Free Denialism by Michael Specter Page B

committee concluded that there was no known data connecting MMR immunizations with the spectrum of conditions that are usually defined as autism. The wording left room for doubt, however, and the report resolved nothing. Three years later, with vaccination rates falling in the United States and anxiety among parents increasing rapidly, and after many calls from physicians for clearer and more compelling guidance, the committee revisited the issue more directly.
    Even at the height of the age of AIDS, when members of the activist group ACT UP stormed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, surrounded the White House, shut down the New York Stock Exchange, and handcuffed themselves to the Golden Gate Bridge, all to protest the prohibitive cost of drug treatments and the seemingly endless time it took to test them, rancor between researchers and the advocacy community was rare. The contempt AIDS activists felt for federal officials—particularly for the Food and Drug Administration and its cumbersome regulations—was palpable. Even the most strident among them however, seemed to regard physicians as allies, not enemies.
    Those days have ended, as the Institute of Medicine vaccine committee came to learn. For years, the culprits most frequently cited as the cause of autism had been the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, as well as those that contained the preservative thimerosal. Thimerosal was first added to vaccines in the 1930s in order to make them safer. (Before that, vaccines were far more likely to cause bacterial infections.) While descriptions of autistic behavior have existed for centuries, the disease was only named in 1943—and its definition continues to evolve. Neurodevelopmen tal illnesses like autism have symptoms similar to those of mercury poisoning, and there is mercury in thimerosal. What’s more, American children often receive a series of vaccinations when they are about eighteen months old. That is a critical threshold in human development, when a child often begins to form simple sentences and graduates from chewing or pawing toys to more engaging and interactive forms of play. Some children don’t make that transition—and because they receive so many shots at the same time, many parents feared, naturally enough, that the inoculations must have been the cause.
    Anguished parents, who had watched helplessly and in horror as their children descended into the disease’s unending darkness, could hardly be faulted for making that connection and demanding an accounting. The Immunization Safety Review Committee was supposed to provide it, although its members represented an establishment trusted by few of those who cared most passionately about the issue. AIDS activism had its impact here too, because it changed American medicine for good: twenty-first-century patients no longer act as if their doctors are deities. People demand to know about the treatments they will receive, and patient groups often possess more knowledge than the government officials entrusted to make decisions about their lives. They have every right to insist on a role in treating the diseases that affect them.
    The rise of such skepticism toward the scientific establishment (as well as the growing sense of anxiety about environmental threats to our physical health) has led millions to question the authority they once granted, by default, not only to their doctors, but also to organizations like the National Academy of Sciences. Faced with the medical world that introduced, approved, and relentlessly promoted Vioxx, a patient can hardly be blamed for wondering, “What do these people know that they are not telling me?” Uncertainty has always been a basic ingredient of scientific progress—at least until reason is eclipsed by fear. Unlike other commodities, the more accessible knowledge becomes, the more it increases in value. Many autism activists, however, sensed that federal health officials and researchers who work with them were guilty of