We are now an organized and united group, thanks mainly to the power of the Internet. Our message has severely eroded confidence in the cornerstone of health care: THE CHILDHOOD VACCINE PROGRAM.
—Anne Dachel1
In late 2010 there was an outcry over a cinema “public awareness” advertisement created by the antivax2 organization SafeMinds and the website Age of Autism. The ad claimed the Thimerosal in that year’s flu shot was a hazard. In response to representations from the rational community, the AMC cinema chain canceled its plans to screen the item. Aghast, one of the principals of SafeMinds, Kim Stagliano, promised to retaliate by boycotting, with her family, AMC theaters all through the holiday season. Good. The last person you want to sit beside in a crowded movie theater is someone who hasn’t been vaccinated.
Today’s rejection of vaccination is not a new phenomenon. From the outset the practice was denounced by the christian churches, which for centuries had maintained that diseases were caused by demons and/or were expressions of divine displeasure. If a disease had been visited upon us by an angry God, the reasoning went, surely any effort to counter or ameliorate it was an attempt to thwart God’s will, and could have no effect but to make him even crosser. Of course, such theological deduction was faced with the unfortunate evidence that those who were inoculated tended to survive while the devout tended not to; and thus, gradually, vaccination was accepted as suiting God’s purpose after all. Even so, suspicion lingers—and not just among evangelicals or the vaccination/autism crowd. The US comedian and self-proclaimed rationalist Bill Maher has frequently maintained on his TV shows that vaccination must “obviously” be dangerous because you’re introducing a disease into a body that was hitherto disease-free. Hm. I carry around nitroglycerin pills to stick under my tongue in case of emergency. Is this a cunning plan by my physician to blow my head off?
❖
The origin of the modern antivax movement, spanning much of the globe, is largely the responsibility of UK medic Andrew Wakefield, who in the late 1990s was a nonclinical researcher at the Royal Free Hospital’s medical school, London. He originated the notion of a correlation between administration of the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and regressive autism—the form of autism that first manifests in infancy, unlike classical autism, whose symptoms are present from the start.
It was Wakefield’s work on Crohn’s disease that led him down the dark alley toward antivaxism. His research had established that the cause of Crohn’s disease is reduced blood flow to the intestines because of blockage of the arteries leading there. So far, so good. The next question was: What blocks those blood vessels? The answer he came up with was: the measles virus, persisting in patients long after the disease has subsided. But then—in a 1995 paper called “Is Measles Vaccination a Risk Factor for Inflammatory Bowel Disease?”3 —he and coauthors took the hypothesis a stage further, claiming Crohn’s disease could be caused not just by the virus but also by the vaccine against it.
This was startling enough that researchers all over the world attempted to replicate his results—without success. Moreover, they found they couldn’t replicate his results concerning the measles virus, either. In the face of this fallout, in 1998 Wakefield and his colleagues published another paper, “Measles Virus RNA Is Not Detected in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Using Hybrid Capture and Reverse Transcription Followed by the Polymerase chain Reaction,”4 which in essence admitted the earlier findings were wrong.
That paper appeared six months or so after a controversial press conference Wakefield held in London to announce his new hypothesis: that autism could be caused by the MMR vaccine. In this scenario, the dead virus in the vaccine, on reaching the intestine, creates physical damage there, which allows malignant proteins to escape from the intestine into the bloodstream and reach the brain. It was just a question of identifying the malignant proteins. In the meantime, there was good reason to take the precautionary measure of administering vaccines against the three diseases one by one, rather than in the MMR combo.
The practice of announcing scientific results via press conference does not have a distinguished history—think of the cold fusion fiasco, for example. In this instance, Wakefield could at least promise a supporting paper would be appearing in Lancet, which very soon it did.5 The UK press, even the quality sheets and the BBC, went wild with scare stories about the dangers of the MMR vaccine. What failed to make the headlines was that a senior coauthor on the Lancet paper, Simon Murch, was among those cautioning against overreaction to Wakefield’s claims: “This link is unproven and measles is a killing infection. If this precipitates a scare and immunization rates go down, as sure as night follows day, measles will return and children will die.”6
Murch’s fears could not have been more prescient. Others of Wakefield’s coauthors were likewise quick to assert that their results were at best suggestive. Such caveats were still being glossed over in 2002 when Lorraine Fraser of the Daily Telegraph was named British Press Awards Health Writer of the Year. Her feat of journalistic prowess? Writing a string of articles promoting Wakefield and his claims that the MMR vaccine caused autism. (The Telegraph and the Mail were particularly strident in support of Wakefield, seemingly on ideological grounds—in the same way that these two papers have been the UK’s most virulent in their AGW denialism.)7
Perhaps most irresponsible of all was the December 2003 TV movie screened by the BBC, Hear the Silence, which starred Hugh Bonneville as a heroic Wakefield, persevering in the teeth of the powerful bureaucratic Forces of Darkness because he had heard the parents of autistic children crying out in anguish . . . It’s a caricature to be found duplicated endlessly in the comments sections of any web post on the subject of either autism or vaccination or both. Even after the British Medical Journal published an article in January 2011 exposing Wakefield’s results as fraudulent (see below), the caricature continued. As an experiment, I went to the first such posting that attracted my attention8 and checked the topmost comment on the stack. Sure enough:
Kathleen D.: I find it appalling that doctors like Wakefield would lose their right to practice medicine because of their concern for the children and their parents. Think about it; he has little to gain and far more at stake here by divulging and writing what his investigations into the 5 studies conducted by different institutions and countries have determined. Unfortunately, the pharmas may “have an offer these institutions CAN’T refuse,” and have backed down original claims of their own findings through extensive investigative studies.
The general sensationalism of the UK and Irish media led—understandably—to a fairly dramatic decline in the number of parents allowing their children to be vaccinated. Soon the levels of immunization in parts of both countries fell below that required for herd immunity. (Some individuals cannot sensibly be vaccinated because of allergies or the like; in others, the vaccine doesn’t “take.” If most of the “herd” are immunized, the fact that a small minority aren’t doesn’t matter much, because the disease isn’t doing the rounds anyway.) The loss of herd immunity in turn led to the reappearance of outbreaks of measles for the first time in many years. As a result of a measles epidemic in Dublin during the winter of 1999–2000, 111 children were hospitalized, of whom 12 had to be treated in intensive care and 3 died.9
The antivax scare in the UK was compounded in late 2001 by the coy refusal of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife cherie to say whether or not their newborn, Leo, had been vaccinated. Much later the Blairs announced that of course the babe had been vaccinated, but by then the damage had been done. Another politician to comment stupidly on the issue was Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London; in consequence, London’s kids suffered worse than those in many other parts of the country from falling vaccination levels and a consequent rise in the incidence of measles.
The net result of the media frenzy and foolish utterances by public figures was that, by 2008, measles was declared once again endemic in England and Wales.
Not all UK journalists were as credulous as their peers. In particular, Brian Deer, a reporter at the Sunday Times, became increasingly suspicious of both Andrew Wakefield and the 1998 Lancet paper heralded by that press conference. Over the years, he chipped away at the story. His research revealed some alarming conflicts of interest, conflicts of interest about which Wakefield’s coauthors and the editors of Lancet had been kept in the dark. Most serious was that, some while before, Wakefield had been hired by an East Anglian lawyer, Richard Barr, to devise the scientific underpinning to help obtain government-financed Legal Aid for a class-action case against the MMR manufacturers. Ideal for the purpose would be a “bowel–brain syndrome,” and indeed Wakefield worked up just such a scheme even before the production of the Lancet paper—i.e., prior to doing the research that supposedly indicated the syndrome’s existence! For this work, Wakefield would over time be paid some £435,643 (then about $800,000), plus expenses.
Several of the twelve children used as subjects for the Lancet paper’s research were referred to Wakefield by Barr; they were, in fact, children of Barr’s clients. Others were referred to Wakefield by the antivax organization Justice Awareness and Basic Support (JABS). Thus the study’s subjects were not randomly drawn from cases Wakefield had encountered while performing his duties at the Royal Free, as was the general assumption, but were in effect self-selected. There was another very serious methodological flaw. In order to demonstrate a direct causal link between MMR vaccination and regressive autism, it was essential to show that symptoms began to develop fairly shortly after the injection; if the gap were longer, the child could have been exposed to all sorts of other influences in the interim, meaning there’d be no unequivocal connection to the MMR shot. To readers of the paper it might have seemed that a short-term cause-and-effect link had indeed been established. What was not evident was that the estimations of the time between the child being vaccinated and the onset of the symptoms were derived from interviews conducted with the parents years later. The researchers had no sensible means of evaluating the accuracy of the parents’ recollections. Add in that it was in the financial interests of those parents who were Barr’s clients to remember a pretty close correlation,10 and the information becomes yet more suspect. A useful study in this context is “Recall Bias, MMR, and Autism” by N. Andrews et al.11
Deer unearthed other problems. Wakefield had stated that his investigations of the children—involving highly invasive methods such as colonoscopies, barium meals, spinal taps, and biopsies—had been approved in advance by the relevant ethics boards. According to the much-later (May 2010) judgment of a General Medical Council (GMC) investigation that led to Wakefield and one of his coauthors, John Walker-Smith, being struck off the medical register, this was not so in the case of ten of the children. In seven instances, moreover, the “invasive practices” were found to be contrary to the child’s clinical interests. For example, the colonoscopies administered to eight of the children were not clinically indicated. One child suffered perforation of the colon in a colonoscopy gone wrong.
In 2004, largely as a consequence of Deer’s work, ten of Wakefield’s twelve coauthors on the 1998 paper withdrew their names from it, and Lancet—having been warned by Deer of the revelations he was about to make in the Sunday Times—retracted it.
It took some years for the consequent GMC investigation to declare its conclusions—which it did, as noted, in May 2010—and during this interval Deer was beavering away at the story behind the 1998 paper. He was by now convinced, not just that the methods had been unethical and the results tailored, but that the study as a whole was fraudulent. At the start of 2011 he published a series of articles in the British Medical Journal laying out the devastating evidence he’d unearthed that this was indeed the case.12 It was an astonishing demolition, and made headlines all round the world.
True to form, Russell L. Blaylock, the cancer-curing physician whose scholarly journal of choice seems to be Newsmax, perhaps sensing a kindred “maverick” spirit in Wakefield, chipped in with his dissent:
Abundant evidence has shown that these very same people destroy the reputations of anyone producing evidence, no matter how well researched and of the highest ethical standards, if it in any way endangers [the] vaccine program. It is ironic that these accusers speak of “blatant fraud,” when virtually all of the vaccine safety evidence they use abundantly is fraudulent by careful design. . . .
They do studies that use as placebo controls people injected with a vaccine adjuvant. Placebos are supposed to be completely inert. The evidence shows that the greatest danger from vaccines is from the vaccine adjuvant—so, how can they use adjuvant-injected people as controls? Yet, all of their studies used such vaccinated controls—this is blatantly manipulated, and they know it.13
Wakefield’s paper said nothing about the dangers of adjuvants, focusing instead on the vaccines themselves. As for Blaylock’s “The evidence shows” phrase, the obvious response is: What evidence?
Jenny McCarthy, the ex-Playboy model turned actress who has become the antivax movement’s celebrity figurehead, took a different approach, preferring—as is her wont—to draw on emotion rather than reason:
Dr. Wakefield did something I wish all doctors would do: he listened to parents and reported what they said. His paper also said that, “Onset of behavioral symptoms was associated, by the parents, with measles, mumps and rubella vaccination in 8 of the 12 children,” and that, “further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome [autism with gut disease] and its possible relation to this vaccine.”
Since when is repeating the words of parents and recommending further investigation a crime? As I’ve learned, the answer is whenever someone questions the safety of any vaccines.
For some reason, parents aren’t being told that this “new” information about Dr. Wakefield isn’t a medical report, but merely the allegations of a single British journalist named Brian Deer. Why does one journalist’s accusations against Dr. Wakefield now mean the vaccine–autism debate is over?14
The “allegations” can largely be found in the report of the GMC, which took some years over its deliberations. Further, as stated in the British Medical Journal, Deer’s series was thoroughly peer-reviewed. McCarthy presumably knows these things but simply doesn’t care. Further, no one in the world has said it’s a crime for a physician to listen to and (issues of confidentiality aside) report what patients have said, or to recommend further investigation of an issue. McCarthy just made that bit up—as one might expect from someone who has boasted about being a graduate of “The University of Google.”15
❖
Long before being investigated by the GMC, Wakefield had to a great extent abandoned the UK for the greener grass of the US. There, his chief facilitator was Congressman Dan Burton (R-IN), then chair of the Committee on Government Reform, a born-again christian, a conspiracy theorist (he led the anti-Clinton cavalry in their claims that Vince Foster had been murdered), and a long-time supporter of quack medicine. In 1977 he was behind the campaign to make the bogus cancer treatment Laetrile legal in Indiana despite the FDA’s scientifically backed contentions that (a) it was ineffective as a cancer cure and (b) brought with it the serious risk of cyanide poisoning. Luckily for the citizens of Indiana, the FDA’s regulations forbid Laetrile from being imported into the state, and likewise various of its ingredients—so it cannot be manufactured there. As he’s in the fortunate position of not having had a body count to prove the folly of his ways, Burton remembers this rather differently.
Similarly, in 1997, when the FDA moved to curb the use of the substance ephedra in dietary and stimulant supplements in the wake of medical research showing it to be dangerous even in small quantities, Burton leaped to the defense of the supplements industry. Along with the industry’s own fake think tank, the Ephedra Education Council, Burton succeeded in delaying the banning of this dangerous substance until 2004. And those who attempted to thwart him did so at their peril, as noted (p. 130) by Dan Hurley in Natural Causes: Death, Lies, and Politics in America’s Vitamin and Herbal Supplement Industry (2006).
It’s hardly surprising, then, that Burton (whose Wikipedia page, when checked on January 8, 2011, mysteriously contained no mention of his campaigns on behalf of Laetrile and ephedra) should be so responsive to Wakefield’s cause. More particularly, Burton suffered the horror of watching his grandson christian succumb to regressive autism, an event he claimed happened shortly after the infant had received nine shots. He blamed this sad occurrence on the mercury-containing Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines.
A press release issued by Burton on October 26, 2000, is a classic example of antiscientific spin:
On July 18, 2000 the Committee [on Government Reform] conducted a hearing entitled, “Mercury in Medicine: Are We Taking Unnecessary Risks?” During the hearing, the FDA admitted that children are being exposed to unsafe levels of mercury through vaccines containing Thimerosal. It was also determined that symptoms of mercury poisoning mimic symptoms of autism—a disease that has reached epidemic levels in the United States. However, the FDA has chosen to allow pharmaceutical companies to merely phase out their use of Thimerosal, leaving mercury-containing vaccines at public and private health facilities.16
It would be extraordinarily unlikely for the FDA to admit any such thing, because the Thimerosal in use in vaccines did not subject children to unsafe levels of mercury; there has never been any serious scientific suggestion that it did.
Although mercury is a toxin, it seems hardly as toxic as its reputation among people who don’t care to probe science too much. Aside from the scare stories propagated about Thimerosal there have been plenty of panics, too, about the amalgam used for dental fillings, which contains about 40 to 50 percent mercury, traces of which slowly leach into the mouth and thence to the rest of the body. Various clinical trials have shown no adverse effects in children whose teeth have been filled using amalgam, in newborns whose mothers had amalgam-filled teeth, and in babies being breast-fed—the main groups perceived to be at risk—yet the fears live on. In 2006 and 2010 the FDA gave dental amalgams a clean bill of health, at least for nonpregnant people over the age of six. Yet, each time, lawmakers exercised their greater scientific expertise to delay full-scale approval.17 (A separate issue concerns the adverse environmental effects of dental amalgam use: “In 1991, the World Health Organization confirmed that mercury contained in dental amalgam is the greatest source of mercury vapour in non-industrialized settings, exposing the concerned population to mercury levels significantly exceeding those set for food and for air.”18)
Despite Burton’s efforts, in 2003 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, having scrutinized the scientific evidence, declined to ban the use of Thimerosal. In consequence, some CDC members received death threats. Where the manufacturers had removed Thimerosal from various vaccines it was for no scientific reason but simply in hopes of calming the hysteria Burton and others had stirred up, hysteria that was leading to a potentially catastrophic drop in the numbers of children being vaccinated. Rates of regressive autism were unaffected by the move.
But back to 2000. On April 6 Burton convened a hearing of his Committee on Government Reform, supposedly to investigate whether or not there was a relationship between the MMR vaccine and regressive autism, but in fact to press his own conviction that there was. The hearing saw a parade of scientists carefully picked as being among the tiny minority who thought such a connection might exist. The star turn was Wakefield; among others was Mary Megson of the Medical College of Virginia, who claimed to be getting great results treating autistic children with cod liver oil: “One child’s IQ score went up 105 points.”19 Golly.
Standing against this torrent was Henry Waxman (D-CA), ranking minority member of the Reform Committee, who’d earlier tussled with Burton over ephedra. It was obvious to him that Burton was rigging the proceedings in favor of pseudoscience. Waxman’s position was that it was up to scientists to determine whether vaccines were safe, not untutored congressmen: “The consequences of an unfair hearing on autism connected to vaccinations can cause people to die.”20 Like their UK counterparts not so many months earlier, however, the US press ignored the voice of reason and mounted a sensationalist blitzkrieg. The worldwide press behaved little better.
Burton’s rigged hearing was as successful as he could have possibly hoped it to be—not in persuading Congress to legislate against vaccines scientifically proven safe but in scaring the pants off current and future parents of small children, so that rates of vaccination plunged. In due course, as had children in various UK communities before them, children in parts of the US lost their herd immunity. In late October 2010, CNN reported that California had suffered 5,978 known cases of whooping cough in the most severe epidemic the state had experienced in almost six decades; ten very young infants had died.21 As Burton had said some years earlier, “I think every opportunity should be given to people so that they can survive and have a healthy life . . .”22
❖
Probably more important than any other factor in spreading the belief that the Thimerosal in vaccines might be responsible for autism was an article called “Deadly Immunity” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which appeared in the June 20, 2005, issue of Rolling Stone. Although there were so many factual errors in Kennedy’s article that Rolling Stone began rapidly issuing retractions,23 these were lost amid the media storm, backed up by Kennedy’s appearances on high-audience programs like Don Imus’s radio show and Joe Scarborough’s TV show. Quoted by Kennedy in his article were several scientists whose qualifications must have seemed to the public highly impressive, as indeed some of them actually were; less obvious was that the views of these scientists were far-flung outliers from the general scientific consensus. Among them was Boyd Haley, then a University of Kentucky chemistry professor (now retired) and at the time highly regarded. According to Haley:
You couldn’t even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe. It’s just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken and swell. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a Petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage.24
There was one major obstacle in the way of fingering Thimerosal as the guilty party: the properties of Thimerosal. Thimerosal is so safe that, in 1929, when Eli Lilly began experimenting with it in hopes it might prove to be an effective antibiotic (it was good at killing bacteria in labs but proved useless at killing them in people), they found that an injection of two full grams of the stuff caused no harm to the injectee at all. This dosage is about ten thousand times bigger than any to be found in a vaccine. Making lemonade out of a lemon, Eli Lilly realized its curious spectrum of properties meant Thimerosal would make an excellent preservative for vaccines: It would kill any organisms that might degrade the vaccine in storage, then metabolize away harmlessly inside the human body after the vaccine had been administered.
Nonetheless the myth was born that, since the product of Thimerosal’s degradation in the body is ethylmercury, its use in vaccines could cause mercury poisoning. But ethylmercury does not have the same effects on the body as mercury—any more than sodium chloride affects the body in the same way as sodium. Ethylmercury does not hang about in the body long, being rapidly flushed away. Even so, the idea was born of chelation therapy as a treatment for autism, and anxious parents were relieved of untold millions of dollars.25
This is not to say that all advocates of chelation therapy as an autism treatment were crooks. The organization Generation Rescue was founded in 2005 by California financier J. B. Handley, whose son Jamie had been stricken by regressive autism a couple of years earlier. Convinced the cause was Thimerosal, the Handleys began daily rubbing a chelating agent on Jamie’s limbs, and believed they could see a huge improvement—as perhaps they indeed could, because who knows the beneficial effect that frequent affectionate rubbing by Mommy and Daddy might have. We can understand why the stalwarts of Generation Rescue could regard this apparent empirical evidence as convincing, at least so long as Thimerosal was still used in vaccines.
Another powerful antivax organization, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), founded in 1982 by Barbara Loe Fisher, Jeff Schwartz, and Kathi Williams, advised Congress in the years leading up to 1986’s National childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which had the seemingly benign effects of creating a compensation program for people injured through vaccination, requiring physicians to explain benefits and risks before vaccination, and so forth. The consequence of the act was, of course, to worry members of the public, who came to believe the risks of vaccination were far higher than they are. This seems to be the purpose as a whole of the NVIC, which capitalizes on its name and on its prior involvement with the government to give the impression it’s a dispassionate, authoritative voice rather than an antivaccination advocacy group.
Fisher, who wrote the antivax tract DPT: A Shot in the Dark (1985; with Harris Coulter), was, as Barbara Loe Arthur, one of the signatories of a 2009 libel lawsuit brought against Paul Offit, Amy Wallace, and Conde Nast Publications over a brief remark Offit had made about her in a long interview with Wallace in Wired magazine:
The November 2009 issue of Wired Magazine, published by Conde Nast Publications Inc., contains an article written by Amy Wallace that quotes Paul A. Offit . . . as saying that Plaintiff Fisher is a liar (“‘she lies,’ he said flatly”). That statement comes within the context of an article that portrays those like Fisher (who oppose mandatory vaccination) as unscientific, uneducated, and harmful to society.26
The complaint was thrown out in March 2010.
Generation Rescue’s Handley had got the idea chelation therapy might be effective from research done by Mark and David Geier, father and son, respectively an obstetrician/gynecologist (with a PhD in genetics) and a biology graduate. In a 2003 study, they surveyed data from the national Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), which collated reports from nurses, patients, and others who suspected a particular vaccination might have caused harm. The Geiers found, they believed, that Thimerosal-containing vaccines seemed to be causing a higher incidence of mental/behavioral problems than did others.27
One of their other recommendations was more drastic. It was already known boys were far more likely to develop autism than girls. Might this be because autistic boys were overproducing testosterone? With this in mind, and knowing testosterone tends to bind with mercury, the Geiers hit upon the idea that another autism treatment might be to cut off the boys’ testosterone production—chemical castration, in other words. After using Lupron, a chemical that has this as a temporary effect, on over sixty autistic children for a period of weeks to impede their sexual development, while continuing chelation therapy, the Geiers believed, in 2006, they’d cracked the problem. It was, alas, yet another false dawn.
And then the Geiers’ ascendant star was brutally extinguished. It emerged that Mark Geier had been yet another medical scientist to receive money from the UK lawyer Richard Barr. And the Geiers’ 2003 paper came under assault by their scientific peers because of methodological and straightforwardly factual errors; for example, it claimed that infants were receiving increasing doses of Thimerosal when in fact doses had dropped off drastically in the preceding years as vaccine manufacturers abandoned its use; and it claimed instances of heart arrest (which is what happens when you die, whatever the cause) as examples of heart attacks. The data from VAERS were also suspect, since VAERS is not a scientific tool to provide the medical community with early warnings of possible problem vaccines; rather, it merely records the voluntarily submitted impressions of anyone involved, qualified or not, in a particular case—i.e., it has the same methodological problems as a website poll. In due course it was discovered that personal-injury lawyers were a principal source of information submitted to VAERS, thereby creating a perfect evidential circle for use in lawsuits: Lawyers could point at “scientific” data they had themselves created!
And what of the journal in which the 2003 paper appeared, the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons? This is the official publication of an organization called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which is a conservative think tank, an offshoot of the infamous Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (see page 285). In a 2009 piece called “The Tea Party’s Favorite Doctors” Stephanie Mencimer blew the AAPS’s pretensions wide open:
Yet despite the lab coats and the official-sounding name, the docs of the AAPS are hardly part of mainstream medical society. Think Glenn Beck with an MD. The group (which did not return calls for comment for this story) has been around since 1943. Some of its former leaders were John Birchers, and its political philosophy comes straight out of Ayn Rand. Its general counsel is Andrew Schlafly, son of the legendary conservative activist Phyllis. . . . Its website features claims that tobacco taxes harm public health and electronic medical records are a form of “data control” like that employed by the East German secret police. An article on the AAPS website speculated that Barack Obama may have won the presidency by hypnotizing voters, especially cohorts known to be susceptible to “neurolinguistic programming”—that is, according to the writer, young people, educated people, and possibly Jews.28
❖
A recent craze in the antivax world is to claim that autism is caused by “mitochondrial disorders,” or is a misdiagnosis of those. In real life, mitochondrial disorders are not unknown, but they’re rare—unless of course they’re far commoner than we think because they’ve been so frequently misdiagnosed as autism! Whatever, this new line of reasoning might seem to let vaccines off the hook, but no such luck. Vaccination apparently exacerbates the “mitochondrial disorders.”
Another recent fad has been to point at the small amount of formaldehyde in some vaccines as a threat to health, specifically as a carcinogen; formaldehyde is, after all, a KNOWN TOXIN! Hm. It’s a KNOWN TOXIN that your liver manufactures every day of your life. At any particular moment there’s about ten times more formaldehyde swimming around in the body of even the smallest infant than in any vaccine you might administer.
❖
Andrew Wakefield, meanwhile, was enjoying mixed fortunes. Having departed the Royal Free Hospital in 2001, he spent increasing time in the US, eventually becoming the mainspring of the Thoughtful House Center for children, in Austin, Texas, an institution that claims both to conduct research into autism and to treat sufferers. In February 2010, as the GMC ruling loomed, Wakefield lost his position at Thoughtful House. In May 2010 he published his own account of the MMR brouhaha, Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines—The Truth Behind a Tragedy. It’s perhaps unfair to mention that this has a foreword by Jenny McCarthy.
One of Wakefield’s associates at Thoughtful House, Arthur Krigsman, came to wide public notice when, testifying before Congress’s Government Reform Committee in June 22, 2002, he claimed to have independently confirmed Wakefield’s results. Naturally the scientific world was eager for details. There was a long wait. Finally, on January 27, 2010, Krigsman published his supportive paper, “Clinical Presentation and Histologic Findings at Ileocolonoscopy in children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder and chronic Gastrointestinal Symptoms,”29 in the first issue of an online journal called Autism Insights. Among this journal’s editorial board were
Bryan Jepson, MD, Director of Medical Services, Medical Center, Thoughtful House Center for children, Austin, TX, USA
Arthur Krigsman, MD, Director of Gastrointestinal Services, Pediatric Gastroenterology, Thoughtful House Center for children, Austin, TX, USA
Carol Mary Stott, PhD, Senior Research Associate, Research Department, Thoughtful House Center for children, Austin, TX, USA
Andrew Wakefield, MBBS, FRCS, FRCPath, Research Director, Thoughtful House Center for children, Austin, TX, USA30
Unusually for learned journals, Autism Insights charges a “processing” fee of $1,699 to authors who submit papers. Discounts are available for authors making bulk submissions.
It can often seem, in discussions of the scientific case for a purported link between the MMR vaccine and autism, that it’s a matter of Andrew Wakefield against the world. This isn’t so. One staunch supporter of Wakefield has been the “nutritional therapist” Patrick Holford. It can be difficult for people outside the UK to understand the extent to which Holford, through a morass of websites and his own Institute for Optimum Nutrition, captures the public ear there. His support for Wakefield was thus no minor detail. Holford sells to parents, through various of his outlets, all they will need to treat their children’s autism—dollops of dietary supplements plus a regime of expensive tests and consultations. Since there is zero evidence that autism will respond to vitamins or any other dietary enhancement, and a vast scientific consensus that it won’t, it’s something of a mystery as to why anyone should part with any money whatsoever to follow Holford’s “action plan”—yet many do.
Wakefield’s false conclusions were restricted to the MMR vaccine. Holford speaks out against vaccination in general, recommending parents do everything they can to build up their offspring’s immune system. Mothers should therefore breastfeed their babies and then later ensure that—you’ve guessed it—the infants’ diets are supplemented by the correct regime of vitamins, minerals, and the rest. He has suggested parents might investigate homeopathic alternatives to vaccination.
With all the hullabaloo being created by the antivaxers, it was only natural that opportunistic homeopaths would move in to offer “alternative vaccines.” According to a BBC report in September 2010,31 this was by no means universal among homeopaths; following up on claims that the three hundred–odd UK members of the Homeopathic Medical Association were offering the “replacement vaccines,” their reporter interviewed six and found that three were more than happy to administer the orthodox MMR vaccine. But the Inverness-based homeopath Katie Jarvis said she offered “homeopathic prophylaxis” to parents unwilling to have their children vaccinated. On being asked if her remedies offered the same protection as the vaccine, Jarvis replied, “I’d like to say that they were safer, but I can’t prove that.” Too right. She also claimed she could protect patients homeopathically against other, even more serious diseases, including polio, tetanus, and diphtheria.
What is perhaps even more alarming is that the UK’s National Health Service spends nearly £4 million ($6 million) annually on homeopathic treatments, money that could instead be spent on medicine.
Some years earlier, in 2002, Edzard Ernst and Katja Schmidt of the University of Exeter did an informal survey, e-mailing 168 registered homeopaths in the guise of a mother seeking guidance as to whether or not to let her child be given the MMR vaccine. Of the 168, 104 replied; of these, 27 dropped out on being informed (as was ethically necessary) that this was a survey rather than a genuine request. Of the remaining 77, 75 advised the mother against vaccination.32
❖
To date the biggest study done in an attempt to find a link—any link—between the MMR vaccine and autism has been the one reported in the 2002 paper “A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism.”33 Because of the efficient records kept in Denmark, the authors were able to analyze the health histories of almost all the children born in that country over a period of eight years, from the start of 1991 to the end of 1998. Of the over 530,000 children concerned, more than 440,000 had been vaccinated; the remainder had not. No difference was discovered in the rates of autism’s incidence between vaccinated and unvaccinated children; further, among those autistic children who had been vaccinated, there was no discernible relationship between age at vaccination and the onset of autism.
One of the most gruesome ironies of the antivax campaign is that there is a known link between rubella and autism: If the mother catches rubella while pregnant, there’s an increased chance (for reasons no one properly understands) that her child will suffer one of the autistic spectrum disorders. The irony arises because, of course, the more kids there are running around without immunity to rubella, the more likely it is pregnant mothers will catch the disease; in other words, far from reducing instances of autism, antivax campaigners are building up future cases of it.
❖
I’ve spent most of this chapter talking about antipathy to the MMR vaccine, but all the other vaccines have their opponents as well—including surprises like the polio vaccine, which one might assume would be universally approved. Far from it; in fact, one could make a case that the modern antivax hysteria owes some of its primary memes to scares over the oral polio vaccine during the 1960s.
A consequence of the creation of the first polio vaccine, by Jonas Salk in the late 1950s—even before the oral vaccine came along—was that between 1954 and 1961 the annual number of cases of polio in the US dropped from 38,476 to 1,312, or by about 96.5 percent; the Surgeon General estimated that, of those residual polio cases, some 90 percent represented people who had refused vaccination.
There’s a modern conspiracy theory claiming that polio was already well on its way out when, with the introduction of Salk’s vaccine, it was given a new lease on life. Like all the best conspiracy theories, this one takes a few uncontested facts and heftily misinterprets them. It’s true that polio rates had been in decline in the developed nations since the late nineteenth century; this was not because the disease was somehow losing its potency but simply—as polio spreads through ingesting feces—a result of better water purification and better personal hygiene. Since the introduction of the vaccines, polio rates have dropped to the point where the disease has virtually (although, because of increased globalization, not entirely) disappeared from the developed world and is fast on the wane in all other countries that have accepted the vaccine. But, just as individual areas experience cold snaps during global warming, so there can be temporary, small-scale, localized upturns in polio rates in the midst of an overall rapid decline. These give rise to anecdotal “evidence” of polio rates increasing after the introduction of the vaccine. The global statistics tell a different story, but statistics don’t sell sensationalist books.
Salk’s vaccine used dead viral fragments. The oral polio vaccine (OPV) devised by Albert Sabin in the 1960s used live virus—much attenuated, but nonetheless live. Parents ignorant of the underlying science quite understandably had fits at the thought of their little darlings consuming live viruses. The OPV is very slightly more risky than its injected counterpart—figures vary, but perhaps one in 750,000 recipients of all three doses of an OPV treatment can develop full-scale polio. (Many countries now use an injected vaccine that is 100 percent safe from this, although of course, as with any medical treatment, there’s still a tiny risk of allergic or other adverse reactions.) This is a minuscule figure when set alongside the chances of catching polio in a society where herd immunity hasn’t been established. Accordingly, in most developed countries polio vaccination was made a legal requirement . . . and the antivaxers of the era had a field day blaming the accursed politicians for putting the lives of children at risk. Since it took some time, despite the legal mandate, for herd immunity to be established, there were still for a while occasional polio outbreaks; rather than realize these were fewer and smaller than in the past, the antivaxers chose to blame the vaccine—“obviously” it was spreading rather than defeating the disease.
In 1988, when a global effort to eradicate polio through vaccination began, the annual incidence of polio worldwide was an estimated 350,000 cases. By 2001, this had dropped to just 483. That was an unusually good year for the “war on polio”—a more realistic average today is 1,000 cases annually. Hard to explain these figures in terms of the polio vaccine spreading the disease, isn’t it?
Polio was well on its way to extinction, in fact, thanks to vaccination, until Muslim fundamentalists in the Nigerian state of Kano decided in 2003 that Western christians were using the vaccine to spread AIDS and/or sterilize Muslim women. State governor Ibrahim Shekarau banned the procedure. Ten months later, in July 2004, the ban was lifted and an urgent campaign was begun to vaccinate four million of Kano’s children under the age of five against the disease. By then, though, there had been polio outbreaks not just in Kano and other parts of Nigeria but in neighboring countries.34
The example of the polio vaccine is not an isolated one. The Measles Initiative was launched in Africa in 2001, its aim being to vaccinate as many children as possible. The results exceeded the most optimistic expectations. In the first five years of the program, annual measles deaths in Africa dropped from four hundred thousand to thirty-six thousand—by 91 percent.35
But in Zimbabwe some years later, members of a sect called the Vapositori refused vaccination for their children on religious grounds; the sect’s leaders claim prayer is the best therapy. Between September 2009 and March 2010 there were 110 known deaths of children from measles, and in most the Vapositori were implicated. In May 2010 the Vapositori climbed down rather than incur hostile legislation.36
There are various examples of nations foolishly assuming that, just because rates of incidence of a particular disease have dropped to minuscule levels, there’s no need to continue with universal vaccination. One example occurred in the UK in the early 1970s, when the government of the day decided to economize by cutting back on immunization against whooping cough. The result was the 1978 whooping cough epidemic in which a hundred thousand were infected and thirty-six people died. At roughly the same time there was a fall in the vaccination rates in Japan for whooping cough from 70 percent to perhaps 30 percent (estimates vary); in consequence, 1974’s figures of 393 cases with zero deaths leaped to 1979’s figures of 13,000 cases with 41 deaths. In the general political chaos following the breakup of the USSR, the practice of universal diphtheria vaccination in the Eastern Bloc countries was a casualty. Between 1989 and 1994, rates of diphtheria infection rose from a total of just 839 to nearly 50,000, with some 1,700 people dying of the disease in the latter year. And this massive diphtheria outbreak wasn’t confined to Eastern Europe; the disease spread into the rest of Europe and thence all over the world.37
But one can go back much further than the late twentieth century. The March 9, 1888, issue of Science had this item:
Vaccination Statistics. — The following extract from The Sanitarian would seem to indicate that a compulsory vaccination law has its advantages: “The success of the anti-vaccinationists is aptly shown by the results in Zurich, Switzerland, where for a number of years, until 1883, a compulsory vaccination law obtained, and small-pox was wholly prevented (not a single case occurred in 1882). This result was seized upon in the following year by the anti-vaccinationists, and used against the necessity for any such law, and it seems they had sufficient influence to cause its repeal. The death returns for that year (1883) showed that for every thousand deaths two were caused by small-pox; in 1884, there were three; in 1885, seventeen and in the first quarter of 1886, eighty-five.”
It’s worth spelling out a couple of things:
Is there not perhaps a pattern detectable here? While it might be very possible to make a case that, all other things being equal, the cause of regressive autism could well be environmental, it seems patently obvious that the culprit can be neither Thimerosal nor the MMR vaccine.
If vaccination isn’t to blame, why are autism rates rising? There’s no easy answer except, just possibly: They aren’t. Certainly part of any perceived increase is that doctors are becoming much more alert to autism, and thus more ready to diagnose the ailment in infants who’re suffering the relevant developmental problems. Another factor is that, in the early 1990s, the definition of what is meant by autism was, for theoretical reasons, expanded to include other conditions—Asperger syndrome and PDD–NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder–Not Otherwise Specified)—that had previously been considered distinct. It’s unclear as to whether these two trends, taken together, might not entirely explain the supposed increase.
Whatever the truth of the matter, bellowing false answers from bully pulpits, far from helping autistic children and those who love them, is merely perpetuating their anguish through distracting from the quest for the true answers. The celebrity antivaccination campaigners, from Jenny McCarthy on down, may believe they’re spreading light and hope. In fact, through their shrill, self-absorbed efforts to drown every voice but their own, what they’re doing is spreading sickness, and misery, and death.