Free Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All by Paul A. Offit M.D.

with seizures and retardation who were labeled vaccine-damaged as children might instead be suffering from Dravet’s. He remembered the emotional burden that the mother had carried for more than forty years: “Why did she get her daughter vaccinated? If only she hadn’t gotten her vaccinated this terrible thing wouldn’t have happened. And she carried the guilt and grief of all of this. So we started looking aggressively to collect the cases.”

    Samuel Berkovic, a neurologist at the University of Melbourne, was the first to figure out what had caused seizures and mental retardation in the children featured in Lea Thompson’s DPT: Vaccine Roulette . (Courtesy of Dr. Samuel Berkovic.)
    In 2006, Samuel Berkovic evaluated fourteen people with severe epilepsy and mental retardation. All had developed their first seizures between two and eleven months of age; all had received the pertussis vaccine within the previous forty-eight hours; and several had been compensated for damage allegedly caused by the vaccine. Some had had fever following the vaccine, but most hadn’t. Berkovic believed that all suffered from Dravet’s Syndrome. So he looked to see whether they had a genetic defect that caused the problem. He found that eleven of the fourteen had a defect in the gene that regulates the transport of sodium in brain cells. (The specific gene is called SCN1A ; and the specific disorder, a sodium channel transport defect.) Recognizing that vaccines can’t change a child’s genetic makeup—and that 100 percent of children with SCN1A defects will have seizures and mental retardation independent of whether they receive vaccines—Berkovic wrote, “The identification of a genetic cause of encephalopathy in a particular child should finally put to rest the case for vaccination being the primary cause.” In the last few sentences of his landmark paper, Samuel Berkovic made a plea on behalf of children with epilepsy: “Correct diagnosis will reassure the family as to the true cause, remove the blame of having vaccinated the child, direct appropriate treatment, and allow realistic planning for prognosis.”
    Berkovic was surprised by the reaction to his paper. “I was very excited about this [work],” he recalled. “I thought it was one of the most, if not the most, important thing I’d ever done.” Following publication, several commentaries praised the work, one calling it the most outstanding paper of 2006. “Most of my neurologist colleagues thought that the paper was really important because they’re the people that see these cases directly. But among the vaccine community I couldn’t get any traction. We were trying to get a much bigger study together and collect more cases and we just couldn’t. I got a bit dispirited and gave up. Why didn’t it get traction? I don’t know. It befuddled me. Maybe it’s because it was something from a bygone era.”
     
    After Berkovic’s paper, it was clear that all the time spent by parents to get health officials to admit that pertussis vaccine had permanently harmed children, all the money spent by pharmaceutical companies to compensate alleged victims, all the work of lawmakers to create a system to deflect lawsuits away from these companies, and all the ink devoted by the media to support these children and their parents had been an enormous diversion from the real cause of the problem.
    Although parents of children with epilepsy and mental retardation were wrong in believing that pertussis vaccine was at fault, they were right in several respects: First: it’s likely that their children had appeared perfectly normal before they received the vaccine. Many infants with epilepsy and retardation syndromes have no symptoms for the first few months of life.
    Second: many doctors had assumed that seizures following DTP had been febrile seizures and falsely reassured parents that these were common and nothing to worry about. During Paula Hawkins’s hearings into the safety of