsty

Ned

Dr. Atar

Scott

Missy

julia

Bloodyheck

Logic

tony

ty

alan

Bob

jim breckenridge

greta

JR

Stuart

shaman

Dr.Ron Paul

James I. Moss

John F.

Shawn Smith

Robert

Heidi

Sam Fent

paul

OrigamiB

OrigamiB

Mike

Frank

BHV

matt

Ben Tuominen

Peter

John

Dan Laks

inane analysis

Robert

John

Priya

Tony Co

Dustin

Alan

Berniece

Dustin

Jeb

David

Lee