First-episode controversy: The vaccine-autism link

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http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/200 ... side_N.htm

By Janet Kornblum, USA TODAY
The premiere episode of Eli Stone, in which a mother wins a $5.2 million lawsuit charging her son got autism from a vaccine, is stirring controversy before it airs.

The American Academy of Pediatrics is calling on ABC to cancel the show, saying in a statement that it leaves audiences "with the destructive idea that vaccines do cause autism."

ABC Entertainment rejected the request in a statement Monday, reminding viewers that the show is fictional: "The story line plays on topical issues for dramatic effect, but its purpose is to entertain."

Still, the academy, an organization of 60,000 pediatricians, is "alarmed that this program could lead to a tragic decline in immunization rates," said president Renée Jenkins in a letter to Anne Sweeney, president of Disney-ABC Television Group.

The letter — and an article criticizing that letter posted Sunday night and circulating Monday on huffingtonpost.com — is rekindling the emotional debate about vaccines and autism.

Some advocacy groups believe the preservative thimerosal, which contains mercury and once was routinely used in childhood vaccinations, is linked to autism or other brain deficits.

But several medical studies have concluded there is no link. A large study reported in September in the New England Journal of Medicine found no link between babies' exposure to the controversial vaccine preservative and the development of problems in language, behavior or intelligence.

Jenkins says even a fictional show might frighten parents away from immunizations, which routinely save lives. In the letter, she said ABC "will bear responsibility for the needless suffering and potential deaths of children from parents' decisions not to immunize based on the content of the episode."

David Kirby, author of the Huffington blog post and of the book Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy, criticizes the letter, saying in his the post that it "borders on near-hysteria over a fictional television entertainment."

"I don't have all the answers," he adds in an interview, "and my job is to keep asking questions. Definitely the jury is very much out" on any autism-vaccine link.

But the jury is not out, counters Paul Offitt, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. There have been more than a dozen epidemiological studies and none proves a link, he says. "I only hope that people see this as the fantasy that it is."

ABC says it will refer viewers to the website for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the end of the program.

The "American Academy of Pediatrics" should just shut up, and this goes to any group that expects people to get ret*d enough to obey whatever they see on TV.

Natural selection.

My initial reaction is the same as above; I suppose my empathy must be 'off' right now.

Kudos to ABC for not giving in to the American Academy of Pediatrics! It's part of today's culture for TV shows and other fictional media to portray a view considered as wrong and misleading by another. It's time for the American Academy of Pediatrics to develop a thick skin.

Isn't anyone worried that this will just increase the amount of misperceptions about autism? It's a sad truth that many people do get their information from TV -- ask a typical person what he knows about autism, and even odds he'll talk about the movie "Rain Man".

As a side note, people who don't vaccinate their children because of imaginary health concerns digust me. They aren't the ones who will die as a result of their stupidity; it'll be their children, who never even got a choice in the matter.

Thereby ending their line and saving the rest of humanity the trouble of dealing with their stupidity.

It makes me wonder who high up at ABC is onboard with Autism Speaks......

That's NBC, AspieDave.

Nobody.

The original script had nothing to do with vaccines. At all.

But they caved in to the Mercury Militia.

Umm...Vaccination has only become a common practice within the last one hundred years, and all of the childhood vaccines given today have been given only been given less than 60 years. My parents did not get many vaccines as children, and are very much alive. My grandparents got none of the childhood vaccinations given today, and all lived past age 50. Thus I am living proof that if society needed vaccinations to stay alive, we wouldn't have a society because we'd have all died long ago.

DevilInPgh wrote:

beau99 wrote:



***SPOILER ALERT***

if you actually planned on watching that show anyway....

I know the NBC link, but I think he's actually leaving/left. I'm betting he has friends at ABC, or possibly at Disney's TV division. What really got me was the plot twist I saw in the article that was linked to digg, that the case hinged on the 'fact' the company head had prevented his own child from receiving the vaccine. People BELIEVE what the see on these shows, as sad and sick as that is. Hell a majority of the people in the US believe Iraq had direct involvement in the 9/11 attacks because they've seen it repeated on TV so many times. There's REASON the 80-100 IQ range is considered "normal"... it's because MOST people fall in it.

SusyQ wrote:

Actually, vaccination of the children deprived the diseases of a crucial vector in spreading to the adult populations. The fact we no longer have epidemics of the diseases involved proves the effectiveness of the technique. Many diseases such as mumps are rarely fatal to a child, but may kill an adult. The elimination of smallpox has saved hundreds of millions of lives. Yes, we survived all of the diseases as a society, even the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. If we ever have to deal with something as virulent as the "Black Death" was in medieval Europe, however, I doubt our society will survive intact. The human race will, but "western civilization" will belong to history.

If you do some digging, you will find that vaccinating children has caused adults to get the diseases more often than normal because they didn't get it as a child and the vaccine wore off. Do some more digging, and you will find that before vaccines, incidences of those diseases declined sharply ON THEIR OWN before the vaccine were introduced, and had become benign diseases in healthy children. Yet more digging will reveal that cases of smallpox and polio actually INCREASED after the vaccine was mandated.
Both my parents had measles etc, and survived to have children, as did many of their generation. As I said before, if vaccination was crucial to the survival of the human race, it would have died out long ago.

Vaccination isn't crucial to the survival of the human race...but it does stop a lot of needless suffering. I think if you asked your own parents "Would you rather have me, with autism or Asperger's...or have me dead from smallpox?" (Yes, I know the MMR vaccine is supposed to be the culprit.), they'd say they'd rather have you around. Most of us were lucky enough to be born at a time when we haven't had to worry about getting easily-spread viral diseases that carry very serious risk of blindness, permanent brain damage, or death. I myself would rather be odd than dead (or have watched my little brother or my best friend die), but that's just me.