Jenny McCarthy as an activist, "Green Vaccines," death threats against pro-vaccine doctors, deadly measles outbreaks: all sprang from one source, a flawed medical study with a tiny sample size, a lead author willing to fudge the facts, and a story the media found too fascinating to fully examine.
Writing in this week's Newsweek magazine, Sharon Begley lays out the timeline of what would become one of the biggest medical fairy tales of the past decade -- a narrative of corrupt pharamaceutical companies, poisoned children, and devoted parents. Too bad it wasn't, you know, true.
As is now clear, the study published in the Lancet medical journal back in 1998 linking the MMR vaccine to autism (via intestinal problems) was just plain bad science. The study looked at only twelve children, for one thing. Worse yet, the lead doctor, Andrew Wakefield, fudged the facts. A decade later, ten of the twelve co-authors have disavowed the research they published, but as Begley's story made clear, at the time the media and public found Wakefield and his findings not only trustworthy, but revolutionary. And he wasn't alone; in 2000 U.S. Representative Dan Burton chaired a congressional hearing to look into the connection, and TV's 60 Minutes gave it the old expose treatment. It wasn't hard to paint parents as heroes (because so frequently they are, even when their facts are wrong), nor to deride the drug companies as villains (because, again, they often are). A story so delicious has a tendency to rob the media of its hallowed skepticism -- how else to explain the major coverage of a study of 12 kids, when subsequent studies (such as one at Boston University that looked at two million children) showed zero relationship between the MMR and autism.
The story rode a wave of parental anxiety and media hype so big that it caused actual changes in behavior around vaccination -- and here's where, I think, Wakefield and his ilk bear some major culpability. As vaccination rates went down and outbreaks broke out, children died of easily preventable diseases. And despite the frequent exhortation from anti-vaccine crusaders to "follow the money" in looking at relationships between doctors and pharmaceutical companies, I'd love to see more digging into Wakefield's financial stake in the autism industry (he was officially sanctioned for misconduct in having hidden the financial support he had received from parents of children with autism before undertaking the 1998 study, and now makes his living running a center that claims to cure autism).
The recent ruling by a special court that declared no connection between autism and vaccines has settled the legal question, for now. As for what happens in the court of public opinion, it's clear that's a far more complicated matter. The anguish felt by parens of autistic kids is real, as is the desire of every parent to protect her child. Let's hope that getting past the vaccine witch-hunt will free up more energy toward finding causes, cures and treatments for peope with autism.
Related:
Resercher Fabricated Autism Link in Vaccine
Florida Dad Pushing to Ban All Thimerosal in Vaccines
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