Blame media-fed panic for anti-vaccine crusade

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.

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 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 was based — that vaccines caused autism — was just 12 children. But the campaign to convince the public was a masterpiece of propaganda.

The story line was that pharmaceutical companies that 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 story line that the media fed 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, the results of the studies so completely discredited the claim that the measles vaccine caused autism that the medical journal which had pub- lished 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.

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 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’s impossible.