By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
The current controversy over whether parents should be
forced to have their children vaccinated for measles is one of the painful
signs of our times. Measles was virtually wiped out in the United States, years
ago. Why the resurgence of this disease now?
The short answer is that false claims, based on other
false claims, led many parents to stop getting their children vaccinated
against measles.
The key false claim was that the vaccine for measles
caused an increase in autism. This claim was made in 1998 by a doctor writing
in a distinguished British medical journal, so it is understandable that many
parents took it seriously, and did not want to run the risk of having their
child become autistic.
Fortunately, others took the claim seriously in a very
different sense. They did massive studies involving half a million children in
Denmark and 2 million children in Sweden. These studies showed that there was
no higher incidence of autism among children who had been vaccinated than among
children who had not been vaccinated.
Incidentally, the “evidence” on which the original claim
that vaccines caused autism was based was just twelve children. But the
campaign to convince the public was a masterpiece of propaganda.
The storyline was that pharmaceutical companies who
produced the vaccine were callously risking and sacrificing helpless children
in pursuit of profit. This is the kind of dramatic stuff the media love. It
never seemed to occur to the media that lawyers who were suing pharmaceutical
companies had a vested interest in this storyline that the media fed on to the
public.
Unfortunately, it takes time to run careful scientific
studies, involving vast numbers of children in different countries. That
allowed the propaganda against vaccines to go on for years. Eventually,
however, the results of the studies so completely discredited the claim that
the measles vaccine caused autism that the medical journal which had published
the article publicly repudiated it. The doctor who wrote the article had his
license revoked.
By this time, however, there was a whole anti-vaccine
movement, and crusading movements are seldom stopped by facts.
This was not the only false claim involved. What made
that claim seem plausible was a highly publicized increase in the number of
children diagnosed as being autistic or being “on the autism spectrum.”
What was not so widely publicized was that the definition
of “autism” had expanded over the years to include children who would never
have been called autistic by the standards set up when autism was defined by
its discoverer, Professor Leo Kanner of the Johns Hopkins medical school, back
in 1943.
Professor Kanner fought against the expansion of the
definition of autism but, after his death, the definition continued to expand —
and the number of children who met the expanded definition greatly increased.
There were financial incentives for this expansion.
Late-talking children, for example, could get government programs to pay for
their treatment if they were designated as autistic or on the autism spectrum.
Despite headlines and hysteria about skyrocketing numbers
of children diagnosed as autistic, the number of children who meet the original
definition of autism has been relatively stable in recent years, at about one
quarter of one percent of all children, according to Professor Stephen Camarata
of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in his recent book, Late-Talking
Children.
It may be significant that the number of children
regarded as mentally retarded has fallen by numbers similar to the rise in the
number of children regarded as autistic. According to Professor Camarata, “This
too suggests that changes in definitions and in diagnostic practices are
contributing to the perceived ‘epidemic’ of autism.”
Does this mean that vaccines are safe? In a categorical
sense, nothing on the face of the earth is 100 percent safe — including going
unvaccinated. But the claim that vaccines cause autism has been discredited by
evidence.
Some say the decision to vaccinate or not should be the
parents’ choice. That would be fine if their child would live isolated from
other children. But that is impossible.
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