children with autism have been saying for years—which is we vaccinated our babies and something happened. That’s it,” she said. When confronted with data from the Centers for Disease Control that seemed to provide scientific refutation of her claims, McCarthy responded, “My science is named Evan [her son] and he’s at home. That’s my science.” McCarthy says that she “fixed” Evan by changing his diet, and recommends that other “warrior moms” do the same. She is fond of saying that she acquired her knowledge of vaccinations and their risks at “the University of Google.”
Like Kennedy, McCarthy and Carrey contend that the federal government and pharmaceutical companies have conspired to keep the evidence that thimerosal-containing vaccines cause autism a secret. “In this growing crisis,” Carrey wrote in the Huffington Post in April 2009, “we cannot afford to blindly trumpet the agenda of the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) or vaccine makers. Now more than ever, we must resist the urge to close this book before it’s been written. The anecdotal evidence of millions of parents who’ve seen their totally normal kids regress into sickness and mental isolation after a trip to the pediatrician’s office must be seriously considered.”
He had a point: every parent with an autistic child has the right to demand that federal researchers seriously consider anecdotal evidence. Anything less would be disgraceful. And that is why it has been considered in dozens of studies over more than a decade. Continuing to encourage false hope in this way, however, is an approach that Kathleen Seidel, whose blog Neurodiversity is the most complete and accessible collection of useful information about autism, has described quite accurately as nonsense, a litigation-driven hypothesis that autism is a consequence of vaccine injury.
Conspiracy theories are like untreated wounds. They fester and deepen—and the autism-vaccine conspiracy is no exception. Within days of Carrey’s article, thousands of people had responded with comments on the Huffington Post Web site. Most were positive. Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center refers to the Public Health Service’s insistence that the benefits of vaccines outweigh their risks as the “great denial”: “It is only after a quarter century of witnessing the Great Denial of vaccine risks,” she wrote, “which has produced millions of vaccine damaged children flooding special education classrooms and doctors offices, that the magnitude of that unchecked power has been fully revealed.” Clearly, she is right about the powerful strain of denialism that the struggle over vaccines has exposed. She has the denialists and realists confused, however. That is one of the problems with conspiracy theories. After enough distortions seep into conventional thought, “the facts” look as they would in a funhouse mirror. Just tune in to YouTube and check out Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the subject of vaccines. In June 2008, at a rally on Capitol Hill to “Green Our Vaccines”—in other words, to make them environmentally safe—Kennedy delivered his most inflammatory speech on the subject, saying that the “thimerosal generation is the sickest generation in the history of this country.” It is not clear how he arrived at that conclusion, since life expectancy for newborns in the United States has increased dramatically over the past seventy years, from 57.1 for babies born in 1929 to 77.8 for babies born in 2004.
The change has been significant even during the past fifteen years—when Kennedy argues children have suffered the most. The trend is the same with regard to DALYs, or disability-adjusted life years, which measure healthy life expectancy—the number of years a child is likely to live without losing time to disability and sickness. In addition, during the period between 1990 and 2004, Kennedy’s key danger years, childhood cancer
Like Kennedy, McCarthy and Carrey contend that the federal government and pharmaceutical companies have conspired to keep the evidence that thimerosal-containing vaccines cause autism a secret. “In this growing crisis,” Carrey wrote in the Huffington Post in April 2009, “we cannot afford to blindly trumpet the agenda of the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) or vaccine makers. Now more than ever, we must resist the urge to close this book before it’s been written. The anecdotal evidence of millions of parents who’ve seen their totally normal kids regress into sickness and mental isolation after a trip to the pediatrician’s office must be seriously considered.”
He had a point: every parent with an autistic child has the right to demand that federal researchers seriously consider anecdotal evidence. Anything less would be disgraceful. And that is why it has been considered in dozens of studies over more than a decade. Continuing to encourage false hope in this way, however, is an approach that Kathleen Seidel, whose blog Neurodiversity is the most complete and accessible collection of useful information about autism, has described quite accurately as nonsense, a litigation-driven hypothesis that autism is a consequence of vaccine injury.
Conspiracy theories are like untreated wounds. They fester and deepen—and the autism-vaccine conspiracy is no exception. Within days of Carrey’s article, thousands of people had responded with comments on the Huffington Post Web site. Most were positive. Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center refers to the Public Health Service’s insistence that the benefits of vaccines outweigh their risks as the “great denial”: “It is only after a quarter century of witnessing the Great Denial of vaccine risks,” she wrote, “which has produced millions of vaccine damaged children flooding special education classrooms and doctors offices, that the magnitude of that unchecked power has been fully revealed.” Clearly, she is right about the powerful strain of denialism that the struggle over vaccines has exposed. She has the denialists and realists confused, however. That is one of the problems with conspiracy theories. After enough distortions seep into conventional thought, “the facts” look as they would in a funhouse mirror. Just tune in to YouTube and check out Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the subject of vaccines. In June 2008, at a rally on Capitol Hill to “Green Our Vaccines”—in other words, to make them environmentally safe—Kennedy delivered his most inflammatory speech on the subject, saying that the “thimerosal generation is the sickest generation in the history of this country.” It is not clear how he arrived at that conclusion, since life expectancy for newborns in the United States has increased dramatically over the past seventy years, from 57.1 for babies born in 1929 to 77.8 for babies born in 2004.
The change has been significant even during the past fifteen years—when Kennedy argues children have suffered the most. The trend is the same with regard to DALYs, or disability-adjusted life years, which measure healthy life expectancy—the number of years a child is likely to live without losing time to disability and sickness. In addition, during the period between 1990 and 2004, Kennedy’s key danger years, childhood cancer
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