Vaccines and “Reasonable” Fear of Autism?

“Fear of autism is perfectly reasonable.”

Well, I guess it could be construed as such. But not really.

The above sentence is from a September 15th article on Babble—”the magazine and community for a new generation of parents”—by Kate Tuttle, with the title of Compulsory Vaccination. The article presents a capsule history of vaccines and resistance to them since their invention in the late 18th century:

Some of these early objectors believed that vaccination was itself an affront to the God who had sent disease to punish sinners, while others, like today’s anti-vaccination activists, feared that the shots meant to protect the public good would inflict harm on individuals.

The numerous scientific studies refuting a vaccine-autism link are cited, and the role of the Internet and the mass media in furthering the life of rumors about this or that as a “cause” of autism; after this comes the statement about fear of autism being “reasonable”:

Fear of autism is perfectly reasonable. It’s a scary diagnosis, one that’s risen exponentially over the past two decades — though whether through a vast expansion of the diagnosis or an actual increase in numbers is still hotly debated. But it’s natural that a condition with no known cause would inspire concerned parents to go looking for a culprit, particularly one they can protect their children from.

Fear of autism might seem “perfectly reasonable.” But autism is not something you can catch, like measles and there’s a tendency, because of fear and a bit even of panic, for people to shrug away and even belittle arguments that attribute the notable recent rise in the prevalence of autism to better diagnosis. It’s not that there is an epidemic of autism, as that fear of a child “getting” autism from something that a parent could “protect their children from” seems endemic in our culture right now.

The Babble article gets somewhat to the heart of why some continue to believe, and quite fervently, in a vaccine-autism link. The now-discredited study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield claiming a link between the MMR and autism that was published in The Lancet in 1998 (not 1988 as Babble says) is noted:

It doesn’t really matter that there’s no significant scientific debate about the matter (as with evolution and global warming, a vanishingly miniscule number of actual scientists disagree with the majority opinion), many parents still feel that the relationship between autism and vaccines is an open question. And though the number of families opting to exempt themselves from vaccination requirements is overall quite small — less than one percent in most states — it’s a very vocal minority. (A growing movement of parents choose to vaccinate their children, but on a delayed or modified schedule.) Parents who opt out of vaccines tend toward the crunchy; Waldorf Schools are among those with the highest incidence of non-vaccination, and have found themselves the epicenters of childhood disease outbreaks.

Many parents still feel that the relationship between autism and vaccines is an open question. To me this is the crux of the problem, and one of the main reasons why belief in vaccines or something as vaccines as causing autism persists. Science is not enough, and is not going, to change people’s views, but their feelings and emotions—the heart over the head, if you will—-play a huge role in all of this. Parental fear of autism is rather anything but reasonable, it would seem, and stems from a resistance to accepting what the science says.

And autism can seem a “scary” word if your child has just been diagnosed and all you can think is, “what do I do?”. But there is (however much it seems to be so or not) a lot more that can be done to help and teach autistic children today—my son’s prospects, while limited and seemingly ever in flux—are much greater than they would have been in previous generations. There’s still a lot of misunderstanding out there, but also a lot more understanding and knowledge. While some parents will continue feel that a vaccine or something in a vaccine “triggered” autism in their child, I’m not so sure whether most parents actually think so, and will continue to believe so.

It’s not autism that is to be feared but how tenaciously the notion of a vaccine-autism link is being clung to, and will be adherd to, long after study after study refutes a link, and the jury is long gone.