A new article in the peer-reviewed open access journal PLoS Biology details why the view of vaccinations having impacted autism rates has persisted in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.
To this day, one out of four Americans accept as true a demonstrably false premise.
Medical Anthropologist Sharon Kaufman explains below the fold why she decided to examine this pheonomenon, and what she found.
[Update: this diary just hit Google News. This might get interesting.]
[NOTE: Much of the following is from an open-source article, which if properly credited, allows one to exceed normal fair-usage standards. I have appended the proper crediting below]
The information appears in an article entitled:
A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine-Autism Wars.
Liza Gross*
Senior Science Writer/Editor, PLoS Biology, Public Library of Science, San Francisco, California, United States of America
Citation: Gross L (2009) A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine–Autism Wars. PLoS Biol 7(5): e1000114. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000114
Published: May 26, 2009
Copyright: © 2009 Liza Gross. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
* E-mail: lgross@plos.org
Let's get to the article:
Sharon Kaufmann explains why she became interested in the whole question:
Until the summer of 2005, Sharon Kaufman had never paid much attention to the shifting theories blaming vaccines for a surge in reported cases of autism. Kaufman, a medical anthropologist at the University of California, San Francisco, knew that the leading health institutions in the United States had reviewed the body of evidence, and that they found no reason to think vaccines had anything to do with autism. But when she read that scientists and public officials who commented on the studies routinely endured malevolent emails, abusive phone calls, and even death threats, she took notice.
"Hecklers were issuing death threats to spokespeople," Kaufman exclaims, "people who simply related the scientists' findings." To a researcher with a keen eye for detecting major cultural shifts, these unsettling events signaled a deeper trend. "What happens when the facts of bioscience are relayed to the public and there is disbelief, lack of trust?" Kaufman wondered. "Where does that lead us?"
Kaufman spent 26 months on hiatus from her primary interest in cultural trends related to health and aging to examine the issue.
(Personal note: I had German measles as a child; there was no vaccine then. In an average year before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, an average of 3 to 4 million cases, and 450 deaths were reported in the US each year. By the year 2000, the disease was declared eliminated in the US.)
What were Kaufman's conclusions?
Kaufman sees the enduring belief in the vaccine–autism theory as an example of what Ludwik Fleck, a clinical microbiologist with a passion for epistemology, called "an event in the history of thought"—a critical step in the way the perception of a scientific fact changes [10]. In the US, that first step came in the form of a simple legislative action that produced new information about what was in vaccines—and quickly fed speculative theories linking them to autism.
In 1997, in response to a bill passed in Congress, the FDA examined levels of mercury in vaccines. It concluded that with all the additional vaccinations added over the years, if each vaccination contained thimerosal, the total level of mercury would exceed existing safety standards for methylmercury.
An important clarification is necessary here. Thimerosal does not contain methylmercury; it contains ethylmercury. While existing standards did not yet exist for ethylmercury, there was evidence that very high doses of ethylmercury could cause neurological damage. So, as a precautionary measure, the AAP recommended the removal of thimerosal from vaccines.
As it turns out,ethylmercury in vaccines was found not to be an issue. Here's a money quote from the NIH fact sheet:
NIAID-supported studies at the University of Rochester and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, assessed levels of mercury in the blood, hair, urine, and stool of 40 infants who received vaccines containing thimerosal and 21 infants who received vaccines without thimerosal, as controls. The infants studied were 6 months of age or younger. This study generated several important results.
Mercury levels in blood and urine were low in all infants studied and, in many cases, too small to measure. There was no observed dose-dependent relationship between the level of thimerosal received through vaccination and the level of mercury in the body.
Mercury levels in blood did not exceed, at any time, the blood levels that correspond to Environmental Protection Agency guidelines for exposure.
Mercury levels in the stool of infants receiving vaccines containing thimerosal were relatively high compared to mercury levels in the stool of infants who were not exposed to thimerosal, providing evidence that mercury from thimerosal is eliminated in the stool of infants.
But the damage was already done; fear, stoked further by non-peer-reviewed articles like this one had already stoked fears of parents.
As the years have gone by, further studies, some involving thousands of children, had rejected a thimerosal/autism connection. And of course, there has been no thimerosal in the most common vaccines since 2001. But that hasn't killed the fear beast, which in turn has led to the re-emergence of viral outbreaks.
I recommend anyone who is interested in the vaccine/autism debate, or even just the group dynamics of fear trumping science to read this article. It will lead you through the role Bobby Kennedy Jr. played, the place Jenny McCarthy has had, and the consequences.
Why should we, as progressives, care? Lisa Gross explains why:
Sadly, studies suggest that the burden of lowered immunization rates will likely fall disproportionately on poor people living in crowded conditions, hotbeds of disease transmission, and exacerbate existing health disparities among minority populations—where kids go unvaccinated not by choice but because of limited access to health services. Exemptions also pose a threat to children who can't be vaccinated because of a medical condition or who didn't mount an immune response to the vaccine, as well as to hundreds of thousands of people on chemotherapy, recovering from organ transplants, or struggling with compromised immunity.