Salon magazine has a very interesting article online about the history of the anti-vaccination movement. It gives an overview of the bad science, egos, corruption, conflicts of interest, and outright fraud at the heart of the movement.
That this is coming from Salon — a magazine that gave space to the ravings of antivaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr. — is nice to see. The article is about a book, Paul A. Offit’s Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, which details the nonsense that is the antivax argument. It sounds like a very good read, and something I’ll have to pick up soon.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:02 am
You want to make your blood boil?
Watch the Jenny McCarthy interview on CNN about her claims that vaccines caused her sons autism and how she “cured” it with vitamins and diet.
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2008/10/01/intv.mccarthy.cnn
October 1st, 2008 at 10:06 am
I’d like to hear a little more about the history of the antivax movement and stuff like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Temperance movements. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which is the legal precedent underlying most public health authority, was a vaccination case involving a reluctant minister, so it’d be nice to know more about that.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:17 am
Jenny McCarthy – Blonde St00pidity Tour
Jenny McCarthy is going on about vaccines and autism again. I must admit, I find it incredible that anyone would take seriously anything that comes out of the mouth of a B-grade soft porn / D-grade mainstream celebrity.Now she’s taking…
October 1st, 2008 at 10:22 am
Let’s send a copy to Jenny McCarthy!
October 1st, 2008 at 10:29 am
Also check out what John Dennehy has to say about it at The Evilutionary Biologist and there’s a ScienceBlogs Book Club happening now over at, well, ScienceBlogs.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:36 am
Keep Kennedy’s name and change everything else to Global Warming. Same story.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:40 am
The best thing about the Salon article is that many anti-vaxxers use the business interests of pharma as a means of distancing and distrusting them. To take the single event that spawned the theory back to profit, greed, and fraud is exactly what needs to get out into the public in a big way. At this point though anti-vax is a religion, and I’m worried that this information will fall on deaf ears.
October 1st, 2008 at 11:02 am
By the way, you can support science by voting for Amanda Peet on “this poll” “What side do you believe is right? Jenny McCarthy or Amanda Peet?”
October 1st, 2008 at 11:32 am
Ever so slightly off-topic…
I just pre-ordered Death from the Skies! from Amazon.
To find it on Amazon, I searched on Death from the Skies (no quotes. I just didn’t feel like it). Ironically, though it was first in the result set as expected, third in the result set was a book by Richard Hoagland. Now that’s ironical. Alanis Morissett is writing a song about it.
October 1st, 2008 at 11:56 am
I heard an interesting point the other day. Apparently there are some anti-vaxers who don’t buy into the autism nonsense but that are concerned about the possibility that some vaccines are manufactured abroad in nations that do not monitor pharma production adequately.
I haven’t had the time yet to look into this as it was only first brought to my attention a few minutes ago as a result of reading this post to someone.
If there is any question about the source for bulk vaccines, then anti-vaxxers need to be clearly defined based on their concerns about the practice.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:33 pm
@Thomas
That is an interesting point, but if it’s coming from an anti-vaxxer I see it as more a part of the creationist “shot-gun” style argument (throw in any info that “discredits” the opponent). Like, pointing out some minor case where dating was off, and saying evolution should be thrown out, rather than just wondering what the actual age is.
If there are vaccine purity problems in a foreign country, that is a reason to tighten controls, or become pro-american-vaccines, but certainly not a reason to be anti-vaccine.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Amanda Peet is hotter than Jenny McCarthy anyway.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:04 pm
[...] The history of the antivax movement [...]
October 1st, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Thomas, that would be the same as becoming anti car because of the Pinto instead of just becoming pro Toyota.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:22 pm
@Thomas
Also curious about the argument you bring up. I wonder if these people are also anti-toothpaste because of the trouble with those tubes of fake Colgate manufactured overseas using antifreeze for the minty flavor.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:47 pm
@Thomas:
Meh, that just screams of moving the goalposts to me. “Oh, okay, sure, maybe that bit about autism was, well, a fraud… but what about *this* [pulls rabbit out of hat]“.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Either Salon got it wrong or the book they are reviewing by Paul Offit got it wrong. At least the Salon piece makes it out like Dr. Andrew Wakefield from the U.K. (who incidentally now is spreading his lies at a clinic here in Texas) was the originator of the autism/vaccine hypothesis. Totally wrong. Wakefield was a relative Johnny-come-lately to that movement. It was actually originated by the late Dr. Bernard Rimland who founded both ASA (Autism Society of America) and DAN! (Defeat Autism Now!). But there is no mention of Rimland in the article which makes the book quite suspect IMHO. Wakefield’s contribution to the cause consists mainly in delivering the junk science while at the same time enriching his bank account.
At least the article does mention DAN! which is refreshing for the supposed anti-anti-vax movement, whom most of its adherants seem to think that their opposition consists of the bimbo Jenny McCarthy and a few irate parents of autistic kids. You see, your opposition is a bit more organized than that.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Bernie Rimland and Lenny Schafer may have been antivaccine before Wakefield, but Rimland wasn’t really pushing the vaccine thing before Wakefield. Bernie was pushing orthomolecular cures for autism. He had been somehow associated with or a fan of Linus Pauling. Bernie started out pushing B6 and magnesium as a cure for some kind of genetic defect in the kids. Some children got nerve damage from high levels of B6 that came to be used at Bernies recommendation. Rimland should have been mentioned as one of autism’s false prophet’s, absolutely, but the book makes some excellent points without mentioning him.
@Schwa, just to make it clear, since I can’t tell what your point is. Jehovah’s Witnesses have never been anti vaccine or anti public health, and they go to doctors and surgeons, they just don’t take blood transfusions.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Rimland is mentioned early in the book, the chapter is called “The Tinderbox”… but mostly in the context of pushing secretion. From my recollection, most of the anti-vax stuff before Wakefield was seizures and SIDS (you can kind of see that in this old webpage that I remember from long ago: http://www.pathguy.com/antiimmu.htm , I remember the Alan Phillips “Vaccination Myths” was pretty widespread a decade ago, oh and he is still around, but I did not feel like clicking on his newest website).
Also, Schwa, the “Autism’s False Prophets” really only dwells on the last two decades, and mostly the last few years. If you really want to learn about the antivax movements through time you need to read Arthur Allen’s book “Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver”.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:56 pm
“Rimland wasn’t really pushing the vaccine thing before Wakefield.”
Indeed, Rimland was pushing the autism/vaccination link as early as 1995 and probably earlier which was several years before Wakefield came onto the scene.
http://www.whale.to/vaccine/quotes1.html
“I was the first to announce the “autism epidemic”, in 1995, and I pointed out in that article that excessive vaccines were a plausible cause of the epidemic. As you know, an enormous amount of clinical laboratory research (as opposed to epidemiological research), has been accumulated since that time, supporting my position. (I did not know then that the vaccines contained mercury, although I had been collecting data since 1967 from the mothers of autistic children, on any dental work they may have had during their pregnancy.) The evidence is now overwhelming, despite the misinformation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Institute of Medicine.”
But something the anti-anti-vaccination (just one more anti- and I won’t know which side I’m on –
) movement should take into consideration is that the whole field of autism has always been littered with quacks and charlatans all the way back to its original discovery by Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger in the 1940’s. Some of these kooks were given full support by the supposedly pro-science medical establishment.
Do a google on Bruno Bettelheim and you’ll see that he was the one who developed the “refrigerator mother” theory of autism – mothers cause their child’s autism by witholding affection. This was the dominant theory of autism held by the medical establishment during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Many autistic kids were taken away from their parents and put into institutions during this period. Incidentally, it was Rimland who demolished the “refrigerator mother” theory. So the “pro-science” side of this debate does not exactly have a stellar record on this topic. Most of its hypotheses concerning the cause of autism have been equally farcical as those put forward by the anti-vax camp.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Tom Marking said ““I was the first to announce the “autism epidemic”, in 1995, and I pointed out in that article that excessive vaccines were a plausible cause of the epidemic.”
That actually sounds more like Rimland claiming to have put out an article claiming it was vaccines. I don’t remember much about Rimland doing much of anything with vaccines until at least 2000. But that is just my memory, which could be faulty… just like Rimland.
And if you can find the actual article Rimland wrote that would be more helpful than a whale.to reference. Because that invokes Scopie’s Law: “In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses you the argument immediately …and gets you laughed out of the room.”
I looked at Google Groups, and the earliest I can find of the Rimland quote is 1999 by Lenny Schafer:
http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.autism/msg/bec765b94aff890a?hl=en
He claims he said something in what he cites as “ARRI, 9/3, 1995, 12/1, 1998″ … the trick is to find it.
But if there was much going on from Rimland warning about vaccines in autism, it would have been blasted all over Usenet. I’m checking and I am not finding much. If you check the bit.listserv.autism group for Rimland, you will see him mentioned way back in 1993, but not in regards to vaccines. It seems he is pushing supplements and other stuff, and there are lots of interesting threads with his name in the titles. It seems he tended to inflate his accomplishments.
(I’ve attempted to find my old Usenet posts, but in those days we were using Compuserve and the username was a long string of numbers, and it has been over a decade and I forgot what it was… I never posted on the bit.listserv.autism group).
October 1st, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Dear Tom,
In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses you the argument immediately …and gets you laughed out of the room.
–Scopie’s Law
Hahaha, goodbye.
October 1st, 2008 at 8:01 pm
“Dear Tom,
In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses you the argument immediately …and gets you laughed out of the room.
–Scopie’s Law
Hahaha, goodbye.”
Yes, and you apparently don’t even know that Rimland was the founder of both DAN! and ARI (Autism Research Institute) and you don’t appear to know what those organizations stand for which makes me laugh at your ignorance. ARI doesn’t even try to hide their position. They are quite proud of it:
http://www.autismwebsite.com/aRI/vaccine/cnntranscript.htm
BERNARD RIMLAND, AUTISM RESEARCH INSTITUTE: Well, I’ve been studying this matter for some 35, 40 years.
Way back in the ’60s, I began collecting information from parents about the possible causes of autism in their kids. Even back then, there were a number of parents who said their kid was quite normal until they got vaccinated. Nowadays, of course, the evidence is very, very convincing that the autism has extremely accelerated in its prevalence.
The California study is one of many which shows this huge increase. The evidence that vaccines are a major cause of the increase comes from a number of directions. One direction that’s been largely ignored are the laboratory studies. There are at least seven laboratory studies, clinical studies, of blood, cerebral, spinal fluid, biopsies of autistic children which show huge differences between autistic children and normal children in terms of the presence of things like measles vaccine virus in their intestinal tract, for example, or their neurons. So, there’s one line of evidence.
Another, of course, is that we have data from thousands of parents who testify, often with videotapes and photographs and eyewitness reports, that their kid was perfectly normal. And they can demonstrate it, as I say, very conclusively with tapes until after the vaccine. The kid retreated into autism. There’s just converging evidence from many, many directions
October 1st, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Tom, all she was saying was that you should not use the whale.to website. You may not have seen my posting because it was held up in moderation, but I say the same thing (the guy who runs whale.to is a long time usenet loon, he even claimed to have burned his bum on demonic ley lines… I kid you not!). Though I did find the actual first posting on usenet.
Unfortunately, Rimland with his ARI and DAN were not doing good and useful research. I did some checking on the postings of the bit.listserv.autism group for mentions of Rimland in the early 1990s, and he does not seem to come off very well.
It also looks like Rimland joined the “vaccines cause autism” bandwagon after Wakefield very poor study of a dozen kids. the quote of his you use, “The California study is one of many which shows this huge increase. The evidence that vaccines are a major cause of the increase comes from a number of directions.” is actually quite silly. That is actually not true.
You need to really read “Autism’s False Prophets”.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:46 pm
More about those satanic ley lines, and the rationality of Scudamore/whale.to:
http://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/?p=998
Scopie’s Law here:
http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Scopie%27s_Law
October 1st, 2008 at 11:28 pm
I think the anti vaccine movement is based on the real truth that a small percentage of people who get vaccines have adverse side effects, a small percentage (probably less than 1 in 100,000) die or have life threatening effects from a vaccine. Gardasil in particular has been in the media for causing a couple of deaths.
This in no way means you shouldn’t get a vaccine, you just need to way the risks and your lifestyle. Does everyone need an anthrax vaccine? no, do people who work around farm animals, maybe.
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:54 am
FWIW, a search of PubMed using the string “+Rimland +autism” returns 34 results, of which one mentions vaccines in its title (most do not have abstracts available online), and this one is from 2004. Interestingly, Rimland (or someone sharing the same name?) is quite obviously involved with autism research from the 70s onwards.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
[...] I’m sorry, what?! I’m a bit of a believer in science and all that (see Bad Astronomy and Salon.) So that was a bit shocking and not [...]