In 1957, a remarkable man named Maurice Hilleman, a J.C. Penney salesman turned microbiologist, predicted and prevented a pandemic strain of the Asian flu.
As detailed by Paul Offit in “Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases” (HarperCollins), Hilleman went on to discover and develop nine childhood vaccines, including protections against measles, mumps and rubella. He also figured out how to combine the right combination of the last three into a single stable shot, called MMR, that saved millions of lives around the world.
Yet it took only one press conference by a British physician, Andrew Wakefield, to twist Hilleman’s vaccine into a dangerous stab at the lives of children.
Wakefield assumed that the vaccine was causing digestive tract problems that in turn allowed certain proteins, “to enter the bloodstream and travel to the brain where they caused autism.” Wakefield’s theory, announced in 1998, was discredited, along with Wakefield, when it was discovered he was paid by a defense lawyer to do his research. But the media ran with the story anyway: “The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, the Washington Post and every major newspaper, magazine and radio and television station in the United States elevated Wakefield’s hypothesis to fact: MMR caused autism. Wakefield in a single statement had undone what it taken Maurice Hilleman years to accomplish,” Offit writes.
And so April, Autism Awareness Month, becomes not a noble search for a cure, but an annual war on the bookshelves, as scientists and activists – often with no medical proof – battle over lifesaving vaccines.
Autism spectrum disorder is broadly characterized as developmental deficits in social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication, and exhibiting repetitive behaviors or interests. The number of children classified as autistic has gone up in the past few decades, due to a reclassification of mental retardation and other learning disabilities as austism spectrum disorders. But that hasn’t stopped upset parents from searching for a reason for the “increase.”
The pendulum has swung so far to panic that to argue in favor of vaccines is to invite public scorn. For instance, Offit, chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, received hate mail and death threats when he had the courage and misfortune of stating that neither a measles-mumps-rubella vaccine nor thimerosal (a mercury-based preservative used in the shot) were ever a risk to children.
“Vaccinated,” Offit’s response to the threats, is a much needed inoculation against books such as Neil Z. Miller’s “Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective” (New Atlantean Press), which not only links vaccines to autism, it throws in brain damage, drug abuse and violent behavior as well. Offit also should be required reading in upscale communities such as San Diego, where in February there was a outbreak of measles – a disease extremely rare in the United States because of vaccines – because 12 sets of parents had refused to protect their own children.
Instead, as Arthur Allen shows in his engrossing “Vaccine: The Controversial Story Of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver” (Norton) vaccines have provided a convenient bogeyman for personal tragedies.
“Vaccine” is a history of the fight for full immunization, a battle that is being lost among the latte-sipping, Whole Food shopping crowd who now refuse to vaccinate their kids out of “health concerns.” Allen shows that supporters of a vaccine conspiracy – and the media – ignore scientific evidence against a link between vaccines, or the number of immunizations and autism. Instead, science is replaced by opinions and conspiracy theories constructed from personal experiences, quick studies and conjectures in search for demons and a quick buck.
As Allen points out, during the controversy surrounding the role of thimerosal and vaccines, “CDC researchers were being sued, subpoenaed and even threatened with death . . . Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana) and hundreds of parents . . . were claiming that vaccines had caused several generations of U.S. children to lose their minds.”
The thimerasol-autism link has been discredited, but that has not stopped vaccine conspiracy theorists from finding other connections. Instead, along came Jenny McCarthy, the former Playboy model. In her book, “Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism” (Dutton), McCarthy claims vaccines led to her son Evan’s autism by causing an overproduction of yeast. Evan (now five) is much better because “children . . . dramatically improve with something as simple as an antifungal, once the overgrowth of yeast is removed from their body.” McCarthy goes on to claim the Hepatitis C vaccine destroyed a friend’s child. There is no vaccine for Hepatitis C.
McCarthy insists that Evan was fine until he received his MMR shot at age 15 months. Her “friends’ babies all cracked a smile way before Evan did . . . he was almost five months old.” That symptoms of autism tend to surface at exactly that age requires McCarthy to accept coincidence instead of an enemy.
McCarthy has also engaged in autism reclassification. Before her book came out, she claimed Evan was a “crystal child,” and she was an “adult indigo.” A crystal child appears to be autistic but is actually just sensitive to air and water. And in case you didn’t know, the “indigo/crystal phenomenon is the next step in our evolution as a human species.”
Now McCarthy supports a movement to purge vaccines of “toxins” and separate out the MMR shot to avoid autism. The medical ‘expert” behind this campaign? Andrew Wakefield. So much for autism awareness.
Robert Goldberg is vice president of The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest in New York City.