5-Minute Time Out: Dr. Paul Offit, M.D.
The author of Autism’s False Prophets says vaccines don’t cause autism.
by Gwynne Watkins
March 2, 2009
So the way to measure vaccine safety is to look at large populations who've received the vaccine. But when you've got vaccines like the flu vaccine, which is a different formula every year, how can parents know that the vaccines their children are getting are safe?
Much reassurance should be garnered from prelicensure studies. I mean, vaccines are tested on a level that is greater than anything we do for anything else we put in our bodies. The Rotateq vaccine and the Rotarix vaccine (both for for rotavirus), one was tested in 70,000 children prelicensure, the other was tested in 62,000 children prelicensure. It's a single Phase III trial, one trial. That's huge! I'm the head of the therapeutic standards community at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and I would say that of the drugs that are on our formulary, seventy percent of them are not licensed for use in children, but we use them in children.
What are some ways that parents can empower themselves using actual information and not just Googling and getting Jenny McCarthy's "Generation Rescue" website and believing what she says?
It's much easier to find people who are like-minded on the internet no matter how ill-founded or ill-conceived their notion is. It's also very hard to find good information. If you're the parent of a child with autism and you want to know what is known about the causes of autism, there's actually a lot. There was a review in the journal Science by Jim Sutcliffe — it was titled "Insights into the Pathogenesis of Autism," and it was a great article. It listed roughly the thirty genes that have been shown to be involved with autism, it showed what proteins those genes made, where in the brain cell those proteins were located, how they trafficked — it was a great article from July 2008.
But that's a scientific journal. Are there publications that are accessible to parents of children with autism? Where would I go to avoid misinformation?
What I can say is that as a medical professional, I see those journals that have those kinds of articles in them. The media doesn't typically pick them up because they're typically viewed as boring. To talk about proteins like neurexin, neuroligin that sit on the synapse, where one brain cell communicates with another, it requires a level of sophistication and an explanation that I think newspapers consider boring.
I think people also don't like the idea that they are not smart enough to understand something.
...continued from previous page!
Related Links
Neurodiversity.com - The website of Kathleen Seidel, founder of the neurodiversity movement.
Unstrange Minds - The website of autism researcher Roy Richard Grinker
Dr. Paul Offit on Jenny McCarthy - Another excerpt from Autism's False Prophets.
This is going to sound completely politically incorrect — and this is why I get the hate now that I get, and this is never going to come out right, but what the hell — when parents say to me, "I did my research and I've decided not to get the chickenpox vaccine," then they haven't done their research. What this "research" means typically is that they looked on the internet and read people's opinions about research. If you want to go to primary research, you should really read the three hundred articles on the chicken pox vaccine safety and effectiveness, look at the scientific studies. And I think it is the rare parent that has a background in pathogenesis or immunology or virology or biology.
The people who do read those three hundred articles are the people with the expertise, who are on advisory bodies like the American Association of Pediatrics — they do go through those studies and they make decisions based on those studies.
On one hand you want to empower parents on healthcare decisions, because if you don't you're going to lose them and they're not going to be the best advocates for their kids' health. The paternalistic "I know more than you because I'm a doctor" certainly doesn't fly anymore in the twenty-first century, but I think there's a difference between paternalism and ceding your expertise.
For example, I was rounding in the hospital and there was a woman who didn't want to give her children vaccines, specifically the rotavirus — which had just come out — and I'm the co-inventor of that vaccine. I spent twenty-five years working on that vaccine. I think I understand that vaccine better than most people. So I'm trying to explain it to her and she just wouldn't accept it. She had read something on the internet and that was that.
Some people believe that you're part of a conspiracy to hide the truth about vaccines from parents. What's your response to that?
All I can say is that those people spend no time with the people who do work on vaccines. First of all, I'm a parent too — I love the separation of "He's a scientist" and "She's a doctor" and "She's a parent." I'm a parent. I have young children who are now getting older, sixteen and fourteen, but when I was giving my children vaccines, I was looking into them. What motivates any scientist is one, the love of science, but two, you think you can do something good. God knows it's not the money; you do science because you think can contribute. Rotavirus kills two thousand children a day in this world and I think we're at a state with science now where we have this technology to prevent all sorts of suffering and death. That's what motivates you.
But you made a lot of money developing the rotavirus vaccine.
A ridiculous amount of money. You have to protect the technology — only a company can make a vaccine. It costs about a billion dollars to make a vaccine, which was more than I or my co-inventor or the hospital had. You have to go to a company to make a medical product. No company's going to take it unless the technology is protected. So you protect the technology. It then became a medical product, and I made millions of dollars.
©2009 Gwynne Watkins and Babble
About the Author
|
|
Related Articles
|
|
Gwynne Watkins was Babble's founding Senior Editor. She has written for a variety of web and print publications, and her theatrical work has been produced throughout the New York area. Her new family musical, Tea with Chachaji, will premiere in early 2010. |
|
|
-
by Paul A. Offit, MD
Vaccines don't cause autism. So why do so many people believe that they do?
-
by Liza Featherstone
Why so many parents won't vaccinate — and what it means for our kids.
-
by Kerry Cohen
My autistic son doesn't need to be fixed.
|
