Nice summary Rahul. I blogged about this a few weeks ago at http://plasticsurgery101.blogspot.com/2008/08/good-doctor-of-day-award-dr-paul-offit.html

This whole thing parallels the late 1980's hysteria over silicone breast implants, where despite no evidence, trial lawyers extorted Dow Corning out of existence over claims of systemic illness that have repeatedly been disproved on multiple international studies.

Sometimes it's nice to see evidence based medcine prevail

Illuminating review/article. Interesting that our pediatrician who is very pro-vaccination only refuses to give one vaccination: Offit's rotavirus vax. All he would say is "there have been problems with it." I read up on it and indeed, there were "problems" and although they claimed to have fixed them, some doctors err on the side of caution with this one.

Scientists do not work in a vacuum, and are probably not much different than celebrity news anchors, who constantly slant the news without being aware they are doing it. Of course there are real pressures on research Scientists, where does the University gets most of its money? Beside that there is a subtle pressure on people who issue the news to avoid shouting fire in a movie theatre. Of course it benefits the major Pharmaceutical companies if the connection between vaccines and autism isn't proved for a few more years.

Look at the financial markets, who was telling you things were collapsing, certainly none of the expert academics, including the Fed Reserve Chief, Ben Bernanke. The truth is a difficult mistress to serve. Science and truth parted ways many years ago.

So do you believe me or your lieing eyes? I listened to one of the heads of a major pharmaceutical company tout a cure for Diabetes, which he predicts will affect 1/3 of all Americans in another generation. Why? (Round up the usual suspects, diet, exercise, and now plastic bottles). Can we trust science, hardly. Can we trust corporate America? When we tried to stop cigarettes they went overseas, and China has more to worry about that milk. The corporations always deny they are selling the things, in this case vaccines with mercury, but exactly where are all those old stocks, have they been recalled?

BTW, did you know that the Tobacco Institute has proven that cigarettes are good for you? What? You don't believe them? They have done studies...

It continues to astonish me how willfully ignorant so many people are. I wonder what % of the anti-vaccine crowd are also anti-evolution.

Vaccines = the greatest medical advance in history.

No intelligent, informed person would dispute that. Why not participate in an effort to improve the safety and availability of vaccines instead of playing Chicken Little?

I think that myself, the children of a good friend of mine, and similar people are all perfect counterexamples to the claim that autism is "caused" by vaccination. In each case, the autistic traits showed up at the same point expected, except before vaccines were given. One blog devoted to the topic is http://notmercury.blogspot.com - a mother who was sure thimerosal made her kid autistic, until she had another that was the same way despite not being vaccinated.

I think it's important to also note that while Kathleen Seidel, like many of us, feels that the issues being obscured by the vaccine hysteria are that of accommodation & inclusion, not 'curing' or training the kid to seem non-autistic. You can read blogs & sites on the topic by autistics of all kinds & parents raising autistic kids of all types here:

http://www.aspergianpride.com/blog/cure-ignorance/

I was just wondering...

If they stopped making the thimerosal-based vaccines in 2001, how long is the shelf life of a vaccine, and what size of vaccine stockpiles are typically maintained? We would need that information in order to decide whether or not your insinuation that vaccines might still be dangerous due to thimerosal is reasonable or not.

Of course, we all hate and distrust big Pharm, but the question isn't whether we can trust them or not. It's whether we can trust the multitude of peer-reviewed, collaborating studies indicating that vaccines pose minimal risks and provide enormous benefits or a few methodologically flawed papers published by (in at least some cases) individuals with well-documented conflicts of interest.

Individuals looking for conspiracies can always find someone willing to sell them one.

To often the media jumps in, just to create conflict, and promote a faulty line of thinking. That has happened with the association between vaccines and autism.

Vaccines have prevented worldwide calamity. They protect the health of my children and then their children. Hopefully this book will get the same attention that the anti-vaccine advocates receive.

I couldn't agree more that most of the vaccine/autism story has been B.S. However, the article is somewhat incomplete in ignoring last year's court decision in favor of a physician's daughter whose autism was caused by her exposure to vaccines. The catch is that she had an underlying genetic "defect" that rendered her unusually susceptible to such an outcome.

Interestingly, in America we have a clear genetic component to many of our autism cases; in Italy no such genetic correlation exists. This is likely explained by our exposure to many more toxic substances than the average Italian. Just ask our bats (white nose disease) and bees (colony collapse disorder) about our excessively toxic environment.

Unfortunately, about all that is needed to approve a new chemical release in America is a potential profit.

This is what you wrote: "His implication was clear. He knew where my children went to school. The he hung up." These days, the hospital he works in regularly screens his mail for suspicious packages.

WTF does "The he hung up" mean anyway? You are writing from a position of authority regarding a sensitive topic. I personally agree that there is no link between thimerosal and autism however you discredit yourself when you use poor syntax. I could just hear some mother with an autistic child saying, "What does Rahul Parikh know anyways, she doesn't even know the difference between 'the' and 'then.' If she had any authority on the matter then there would be enough money in the budget for a proofreader. So try reading what you wrote and don't rely so much on spellcheck.