‘Link’ cut between vaccines, autism

Here’s the bad news: Even some doctors, whose title confers automatic legitimacy to their opinions, went in for the conspiracy theories linking child vaccinations to autism and other ailments.

Here’s the good news: Hardly any parents in the United States paid attention.

And there’s more news of the good variety: The 1998 research that spawned the specious connection between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism has been not merely discredited.

It has at last been disowned, as it were, by the medical journal that published the shamefully shoddy work in 1998.

The Lancet, which is basically the British equivalent of America’s New England Journal of Medicine, last week retracted the 1998 paper by Dr. Andrew Wakefield.

A panel of British doctors concluded that Wakefield showed “callous disregard” for the children he studied.

Wakefield was guilty of a couple other ethical lapses besides.

For one, among those who bankrolled his research were lawyers representing families that intended to sue vaccine makers.

For another, the year before he published his findings, Wakefield patented a measles vaccine that could have replaced the measles-mumps-rubella inoculation which he linked to autism.

Suspicion about such claims has been heightened since 2001, when vaccine makers stopped adding thimerosal, an anti-bacterial and preservative agent, to almost all vaccines for infants and toddlers. Thimerosal, which contains mercury, has been cited as a possible cause for autism.

Yet childhood autism rates have not dropped since thimerosal was removed from vaccines.

Even while anti-vaccine hysteria was spreading, virus-like, vaccination rates in the United States continued to rise.

Now, at least 90 percent of American children have had the recommended vaccinations, with the exception of the one that protects against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. The rate for the DTP vaccination is about 85 percent.

But despite those encouraging statistics, other numbers show that the threat of those and other diseases can grow if even a minuscule portion of the population ignores the overwhelming evidence showing immunizations are both incredibly safe and effective.

For instance, the number of measles cases in this country reached 131 in 2008 — the most in more than a decade.

Most of the people who came down with measles that year were younger than 20, and 112 either had not received the MMR vaccine, or their vaccination history isn’t known.

There were 273 cases of pertussis (whooping cough) in Oregon in 2009.

Sadly, people who get sick aren’t the only potential victims of vaccine fear-mongering.

We feel sorry too for parents of children with autism who wondered whether, in trying to protect their children by having them immunized, might have “caused” their autism.

It’s also unfortunate that some parents were so worried that they decided not to have their kids immunized.

And finally, the groundless speculations about the side effects of vaccinations might have diverted attention, and more importantly money, from responsible research into autism, which continues to lack either a cause or a cure.

Ultimately, we hope the debunking of Wakefield’s research will permanently sever, in the minds of parents, any correlation between autism and vaccines.

The development of immunizations ranks among the greatest medical achievements of the past 60 years.

But as the recent outbreaks of almost forgotten diseases such as measles and pertussis prove, vaccinations can protect us only if we use them.

The fear of autism was never a logical reason not to inoculate children.

But we hope The Lancet’s repudiation of the very work it published 12 years ago will eradicate that fear as efficiently as the various vaccines have done with debilitating and dangerous diseases.