Can we move on now?
~ This entry was posted on March 15, 2010
In a landmark ruling, the federal “vaccines court” ruled Friday in three separate cases that the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal does not cause autism. To anyone who follows this story this is not actually news. The finding supports the broad scientific consensus on the matter that we have known for years. But sadly there is still a relatively large percentage of parents who are convinced that their child’s illness was caused by vaccines. Some reports indicate that as many as 1 in 4 parents still believe that vaccines cause autism.
We don’t discount that parents with a child with autism grasp at straws to try to understand this baffling disorder. Of course they want to explore anything that may help their children and are even more vulnerable to the latest web/news story. Having a child with any disability is painful and all consuming. High profile celebrities who lead the “blame the vaccine” parade do not help the matter. But the science here is very clear. There is no evidence that vaccines cause autism. It is time that we believe what the data shows. It is disheartening that so much time and money is being spent on something of no significance when we could be focusing our energies on uncovering what truly causes autism, how to best treat those affected by the disorder and how we help parents pay for the costs of those treatments.
I was pleased to see that the very respected Autism Speaks, the nation’s largest autism science and advocacy organization, came out with a statement following the ruling in which they said “the proven benefits of vaccinating a child to protect them against serious diseases far outweigh the hypothesized risk that vaccinations might cause autism. Thus, we strongly encourage parents to vaccinate their children to protect them from serious childhood diseases.”
Sadly, I suspect this won’t be the last we hear on this matter. But here’s hoping it is because as Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA, wrote in a blog on the Daily Beast “The sooner we get over the idea that vaccines are the cause of autism, the sooner we can find what is really to blame.”
