October 29, 2007
The facts are easy to understand. Decades ago we had one autistic birth in every 2000. Today we have one in every 150. That is a frightening increase that quite simply, must have a cause. It is not believable to have occurred from random chance or normal progression. There seem to be three sides on the causation argument. Group one says that the increase is traceable to mercury based preservatives that were implemented by companies’ right before the autism explosion started. The second group says that there is no such causation relationship, vaccines are safe, and we should spend more time worrying about early detection and services for the autistic child then trying to find out why. The last group admits that they simply do not know enough yet.
The first group contains a great deal of parents of autistic children, who rightly want to know why their children fell into this extreme spike in autism. They have been a true grassroots effort, trying to find out the dark secrets in corporate America for years. They eventually received some much needed public clout when Robert Kennedy wrote this piece in 2005:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7395411/deadly_immunity/
While some minor errors have been discovered in this article since it ran over two years ago (see bottom of Deadly Immunity), they were minimal and not damaging to the main points it contained. Without rehashing the entire article, the essential thrust is that it seems our government was more concerned about damage control and protecting the interests of corporate vaccine makers than in safeguarding the children of America. Tough rhetoric? Too bad. One cannot read the Kennedy piece and not feel outraged while digesting the history of mercury based vaccines and the carnage they may have wrought on generations of children. This is of course assuming that the causation can be proven. Pro-vaccine crowds will clamor that mercury was no longer used after 2001, yet autism rates have not declined. If so, I would like to hear from all sides how that fits in with the perception of vaccines as the bad guys.
What I do not need to hear anymore are the voices of those with a clear interest in downplaying the vaccine connection telling me to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. These are the primary people in group two. They consist of “scientists” and medical practitioners who primarily wish to defend vaccines and corporate spokespersons who wish to defend their companies from the threats of legal action. We saw another fluff piece come out this week in the Wall Street Journal, which has always sided with the machinery:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119344390330373531.html
Dr. Brown tells a heart wrenching tale about watching a seven year old girl die from chickenpox and how she “vowed never to let a child on my watch suffer from a disease that was preventable by vaccination.” How terribly noble and of course completely irrelevant to this discussion. The issue has never been to do away with vaccinations, just the horrific poisons placed in them by companies looking to save some money. Dr. Brown goes on to defend the vaccination industry by telling us all the benefits of vaccines. Since she is an educated woman, I will assume that Dr. Brown realizes that her argument is a strawman; and a most vile strawman at that. What is at issue is not the efficacy of vaccines but the decision made by vaccine companies to use a preservative based on mercury; which is one of the most deadliest toxins known to man. They chose to use this preservative so they could mass produce the vaccines and increase profits dramatically. When the parents of autistic children started putting the pieces together, those same companies decided to stop using these mercury based preservatives even though they insist on their safety. Dr. Brown goes on to trash a book by Jenny McCarthy, who actually is a mother of an autistic child. She splits hairs over what may have been two errors found in the entire book and thus makes a case to dismiss her entire account. She even mocks her at one point claiming she has a “medical degree from the University of Google.” This is a common tactic of the voices in group two. Dismiss opponents as wrong and mock them as stupid because they are not part of the very medical establishment they claim is trying to cover up the autism scandal. Of course Jenny McCarthy did not write a book claiming to be a doctor. Her book is entitled, “Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism.” It seems the good doctor missed the point. Perhaps that is because while she is a parent, she is not a parent of an autistic child. Maybe if she was, she would be more understanding of the harrowing journey to which Ms. McCarthy speaks. Perhaps she would understand that maybe cute sound bites, poor strawmen, and stupid derision are not the best way to handle this situation. Perhaps she would be defending the parents and not the vaccine companies. Dr. Brown claims that it is the vaccination program that is under attack but she knows better. Somewhere in medical school she must have learned English. It is not the vaccination program under attack by group one. It is the poison the vaccine producers used to increase their profits that are under attack. So all disingenuous distractions aside, let’s try and stay on point.
That leaves group three, of which I am a part of. It may seem that I have commiserated more with group one and that is probably true. I look at who is doing the talking and see that the majority of people in group one are concerned parents who have autistic children and have a right to know the truth. Unfortunately the majority of people in group two have a vested interest in disproving the mercury-autism link. They are like Dr. Brown who works within the very establishment that is being accused of the link. They also come off as Dr. Brown comes off. They sound disingenuous and dismissive. They sound arrogant and insincere; making arguments where there are none to try and distract from the simple facts. Those facts remain that decades ago we had one autistic birth in every 2000 and today we have one in every 150. While prevention and treatment are crucial, I would still like to know what caused this spike. We owe that to generations of parents who fight as Jenny McCarthy fights; for the truth. I do not know if Jenny McCarthy and the parents in group one are right but their plight seems more genuine when the shrill voices in group two try to create distractions instead of dealing with the facts.
