Vaccines, autism, and Obama

I’m really disappointed in my candidate.

I recently put a “Scientists for Obama” bumper sticker on my car, because I liked his positions on science and other issues, but this week he joined McCain and Clinton on the bad science bandwagon that continues to attempt to link vaccines to autism.

First, McCain made a statement that “there’s strong evidence that indicates it’s [the rise of autism] got to do with a preservative in vaccines.” In fact there is no evidence in support of this and much evidence against it. Then Clinton answered, in response to a questionnaire from an autism activist group (which is promoting the bogus vaccine-autism link), that she was “committed to ... find the causes of autism, including ... vaccines,” and further that “we don’t know what kind of link there is between vaccines and autism, but we should find out.” Wrong, Senator Clinton – we do know what kind of link there is, because we’ve run dozens of studies, and the answer is that there is no link. No link!

And finally, most recently, our last hope, Barack Obama, who had stayed out of it, said at a rally this week that “some people are suspicious that it’s [autism is] connected to the vaccines.... The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it.” Wrong, Senator Obama. The science is as conclusive as it can get, and there is no link. Unfortunately, most people – and most Senators, it seems – don’t understand that scientific methods cannot prove a negative. So if there is no link between A and B, you can study it to death, and the best you can say is that “we failed to find a link.”

I blogged on the autism-vaccine issue not long ago, so I won’t repeat that here, except to remind readers that the controversy all started (see my earlier blogpost) with a fraudulent study by Andrew Wakefield in The Lancet arguing for a link between vaccines and autism. Wakefield's data was collected fraudulently, and after the fraud came out – including Wakefield’s financial interest in the study – his own co-authors repudiated him and retracted their findings. Wakefield is under criminal investigation in the UK, so he relocated to the U.S., where our lax regulations have allowed him to set up shop again, offering his own brand of “help” to parents of autistic children. Meanwhile he tours the U.S. giving talks and interviews, pushing this bad science, and making plenty of money off the parents of autistic children.

The blogs I’ve seen on this have multiple responses from vaccine-autism believers, including parents with heartbreaking personal stories, and a growing number of journalists who are astonishingly ignorant of science (including David Kirby at the Huffington Post, who seems to think he’s figured it all out). They are all wrong, but their activism continues to muddy the waters and confuse the public. There are numerous sites explaining the science in more measured terms, including the Institute of Medicine’s detailed reports, and it’s a shame that the science is being shouted down.

I wrote to Senator Obama today – on his campaign website – asking him to talk to a real scientist about this issue and to reconsider his statements. If he doesn’t – and I don’t expect that his staff will even tell him about my comments – then we’re left with three leading candidates who are all misinformed on this important public health issue. My only (slight) consolation is that Obama’s statement is the most muted of the three, since he didn’t actually assert that there was a link, just that the science was inconclusive. If I get a reply from the Obama campaign, I'll be sure to post it here.