Antivax Fraud

To the Editor:

It is disheartening when a letter writer references the antivax “Informed Consent Action Network” as representing some level of scientific authority on the perils of vaccination.

In fact, ICAN’s premise that “vaccines are bad” is founded on the work of Andrew Wakefield, a physician/researcher in Great Britain who along with 12 co-signers filed a scientific paper with the respected medical journal the Lancet. That study drew a nonexistent link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The fact that the conclusion was reached based on a study of only 12 children with no control group should have raised a red flag. The fact that Wakefield failed to disclose that he was accepting payment from attorneys engaged in suing vaccine-producing companies on behalf of parents with autistic children raised the question of medical ethics.

Ten of the original co-signers retracted their support of the study, and follow-up examination of the study revealed cherry-picked data, falsified facts and scientific misrepresentation that eventually forced the Lancet to withdraw the paper and issue an apology.

Wakefield’s paper was quickly disproved by follow-up epidemiological studies. He was convicted of fraud and stripped of his medical license, but the damage was done. Vaccine rates dropped worldwide. The subject should have been closed and would have been were it not for the efforts of Del Bigtree and big-money donors along with a host of celebrities supporting the anti-vaccine crusade.

Conclusions without facts are simply personal opinions. Free speech in this modern age means the folks that have the money have the megaphone to spread their personal opinions regardless of the potential for harm to the misinformed. Del Bigtree, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the bogus doctors who have hitched their wagons to this cash train are free to spew fact-free conjecture as truth with no repercussions, until they are sued, a la Alex Jones’ InfoWars.

Autism is devastating. It has touched my family, but the facts around its prevalence and cause are still being gathered. The facts around a host of diseases that afflict humankind and the vaccines that prevent those diseases are abundant and proven. Smallpox was eradicated. Polio was nearly eradicated before fear of vaccines gripped remote parts of the world. Measles was almost unheard of in first-world nations before the internet took Wakefield’s fraud as gospel and parents declined routine vaccines for their children.

The sad thing is it is the children who will bear the pain and sometimes lifelong effects of preventable diseases when their frightened parents opt out of vaccines. Vaccines are not risk free, but they have saved millions of people from death and disability worldwide. Don’t give voice (or money) to the charlatans who are using disinformation as a cash grab.

Ralph Thayer

Barnegat Light