Jenny McCarthy’s new war on science: Vaccines, autism and the media’s shame — salon.com

"Vaccine Nation: America's Changing Relationship With Immunization" The IOM committee took on the feared link between MMR vaccine and autism as its first order of business, convening a meeting in March 2001 and releasing its conclusions a month later. Looking closely at the existing research, the scientists on the panel didn’t find much to implicate the MMR vaccine, but they did find much to exonerate it. To begin with, the MMR vaccine was licensed long before prevalence of autism spectrum disorders began to climb. Eight different epidemiological studies showed no association between MMR vaccination and autism. These studies didn’t definitively disprove a causal relationship, but at the same time, the single study suggesting a link between vaccines and autism—Wakefield’s study—failed to prove a causal relationship. Epidemiological evidence aside, there was also no good biological model to explain how MMR vaccines could contribute to autism, in either lab animals or humans. The likelihood of a causal relationship, the committee concluded, seemed remote.

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