The Vaccine Controversy Vaccines have been used to provide protection against infectious diseases for at least a thousand years. In was practiced in other parts of the world long before it's brought to Europe and United States. In 1796, the British Doctor, Edward Jenner used cowpox material to design the first successful vaccine to prevent smallpox. But from their inception, there was controversy about the safety of vaccines and fear about possible harm they might conflict. That debate continues today. ABC News - Autism Awareness: Funny girl Jenny McCarthy showed a less humorous side on Larry King last night. The discussion was about autism. Jenny’s son Evan is autistic, and there was a little debate about the use of vaccines. Jenny McCarthy’s Autism Fight: Look at, it’s plain and simple. Too many shots, too soon! Michael John Carley, Founder, GRASP [Global and Regional Asperger’s Syndrome Partnership] & Asperger’s Patient: Vaccines prevent an infinite number of children from contracting infectious diseases causing them to be seriously ill or disabled every single day, and yet today we still have an alarming number of parents who retain somehow that belief, despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that vaccines caused autism in their kids. One of the medicine's greatest triumph, vaccines have eradicated smallpox and greatly reduce the incidence of diseases such as polio, misos and tetanus from much of the world. I believe in vaccinations. I have treated children over the year who unvaccinated later died of diseases we could prevented. PBS ‘Frontline’ - April 2010: Yet some parent groups attack vaccinations as the cause of chronic diseases, from ADHD to autism. Michael John Carley: This all started in 1998, when a British gastroenterologist named Andrew Wakefield published an article in the medical publication, The Lancet, hypothesizing a link between vaccines and autism. Doctor Accused of Fraud Speaks Out: The work certainly raises a question mark over MMR vaccine. One small study ignites a huge public health scare and an even bigger anti-vaccine movement. Fears over autism gripped parents, and some started to refuse life-saving vaccines for their kids. Brian Deer, British Medical Journal: Reporter Brian Deer debunked Wakefield’s study. By comparing the original medical records to the study data, he found much of the science was falsified. But even before this report, Wakefield had been stripped of his medical license. His study was retracted by the journal that published it, and at least twelve studies have proven that there is no link to the MMR vaccine and autism. Dr. Ricky Robinson: The time when autism presents itself is exactly in the same period when the infants get their fifteen-month and eighteen-month vaccination. And, but this is the time when parents start noticing that their children are, don’t have the skills that they would expect at this age. So it’s easy to blame something on a vaccine. Despite the scientific reputation of Wakefield's work, vaccine critics and parent groups continue to support him. They questioned not only the MMR, but the many ingredients in vaccines, particularly a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal. Robert Kennedy, Jr.: Public health agencies decided to act on the side of caution rather than wait for the results of epidemiological studies. In 1999 the FDA asked manufacturers to reduce or eliminate thimerosol in vaccines as soon as possible. Michael John Carley: Vaccine theorists took this as a cowardly admission of guilt. Oh, they know what they’re doing. You know, they’re just inventing another excuse to get rid of it when they know that this is the reason our kids have autism now. And this was when you really had the explosion of articles (Autism:a novel form of mercury poisoning, S. Bernard et al, 2001). This is when the books by Jenny McCarthy came out (Mother Warriors, Louder than Words). This is when David Kirby’s Evidence of Harm started to come out. This is when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. published an article in salon.com in Rolling Stone Magazine called Deadly Immunity: only interviewed parents who believed that their children’s autism was caused by vaccines. Jenny McCarthy: We don’t know for sure, which is why we keep saying, ‘Study it,’ but they won’t. In fact, around the world, scientists had been studying groups of children. Epidemiologist in Denmark compared two groups of children, those who had received the MMR triple shot and those who hadn’t. They found no difference in the autism rate between the two groups. Researchers in Sweden, Finland, Britain, and the U.S. also found no association between MMR and autism. Additional evidence came from Japan. In 1993, Japanese replaced the MMR triple shot with three separate vaccinations. But autism rates did not fall following this change. In fact, they appeared to rise, making the triple shot an unlikely cause of autism. Danish researchers also investigated the mercury preservative thimerosol. They found that children who were given vaccines with thimerosol before 1991 had identical autism rates as children who received mercury-free vaccines after that date. John Michael Carley: Now that thimerosol had been removed from most vaccines, it stands to mathematical reason that the prevalence numbers will decrease. In February of 2007, the CDC released the new numbers, and they went from one in a hundred sixty-six to one in a hundred and fifty. The prevalence numbers rose. They did not decrease. In essence, this issue should have been over and done with right then. Unfortunately, once on the Internet, the information is really corrected, and every day, new groups of parents read about it for the first time. Dr. Ricky Robinson: You can’t decide to not vaccinate your children and not realize the risk that you’re putting them under. And that if your children are unvaccinated, they are totally susceptible to all of the childhood illnesses which are lurking in our society, but are not popping up like they used to because most people are willing to take vaccines. So these parents have to accept this kind of risk. Vaccination affects not just the individual, but the collective body of community. This is the principle of herd immunity. When enough people are given a vaccine, virus have trouble moving from host to host and seize to spread. When enough people don't vaccinate, herd immunity begins to crumble. John Michael Carley: In California, Jenny McCarthy’s home state, in 2010, you had twenty-eight cases of measles, by far the highest in the nation. As well as a whooping cough outbreak, which affected 10,000 people and killed three infants. If by not vaccinating, you’re taking the choice to be healthy away from your child’s classmates at school or your neighbors or even some of your own family members, then theoretically you can’t call it an issue of choice. Very strong herd immunity could completely eradicate many vaccine-preventable diseases, rendering vaccines unnecessary. This happened with smallpox in the 1970s. A decade ago, the World Health Organization had plans to eradicate polio, followed by measles. But vaccine scares around the world serve to chip away at herd immunity, and put them also vulnerable in our society at risk for these deadly and highly infectious diseases.