COMMENTARY BY LENNY SHAFER OF FEAT (Families for Early
Autsim Treatment)
Going into the third day since medical researcher Andrew
Wakefield dropped a news concussion bomb with the publishing of his latest findings
of measles virus in 83% of autistic children, there has been virtually a news
black out in the US. With a singular
expectation, there has been no news in the press about the latest development
of an issue in the UK that has drawn in the government, the Prime Minister, his
infant son, and at least 2000 families with late onset autism, the hyperbolic
British press and the national health maintenance system into a raging public
Health debate.
The single report that we were able to find outside Europe
and the rest of the world, is a Reuter’s piece directed to professionals and not
consumers. The article leaves autism
out of the copy nearly altogether. The article, with its curious spin is
provided here below for the reader’s aghast.
Also included below is a commentary from the medical
science journal where Wakefield has published his new research, which urges the
public not to hysterically leap to conclusions and read too much into this
latest information. The message is that
Wakefield’s work does not, they repeat,does not prove that MMR vaccines cause
autism, a point Wakefield did not even attempt to make in this research, however.
“It doesn’t prove causation” agrees Barbara Loe Fisher of
the National Vaccine Information Center, “but it does go a long way to show an
association.” In other words, we
arguably have a smoking gun.
The defenders can continue to argue that there is no solid
proof of a connection between vaccines and autism. However, there is enough evidence for a serious hypothesis. Given this latest addition to the puzzle of
autism’s etiology, it is now time for our public health officials to finally
shift their focus from spending the public’s money on research designed only to
defend vaccines, to research designed to get at the at the cause of autism.
The time is over for increasingly silly dismissals of the
autism epidemic. The time is over to
utterly ignore the eyewitness experiences of hundreds to thousands of parents
who have seen the children slip away only after the injections. The time is over for simply insisting that
there is no proof of a connection between certain vaccines and autism. This is not enough, for there is indeed plenty
of evidence to suggest there might be. For public health officials to remain
complacent in the face of this growing evidence is simply not acceptable.
If our hypothesis about the causes of autism prove to be
wrong as the defenders insist, for us it will be back to the drawing board, for
we cannot join them in their complacency.
But if they prove to be wrong one cannot imagine the consequences. For after we find the cause, treatment and
cure for autism, there will be some matters of justice that wait.
* * *