Another casualty of the Lancet study is trust of medical research. Some parents were always skeptical about the study — after all, since it appeared, 10 of its 13 authors disavowed its conclusion linking the developmental disorder to vaccines. No other study found any such link.
But other parents are not letting go and insist there is a cause and effect between vaccines and autism.
"It’s very hard to be a parent in the information age," said Suzanne Buchanan, clinical director for Autism New Jersey. "There is so much information and it can be difficult to figure out what is credible and what is not." If a parent questioned a pediatrician who didn’t have the time to answer thoughtfully, the distrust grew.
Perhaps most troubling of all is the diversion of time, money and other resources on a theory that has now been thoroughly refuted. "We now need to put resources into more plausible theories," Buchanan said.
In the Los Angeles Times, Michael Fumento writes about an important externality:
Some groups claim only to oppose mandatory vaccines, but this ignores the need for what's called "herd immunity." That means a certain level of the population must be vaccinated (generally around 85% to 90%) so those unvaccinated are still protected.
Lack of herd immunity is what killed Gabriella "Brie" Romaguera. The New Orleans baby died of pertussis, or whooping cough. At one time, this disease afflicted more than 250,000 American children yearly, killing 9,000. Vaccinations reduced that to just 1,000 new cases annually by 1976; but by 2008, cases had soared to more than 10,000 annually.
Brie contracted the disease when she was a month old, too young for her first pertussis vaccine. "I'm not laying blame," her mother, Danielle, told me. "But people need to know they can infect other people's babies. It kills. People think these diseases don't exist anymore, but that's only because children are being vaccinated."
