Science Guardian

How many of you are parents worried about vaccines, and whether they will give your babies autism? I assume many here probably think, as I did, that the idea is as preposterous as mainstream medicine said it was last May, when the hallowed Institute of Medicine reported that it wasn’t likely.

Well, duh. There is cause for alarm, according to a persuasive book, Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy, just out from St. Martin’s Press. And the affair has implications for the AIDS-HIV issue.

I attended the book’s publication party last night, at the Antartica bar at Hudson and Spring, and afterwards at EAT round the corner. The party, chock full of outraged parents and handsome gay men, plus two idealistic Washington lawyers, was hosted by the author, David Kirby. He has a pay-the-rent job at the UN but devotes himself to writing on health for the New York Times and has now written a book. It is, I think, a public service, for he has clarified the topic with evenhanded thoroughness.

I was glued to it today going down to Wall Street, partly for its style. It presents a controversy in a completely credible manner, without taking sides, and you conclude what you conclude, without being pushed. While hard scientific proof is lacking, I ended up persuaded that we may have here another case of “evidence of harm” done by the health community to its unfortunate charges, in this case American children.

I am glad to say that it has struck a nerve in many others too. Sales are already passing 50,000 after only a week and it is in its fourth printing. I’d say this reflects the public demand - the deep hidden need, in fact - for authoritative briefings in matters such as this, which is in many aspects the same story as in AIDS. Parents on alert to these kinds of iatrogenic (doctor caused) dangers, where the lives of their children are at stake, need more than reassurance from a government appointed committee.

This is the role of journalists and why we need them, as the vivacious blonde lawyer, Beth Clay, said to me when I talked to her. There are too few investigative journalists who don’t follow the media habit and simply convey the press releases of government departments and industry in health matters, she said (Yes, ma’am). As the other lawyer there (James Moody, Chairman of Advocates for a Competitive Economy, who has a squiff eye, but decency extruding from every pore) explained at length, there has been a sea change in attitudes in Washington in the last three or more decades.

It follows on the heels of the great change in the academy, where thirty years ago no one in bological research had any company with which they were involved, and today it is hard to get any respect if you don’t have a corporate role. Corporate money is now the blood transfusion providing life support to departments at major universities. Nowadays, he said, everyone in Washington sees their neighbor on the take from lobbyists and the drug industry, and feels a fool if h/she gets left behind. Well, not so surprising, perhaps. Nader is famous for never going after the cigarette mannufacturers who funded him, the lawyer said.

I asked the blonde lawyer what she thought the layman should do, and she said they should do as the journalists and the politician’s staffs should do. “There is only one thing to do and that is to go the the source yourself and read the scientific studies for yourself, and see if they were well done and if they prove what they say they show.”

That was nice to hear. She had faith in the man-in-the street, or at least the upper middle class layman, being able to penetrate the mysteries of scientific papers. Some would say she is optimistic, but I think not. I hope she can spread the habit.

I admit I had picked up quite the wrong impression by skimming the news superficially in the past, and assumed that the concern about vaccines was generated only by ignorance and fringe beliefs. Perhaps this was because I knew personally one of the two authors of one of the earliest books on the matter, Shot in the Dark . This was Harris Coulter, who was a firm believer in homeopathy (he wrote a history of medicine from that point of view) despite his inability to defend it against professional scientific skepticism.

So I was surprised to see that the book reliably conveys that there is very good cause for concern. Studies correlate the rise in autism with the rise in mercury based vaccination and also other famously growing ailments among children, including ADD (attention deficit disorder), ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), and gross speech delay. One mother last night told me that her son at 7 spoke no better than a 2 year old.

There is obviously something deeply wrong somewhere since autism is making steady leaps in America - it’s gone from 1 in 10,000 births in the 1980s to 1 in 500 in the 90s to 1 in 250 in 200 to 1 in 166 in 2004 (boys suffer 4 to 1 over girls). No less than one in six American children have a developmental disorder or a behavior problem!

All of this correlates with mercury exposure through vaccines, which doubled between 1988 and 1992. The parents of children with autism present last night were absolutely sure of the cause, telling me that their child’s sudden onset of symptoms followed immediately after their vaccination.

If they are right, the deadly element in vaccines is thimerosal, the vaccine preservative which is just about half (49.6%) mercury. Thimerosal is needed for the more popular, cheaper multidose vials which are punctured repeatedly for each dose, which would otherwise breed fungus and bacteria. Live vaccines or single dose vials don’t have to have it in them.

Thimerosal is cheap and since the 1930s when it was introduced has been preferred prcisely for this reason, and because it was already used in the production line for vaccines.

The first case of autism was recorded on the early 1940s, a few years after thimerosal was introduced, but for years emotionally distant, “refrigerator mothers” were blamed for autism, according to the theories of Austrian born psychologist, Brunel Bettelheim.

In 1964, however, Bernard Rimland, a psychologist with an autistic son, wrote Infantile Autism:The Syndrome and its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior which debunked the aloof “refrigerator mother” theory and persuaded readers it was of biological origin.

In the 1980s vaccines finally came under suspicion, though it was also clear that, as Rimland pointed out, there must be some genetic predisposition. Not only are boys four times as susceptible than girls, but autism may run in families, judging from what one mother told me last night of her own family. But it cannot all be genetic, as Kirby slyly notes, not when autism, by most accounts, is epidemic. “There is no such thing as a genetic epidemic.”

The families’ distrust of the medical establishment is palpable, and they are infinitely grateful for Kirby’s review which puts their view - “they call us the crazy vaccine people” - on a firm footing. The Institute of Medicine report of May 2004 ordained that the evidence “favor rejection of a causal relationship” between thimerosal and autism. But later animal and test tube studies provide further evidence of harm from thimerosal-laden vaccines, he says.

While the US is supposedly abandoning such vaccines, the British have set a deadline of September 2004 to ban them, after suffering a rate equal to the US (I wonder what has happened since.) Northern European countries with more cautious policiessuffer much less than that. Denmark removed thimerasol from vaccines in 1992 and now has only a 1 in 1,300 rate.

Meanwhile, the doctors, bureaucrats and drug company reps who discount the thimerosal danger refused to be interviewed for the book, David Kirby says. He told me he had the top four CDC officials lined up for an interview, and was in a car 20 minutes away from them in Atlanta when he got a call on his cellphone. Sorry, they would not talk to him after all, because the cases were being pursued in court.

But these were cases the CDC played no part in. Meanwhile the same officials warn against mercury in fish. Mercury is a known neurotoxin - “most dangerous element to humans after plutonium,” said a furious father to me last night. “Don’t inject it into babies!”

It does seem inexplicable that anyone, let alone the CDC should allow it to be injected into babies one or two days after birth, at doses that exceed federal adult safety exposure levels by up to fifty times per shot. “There are not satisfying answers,” writes Kirby calmly, in his restrained, New York Times mode. He makes the point that he is not writing an anti-vaccine book, nor a partisan one. But he does note “heavy resistance from the powerful public health lobby” to the efforts of parents to prove that mercury in vaccines is what pushed their kids “into a hellish, lost world of autism.”

In 1999, the US government in a “Joint Statement” officially acknowledged that children were being exposed to mercury beyond federal safety limits, and promised to phase out thimerosal in vaccines and to determine if injecting it into infants was responsible for autism nd other nurological disorders. So far neither has been fully achieved, says Kirby.

Though thimerosal has been removed from most routine vaccinations given to American children - there are some 52 of these according to one father I spoke to, who said he felt they were overloaded - but it is still in flu shots. How many Americans know they are getting a mercury injection when they take this route to fend off flu?! And the CDC recommends flu shots for pregnant women and children between six months and twenty three months old.

With perhaps billions of dollars in legal claims at stake, the drug industry guys are running around the country spreading their largesse in hopes of winning indemnity against claims, not to mention trying to suppress evidence of thimerosal’s toxicity. Apparently the cat is long out of them bag, however. A Merck memo from 1991 was uncovered, admitting that the substance was toxic, I gathered.

All in all, an excellent case study of why one cannot make any assumptions about the validity of AIDS research, since the same forces are undoubtedly at work in that field, with billions also at stake.

In fact, given the much more powerful global politics of AIDS, it seems that the beliefs of that much more prominent ideology will surely be far less objective, and far more deeply protected, than in the realm of autism.

The book’s web site is at http://wwww.evidenceofharm.com

In AIDS, belief in the HIV paradigm seems driven more and more by a religious zealotry rather than any rational scientific cognitive process. The rote phrase “overwhelming evidence” is repeated like a religious mantra, evidently reflecting the absence of firm proof that HIV is the cause of AIDS—of any good evidence at all for the idea, and a multitude of reasons for rejecting it, if the skeptics are right.

Without any proven scientific basis for the belief, in the form of a peer reviewed paper in a respectable journal that can be referenced, the believers fall back on stating their belief loudly and angrily, and invoke outrage at the harm that the skeptics’ questions might lead to. To those that demand proof, this looks very much like the evasion of religious believers when asked for evidence of miracles.

As a matter of fact, the scientist in us is becoming more and more convinced that the religious impulse is far from beneficial in any sphere today. That is why we were fascinated by a remarkable segment featured by CSPAN2 on Saturday night.

A young man with a pleasantly lucid style was addressing a congregation in a large synagogue in Irvine, southern California, and informing them quite straightforwardly that the dogma in their religion and indeed all institutionalized religions was sheer bunk. Not only that, but such dogma comprised a huge danger to the future of human society, and should be done away with.

Yet instead of rising up in indignant wrath, the audience lined up to ask respectful questions.

As we listened, we understood why. Finally, it seems, the book on the problem of religion that the world has been waiting for has been written in the clear and persuasive style nnecessary to get the messsage across. Sam Harris, the young Stanford neuroscience student and philosophy graduate giving the talk, has written what all of us have been thinking but few have dared to say quite so frankly. His book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, published last year, fearlessly applies reason to religion, or at least, to the myriad petty or grand superstitions that encrust the world’s major religions like barnacles on ocean liners.

Even to write such a book in the present cultural era in the US seems like an act of courage, even foolhardiness, given the fact that this society gives religion’s critics such short shrift that it is not so long ago that the most famous atheist here was murdered.

Harris, however, writes boldly and without fear or favor, and this may be because he feels that the time has come. For it is 9/11 and the Iraq aftermath of escalating terrorism that have prompted his analysis, and the solution he offers. What Harris is saying is that it is the set of myriad unique beliefs which distinguish one religion from another that are lighting the religious fires that are threatening to consume the world.

Petty or large dogma ranging from the virgin birth and Christ being the Son of God in the Christian world, to the 72 virgins awaiting martyrs in the Muslim paradise, are the root cause of conflict, he says, because they are what distinguish one religion from another and excite tribalism.

In believers fueled by the fervor of religious passion, these false and irrational superstitions reliably lead to airliner missiles and suicide bombers. Without them, one religion would be much the same as another, and the world could join in global ecumenicalism. Worst of all in the belief in a heavenly afterlife, which justifies martyrdom and devalues the threat of death.

What is so satisfying is that Harris mercilessly points up the absurdity of dogma in such a calm and non-combative tone that even the intensely religious are unlikely to be offended, as the CSPAN segment showed (the event was a reply from January 18 this year).

On Amazon, the breakthrough volume has received a huge amount of readers reviews, 242 at last count. Surely the intense response aroused by his work reflects the great need that exists in the hearts of many to bring reason and faith together. But what is also noticeable is an odd fact, which exactly proves his point. Time and again, those of a particular faith or religious sympathy find that the book is slanted against them.

Of course, there are other places where reason has been brought to bear ffectively against religious beliefs. The monthly magazine Free Enquiry, published by the Center for Enquiry of New York, reliably features heretics such as Christopher Hitchens and Oxford scientist Richard Dawson in its pages, lobbying hand grenades against the obvious absurdities and inconsistencies of blind faith. But the magazine in general smacks of an adolescent earnestness and a picayune preoccupation with logical fallacies which the religious scorn as minor and easily ignored or refuted, even if they don’t immediately know how to do so.

At the opposite end of the spectrum there is the brilliant work by the Oxford philosopher Simon Blackburn, “Think”. In a mere twenty or so pages he demonstrates what all good philosophers now know, pace Thomas Aquinas, which is that any religious belief which posits an all powerful God inevitably implies an impersonal being with no concern for human welfare, one utterly irrelevant to human lives.

Neither logical approach seems likely to influence the average believer in a personal God, however, let alone the committed Catholic or Muslim.

What the youthful Harris does so helpfully, however, is nail the distinctive irrationalities in major religions to the wall, show that they conflict with other religious belief systems, and demonstrate how little they have to do with fundamental spiritual values. This is a rather clever approach, because it is one that believers can listen to and if they wish, take action.

They can, if they like, abandon their faith in particular beliefs that go against reason, without necessarily abandoning the comfort of a general belief, however questionable that may in fact be. This will be all to the good, as Harris points out. For these are the needless differences which lead everyone to insist that their own bible is holy writ, and informs them that people with different texts must needs be misguided infidels who should be killed.

Whether Harris’s thesis will have any influence is hard to predict, but one can say that reading the first few pages of his work feels like breathing a refreshing breeze of fresh air and lucidity amid the reek of the sentimental claptrap that passes for religious talk these days.

It is this “I’m OK You’re OK” misplaced mutual tolerance of nonsense which leads, in Harris’s view, to the very clashes those who express such goodwill think they avoid. As a matter of fact, the book is worth buying simply to see his own tight rope act performed, where he manages with exquisite verbal accuracy both to respect religious belief as an impulse and to expose it as irrational at the same time, thus combining tact with illumination. Harris is so unerring in his language that he has only to describe some wrongheaded notion to defeat it.

Of course, as noted, he is alienating nearly everyone in the world with what he writes because almost every believer takes offense at what he writes about his or her own group, while delighting in what he criticizes about its rivals. One Amazon review saying he is a Jew hating Muslim will be followed by another perceiving he is a Muslim hating Jew—proving his point that these ideologies are primed for tribal responses and warfare.

Actually he seems merely a thoughtful, engaging, even tempered young guy who has the fine attribute of coolly analyzing various ways of thinking without precopnceptions, then and only then formulating and offering his own. Admirable. This kind of objectivity about what other people think allied to objectivity about what you think yourself is what will save the world. It is entirely non–tribal, independent, and constructive—the opposite extreme from the religious fanatic, whether suicide bomber or the typical HIV-AIDS believer.

Would that minds like this would turn to examining the irrational and inconsistent beliefs of HIV-AIDS, which in this regard is behaving exactly like any other major religion. What a contribution they could make.

If there is any flaw in his book, it may be that as a good skeptical analyst Harris too much emphasizes beliefs themselves and whether they make any sense, instead of the fundamental problem. That deeper problem he points to is the egregious tendency to make beliefs of all kinds tribal badges. Too often religious beliefs are barriers to our common humanity, for this reason. Once they are communal and tribal, nearly everyone marks those with different beliefs as antagonistic. This phenomenon is very apparent in AIDS HIV believers, whose comfort zone does not include those who ask them why they believe as they do.

As several documentaries about the Isreal-Palestine problem have pointed out, it is our children that show us the way. When Jewish children mix with Palestinian, these films show, humanity easily triumphs over different beliefs. Evidently the power of religious beliefs to engeder tribal fears of people who are different is as powerful as skin color in engendering prejudice, yet as the children show us, it is all so needless. It is as Harris argues. If all of us followed reason and abandoned unreasonable beliefs, we all could be brothers under whatever we may conceive God to be.

There is an interesting interview with Harris on line.

The most interesting thing of all about Harris may be his manner, which enables him to appear before a variety of church audiences and win them over with reason. Apparently reason is not entirely dead, even in the congregation, if it is approached in the right way. The overriding truth may be that a fine analyst with tact can win over religious audiences and persuade them to abandon their particular beliefs for the general ones we can all subscribe to. If so, he will deserve the Nobel peace prize.

Harris is already being put on a par with Oliver Sacks and even Lucretius as having written a seminal book. We prefer to compare him with Bertrand Russell, whose excellent essays on this topic he recommends Why I Am Not a Christian : And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects by Bertrand Russell

With most of his Amazon reviewers, we say, Long live Sam Harris!