The following is a reader take by Rahul Parikh.
Where is the line between true and false advertising? And should we be more careful when the claims an ad makes has potential health consequences for children and communities?
Let’s ask newspapers that question about big adverts they’ve printed from Generation Rescue, an autism advocacy group, the one headed up by Jenny McCarthy, who regularly appears on National TV claiming vaccines cause autism.
The ads, which you can see on the Generation Rescue website, and have run mostly in USA Today (there were two in the New York Times in 2005) are formulaic for those of us who have seen them. Images of large syringes and needles, big headers asking things like “Are We Poisoning Our Kids?” and claiming “A 6000% Increase in Autism. Wouldn’t You Try to Cover it Up Too?” The smaller print then goes into some pretty disturbing details. Among them:
* “the CDC knows that the ambitious immunization schedule begun in the 1990s, nearly tripling the amount of mercury injected into our children, created an epidemic of autism in America”
* “Vaccines contain “Mercury, Aluminum, Formaldehyde, Ether and Antifreeze.”
* “as the number of childhood vaccines has tripled, we’ve seen an explosion of neurological disorders like ADHD and autism…”
As evidence of a link between autism and vaccines, one of the ads refers to a “market survey” Generation Rescue commissioned which found “vaccinated boys had more than a 2.5 times greater rate of neurological disorders than unvaccinated boys.”
Scary and very confusing stuff if you’re a parent and you’re trying to do the right thing for your child. So let’s look beyond the claims and at the facts:
* There is no credible (unless you consider a market survey credible) evidence to suggest that any specific vaccine, any specific ingredient meant to keep vaccines safe and effective, the schedule of vaccines or the number of vaccines a child gets causes autism. Yes, anti-vaccination advocates point to studies of their own, and claim that the studies that support vaccine safety are all funded by pharma. But anti-vaccination groups fund their own “research” as well. So putting money aside, when one looks at the credibility of the science (internal validity, reproducibility of the results, and the generalizability of them), the answer shows vaccines are safe and effective. For more about the lunacy of anti-vaccine science, read or see my review of Dr. Paul Offit’s book.
* Vaccines do not contain antifreeze or ether. Mercury, in the form of thimerosal, was removed from most vaccines in 2001, even before several studies showed it was not the culprit behind autism. One study, looking at the rates of autism in California after 2001, found that autism rates rose in the post-thimerosal era. It’s true that some vaccines contain aluminum to help stimulate an immune response, and there are trace amounts of formaldehyde as a preservative.
The implications of the ad are clear — health officials have covered up a conspiracy to hide a inconvenient truth about vaccines,. But the reality is that the ads push a message that’s help drive down vaccine rates in many parts of the country in the absence of good medical evidence to the otherwise. It’s PR, not science, and it’s hurting the health of children and communities. Consider:
* A Measles outbreak in San Diego in March 2008, after an unvaccinated child returned from a trip to Europe
* An outbreak of H. flu in Minnesota, some of whom were in children whose parents have refused vaccines
Questions for readers: Should media outlets balance the public interest and the strong advertising claims, like in these ads? Does a lack of medical evidence to support an ad qualify it as false advertising? Should the FDA regulate ads that make health claims that are unsubstantiated, or–like tobacco–add a Black Box Warning to adverts that make medical claims?
Rahul Parikh, a pediatrician in California, is a contributor to the Los Angeles Times and blogs at sWell on Open Salon.
Related posts:
- A pediatrician takes the anti-vaccine movement head on
- Losing the anti-vaccine fight, and what we should do next
- MMR vaccine not linked to autism
- Rahul Parikh: Grading the Gates Foundation
- Vaccines do not cause autism in children, whether or not they have inborn errors of metabolism
- Andrew Wakefield exposed as a fraud, the autism-vaccine belief is based on falsified data
- Both the far left and right agree not to receive the H1N1 vaccine
{ 11 comments }
Um…if all of the other children were vaccinated, why did they catch the measles when one child brought it back from Europe? Me and my two older brothers were vaccinated and I caught the measles from the vaccination – then my older brothers got it. Do the vaccinations work?
Julie – Not everyone “takes” to a vaccine. This is the importance of “herd immunity”. Due to immunosuppression, some patients cannot receive vaccinations – it is therefore imperative that the healthy percentage of the population receive the vaccines. That being said, we do still have constitutional rights.
Julie–vaccinations work, but all vaccinations that involve a live form of the virus–as with the MMR vaccine–carry a very small risk of infecting the person with the virus. It can happen with anything, even with a flu shot. It’s a matter of the person’s immune system not responding normally to the virus for whatever reason. It can often be near impossible to predict, since it may be such a slight deviance from normal that it’s nearly impossible to tell. The autism/vaccine controversy has been blown way out of proportion. Until there’s real, scientific evidence of thimerosal causing autism, or of vaccines “overloading” children’s immune systems as some have claimed, I don’t buy it. There have not been any studies that have provided real scientific proof for either of these theories–those that claim they did have since been found to be the result of manipulated data or flawed research techniques.
“Ask your doctor” Rx drug ads must be run along with a boiled-down version of the package insert with all the risks, side effects, etc. Why can’t antivaxer ads be required to meet similar criteria and list the risks that can be incurred by unvaccinated children? How about including the risks their germy kids pose to others?
Is this too logical? Unfair? An impingement on their right to free speech? Maybe. But allowing some germy kid to spread preventable diseases infringes the majority’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Vaccinations don’t cause autism. Nobody knows for sure what causes autism and other mental illnesses. The money antivaxer lunatics spend on histrionic ads could be better spent elsewhere.
Hasn’t it been established that multiple measles vaccinations are required? ISTR reading about the WHO working with the Japanese health authoritiesto revise their measles vaccination schedule after multiple outbreaks of measles in teenagers.
I think doctors are missing the point as to why the anti-vaccine movement is gaining appeal. In my mind there are three types of people the antivaccine moment appeals to.
for some it’s not about credibility of the antivaccine movement, it’s about the excuse. People hate giving thier kids vaccines, kids cry, it cost time and money. The anti vaccine movement has given some people enough reason not to persue vaccines.
Then there’s actually people who have kids with autism. they are told this kid has an uncurable disease and they don’t know why, and their’s nothing they can do about it. They are desprate and probably angry and it just happened for some people vaccines became the target for their fustration.
Then there’s simply the scared- people who are concerned about any possible risk.
Providing arguing against the antivaccine movement, does nothing to resolve the orginal problem these patients had (dislike, desperation, fear). It may actually embolden some people to adamantly stick to thier beliefs. And this is why doctors are losing ground on the vaccine front.
As a Respiratory Therapist who has worked with children for just under 20 yrs. I have to say nothing is worse than seeing a baby or child die, except a child who has died from an avoidable disease. I have seen children die of “whooping cough” because of a parent who believed the propaganda over vaccines, and refused to vaccinate their children. What a price to pay for an uninformed decision. Science doesn’t lie, but people with agendas can and do.
It’s PR, not science, and it’s hurting the health of children and communities.I think “guerrilla marketing” – an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination – best describes the nature of the anti-vaccine lobby. The conventional system for promoting new health paradigms, scientific proof, doesn’t work for anti-vaxers. So we’re seeing unconventional methods.
Full page ads in USA Today are just part of the problem. Equally troubling is the credulous coverage the movement receives in news and entertainment media.
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The new, 11th edition of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Epidemiology and Prevention of Vaccine Preventable Diseases (The Pink Book) is now available for pre-ordering from the Public Health Foundation (PHF). “The Pink Book” provides physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, pharmacists, and others with comprehensive information on vaccine-preventable diseases. The new 11th edition contains the latest information and updates on immunization. To order online, visit http://bookstore.phf.org/.
Physicians are often the ignorant ones in the vaccine debate. We are indoctrinated from medical school on about the holiness of vaccines and can’t understand why anyone would think different than our statistically logical minds. The truth is there is a lot of good science against vaccine safety. There has been evidence that autism rates have declined since removal of Thimerosal(see http://www.aapsonline.org/press/nr-03-02-2006.php). Parents do research and come up with information, some good some bad research, and physicians dismiss it as they know it all when they haven’t taken the time to do some pubmed searches so they can understand and validate the concerns of parents. in the end vaccines, for the most part for most children, are relatively very safe and win out in a risk-benefit analysis. Once you validate that there are risks to vaccines parents are willing to accept those risk over the risk of not vaccinating. But if you deny the risks of vaccines you become part of the system they feel is trying to deceive them and poison their children.
I don’t think AAPS is a particularly good source to cite. Particularly when the source cited is a review by the infamous Geier (http://www.casewatch.org/civil/geier.shtml) duo.
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