Foul Play

By J. B. Handley

Are you a Jason Giambi fan? I am. The guy is known in the majors for being one of the most genuinely nice guys to ever call a dugout home. His sweet swing, hard work, and clutch play made him a local favorite during his years with the A’s, and I loved rooting for the guy.

Like many of his peers, he seemed to be more buff than the Hulk, and the comparison between him at his peak of swatting homers and his Olympic Team baseball card photo was a bit like comparing Arnold to Pee Wee Herman. So maybe the A’s had a great weight room? 

Unlike his peers, Giambi recently admitted that he used steroids to enhance his strength and performance. So Giambi is also a cheater, just like several dozens of his peers, who were no doubt doing exactly what he was doing to produce the 1990s “homerun era” of baseball.

Today, Giambi is an army of one, meaning the one man big enough and honest enough to tell the truth. Was his decision to speak up applauded by his peers? Not really. The Yankees? Not particularly. Baseball in general? No, as they now want him to rat out others.

Giambi’s new religion, self-incriminationalism, does not appear to be attracting many converts. The autism community could learn a lot from Mr. Giambi, although they probably won’t. Let’s kick Autism Speaks while they’re down and explore their potential to be converted.

Late in 2006, the early results of a survey we were doing on unvaccinated children were rolling in. The results were disturbing, and potentially meaningful. We chose to share this information with a number of autism organizations, including Autism Speaks. Our proposal to Autism Speaks was to help us fund a larger study, as we were only collecting data in Oregon and California.

I got a very polite call from Andy Shih of Autism Speaks. He expressed interest in what we were doing, emphasized how important methodology was, and said he would like to better understand our approach. He said because of the CAN merger, he was getting out to the West quite often, and in early 2007 he’d like to fly up to Portland and spend time with me reviewing our results. I was encouraged by the open-minded call, the professionalism, and the interest in learning more. I told him I welcomed the opportunity to meet.

That was the last time I ever heard from Mr. Shih. No follow-up, no email, just silence. I don’t know why. Now, honestly, I doubted Autism Speaks would ever fund something Generation Rescue was doing, and I would have had no problem with them saying “no thanks”, but what I did expect is that they would follow-up the disturbing early results I was sharing with them and consider doing their own additional research. To the best of my knowledge, they have not.

Why? Let’s look at just one member of Autism Speak’s Scientific Advisory Board -- where decisions on research funding take place -- Dr. Eric London.

This letter from Bernard Rimland, written in 2000, is all you need to read. A brief excerpt, in Bernie’s words:

‘Garbage science!” That is how psychiatrist Eric London characterized what he had just heard from several fellow parents of autistic children. Some of the parents were also MDs or professionals in other fields. “If you presented your views to a journal-reading club at a medical school,” Dr. London continued, “they would be thrown out the door.”

The view that Dr. London objected to so strongly-that perfectly normal children had become severely autistic shortly after being inoculated with vaccines containing large amounts of highly toxic mercury-had been presented by parent-attendees at a National Institutes of Health meeting on October 23, 2000. The conference on “The Role of the Environment in Autism,” was sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

“Continuing to deride what he called “garbage science,” Dr. London went on to explain that scientific progress proceeds like the building of a brick wall. “You start with a solid foundation to which you add, very systematically, experimentally proven facts, which fit neatly into place, brick by brick.”
I arose and objected strenuously to Dr. London’s assertions, noting that Dr. London’s brick-wall model of scientific progress reflected a very common misconception. The brick-wall model is a useful way to teach science to beginning students: “Little steps for little feet.” But it is not the way scientific progress actually occurs in real life. I had in fact addressed this very matter in my Afterword to Anabel Stehli’s book, The Sound of a Miracle. Referring to the brick-wall theory of scientific progress, I wrote “Nonsense! Nearly four decades as a full-time researcher has taught me that the crossword puzzle makes a much better model of how science really proceeds. Very often, finding the right answer in one corner will show that an answer already well established in some other corner is wrong, and needs to be erased. There is at least as much erasing of old answers as there is writing of new ones. The more important the finding is, the more likely it is to spring from the crossword puzzle, rather than the brick wall, process.”

“The story of man’s progress is a chronicle of authority refuted.” This adage is particularly true in the field of medicine. Historically, those who made the breakthroughs, the discoveries that brought about major changes in thought and practice, have been ridiculed and reviled by their contemporaries. The greatest names in medicine were treated with contempt by their colleagues, including Semmelweis, Lister, Pasteur, and Harvey in the distant past, and, in the recent past, contemporary physicians such as Abram Hoffer, the Shute brothers, Henry Turkel, and Kilmer McCully.

“Yes,” I told Dr. London, “what you have heard this morning about the harm done by the mercury in vaccines probably would be thrown out the door of a medical school. Medical schools have a long and sordid history of punishing the bearers of new ideas, and especially new ideas that belie cherished long-held beliefs, such as the belief that vaccines are totally benign and do no harm.”
Eric London and his wife Karen are the founders of the National Alliance for Autism Research (NAAR), which they established in 1995. When I published a one-page editorial in the Autism Research Review International in 1998 about the to-me obvious huge upsurge in the prevalence of autism, and listed vaccines as one possible cause of the increase, Eric London wrote a 4-1/2 page rebuttal in the NAAR newsletter. He rejected my reply.

Well, as readers of the ARRI already know, the reality, and the huge dimensions, of the increase in prevalence are now well established, and the role of vaccines in bringing about the increase is becoming more widely accepted.’

This was written in 2000. Seven years ago. Is Mr. London a candidate for Mr. Giambi’s new religion? Would he receive a proposal for an unvaccinated children survey with open arms? Or, would he behave like 99% of the major leaguers who juiced and put his head in the sand and hope things blow over?
Our survey results will be released tomorrow. I hope you’ll let Autism Speaks(click here to send them an email) know how you feel.

J.B. Handley is the founder of Generation Rescue.

Comments

[MadDad]

Not even close!! You could not survive there if you believed vaccines were part of the cause. They think we are nuts.

[AutDog]

Does AS have people equally biased on the vaccine/mercury side on its staff?