It’s understandable that parents of children with autism, like parents of children with any developmental problem, want to know what caused\u00a0 it–and often want to know who’s to blame.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Unfortunately, in the case of autism and childhood immunizations, a combination of greed, bad logic, and outright lying by some unscrupulous\u00a0 “investigators” has created a situation in which innocent parents have come to believe that evil vaccines caused their children’s autism.<\/p>\n
It’s not true.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet, like many errors, it’s become ingrained in some peoples’ minds–largely because of three factors.\u00a0 First, it gives parents someone to blame and gets them off the hook with relatives.\u00a0\u00a0 If it’s caused by vaccines, they don’t\u00a0 have to consider the known causes, including genetics.\u00a0 Second, it makes a huge profit for those who promote the vaccine hypothesis and offer goods and services to ameliorate the supposed damage done by the vaccine.\u00a0 And third, there’s the profit motive: if autism were caused by vaccines, then suing vaccine manufacturers (and now, the government because it’s taken over the liability) could make a lot of money for lawyers and parents alike.<\/p>\n
To understand why the vaccine hypothesis is wrong requires some history as well as good science.<\/p>\n
History first.\u00a0\u00a0 Opposition to childhood immunizations has existed since the first immunization programs began.\u00a0\u00a0 Despite the clear population-wide benefits,\u00a0 some governments refused\u00a0 on eugenic grounds: Hitler, for instance, insisted that real Aryans wouldn’t die of diptheria–only lesser races would succumb–so Germany suffered a diptheria epidemic during WWII which did impair its military capability.\u00a0 Rommel caught diptheria and was sent home from North Africa because he was so sick.<\/p>\n
Similarly, some people argue that immunizations preserve the weak at the expense of the strong. \u00a0 Others consider immunizations too dangerous, and point to the rare deaths associated with them.\u00a0 They argue that if everyone else is immunized, they are protected by herd immunity and can avoid the risk of the immunization.\u00a0\u00a0 Still others have religious or philosophical objections, usually based on the concept of “fate” or “God’s will.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In some parts of the world, political opposition to vaccines manufactured or invented elsewhere has resulted in lies about the vaccines (that they’re really anti-fertility drugs, for instance.)<\/p>\n
Those who oppose immunizations have used a variety of arguments, as above, to blame “vaccines” for a variety of ailments via a variety of\u00a0 physically impossible mechanisms.\u00a0\u00a0 The target vaccine has changed over time, but many of the same arguments are used.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When autism emerged from the shadows cast by Bettelheim (the “refrigerator mothers” hypothesis)\u00a0 and people began looking for someone else to blame, those who opposed childhood immunizations took up the cause of autism.<\/p>\n
Their first vaccine target was the whooping cough (pertussis) vaccine; some parents had already refused to allow their children to have that in the usual DTP combination,\u00a0 and though it was widely given in some countries, it was not in others.\u00a0 That made it possible to determine fairly quickly that the autism rate was the same with and without the pertussis vaccine.<\/p>\n
The next target of concern was the tetanus vaccine.\u00a0\u00a0 If you troll through old Usenet posts in one or more of the autism groups from the mid-90s, you’ll find peculiar (and physically impossible) hypotheses about that vaccine (one of the oldest and most reliable) that go like this.\u00a0 Tetanus is caused by a bacteria in the genus Clostridia.\u00a0\u00a0 Botulism is caused by another bacteria in the genus Clostridia, C. botulinum.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Both bacteria produce toxins that cause a characteristic disease.\u00a0\u00a0 Botulism is caused by ingesting the bacteria in foods–the toxin can be absorbed through the gut.\u00a0 Infants, but not adults, can get botulism from C. botulinum spores in honey.\u00a0\u00a0 So far so good.\u00a0\u00a0 But note that neither tetanus nor botulism looks anything like autism.\u00a0\u00a0 The people who came up with the “tetanus vaccine causes autism” idea proposed that an infant\u00a0 getting a tetanus immunization might have “tetanus spores” end up in the brain (via a circuitous route that required transmission through the blood to the gut, where the spores would be absorbed through the gut back into the blood and thence to the brain where they would do neurological damage and produce autism.<\/p>\n
What’s wrong with this?\u00a0 Well,\u00a0 there aren’t any “tetanus spores” in tetanus vaccine, to start with.\u00a0\u00a0 An infant or small child with tetanus does not look like a child with autism, and if they survive they still don’t look like a child with autism.\u00a0\u00a0 They look like a child who’s had tetanus, a known quantity.<\/p>\n
Once the vaccine hypothesis had been disproven for tetanus, diptheria, pertussis, and polio,\u00a0 the same “investigators” moved on to other vaccines with the same basic arguments and attitudes.\u00a0\u00a0 Rubella was an attractive target, as were measles and mumps: viral (not bacterial) diseases that did sometimes cause an encephalitis (brain inflammation) with permanent neurological deficits.\u00a0\u00a0 The deficits were not the same as in autism, but facts never bothered these scare-mongers.\u00a0 Moreover, the use of a mercury compound in the combined MMR (measles\/mumps\/rubella) vaccine\u00a0 gave them another scare-point, as mercury compounds (both organic and inorganic) are known neurological toxins…in sufficient amounts.<\/p>\n
Once more, though, the facts don’t fit the hypothesis.\u00a0 Infants and children have suffered both inorganic and organic mercury poisoning…and the symptoms do not look like autism.\u00a0\u00a0 These conditions are well-known to the medical community and well-characterized for all ages from infancy on up.\u00a0 The argument that very, very, very mild mercury poisoning (the amount injected in an immunization)\u00a0 might cause a totally different neurological condition simply does not stand up.<\/p>\n
Why did anyone (even parents with no background in medicine) ever believe any of this nonsense?\u00a0\u00a0 Because for most people, anything that happens before an event is considered a possible cause of that event, especially if it is someone else’s acts. \u00a0 So the fact that the bulk of childhood immunizations are given between age 2 months and age 3, and that children with autism begin to show developmental delays in this same period,\u00a0 suggested a connection between those.\u00a0\u00a0 Coupled with the belief that the incidence of autism increased at the same time that certain vaccines came into use,\u00a0 the case for the autism\/vaccine hypothesis seemed made.<\/p>\n
But once more the facts don’t support the hypothesis.\u00a0 Where the research has been done, the increase in diagnosis of autism cases was balanced by a decrease in diagnosis of mental retardation.\u00a0\u00a0 In other words,\u00a0 children who used to be called “retarded” (not something for which vaccines were ever blamed) were now being diagnosed as autistic.\u00a0\u00a0 Even 25 years ago, autism was a diagnosis so weighted with horror that doctors avoided it if they could use another label…now it carries much less social stigma.\u00a0\u00a0 So the increase in cases does not mean an actual increase in the incidence–but in the recognition that a child who appears deaf or mute, or who has profound developmental delays or who doesn’t interact well with others, might well be autistic– not deaf, not retarded, not “emotionally disturbed.”<\/p>\n
Time after time, real scientific investigation has shown no evidence at all that vaccines cause autism, but the proponents of the vaccine hypothesis continue to recruit more and more frightened parents to the cause.\u00a0 I have been following this in the medical journals (both British and US) for thirty years…reading the research papers, the review articles, all of which conclude that this hypothesis has no basis in fact.\u00a0 Real research in the causes of autism point clearly to events in utero, before birth, as the cause of most autism.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Last week’s court case which dismissed vaccines as the cause of autism (and thus removed the ground for granting damages)\u00a0 is just one in a string of reverses for the vaccine hypothesis.<\/p>\n
It is tragic that so much time and money and effort has gone into attacking vaccines instead of providing the support and therapy that autistic children and their families need…that unscrupulous “investigators” have used parental fear and concern to bolster their own egos and pocketbooks.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Thirty years ago, I was willing to believe that these “investigators” were honest, that they\u00a0 really were trying to find the real cause of autism–but after all that’s happened, after reading their “research” and that of others, and after noticing that they shifted their ground from vaccine to vaccine with the same specious ideas, that they refused to accept valid research results, that they continued to urge parents to raise money for their foundations, continued to provide “information” that ran counter to the facts, I no longer believe that.\u00a0 I believe they are charlatans, quacks, snake-oil sellers who simply want to make a living off the misery of others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s understandable that parents of children with autism, like parents of children with any developmental problem, want to know what caused\u00a0 it–and often want to know who’s to blame.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Unfortunately, in the case of autism and childhood immunizations, a combination of greed, bad logic, and outright lying by some unscrupulous\u00a0 “investigators” has created a situation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,30],"tags":[3,20,49,50,21],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-theories-of-causation","tag-autism","tag-bioethics","tag-opinion","tag-parenting","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions\/58"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}