Okay I'm not even going to bother with some witty intro, I'm just going to get right into this.
If President Trump is seriously considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head a "vaccine safety and scientific integrity" panel, then that is probably among the most alarming things he proposes to do. Leave the accused racism and misogyny aside for a moment. This needs attention.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a known anti-vaccine figure. Through and through. In the face of mountains of data to the contrary, he questions the safety of the current vaccination schedule, links vaccines to autism, and thinks there's this ongoing conspiracy on part of the pharmaceutical industry to inject our kids with thimerosal (never mind that thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccines back in 2001). He has cherry picked data, misrepresented science, and twisted the words of his accused in ways that would have earned me a failing grade on a high school English paper. You could say it's just benign neglect, but considering what he has to profit from his books, interviews, and his work as an activist and attorney, I beg to differ.
Yeah, scientific integrity my foot Mr. Trump! I don't care if this guy pats you on the back for your mistaken belief that vaccines can cause autism, you might as well be putting an astrologist in charge of NASA! This man has no background in health, public, pediatric, neurological, epidemiological, or chemical sciences. Or anything like unto them really. He is an environmental activist and attorney. Big difference. The fact that other individuals will be on this committee as well gives me no comfort considering that no reputable expert or insider on this issue would want anything to do with that which uses pseudoscience as a platform for public policy.
I've heard it said from multiple sources that we are living in something of a "post-truth" era. More and more I'm finding that to be an apt description. I mean, you really need to look no further than politics.
In the case of Mr. Kennedy's potential commission, however, it's not just about politics. It's about science, which is ironically one of the avenues through which man can discover truth. But then again, who needs to discover actual truth when we can disregard established methods and stick with that which feels good to us?
I mean, the potential commission of Mr. Kennedy here is a case in point of that. No matter how many times it gets repeated, evidence does not support a casual link between vaccines and autism, nor would a healthy child's immune system be overwhelmed by the current vaccine schedule (frankly, an infant is exposed to who knows how many more pathogens just by being held in somebody's arms than from any vaccine). Studies have demonstrated this over, and over, and over, and over again. What I've cited here only scratches the surface of the data available.
And yet there are those who insist on clinging to the few "studies" sympathetic to what they've already concluded. While composing this post, I was able to find three (1, 2, 3)* papers potentially fitting that mold, two of which came from the same journal titled Medical Hypotheses, which isn't really much of an academic journal considering that it does not use peer review in the submission process (nor were those papers really studies that presented anything new.) In case you didn't know, peer review is a very, very important step in maintaining scientific integrity and rigor**. Admittedly, the journal was intended to be a more unconventional forum anyway, but when you're dabbling in pseudoscience and publishing two papers about AIDS Denialism as recently as 2009, you're beyond merely unconventional at that point. To be fair, the journal did retract those papers, but still...
And then there's the third one, which turns out to be more nuanced than meets the eye. In any event, I haven't found anything that replicated its findings, which is again another important thing in science. Isolated studies are not enough. They need to be repeated.
Oh but wait, how could I forget! The man responsible for creating all this vaccine hysteria was Andrew Wakefield, who published a study in the Lancet in 1999 that proposed a potential link between the MMR vaccine and the onset of autism in young children. Alarming as it was at first, his own findings were inconsistent if not falsified, the sample size was extremely small, no control groups were used, his methods were unethical and motivations dubious. Ultimately his medical license was revoked, and the Lancet retracted the paper.
Now, perhaps some good came out of that, as it fueled intensive studies into the safety of vaccines. Yet the anti-vaccine camp refuses to relent. Instead they backtrack and change their arguments, but each time these new hypotheses are consistently refuted. Of course, having multiple failed hypotheses on your table isn't bad for science in and of itself. The problem arises when you continue to believe in them even when they are demonstrably wrong. Not that it's easy to admit being wrong. But if one is serious about being honest in an open discussion about public health, shouldn't that be key?
Yet in the post-truth world we seem to live in, those operating under the guise of "scientific integrity" may be just that: post-truth. At that point, you're not really concerned with the whole truth thing so much as twisting the parts that suit you. Then there's duping the masses of otherwise reasonable people into following suit.
What's sad about this is that it means bad news for public health and safety. I need not go into the issue of vaccine preventable diseases. But what I would like to go into is this: autism awareness itself.
This is something that strikes a more personal chord with me as I my older brother and several cousins fall on the autism spectral disorder. You can read about my brother in a previous post titled Adam.
The thing that I have noticed about those who cling to anti-vaccine logic is a fundamental misunderstanding of what autism is, as well as the individuals affected by it. This on multiple levels. I remember when I was writing a research paper on the different hypotheses around the causes of autism. Shortly after I finished it, I somehow stumbled across a Jenny McCarthy thing where she claimed she "cure" her son of autism. How did she do it? A gluten-free diet!
Huh!? I thought. That literally made absolutely no sense whatsoever! I mean, common sense alone, especially after I had just done that research paper, said that this was complete bunk. Autism is a neurological disorder, what the frack does gluten have anything to do with it? Oh, so it reduces stomach cramps and bad bacteria in the gut, which means her son became a lot calmer? Well no duh he became calmer, his stomach wasn't hurting anymore! That would make anyone ornery! But that has nothing to do with autism! Hey, she should come visit Adam and see if her natural home remedies cure him! I'm sure once she's through, he'll be talking, reading and behaving normally like magic... NOT!
What it reminded me of was when our family tried not giving Adam milk for a while as a kid, because I guess someone had told us that was a good treatment. He had his own jug of soy milk or whatever in the fridge, but ultimately it made no difference whatsoever, and according to mom he hated that stuff anyway unless it was on cereal.
This, unfortunately, is not the end of alternative treatments*** used on children with autism, thanks in large part to the people who promote the idea that vaccines are to blame. While things like aromatherapy, gluten-free and dairy-free diets are just silly, those in the last link are horrifying. And real. And dangerous. So it makes me all the more infuriated at the people who market these as viable treatment options. It takes a special kind of evil to tell a scared parent to use special diluted industrial bleach enemas on their vulnerable, disabled child. And if that doesn't work, try chemical castration! Or chelation! Or hyperbaric oxygen therapy!
Or you know what, let's pull out all the stops and try stem cells! It's not like stem-cell treatment is already a very experimental area in medicine that you should never try at home! Nah, it's somehow guaranteed to cure autism! Don't ask me how it works.
More nefarious is this: that children with autism are those who are damaged, defective, if not utterly diseased. That autism is a plague to be feared more than measles, whooping cough, tetanus, or polio, all of which have potentially fatal consequences for children that autism does not. Let me put this in clearer terms:
Even if there were a small chance that vaccine components and autism were linked, you would rather gamble with making your little child sick with a disease you could have prevented than take the remote chance your child turns out to be mentally disabled?
Let me say this again: You would rather let your child get sick with/die from an easily preventable disease because you're scared that he/she might turn out to be mentally disabled if your don't?
Now to quote from my mom's blog:
"On the other hand, they don't believe that if their child contracts a disease like measles that it's a problem. Even though there ARE known complications of that disease, including pneumonia, encephalitis and death. It's not just a case where a kid gets some spots for a few days and then he's fine. It's a miserable disease. Why do they believe that's an ok risk to take but getting a vaccine is not an acceptable risk?"
Side effects to happen, and on rare occasions they are serious. However, this is true for virtually any drug or medical procedure. I can develop an infection from an appendectomy, but that doesn't mean appendectomies everywhere should be feared. Appendectomies save lives, and so do vaccines! Those of us growing up in recent decades never saw the woes of the diseases that vaccines now prevent. We never saw smallpox. We never saw polio. We never had friends die of complications from measles. The flu does not take nearly so many lives as it once did. This is because millions of children receive their vaccines each year, and overwhelmingly these same millions of children continue living healthy lives without any incident because of that. This is completely normal to us.
But then we see different children with autism, and oh no, it's a scary epidemic! There's something wrong with them! And that's all certain people see them as, even if they may not consciously realize it. But ask someone with autism or asperger's. That is not how they view themselves, and they wish that other people could see that too. They are not poor, damaged byproducts of some kind of vaccine injury, they are unique, perfectly capable people with brains that just work a bit differently than yours. Stop treating them like they are defective.
I have more I want to say about this, but it is really late, and if I don't go to bed now, I will hate myself all the more tomorrow. Goodnight world. Think on this. Please.
*No one can say I'm not at least a bit objective in included opposing views. Do take these particular sources with a grain of salt though, seriously. For instance, one of the authors of the third paper, Dr. Geiers, is linked with the marketing of the drug Lupron, which is the chemical castration agent used in one of the alternate therapies for autistic children.
**This is not to say the peer review is without its limitations, it's just the best we've got right now. On the other hand, having one single editor review the materials submitted to what is touted to be a reputable scientific forum, as in the case of Medical Hypotheses, is never a good idea. Ever.
***I realize that this may not be considered the most reputable source in comparison with the others I've provided, but you can easily google each of its points and verify them. This source would be more reliable, but the problem is you need an account to access the full text.
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