Comments on Frontline: The Vaccine War

Last night I watched “Frontline: The Vaccine War” on PBS (I watched it online the night after it aired). I thought it was pretty fair, but I followed the blog comments afterward and was astounded. The vitriol and anger people have toward vaccines and the CDC, and the scientists who have studied the links is astonishing. One mom was quoted on the documentary as saying there’s no more polio or diptheria, when are we going to stop those vaccines? Perhaps that true in the US, but certainly not on this planet. One traveler from another country carrying the polio vaccine and one unvaccinated child…there’d be polio again!

There are at least 12 studies that have shown no connection between vaccines and autism. Wakefield’s 1998 study implicating the MMR vaccine to ‘gut inflammation’ in children with autism has been totally discredited and has never been replicated. Studies have shown that mercury poisoning (from fish and other sources) is not at all similar to autism. In Denmark, scientists studied half a million children, half of whom had the MMR vaccine and half who hadn’t, and there was no difference in autism rates.

One commenter, who happened to be a doctor, made complete sense to me. The anti-vaccine people claim that there are hundreds of thousands of families whose kids have been injured by vaccines; given this digital age, where are their pre-and post-injury home videos? This commenter mentioned that he had asked families of his patients for their pre-vaccine videos of their children and the families refused. If they were so certain vaccines had injured their child, why would they refuse to document it?There are now studies of siblings of children with autism via videotapes. Researchers are finding that as early as 6-12 months they can see signs of autism in the home videos of these siblings.In my 30-plus years of being in this field, I have yet to meet one parent who claims their child was vaccine-injured. Is that proof? No, not at all; just an anecdote.