The Power of Bad Ideas

I have tried not to be too hasty about claims that vaccines cause autism. Autism is very weird, and it seems especially weird that it should be increasing -- severe autism is not a vague condition like ADHD, for which you can imagine the numbers changing with different standards of diagnosis. Autism is pretty hard to miss. But legislators bending over backwards to avoid offense have commissioned study after study, and not one has found any link. And as the scientific case against any connection gets firmer, the anti-vaccine lobby gets louder and louder. The NY Times has a story today about Paul Offitt, an infectious disease specialist and advocate for vaccines who has seen protesters holding up signs that call him a terrorist.

I think the hysteria flows from two sources: first, the inability of parents of one or two children to accept the loss of a child to a mysterious, untreatable condition, that is, a confluence of small family size and high medical expectations; and second, the sense of unease created by our modern, mechanized, digital, chemistry-based world. Actress Amanda Peet:

“Where I live in L.A.,” she said in a telephone interview, “there’s this child-rearing trend — only feed your kids organic food, detoxify your house. And there’s a lot of anticorporate fervor, anti-pharmaceutical company fervor.”

When she was pregnant, she said, “I’d have lunch with my friends who were moms, and they’d say they wouldn’t vaccinate, or would space out their vaccinations and hadn’t I heard?”

And it remains possible that some environmental toxin or another, or some combination of them, might contribute to autism. But the attack on vaccines is not driven by an attempt to understand what is happening. It is driven by despair and dread, a combination that can overwhelm even the strongest minds. I think almost everyone who watches the parents of autistic children fulminate feels too much pity to want to oppose or attack them. But as the debate gets louder and uglier, it is becoming essential that rational people take a stand here. Diseases that we have nearly wiped out with vaccines used to kill millions of people every year. Except for smallpox, those diseases are still out there, and if we lower our guard they will come back and kill again. Wherever unvaccinated children congregate, they create the danger of an outbreak, and since even the best vaccines convey only partial immunity some vaccinated children could get sick, too. That risk is becoming real, and that means mobilizing the rational majority to oppose the danger anti-vaccine fanatics are starting to pose to our society.

If there is hope for curing or reducing autism, it does not come from mystical quackery and anti-corporate rhetoric. It comes from science. If we do not face the problem with rational, open minds, and use real evidence to develop a real understanding of autism and its causes, we will never cure anyone. Denouncing vaccines will not help the autistic, their parents, or anyone else.