The Vaccine-Autism Scare: Panic in the Wrong Place

Just up in Newsweek: A detailed account of "how childhood vaccines became villains," starting with the 1998 press conference at which Dr. Andrew Wakefield announced that he had found a link between the MMR vaccine and autism----a link that has very much now been disproven. Kevin Leitch also posted a A Brief History of the MMR and Autism on January 28th here and I wrote about the recent vaccine court rulings, in which three federal judges ruled against three families---the Cedillos, the Hazlehursts, and the Snyders---who were seeking compensation from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP). (And, you can read the decisions yourself here.)

These are the last two sentences of the Newsweek article by Sharon Begley:

It is bad enough that the vaccine-autism scare has undermined one of the greatest successes of preventive medicine and terrified many new parents. Most tragic of all, it has diverted attention and millions of dollars away from finding the true causes and treatments of a cruel disease.

"Vaccine-autism scare" is an apt way to describe what increasingly seems like a well-meaning but misdirected panic about vaccines or something in vaccines as somehow being a cause of autism. Yes, this "scare" has "diverted attention and millions of dollars away" from the real concerns here, but it should be noted that, as important as it is to find out more about "causes and treatments," at the top of everyone's agenda should be the need to provide the best and most appropriate education and services for individuals on the autism spectrum, of all ages. Autism is lifelong and we need to start thinking of it not as a "cruel disease," but as a disability that is most likely genetic, and about how we can change things to best support them.

And the fact that we've spent so much time and energy and resources on one now-refuted theory of autism: That should really give us reason to panic.

Photo by Jim Linwood.