The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

[Ian David]

Bad Medicine
Seth Mnookin’s new book asks, are vaccine fears endangering our health?
By Harriet A. Washington

The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear | By Seth Mnookin | Simon & Schuster | 448 pages, $26.99

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth,” warned Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who pressed this adage into service on more than one occasion. In The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin starkly exposes the social architecture supporting one such lie: the pervasive and destructive myth that certain vaccines—those laced with a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal—are responsible for rising rates of autism in the United States.

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Next comes the resistance to water fluoridation, wherein Mnookin pinpoints the hazy science of the opposition: “When they asserted that there is some hypothetical quantity of drinking water that would contain enough fluoride to be toxic to humans, they did so confident that nobody in the media would point out that that amount was fifty bathtubs’ worth.” The author then touches on the 1976 swine-flu fiasco and problems with the DPT vaccine, before veering off into the evolution of autism.

In the second section of his book, Mnookin turns to dismantling the causation theories that link thimerosal and autism. As he explains, this link was promulgated by such scientists as Andrew Wakefield, a physician whose 1998 Lancet paper castigated the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine as a possible trigger for autism. Here was the first major study to set off alarm bells—even though it was later retracted, and Wakefield himself subsequently struck off the British medical registry. What followed the initial publication was a flood of lawsuits, high-profile articles, books, televised debates, and even rumblings against a government conspiracy to protect the pharmaceutical industry.

As readers of The Panic Virus will soon grasp, the thimerosal theory has no credibility. And in any event, the preservative has long since been removed from all but a few vaccines. The FDA found no evidence that miniscule levels of thimerosal caused autism or other harms, but since the government did think it prudent to end the use of mercury and its derivatives, it was gradually phased out.

More:
http://www.cjr.org/review/bad_medicine.php?page=all

Hat-tip to: http://twitter.com/teh_skeptic/status/30270016767139842

See also:

Curing the vaccine scare: Recent report debunks autism link as 'a deliberate fraud'
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=222x99080

After Wakefield: Undoing a decade of damaging debate
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=222x98388

The Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin Reviewed in Left Brain/Right Brain
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=222x98190

[madrchsod]

1. i have a friend who`s oldest child is autistic

she blames the condition on vaccines she took while in the national guard. so her three kids are not vaccinated and are unable to attend any school in our state. she has spent over a hundred thousand on quack treatments. she has a master in education but unfortunately she`s one of those.

[Ian David]

2. Tell her you think the "refrigerator mom" theory is as valid as the vaccine theory. n/t