A Failed Hypothesis

Back in 2002, when I first heard about the claims that vaccines that contain thimerosal (ethyl mercury - and I think most, if not all, of the vaccines contain this) cause autism in kids, I just simply refused to believe it. I just didn't believe that these life-saving vaccines can really cause autism in kids. If that is true, then all of my kids would have been autistic, since they all had vaccination shots (and lots of them) when they were babies and toddlers.

But of course, my sympathies go to those parents with kids who have autism and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). I know it is very challenging to take care of kids with this condition. Kids with this condition need very extraordinary loving parents. Many parents, faced with the challenge of raising autistic children, not unreasonably wondered whether there was something wrong with vaccines in the first place.

Last night, I found out that a special court has said that vaccine is not to blame for autism.

In a big blow to parents who believe vaccines caused their children's autism, a special court ruled Thursday that the shots are not to blame. The court said the evidence was overwhelmingly contrary to the parents' claims — and backed years of science that found no risk.

"It was abundantly clear that petitioners' theories of causation were speculative and unpersuasive," the court concluded in one of a trio of cases ruled on Thursday.

I also found this post from Respectful Insolence. It is a very long essay about the myth of the claim. But if you are interested to know more about this subject, this is worth while:

One of the most pernicious medical myths of recent years has been the claim, promulgated by a subgroup of parents of autistic children and facilitated by scientists of dubious repute, that somehow the mercury in the thimerosal (ethyl mercury) preservative used in common childhood vaccines in the U.S. until early 2002 causes autism. Although it had been percolating under the radar of most parents and scientists for several years before, this belief invaded the national zeitgeist in a big way in 2005, beginning with the publication of a book by journalist David Kirby entitled Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy. The fires of hysteria were stoked even higher by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who published a truly twisted and misleading piece of pseudojournalism and pseudoscience published simultaneously in Rolling Stone and on Salon.com entitled Deadly Immunity. Relying primarily on quote-mining of the transcripts of both a conference held Atlanta by the CDC to discuss the question of whether autism is related to thimerosal in vaccines and an Institute of Medicine report on vaccines while simultaneously misrepresenting the results of two studies by Verstaeten et al to paint a false picture of a government coverup, RFK Jr. almost single-handedly managed to stoke fears that vaccines were causing an "epidemic of autism."

I say "almost" single-handedly, because, unfortunately, he had help. Relying on the dubious research of a variety of investigators, such as the father-and-son team of Dr. Mark Geier and David Geier, whose prodigious output of badly designed studies emanating from a lab in their home in suburban Maryland, done using a rubberstamp institutional review board stacked with friends and cronies to approve the studies, and published for the most part in non-peer-reviewed journals, activists loudly insisted that mercury in vaccines was the cause of most autism. Others claiming to demonstrate this link include Boyd Haley, a chemist from the University of Kentucky, and a few other vocal scientists and advocates, who claim that autism is, in essence, mercury poisoning. Facilitating the dissemination of this message were reporters such as David Kirby, activists such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and media personalities such as Don Imus. Indeed, some activists claimed that some vaccines were "poisoning" our children, even going so far as show photos of autistic children with the label "mercury-poisoned" underneath them on placards held aloft at protest rallies. They made quite a splash then, and still do to a lesser extent even today. There's just one problem.

The scientific data, taken in totality, do not support a link between mercury in vaccines and autism. Today yet another important study by Robert Schechter and Judith Grether was released published in the Archives of General Psychiatry entitled Continuing Increases in Autism Reported to California's Developmental Services System: Mercury in Retrograde1, that utterly failed to support the hypothesis that mercury in vaccines is an etiological factor in autism. It is yet another nail in the coffin of the medical myth that mercury in vaccines causes autism.

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