THOMAS SOWELL: Why the big jump in autism diagnoses?
STEVE BREEN / CREATORS.COM
The controversy over whether parents should be forced to have their children vaccinated for measles is one of the painful signs of our times. Measles was virtually wiped out in the United States years ago. Why the resurgence of this disease now?
The short answer is that false claims, based on other false claims, led many parents to stop getting their children vaccinated against measles.
The key false claim was that the vaccine for measles caused an increase in autism. This claim was made in 1998 by a doctor writing in a distinguished British medical journal, so it is understandable that many parents took it seriously.
Fortunately, others took the claim seriously in a very different sense. They did massive studies involving half a million children in Denmark and 2 million children in Sweden. These studies showed that there was no higher incidence of autism among children who had been vaccinated than among children who had not been vaccinated.
Incidentally, the evidence on which the original claim that vaccines caused autism was based was just 12 children. But the campaign to convince the public was a masterpiece of propaganda.
The story line was that pharmaceutical companies who produced the vaccine were callously risking and sacrificing helpless children in pursuit of profit. This is the kind of dramatic stuff the media love. It never seemed to occur to the media that lawyers who were suing pharmaceutical companies had a vested interest in this story line.
Unfortunately, it takes time to run careful scientific studies. That allowed the propaganda against vaccines to go on for years. Eventually, however, the results of the studies so completely discredited the claim that the measles vaccine caused autism that the medical journal which had published the article publicly repudiated it. The doctor who wrote the article had his license revoked.
By this time, however, there was a whole anti-vaccine movement, and crusading movements are seldom stopped by facts.
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THOMAS SOWELL: Why the big jump in autism diagnoses?