“How do you go from bouncing baby boy to all of these problems within three hours?” That’s what one mother from San Diego asked when I shot an hour-long program three years ago about the developmental disorder called autism, and the possibility that vaccinations might be a cause.
Her son Eric had been “perfect,” she said, until he had his childhood vaccinations. Which were followed by a slide backward. Into autism.
Of course, if it were just that one mom, you could dismiss her question as an anxious inference. But I interviewed about a dozen families with autistic kids, and they all told the same story: My child was developing normally — motor skills, communication skills, social skills — until the vaccinations. Then, a violent reaction, and everything changed. The mother of one little girl I met in Tennessee who is now totally dysfunctional told me, “She screamed like a wild animal,” and said, “I pray to God I never hear it again.”
Sure, you can scoff at a small sample of 12. But how about a bigger one? More than 5,000 families have filed claims with the federal government’s Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Are they all wackos? The ones I interviewed certainly aren’t. They include a county probation officer, a law professor at New York University, the wife of a lieutenant colonel in the Marines, even the daughter of a former chairman of NBC. Not exactly a fringe group.
Yet anyone who believes that for all their preventive possibilities, some vaccinations might also be dangerous are vilified. A Wall Street Journal editorial called their fears the “vaccine follies.” A New York Times columnist referred to “a chilling disregard for science.”
I’m sorry, but there still is too little science, from either side, about all this. In fact, the National Institutes of Health wrote on its own website, “The exact causes of these abnormalities remain unknown. There are probably a combination of factors that lead to autism.”
Autism is not a “disease” that can be detected by testing a child’s blood, or by mapping the genome; it is a disorder of the brain that leads to a set of abnormal, anti-social behaviors. You wouldn’t even find it in an autopsy. So if the exact causes remain unknown, how can anyone say with caustic certainty that vaccinations aren’t one of them?
Science? The movement that questions the safety of vaccines has long called for a study that would specifically compare the incidence of autism in vaccinated children versus unvaccinated children. The government’s response? It would be unethical to leave some kids unvaccinated for the purpose of research. Excuse me, but hasn’t the whole panic during the measles epidemic been that too many kids aren’t being vaccinated? Control group, check!
Meantime, to me, circumstantial evidence points to the possibility of a vaccine-autism link. Does it make no sense at all to think that if we load our children with foreign serums, something might sometimes go wrong? Especially since, until only a few years ago, a common preservative in vaccines contained mercury. When I was a child, I was warned that if mercury ever spills from a broken thermometer, I shouldn’t even touch it. Yet we injected it into our kids.
Look, I believe in vaccinations. If they help stem the spread of disease and reduce the public risk, I think they serve the greater good. But there are doctors who will vaccinate when a child is sick and the immune system is down, or offer multiple vaccinations in a single visit simply because it’s convenient.
Anyway, if I had an autistic child and had reason to believe that vaccinations were the cause, I might define “risk” differently. One mother said to me as her severely autistic child sat on her lap, “If this were your child, you couldn’t say, ‘It’s OK. It may have happened to you, but look at the people we’ve saved.’ “
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit or check out our for how to submit by e-mail or mail.
