After clean water, vaccination is the most important tool we have in preventing disease. And yet, in the year 2011, so many parents are refusing to have their children immunized that ever-increasing numbers of children are suffering from easily preventable childhood diseases and the resulting permanent harm and even death that they sometimes bring.

The concerns of parents about vaccines are primarily based on the perception that MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) and DPT (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus) inoculations cause autism because they contain a type of mercury. They do not contain mercury of any kind and there is not a shred of scientific evidence that autism has any relationship to vaccinations.

In 1998 a doctor, who was in the pay of lawyers preparing class action suits alleging their clients’ children were autistic because of the inoculations they had received, published a paper in the highly-respected medical journal, Lancet, claiming he had detected a relationship between shots and autism. This claim has since been proven to be entirely fabricated, he has lost his license to practice in England, and he is in disgrace with the medical community.

Nonetheless, every day books are published and magazine articles written, news stories are broadcast and radio and TV interviews are conducted in which passionate parents of children with autism are presented sympathetically when they claim, with no scientific evidence at all, that there have been studies that have shown that “jabs” cause autism and that their own children became autistic within hours or days of being innoculated.

From the book: “Anecdotes and suppositions, no matter how right they feel, don’t lead to universal truths; experiments that can be independently confirmed by impartial observers do. Intuition leads to the flat earth society and bloodletting; experiments lead to men on the moon and microsurgery.”

This is one of the saddest stories of our day. The parents who believe this myth about autism and refuse to have their children inoculated are not living in depressed inner city neighborhoods. They are not high-school dropouts. They are upper middle class parents, people with advanced degrees and professional training, lawyers, businesswomen, nurses, who should know how to differentiate between old wives tales and scientific experimentation. And there are enough of them that for some diseases we no longer have what’s called herd immunity. Not enough of us have been vaccinated against diseases like Hib, whooping cough, and measles to prevent epidemics. Our family doctor gave my husband a pertussis shot the other day because so many parents have refused to have their children inoculated that whooping cough is now epidemic in Washington state.

Measles is the most infectious microbe known to man and has killed more children than any other disease in history. And we are no longer protected against it because people who should know better are relying on “gut feelings” and their “mommy instinct” instead of clear and repeatedly proven scientific evidence. The result is numbers of cases of measles that, according to the Center for Disease Control's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly are beyond historical limits.

This fine book explains clearly and with extensive footnotes to reliable sources how this appalling situation came about and the resulting tragedies that have ensued. He quotes psychologists who have studied mob behavior and phenomena such as cognitive dissonance, availability cascades, and confirmation bias. He describes the growing market offering alternative medicines, unproven procedures, and other costly but ineffective treatments that are touted to “cure” autism. He examines the thousands of class action suits that have been brought to the US Vaccine Court. He quotes experts from the Centers for Disease Control, the American Medical Association, the National Institutes of Health, the American Academy of Pediatriacs – scientists and doctors specialising in vaccinology, immunology, communicable disease, autism, toxicology. All of them, without exception, deny there is evidence connecting autism with vaccinations.

The author speaks of his young son: “As my son grows older, I hope that . . . he will feel empowered to make his own decisions and will have the self-confidence to challenge traditional wisdom. I also hope that he learns the difference between critical thinking and getting swept up in a wave of self-righteous hysteria and I hope he considers the effects of his actions on those around him. Finally, for his sake and for that of everyone else alive, I hope he grows up in a world where science is acknowledged not as an ideology but as the best tool we have for understanding the universe, and where striving for the truth is recognized as the most noble quest humankind will ever undertake.”

2011 No 31