What’s the deal with Jenny McCarthy?

A day or so ago online media was all atwitter about Jenny McCarthy because a new TIME magazine article said her son was not autistic.  This was newsworthy because McCarthy is a very vocal anti-vaccine advocate, as she believes it caused her son’s autism, thus if her son never had autism, her anti-vaccine theory would be wrong.

Well, apparently, a lot of things were wrong.

According to the Huffington Post, the story came from Radar Online and it there were numerous errors:

• The “new” TIME magazine article is actually from 2010
• Jenny McCarthy never said her son didn’t have autism, she said that some people have speculated that her son had a different condition.  (Source: Huffington Post)

Of course, the real mistake here is that people still think the MMR vaccine cause autism.    Here’s how that mess got started…

Back in 1998, an article was published in a medical journal called The Lancet, in which a doctor named Andrew Wakefield did a very small study about the supposed link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) and autism.   And by small study, I don’t mean several hundred patients:  twelve (12) children were included.  According to the article, eight families out of twelve said that their children developed autism days after receiving the vaccine.  (Source:  The Sunday Times of London.)

Only…an investigation published by British medical journal BMJ found that Wakefield falsified the records.  In most of the cases the ailments he wrote about in the article did not match the children’s actual medical records.

Five of the children in the study already had documented symptoms before the vaccine and three were not autistic.

The study has been retracted, and most of the co-authors withdrew their names from the study in 2004 when they discovered that Wakefield had been paid approximately $674,000 from lawyers that intended to sue vaccine manufacturers, a conflict of interest he neglected to disclose.  (FYI – the person who did the investigative reporting, Brian Deer, has signed a disclosure stating he has no financial interest in the matter.)  (Source:  CNN – Retracted autism study.)

Wakefield was stripped of his medical license in Britain.

Even though the study was both small and fraudulent, the impact has been immense with nervous new parents not getting their children vaccinated, ultimately causing  a rise in the cases of measles, mumps and rubella, all preventable diseases.

No parent wants their child to get sick.  My husband and I had this same debate because he was so freaked out after reading message boards on the internet.  But part of our jobs as parents includes lending more weight to the actual facts presented by scientists than to a celebrity, who may be a loving mother, but has no medical background.

What are your thoughts about vaccines?

Lisa 

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