There was a tough-minded closing paragraph in a thoughtful piece in the weekend Boston Globe about the continuing controversy over infant vaccines and thimerosal:
Perhaps that is why it’s better that our public health policies require childhood vaccination and discourage individuals from making the choice themselves. In the final analysis, the secret truth about vaccines may be that, sometimes, personal freedom can be a dangerous thing.
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The article could have highlighted this point more:
“[F]ederal authorities called for the removal of thimerosal from vaccines in 1999 as a precautionary measure, without conclusive proof of harm, and some states, including Massachusetts, stopped administering childhood vaccines containing the preservative as soon as alternatives became available.”
I recently had to address this question myself when my first child was born: it’s all well and good to scourge “junk science,” but when you’re actually faced with the prospect of having your newborn stuck with a bunch of needles it does get your attention. So I called the director of the Mass. vaccine distribution program — in Mass., at least, vaccines are purchased and distributed to doctors by the state — and asked him what was up.
He explained that the vaccines currently used by Massachusetts are preserved with thimerosal at one stage in their production, but (with one exception) the thimerosal is removed before the vaccines are turned into the single-dose kits used by doctors. Only trace amounts remain. The exception is flu: there doesn’t seem to be any good way at present of making a stable flu vaccine without thimerosal.
So instead of a dozen or so vaccines with significant levels of mercury, going forward with the vaccination program in Mass. in 2005 means at most trace amounts of mercury in the case of every vaccine except flu (which newborns don’t get anyway).
Prior to this call, my wife and I had been thinking that we would go forward with vaccinations in any event: even assuming there is a link between mercury in vaccines and autism, the risks of serious contagious disease are worse than any measurable risk of autism. When we learned that Massachusetts had in fact taken the vast majority of mercury out of vaccines, vaccination was a no-brainer.
Wow, a great article on a controversial subject. Although generally on the side of the benefits of vaccination, as a physician I can’t really understand the rationale for vaccinating infants against Hepatitis B which in this country is spread either sexually or through dirty needles.
Paul:
I am the father of an autistic son. My wife and I are both engineers with PhDs. We resisted for a long time the idea of vaccine/mercury connection to autism, because we implicitly accepted that the system should “be better than that”. Well, we now think that there is a great deal of evidence for this connection. I believe it is the system that is in denial (or worse).
It would have helped if people like our pediatrician were a little more clued in. We just go the “Oh, your son is just delayed in speaking. He will be fine. My daughter was like that” kind on thing. I lost confidence in him when I accidentally found out one visit that he actually had been thinking that my son was one year younger than he was. He had remembered the year of birth wrong and never bothered to look that up again. So much for his “Oh, he is OK” stuff all along.
I believe autism will eventually be proved to be a biomedical condition, caused by injecting harmful chemicals into kids. There is clearly a genetic component in this, but that is true of all chemical interactions with the human body (not everyone who smokes gets cancer). Some kids can’t detoxify as well as others. I know the “system” scoffs at that idea, but the system isn’t always right. Some courageous people (including doctors) are pursuing this, and I think they are coming closer to establishing it scientifically.
My son has been improving on the biomedical treatments. We are hopeful that he will recover fully, like so many other kids have done.
Sridhar