Vaccines Don't Cause Autism

Editor's Note: Moms Who Vax has been on an extended hiatus, but we return today with a cross-post of a brief blog post written by Trish Parnell of PKIDs (Parents of Kids with Infectious Diseases). The original post can be found here. 

Vaccines don’t cause autism.

I’ve been saying this for 20+ years. I’m not a scientist, and I don’t think any parent should embrace my statement based solely on my opinion.

My statement is based on the work of scientists who’ve studied vaccinated and non-vaccinated children in multiple countries, and they say: vaccines don’t cause autism.

It would be easier for researchers of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) if vaccines caused autism, but they don’t. After all, if vaccines did cause ASD, then researchers and research funding could all focus on vaccines.

But, vaccines don’t cause autism. In a way, it’s good to know that, because funders can save their money by not investing in yet more studies that will conclude that vaccines don’t cause autism.

And researchers can spend their time zeroing in on the (probably) many causes of ASD without spending a moment more on vaccines as a research subject.

If you are a parent of a baby or child about to be immunized, be prepared for the young one to have a sore arm, fever, swelling at the site of injection, or many other minor and short-term side effects of vaccination.

These are not fun for the child, and are worrisome for mom and dad, but you don’t have to worry about ASD as a side effect of vaccination because—

Vaccines don’t cause autism.

Please make an appointment with your child’s healthcare provider to discuss any questions you have about vaccines. You are the parent, and you should never feel that you can’t ask questions.

As you browse the Internet for information, I encourage you to follow the science, not the personal stories that sound scary. There are so many websites, blogs, bulletin boards, listservs, Facebook pages, tweets, and so on that say this and that, it’s hard not to be swayed by a good tale.

But this is your child, and you don’t want to guess. You want to know. Peer-reviewed studies help us determine what’s safe and what’s not safe for our child.

After 20+ years, this I know: vaccines don’t cause autism.

Trish Parnell is a health educator and the director of PKIDs.

Telling Anti-Vax Parents They're Wrong Only Makes Them More Anti-Vax

By Karen Ernst

Today, a study in the Journal of Pediatrics seemed to point out that what pro-vaxxers are trying to do is all wrong.  It might seem to suggest that debunking vaccine-autism myths, explaining relative risks of disease, and demonstrating the effects of vaccine-preventable disease is ineffective.  

The study tried to influence parents’ decisions about vaccines using four strategies, all utilizing online resources: correcting misinformation about the MMR-autism myth, giving information about the risks from vaccine-preventable diseases, presenting first-person narratives about children who had contracted VPDs, giving visuals of those risks. After being presented with one of these four strategies, parents were surveyed about how much more likely they were to choose an MMR for their children.  The information used came from the CDC, although the source of the information was not given to the parents surveyed.  The parents participating in this study came to the study with a wide variety of beliefs about vaccines, and almost none of them left with their beliefs being changed.

In short, the Pediatrics study found, in summary, that:

1. Showing ardently anti-vaccine parents proof that vaccines don’t cause autism only made them less likely to vaccinate.

2. Explaining the risks of vaccine-preventable diseases does not increase the chances that parents would agree to the MMR in the future.

3. Showing parents visuals about disease risk or giving them stories about children suffering from vaccine-preventable diseases did not make them more likely to vaccinate their children.

Those findings seem pretty damning for the pro-vaccine message, but I think we should take heart.  There is so much this study didn’t cover, and so much we can do that would work. Here are my thoughts on the findings:

1. Anti-vaccine parents have a broad range of concerns about vaccines beyond the vaccine-autism myth. Hitting one discussion point only irritates their sense of “they don’t get us.” The study might also fail to nudge ardently anti-vaccine parents because there is no human component, and the targeted parents have no opportunity to feel that someone took the time to genuinely hear out their concerns and address them in a personalized way.

2. Emphasizing risks often feels to parents like “fear-mongering,” and parents who refuse vaccines might feel that they are able to continue refusing vaccines since they live in communities with high vaccination rates where the risk of their child actually contracting a vaccine-preventable disease is low.  Just the other day on our Voices for Vaccines Facebook page, one mother commented, “I do not vaccinate, but would definitely consider it if traveling overseas.”  Anti-vaccine parents believe that their risk for contracting diseases is greater where those diseases are endemic, and trying to convince them that their children are at risk for complications from diseases they are unlikely to catch at home is problematic.

Conversely, anti-vaccine parents are likely to disbelieve in herd immunity. As Amy Parker’s mother once did, anti-vaccine parents often rely on organic foods and healthy living to protect their children from diseases that are often airborne and highly contagious. Those of us providing the cover of herd immunity to their children only make it easier for them to continue to delude themselves into believing that their lifestyle is the deciding factor. And because allowing children to become ill to prove our point is wrong in every sense of the word, it’s simply unlikely that anti-vaccine parents will change their minds due to fear of risk from disease.

In reality, what these anti-vaccine parents are doing is increasing the risk that these diseases will come back and that someone will suffer from a serious complication.  The parent who already vaccinates does so not only out of concern about serious complications, but also because they want to prevent illness in their children. But only ardent pro-vaccine parents are typically also passionate about the power of protecting her whole community.  However, maybe we can use pride in protecting the community not as a way to motivate parents to vaccinate but to motivate vaccinating parents to take pride in their actions and speak up about them.

3. Images and stories about children in peril because of disease only makes parents look for other dangers.  I call this the “Law and Order: SVU” effect, named so because after I have watched episodes of this show where children were in peril, I tend to see dangers for my children everywhere--beyond the scope of the subject of the episode.  

The researchers call this the “danger-priming effect.”  Priming parents for danger doesn’t make them more likely to take the solution you are offering, according to this theory.  It makes them more likely to look for dangers everywhere, including in that syringe you are holding out to them.

4. This study was limited in what it could reasonably do to ease fears about immunization because it was online and impersonal. There’s simply no way to quantify all of those conversations that occur on the playground among parents or around the Thanksgiving table or even between friends on Facebook.  

Parent-to-parent communication is entirely different than the communication in this study.  Think about what we know about ardently anti-vaccine parents:  They are more likely to believe conspiracy theories and thus less likely to believe officially sanctioned scientific evidence.  They are more likely to have a social network guiding them toward vaccine refusal, and providing them positive social reinforcement for their decisions.  The cold, impersonal online survey has no chance for success in the mind of a parent whose decisions are socially reinforced and are based on a distrust of official stances.

So what can we, as pro-vaccine lay-advocates, do? Are we likely to make parents less likely to vaccinate through our advocacy?  

I do not believe so.  In fact, I think lay-advocates--everyday parents and citizens--are key. Recent research shows that normalizing immunization works.  So let’s do that. Let’s let people know that we happily vaccinate our children because we understand the science behind it is clear and because we value our children’s health.

And vaccinating is normal.  Well over 90% of parents vaccinate on-time. If anti-vaccine parents feel that their position is being reinforced by their social network, then we as parents are not doing our job to protect our children and their friends. If every parent with fully vaccinated children simply stated that their children were vaccinated on-time, there would be a groundswell. The voices of these parents would drown out the fear-mongering and lies of the anti-vaccine movement, and concerned parents would feel more confident to join our ranks.

In other words--speak up. It just might work.

The National Vaccine Compensation Injury Act: 
A Compromise – not an Injustice

Or: Why the Latest Video from the Canary Party is Misleading

By Dorit Reiss

In 1986, Congress passed the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Act (NVICA) creating the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP).  The program attempted to address two problems: the government’s fears that vaccine manufacturers will leave the market due to lawsuits, leaving children and adults vulnerable to preventable diseases and plaintiffs’ desires for a simpler, cheaper, more certain process for compensation. It was a compromise with something for everyone, created with input from, among others, the National Vaccine Information Center, an organization that criticizes vaccine safety and emphasizes vaccine risks.

However, in a new video narrated by actor Rob Schneider, the Canary Party claims that the only reason there is doubt about the link between vaccines and autism is because the NVICA created a system that discriminates against plaintiffs and works completely in favor of pharmaceutical companies, and that it is run by a corrupt government.

The video is wrong pretty much from start to finish. This blog post will address three of its problems: the claim that NVICA is the only thing hiding the link between vaccines and autism; the inaccurate, incomplete depiction of NVICP; and why the claim that using the regular courts instead will benefit plaintiffs is wrong.

No Credible Evidence Supports a Link Between Vaccine and Autism

The Canary Party’s video purports to tell the story of a child named Eric who suffers from “vaccine-induced autism” – but there is no credible evidence that there is such a thing as “vaccine-induced autism.” The Canary Party video offers three pieces of evidence on this, none of which really support the claim. First, it says that as more vaccines were added to the recommended immunization schedule, autism rates “skyrocketed.” The video does not explain why this temporal correlation alone shows causation, or why it is a more convincing correlation than, say, increase in internet usage and raising rates of autism.

It also ignores the evidence suggesting that the increase is because of the change of diagnosis and of detection, not necessarily in incidence. To back this up, the video refers to “dozens” of studies, and the link attached to it refers to a list of studies compiled by Ginger Taylor, the Canary Party’s Vice President. However, that list does not support the claim either: the studies are either seriously flawed, have nothing to do with vaccines, or otherwise do not support the claim, as detailed in posts by blogger Liz Ditz, who thoroughly debunked them.

In contrast, numerous serious studies, some very large scale, have examined whether there is a link between vaccines and autism. No credible study found one. (Here is a partial list.)

Third, the video claims that NVICP compensated cases where a child had autism. But the NVICP never compensated a case on the theory that vaccines caused a child’s autism. Never. In fact, such a claim was soundly rejected by the program in the Omnibus Proceedings. Bailey Banks, whom the video mentioned, was not compensated on a theory that vaccines caused his autism but because vaccines may have caused another problem. The video also refers to a study by Holland, et al, which found 83 children compensated by the program who also had autism, but none of these children was compensated because vaccines caused their autism – they were compensated for other things (e.g. encephalitis). And, in fact, the rate of autism in the population of children with severe vaccine reactions (“vaccine injury”) is actually lower than the rate of autism in the general population.

NVICP Offers Advantages both to Manufacturers and Plaintiffs

The video suggests that NVICA was passed in 1986 as a result of pharmaceutical lobbying with the sole goal of shielding manufacturers from liability, and that it does shield manufacturers from liability. That claim is incomplete. The Act was passed to prevent companies from leaving the vaccine business, because they were leaving, leading to vaccine shortages, putting children and adults at risk. But that was not the only reason.  Plaintiffs were also complaining about the adversarial, prolonged court process and the act looked to simplify that process. In Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, the Supreme Court explains the quid pro quo involved – somewhat similar to the compromise represented in workers’ compensation schemes:  in exchange for shielding manufacturers from liability for some kind of claims – design defects, for example – the plaintiffs received substantial benefits: no show of fault is required, and plaintiff does not need to show the product was “defective” (which they would have to do in a design defect claim). The plaintiff does not have to show causation when claiming one of the injuries listed in the “Vaccine Injury Table."

The process is simplified. Attorney fees are provided for any claim that is not frivolous – including losing claims (the video claims attorney fees are slashed and delayed to “punish” claimants, but brings no evidence to that effect; in fact, the program paid out over 150 million dollars in attorney fees.

In return for the substantial benefits given plaintiffs, manufacturers are shielded from liability for design defects; but they are not invulnerable: they can still be sued for manufacturing defects or warning defects. This is substantial: the worst vaccine-related disaster in modern history, the Cutter Incident, was the result of a manufacturing defect, not a design defect: a vaccine designed to include an inactivated – dead – virus actually included a live poliovirus, permanently paralyzing 200 children and killing ten. That case could still be brought in the regular courts today.

In short, presenting the program as tilting the law in Big Pharma’s favor is wrong. It does protect manufacturers from some kinds of liability; but it offers plaintiffs substantial benefits. The program is also subject to judicial review: decisions can be appealed to the federal judiciary if a plaintiff does not agree with the result.

NVICP Offers Plaintiffs Real Advantages over Regular Courts

The Canary Party's video tries to portray the program as unfairly barring plaintiffs from the much better--as it suggests— judicial process. The video portrays an idealized, inaccurate process of civil court litigation proceedings: some of the problems it points out in the NVICP process will be found in civil litigation too – and that process will include other costs and disadvantages to plaintiffs. 

Comparison of NVICP and Civil Litigation

One advantage the video suggests a civil suit will have over the NVICP program is that plaintiffs will have their own “private lawyer,” (although the lawyers representing the plaintiffs are, like the lawyer in a civil suit, retained by the plaintiffs and are, in fact, “private lawyers” too) who will not have to rely on being paid from the program’s funds. But will that benefit plaintiffs? The video suggests that payment through the program fund hampers getting representation. But the usual arrangement in civil litigation for tort suits would be a contingency fee. Why would lawyers be more willing to take vaccine injury cases when they only get paid if they win than in a system that pays them even if they lose? And if a plaintiff won, under the usual contingency fee regime, the lawyer would be getting 30-50% of the award. Under NVICP, the plaintiff gets the entire award.

The video laments the lack of a discovery process with the potential to find incriminating documents. Putting aside the fact that discovery can be very costly for the plaintiff, the program does not disadvantage plaintiffs on this count: since plaintiffs do not need to show fault, they do not need incriminating documents.

The video suggests a special master is not objective. But the special master is a lawyer appointed by the Judges of the United States Court of Federal Claims, a federal court whose judges have life tenure. There is no reason to think the special master is any less objective than a federal judge. The video then goes on to suggest that the lack of legal precedent is an issue for the court. The court has issued inconsistent verdicts in the past; but then, civil courts in the United States are not necessarily consistent either. Juries have been known to reach differing verdicts on similar facts. Courts in states across the U.S. reach differing results on matters of law. There is no guarantee that a civil court will be consistent. Precedent only applies within a given jurisdiction’s hierarchy, not across juries, and it does not bind other jurisdictions, or even the highest court of the jurisdiction in question. A move to the civil courts may reduce consistency in results rather than increase it.

Challenges of Civil Litigation

Winning a product liability suit is not easy. A comparative view may be instructive: as early as 1953, the German Federal Supreme Court, the Bundesgerichtshof, of February 19, 1953 (BGHZ 9, 83), awarded no-fault compensation to someone injured by a vaccine, because showing fault – as was required for civil litigation – is very hard. A World Health Organization report found 19 countries that adopted no-fault schemes for vaccine injuries – and in several countries where this was left to the regular courts, “significant public pressure” calls for similar no-fault schemes. It is simply hard to win such a case in civil courts.  

To win, plaintiffs would have to show a vaccine’s design was defective, using one of the existing tests; unlike manufacturing defects, design defects are handled under negligence principles, not strict liability. If the “unavoidably unsafe” category is actually applied to vaccines (the Supreme Court – contrary to what the video says – rejected its application to NVICA in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, the plaintiff will have to show the manufacturer was actually negligent indesigning the vaccine, not an easy thing to show (although the Idaho court took a different approach to this). 

There would be no table injuries, so plaintiffs would have to show causation in every case, using expert testimony. Given the abundant amount of current studies against the claim that vaccines cause autism, and the lack of credible studies supporting it, the plaintiff is unlikely to be able to do that. 

According to the latest data I found, product liability claims focusing on asbestos win 53% of times, but other product liability claims win 19.6% - and that includes manufacturing defects, subject to strict liability. The chances are high, given the causation challenges, that claims like the hypothetical Eric’s would do much worse, losing the vast majority of the time. 

So, exchanging a civil process for NVICP would be probably make it harder for most plaintiffs to win, would not provide plaintiffs additional process guarantees, and be unlikely to make it easier for them to find a lawyer—and all that at the cost of potentially driving vaccine manufacturers out of the market when some cases – probably not related to autism – do win. 

It’s a great idea, however, if you want to undermine vaccination and bring back vaccine-preventable diseases. It would work great for the one in a million plaintiffs or less who will win and maybe – just maybe - get a larger award than she would in the vaccine court (though even then she would have to split it with her lawyer); but it would not help and may well harm the majority of plaintiffs, and it would not help public health.

For the most part it’s a bad idea all around, based on faulty premises.

Dorit Reiss is a professor of law at University of California. She has published writings on administrative law, and recently wrote "Compensating the Victims of Failure to Vaccinate: What are the Options?" Dorit is a member of Voices for Vaccines' Parent Advisory Board.

Moms Who Vax: A Response to Rep. Mary Franson

By Karen Ernst

Editor's Note: At a committee hearing in the Minnesota State Legislature on January 30th, state representative Mary Franson made comments about autism and vaccines in an otherwise unrelated discussion about whether insurance companies should be compelled to cover services relating to an autism diagnosis. These comments are representative of Franson's ideas about vaccines, as she has sponsored several bills that would weaken current state immunization rules. Below is parent Karen Ernst's response to Franson's comments.

I’m deeply disturbed by Minnesota State Representative Mary Franson’s comments during the House Health and Human Services Policy committee meeting on January 30, 2013.  While discussing funding for autism services, Franson commented: “As a mother of three children, I am very thankful than none of my children have had to experience autism, or my family hasn't had to go through that experience. But also, I'm one of those parents that no longer vaccines [sic] either because of the fear that I have had talking to other parents that have experienced their child becoming--experiencing autism after what they found, what they believed correlated with the vaccinations.”

I know many children on the autism spectrum.  Their parents are grateful that they are who they are and do not wish for them to be different. Their parents also readily protect their children from diseases prevented by vaccinating them.  The fear of autism is spread along with anti-vaccine misinformation, and neither is based on reality.

Stated plainly: vaccines do not cause autism.  Andrew Wakefield, whose poorly designed study was retracted shortly before he lost his license to practice medicine, has gained much financially in promoting the dangerous and erroneous idea that vaccines are linked to autism, but they are not.  Dozens of studies across the globe have shown that vaccines and autism are not related at all.  The science is settled.

One wonders why an elected representative is promoting both thoroughly debunked ideas about vaccines and hurtful sentiments about autism. Let’s hold our representatives to a higher standard and demand that they be grateful for the existence of all children and that they support measures that prevent potentially deadly diseases.

Deuce Bigalow and the Don

By Karen Ernst

Donald Trump, Immunologist

The beginning of school is a simple time for parents who fully vaccinate their children.  If their children are entering Kindergarten, seventh grade, or a new school, they simply send in the immunization records their pediatrician gave them.  Otherwise, they do not give the matter much thought.

The beginning of the school year must be entirely different for anti-vaccine celebrity parents, I imagine.  It must be, because they are coming out in full force with their complaints about vaccines and the accompanying school requirements.

Actor Rob Schneider is speaking out against a California bill, which has passed through the state legislature and is waiting for Governor Jerry Brown's signature.  What is Schneider's issue with this new piece of immunization legislation?  He objects to AB 2109's requirement that parents meet with a licensed health care professional and receive their signature before opting out of vaccinating their children.  That's right.  He objects to people receiving information from doctors.

Dr. Richard Pan, the Assemblyman and pediatrician from Sacramento who sponsored the bill, met with Rob Schneider in an attempt to discuss the bill and immunizations with him, but apparently the discussion did not go well.  According to the LA Times blog, Pan's spokesperson reported that “It stalled out at times just because they’re really working off two different sets of data, one that comes from worldwide scientific opinion and the other that comes from a collection of celebrities”

With AB 2109, California follows in the footsteps of Washington with its new requirement, and the objections, thankfully, will likely come to nothing.  Nevertheless, it begs the question: what are Schneider and the other anti-vaxxers afraid of with this bill?  AB 2109 does not mandate the content of the discussion between a parent and a health care provider.  The bill does not take away a parent's decision to eschew vaccines.  It simply asks that parents hear the the best information available to experts on the topic of vaccines.  Parents can still choose to side with the non-experts at the end of the conversation and send their children into their communities without contributing to community immunity and public health.

On the other coast lies the side of the story Rob Schneider and the rest of the anti-vaccine movement want you to hear, the side they hope drowns out those conversations between doctor and patient.  Donald Trump has entered the conversation in celebrity style, gaining much attention via Twitter and Facebook.

The latest is a photo showing the number of diseases we can prevent with vaccinations today compared to the number we could prevent in 1983.  Of course, Donald Trump frames it differently with this caption: “Look what happened to the autism rate from 1983-2008 since one-time massive shots were given to children. This chart was given to me by a parent of two autistic children. I may not be a doctor but I have lots of common sense. Read my previous statements on autism…”

I'd like to point out other things that have increased since 1983, which we could correlate with the rise in the diagnoses of autism.  Hip Hop was in its infancy in 1983, and now its reach is everywhere.  Cell phones, also, were nearly unheard of in 1983.  Now, like autism, their prevalence has risen.  And, as Lexi Magnusson at Mostly True Stuff has pointed out, JennyMcCarthy's rise in fame is also correlated with the rise in autism.

In fact, connecting vaccines to autism is one large failure to understand that correlation does not equal causation.  Business Week pointed out that we can correlate M. Night Shamaylan's decline in film-making quality with a decline in newspaper sales and Michele Bachmann's presidential candidacy with the show Staten Island Cakes.

It's simple, though.  Vaccines do not cause autism.  They just don't.  Even when anti-vaccine groups have tried to show that the incidence of autism is great among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated, they have failed.  They have also failed to float a theory that links autism to vaccines.  Study after study has disproven any possible link.  In fact, the science exonerating vaccines in the rise of autism is so thorough, that it is considered scientifically settled. 

Behind it all are things a little more insidious.  Part of the anti-vaccine spiel that vaccines cause autism rests on a fear of autism.  This fear of autism leads to all manner of abusive, terrible, and useless therapies, from chelation to bleach enemas.  I have also seen autistic adults being berated and bullied for demanding their right to be accepted for who they are.  In fact, the berating and bullying is present on Donald Trump's Facebook post.  All of this treatment is inhumane, and no person deserves it, whether he is autistic or neurotypical.  Everyone deserves acceptance for who he is and who he cannot help being.

I cannot help but be viscerally angry at celebrities who use their spotlight to instill fear in parents about vaccines, autism, and conversations with their own doctors.  They have a big voice, whether they deserve it or not, and they are using it to shout down experts and to endanger the health of our communities.  Ignorance is something we can all prevent, and no longer can we allow these celebrity voices to outweigh the reasonable voices of scientifically minded parents who intelligently rely on the best, real experts.  We must all speak out.

Karen Ernst is a mother, teacher, and the co-founder of Moms Who Vax

From Anti-Vax to Pro-Vax: One Mom's Story

By Chrissy Ruis

When my oldest child was born in 2005, we faithfully followed the immunization schedule, knowing nothing of the controversy until a several months later, when I discovered internet forums. I have always been into natural health and foods, so when I first learned about all of the scary-sounding ingredients in vaccines, I was alarmed. And then when my son (eight months old at the time) came down with a mild case of pertussis, I was angry that he got all of his shots “for nothing.”

I dove deep into the anti-vax scene, visiting countless websites, reading all of the books I could get my hands on. I read the package inserts, medical journals, and the CDC’s Pink Book, until I convinced myself that I was making an informed choice not to vaccinate. After all, I wasn’t vaccinated and I was perfectly healthy; my father didn’t believe in vaccinations, but he never really told me why. I became an active poster on some parenting forums, taking every opportunity to share my “research”; I even created my own vaccine information web page.

A couple of years later, when I was pregnant with my second child, my husband and I became very concerned with our son’s development; he was lagging behind and just seemed so…different from other toddlers. Our pediatrician was of an older generation and didn’t seem all that concerned, but it just kept nagging at me. My husband and I agreed to give it a little more time to see if he grew out of  “it,” not really knowing for sure what “it” was until soon after, on a mid-October afternoon.

Let me preface by saying I never watch talk shows, which is why it is so odd that, while waiting for my husband to finish getting ready to for an afternoon at the park, I happened to watch Oprah. Her guest that day was Jenny McCarthy, whom I only knew from the ’90’s dating show on MTV, Singled Out. Why was she on Oprah? Turns out, she was promoting her new book, Louder Than Words. The moment came where she began describing her son’s characteristic and it hit me “That’s it: autism!!” Sure, Bobby had relatively normal speech for his 2.75 years, but it was just something about the way he spoke. Everything else was spot-on: the repetitive behavior, the spinning objects, the lack of interaction, the sensory issues; it all fit. He was due for his next well-visit in another month, so I brought it up then with the pediatrician. Like I said, he was an older doctor (in practice longer than I had been alive), and was quite up front with his lack of knowledge about autism… which meant we were pretty much on our own to figure out how to proceed.

Just after his third birthday, Bobby was evaluated, given a diagnosis of autism, and enrolled in a full-day ABA program. At first I was relieved because my worries had finally been validated. Then I was angry and convinced that my child had been damaged by the vaccines he had gotten before we stopped after twelve months. Obviously, I had no intention of poisoning my newborn daughter, too.

Naturally, as the two worlds intersect, I got caught up in the biomedical movement, convinced I would “heal” Bobby by “detoxifying” him. The poor kid was on a restrictive diet, given countless supplements, clay baths. Epson salt rubs, you name it. He did make a lot of progress, to the point where he was one of the highest-functioning kids in his school. Arrogantly, I believed it was because I was so dedicated to biomedical treatments. Once he aged-out of his school, I decided to home school Bobby, as our school district had very few accommodations for him. I continued with biomedical treatments, except we were doing a lot less because money was a lot tighter than before. Home schooling was good at first, but gradually it began to take its toll; I was worn out and exhausted dealing with Bobby’s behaviors 24/7.

Then, last December brought the birth of our third child. We had a very serious health scare when I passed group b streptococcus to him during labor. I got the recommended IV antibiotics, but got to the hospital too late to get the full four-hour course before he was born. Obviously, it wasn’t vaccine-related, but it did cause me to re-evaluate my ideas about health care… including vaccines. When I’d go to the NICU to nurse my new baby, I’d look around at these tiny babies, some of them no bigger than a Barbie doll… and I was in awe of how science has advanced to where micro-preemies now actually have a shot at life.

How a simple antibiotic spared my baby from becoming very sick, or even dying.

Then it hit me that the same could be said for vaccines. I quickly tried to push that thought away, but I couldn’t escape that little epiphany. But how could I suddenly consider vaccinating? My oldest child hadn’t been vaccinated since twelve months, and my three-year-old had never been vaccinated. I still couldn’t think of vaccines as being anything but “toxins,” but I suddenly felt driven to look more closely at the pro-vaccine side.

Seth Mnookin’s book, The Panic Virus, had just been released; it sounded interesting, so I gave it a read. Wow. It made me seriously consider at least selectively vaccinating. He cites Dr. Paul Offit quite a bit, so I grudgingly decided to read his books, too. I devoured the books in one week, and during that time, every anti-vax argument I had began to crumble away.

I realized I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. Mnookin and Offit’s books completely deconstruct every aspect of the anti-vax and biomedical movements, until there is just no leg for them to stand on.

Realizing how wrong I had been, how easily I could have allowed my children to become seriously ill, and how much money I wasted on biomedical scam…I was so angry with myself. Unfortunately, with everything else going on in my struggle to balance my children’s needs, home schooling, and coping with a severely colicky newborn, I cracked. Literally. I had a mental breakdown and needed to be medicated. Money was tight, so the only way we could afford the co-pays for my medication and therapy sessions was to cut out Bobby’s supplements and the specialty foods to keep him on his diet. I was terrified that he would regress and lose all of his progress, but guess what happened: nothing! He got neither better nor worse, which means we had been throwing money down the drain for nearly three years.

Next came the moment of truth: bringing my kids to be vaccinated. First up was my three-year-old. It was traumatic for her, but we got her up-to-date. I had originally planned on a much delayed schedule for my new baby, but I realized there was just no logical reason to delay, so we went ahead with the recommended schedule. They are both fine and developing typically. With Bobby, I hadn’t planned on getting him any vaccines, but once we decided to send him to public school (we moved to a new district with a better special ed department), I knew I didn’t want to send him without any protection, lest he bring home preventable diseases to the new baby. He got the few he needed to be up-to-date for school and despite my dreadful fears, guess what happened: nothing! He didn’t regress, and if anything, he actually had a developmental leap in his social skills (coincidentally, of course!).

Maybe, just maybe, vaccines had absolutely nothing to do with his autism; he never had a regression or anything, just developmental delays that, two more babies later, I can recognize.

I became very angry at the whole anti-vax movement. Angry at the subtle sleight-of-hand and the exploitation of concerned parents. Angry for the desperate parents of autistic children, who are being scammed like I was. Angry at myself for encouraging so many others to stop vaccinating. I’m slowly making amends, though. I am vocal about my change in beliefs and can (and do!) debate circles around any anti-vaxxer.  The kids are all up-to-date on their vaccines, and are as happy and healthy as ever.

I even got my first vaccinations, too.


Editor's Note: If you are a parent who would like to share your story about why you vaccinate, please contact us at momswhovax AT gmail.com

Vaccines Cleared Again as "Culprit": or, Whose Mind Do You Trust?

For any parents out there seeking fresh reassurance that immunizations do not cause autism, perhaps this week's announcement of research results from the Institute of Medicine will provide some.

Using seventeen years of data, the institute found absolutely no link between immunizations and autism; more, it found that immunizations are overwhelmingly safe, and that bad reactions are exceptionally rare, especially considering how many vaccines are given across the globe.

But, tragically, those with a great deal at stake (mostly money) in perpetuating the falsehood that vaccines not only cause autism, but are responsible for a host of health problems, continue to deny the science and find ways to scare parents into skipping vaccines. As parents ourselves, we understand all too well how that visceral fear of harm coming to our children can be stimulated--and taken advantage of.

The National Academy of Sciences has nothing to gain by lying about the research. It is an independent body of researchers and scientists. The question of undue influence aside, the anti-vaxxers then ask if the science has been interpreted correctly. We would ask you to judge for yourself the qualifications of those minds from the Institute of Medicine (and all the minds responsible for producing the more than 1,000 vaccine studies the Institute analyzed) versus the qualifications of non-scientists, public relations professionals, and autism activists from anti-vax organizations like National Vaccine Information Center.

In order to continue believing the vaccine-autism non-link, you would have to believe in a decades-long conspiracy among the United States government, the greatest scientific minds in the country, university researchers, epidemiologists, including those from the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, pediatricians across the country, and drug-makers. That only a single man, over the course of this entire debate, has come forward to make "scientific" claims that immunizations and autism are related, is telling. One would actually think that more folks would take advantage of an opportunity to become famous--to be the one guy or gal who could definitely prove a link between vaccines and autism. More telling, though, is that that single man who did claim to find a link--Andrew Wakefield--faked his results, manipulated his subjects, kept that manipulated sample size to under fifteen, and was stripped of his license to practice medicine as a result of his fraud. The Lancet, which published this study, retracted it entirely. In contrast, the New York Times describes the Institute of Medicine this way:

The Institute of Medicine is the nation’s most esteemed and authoritative adviser on issues of health and medicine, and its reports can transform medical thinking around the world. 

We then turn to concerns  that have some real science behind them. For example, this study found that while exceptionally rare, immunizations can cause negative effects in some immuno-compromised individuals (much like any medicine might). It is in this area of the study that you will likely see many anti-vaxxers flock to in order to proclaim that the study "proves" vaccines are harmful. What you won't get from them is context.

Let's take the finding that one of the risks of receiving the chickenpox vaccine is that, years after the vaccination, some people (immuno-compromised individuals, such as those undergoing chemotherapy) can develop pneumonia, meningitis, or hepatitis if the virus used in the vaccine in a weakened form "reawakens" because of that cancer. This, you'll hear anti-vaxxers say--and many already have--proves that the safety of vaccines is still in question.

Not quite. Here's your context. The exact same risks of developing meningitis, pneumonia, and hepatitis are present in individuals who got chickenpox naturally. No, that's not quite right--the risks for developing these health problems are far *greater* in those who had chickenpox naturally. Read: the risk is greater in those who were not vaccinated and who contracted chickenpox the old-fashioned way. Or the new-fashioned way, I suppose: at "chickenpox parties," where unvaccinated children are exposed to an infected child so they can gain "natural immunity" in the form of the chickenpox virus.

We do find it heartening that as more and more of these conclusions from wide-ranging, objective scientific research firmly establish that there is no link between immunizations and autism, the retorts from anti-vaxxers begin to sound as error-ridden as they, in truth, are. In fact, I have noticed a note of desperation creeping into some of the quotes I've been reading in the press. Take the quote in the New York Times article from Sallie Bernard of SafeMinds, which contends there is a link between vaccines and autism. She says,  "I think this report says that the science is inadequate, and yet we are giving more and more vaccines to our kids, and we really don't know what their safety profile is."

It is interesting that a survey of more than 1,000 peer-reviewed research articles on vaccine safety, which finds no link to autism and very few adverse effects in the population to any vaccine, is considered "inadequate" to Ms. Bernard.

If you're still not sure whose scientific judgment to trust, you can compare credentials. Ellen Wright Clayton, the chair of the IOM's panel, is the Craig-Weaver Professor of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt, the Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society. She is considered one of the country's leading experts in Inborn Genetic Diseases, and as been a member of the IOM since 2006.

Sallie Bernard is the founder and former president of a full-service market research and marketing consulting firm and is the parent of an autistic chid.

Here is the New York Times article on the new findings by the Institute of Medicine. Vaccine Cleared Again as Autism Culprit.