OLMSTED ON AUTISM: TIME AND NEWSWEEK AND "THE REST OF US"

By Dan Olmsted

People flying out of Chicago from Autism One last weekend couldn’t help but notice the cover of the new Time staring out at them from O’Hare’s 5 million newsstands: “The Truth About Vaccines.” Subtitle: “Worried about autism, many parents are opting out of immunizations. How they’re putting the rest of us at risk.”

Uh-oh. You and me versus “the rest of us.” Welcome back from the Westin to the Real World. Is it really necessary to turn inside and read what we all know is coming after a cover headline like that? I resisted for a few days, but I have now done my duty. Rather than rage on about the overall tone of the article and its attempt to put the vaccine-autism zealots (you and me) in our place (le bin de les loones), I’d rather make a few observations that fit with the larger picture that’s starting to emerge.

First: Where is Bernadine Healy? Nowhere. Maybe the fact that she wrote about taking the vaccine-autism link seriously in a sort-of rival, U.S. News & World Report, made it a non-story for Time. They still could have quoted her CBS interview, though. Trashing the vaccine theory without at least mentioning the concerns of the former NIH head is just not going to cut it any more.

Second: Where were the pharmaceutical ads? Nowhere to be found, either. Except for a diabetes meter, Time was pharma-free. Memorial Day is often a low point for ads, so perhaps it just worked out that way. It’s also possible, and completely ethical, for Time to give a heads-up to pharma advertisers that they might want to stay away that week. But when you feel how thin the issue is, you realize how pharma props up the newsweeklies.

Third: Time gets little things wrong that, I believe, suggest a lack of deep familiarity with the subject – which is their absolute bedrock obligation. The government “acknowledged that a 9-year-old girl with a pre-existing cellular disease had been made worse” by vaccines. But as Jon Poling says, no one knows whether Hannah’s mitochondria problem was pre-existing or triggered by the vaccines. Right away, Time is holding hands with the feds.

Time says, “In 2001, however, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration study revealed that a 6-month-old receiving the recommended complement of childhood vaccinations was exposed to total levels of vaccine-based mercury twice as high as the EPA considers safe in a diet that includes fish. By the end of that year, thimerosal-free formulations of the five inoculations that included it … had replaced the older versions. The result was a drop in mercury-exposure in fully immunized 6-month-old babies from 187.5 micrograms to just trace amounts found in some flu vaccines.”

Help me out here – wasn’t the key finding on thimerosal exposure announced in July 1999 (whatever other study may have come out in 2001), and weren’t some mercury-containing vaccines still out there after 2001, and isn’t the amount in a flu shot more than a “trace,” and don’t more and more especially vulnerable pregnant women get it, not just infants, and isn’t mercury in most, not “some,” flu shots? And isn’t that one paragraph of shadings and misstatements enough to convince the casual observer that all this concern is silly?

And then, get this statement by the writer: “Thimerosal can do serious damage to brain tissue, especially in children, whose brains are still developing. It was perhaps inevitable  that parents would make a connection between the chemical and autism. …”

Well, yeah, I guess they would. Does the writer really mean thimerosal, Paul Offit’s “gentle bacteriostat,” can do serious damage to brain tissue? Because as written, that’s what it says. Can a whole gaggle of writers and editors not understand the difference between thimerosal as a specific organic mercury vaccine ingredient and mercury in its many manifestations? I mean, you could write a headline from this that reads: “Vaccine mercury damages infant brain tissue.” Of course, that’s true, but I don’t think that’s what Time meant. I’m not sure they know what they meant.

This kind of glib, rapid-fire factual sloppiness is why I’ve said that perhaps the most important thing Big Media outlets could do is get an autism beat reporter and an experienced editor who can get this simple stuff straight. Then maybe they’d start seeing the picture that emerges when the pieces are not so relentlessly distorted and confused.

OK, now to Newsweek. If Time was all fouled up on the larger picture of vaccines and autism, Newsweek was knee-deep in the case of a single child “Growing Up Bipolar,” as the cover said. The story was fine on its own terms, although the heartbreak of raising a sick child is by now a journalism cliché, as I’ve also written before. The question is why oh why oh why oh is this child bipolar – or to put it in more human terms, so terribly sick? As an infant, “Max never slept through the night. … He cried for hours at a time. He banged his head against his crib and screamed until his face burned red. Nursing, cuddling, pacifiers – none of them helped.”

HEY GUYS – It’s a spectrum. It’s increasing. These kids are all messed up, and vaccines are not off the hook as a primary suspect. Just ask Bernadine Healy. This comment from her interview with Sharyl Attkisson of CBS was overlooked but cannot be overemphasized:

“When I first heard that there was a link between autism and vaccines, I thought, ‘Well, that’s silly.’  Really, I mean, I tended to dismiss it just on the superficial kind of reading, you know, just reading what was in the papers.  No offense to the media.  So, when I first heard about it, I thought, ‘Well, that doesn’t make sense to me.”

Well, I’ll be happy to give offense to The Media. If I could put the headline on Time magazine’s cover, it would be this: “The Truth About Vaccines. Faced With a Story They Can’t Understand, Many News Outlets Say It’s Silly. How They Put the Rest of Us at Risk.”
--
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.
 

Comments

[Lawrence]

Mr Olmsted,

As you know, science reporters, maybe even more than reporters on other beats, live in fear that they will be cut off from their sources. They basically need two skills. They must be able to translate science into language that readers can understand and they need to maintain their establishment sources so they are not cut out of the deal on any important stories. In the world they operate in, critical thinking and an investigative attitude are treated like skunks at the picnic.

Science reporters are generally pack journalists who attend conferences together and socialize with each other. They often share a sense of superiority with scientists that is unfortunately cultivated more and more in Big Science.

The CDC and NIH keep reporters at the biggest media outlets like Time, Newsweek and the New York Times on a very short leash. The minute one of the fraternity does write anything the CDC or NIH doesn't like, the call goes into their editorial or publishing bosses and there's an attitude correction. (Thank the Lord for the rise of the internet.)

At Newsweek, in 1992, Geoffrey Cowley broke a story that almost pulled the rug out from under everything the CDC and NIH had been telling in the public about AIDS. At the AIDS conference in Amsterdam, it was revealed that there were (and are) cases of AIDS without HIV. That should have been the end of the HIV theory and absolute proof that the CDC had gotten the definition and cause of AIDS wrong. The fact that HIV-negative AIDS was also occurring in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients should have been an indication that AIDS and CFS were part of a much larger neuroimmunological epidemic that should have been given a new name.

Rather than going where the new HIV-negative AIDS data was sending them, the CDC and NIH went into a public relations battle and swept the new developments under the rug. Instead of following Cowley's lead, a couple of his science journalist colleagues turned on him. Newsweek's investigative burst of energy was short-lived and Cowley didn't pursue the story much further.

Instead of looking for another virus or new factor that might be the cause of AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, under the guidance of AIDS Czar, Tony Fauci (a name all autism activists should know), any AIDS-like illness that didn't have HIV was not considered to be part of the same epidemic. A political era of dogmatic circular reasoning began in which AIDS without HIV was not AIDS. A kind of medical apartheid began that allowed the one virus linked to AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (and autism) to spread.

And that virus is HHV-6.

You may think that the vaccine autism issue is so important that it is bringing the big guns of the scientific establishment and the media out to shut you up. You are partly right. But you are actually skating close to an issue that is much more threatening than the vaccine issue.

Every time you talk about autism being an epidemic you inadvertently bring the world one step closer to potentially seeing the HHV-6 link between AIDS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, autism and many other neuroimmunological problems. Your focus on the autism spectrum threatens to reveal the HHV-6 spectrum.

If you open a second front in this autism battle, one focused on HHV-6 and the HHV-6 spectrum, you may change the balance of power so dramatically that the CDC and the mainstream media will have to get back in the business of telling the truth.

[SAM]

What should be truly puzzling to the masses is how in the world we're putting everyone else at risk. "They" love to spout that immune compromised individuals like those with cancer or AIDS can't be vaccinated, so it's our job to create herd immunity. I'm not even going to go into the fact that herd immunity doesn't even exist and only seems to fall on the backs of babies and not the rest of us, as if only babies and small children spread disease.

But I want to know why cancer and AIDS victims can't be vaccinated. Why not? What happens to them if they are? Vaccines are then (by their own admission) not a good idea for part of the population, but everyone else handles them just fine? I want to know what happens (by "their" admission) to the immune compromised if they are vaccinated (neurological complications, maybe?).

[Media garbage]

"Yeah, I remember the good old days too... why hasn't Discover Mag revisited the issue?"

Maybe they decided in the interest of global warming that it was better not to have sold out issues anymore.

I have no idea what drives the media anymore. They are *manifestly* not doing their job or are not being allowed to do their jobs. Who knows.

[Mark Blaxill]

Sakura, that's extremely interesting and not the least bit surprising. When reporters are writing editorials disguised as news pieces, one way they do ths is to choose the characters that support the opinions they're disguising as facts. That requires using characters that play their assigned roles. Smart, educated, well-informed vaccine consumers are not part of this kind of propaganda piece. We first saw this with Gardiner Harris in the NYT and it continues.
Mark

[Jeanne]

Media Garbage,

Yeah, I remember the good old days too... why hasn't Discover Mag revisited the issue? Oh, and I didn't go out and buy the Time magazine, I wouldn't waste my money on something like that either, my parents have a subscription and passed the issue on to me when they were done with it.

[Sakura]

I'm a non-vaccinating parent. I was interviewed for this piece but not quoted.

Why not?

I'm sure the fact that I admitted to utilizing CDC data and PubMed as when doing the the risk benefit analysis of whether to vaccinate our daughter didn't fit into their story line. Neither does the fact that both my husband and I have Master's Degrees in a health science. Or the fact that my clinical specialty is in helping children on the spectrum. Or that our pediatrician is 100% supportive of our research and decision.

[Anne Dachel]

Dan, your first point tells us volumes. Where is Bernadine Healy? Why didn't she make the front pages all over the U.S.? If it weren't for Sharyl Attkisson at CBS no one would have heard about her concerns over vaccines and autism. QUESTION: If Dr. Healy had announced resounding support for the NO EVIDENCE OF HARM people, would ABC and NBC have had it as the lead story on the nightly news?

Notice that research by people like Dr. Laura Hewitson, Dr. Thomas Burbacher, or Dr. Mady Hornig is never mentioned in most of the press coverage of the controversy. Instead we'd told that "studies show no link." Paul Offit makes the New York Times saying the same old thing about no serious side effects and ridiculing parents. Pharma funded studies always show up on lots of Google news sites.

The selective reporting on autism and vaccines regularly leaves out anything that challenges what officials keep telling us. It's easier to make believe that all the research backs the long-time claims of the CDC. The TIME cover headline was The Truth About Vaccines and the inside headline was How Safe Are Vaccines? So did we get "the truth about vaccines"? Were our fears allayed? Was vaccine safety demonstrated? Was the controversy ended?

Not even close.

It'll be interesting to see how much we hear about the Green Our Vaccines Rally next week. Thousands of parents converging on Washington asking for safe vaccines should be worthy of at least a small mention. This is the controversy that's only going to get worse. The press won't be able to keep on pretending all's well with vaccines because too many people are shouting that it's not.

Anne Dachel
Media editor

[Twyla]

If someone came forward to say, "My son got sick to his stomach and vomited after eating some fresh spinach," would the headline be, "Anti-vegetable mother responsible for drop in number of people eating their vegetables!" No, it would be about whether the spinach was contaminated. Amazing how the story about vaccine safety issues gets turned around to be about the dangers of not vaccinating, instead of being about whether there are some legitimate safety concerns.

But, even though this Time story is full of inaccuracies and government spin, at least it puts vaccine questions in the news. Before, these issues were not even covered at all. A friend of mine who does not have a child with autism and is not very familiar with these issues commented, "But look at the cover! It's scary looking! Just having this article in the news gets people to start wondering about this!"

On the Time web site at www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1809403,00.html, there is an interview with the mother of the boy who brought measles home from Switzerland. This interview does provide some voice for vaccine safety concerns. I haven't seen the magazine in paper, so I don't know whether this interview was included in the newstand Time.

[Media garbage]

"I could put the entire magazine in my recycling bin… which I did."

In my town the recycling unit is so stuck up and snobbish that it refuses to recycle glossies. Only newspapers allowed. Unfortunately, it would have had to end up in the garbage heap at our house which is a tad worse than recycling. Its a good thing I decided to save a part of a tree by not buying it in the first place. In fact there is little incentive to spend limited dollars on trash, I would rather use them for treatments for my child. I remember in the good old days we used to go out to buy the publications that wrote something favorable about autism. Remember that great Discover article on autism, the magazine was sold out.

[Jeanne]

As Mr. Olmstead states in his post, I too resisted reading the Time Magazine piece. I guess I figured, same shit, different day. But I finally gave in and forced myself to wade through the BS. And BS it was. When I had finished reading the article, I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, what a piece of crap journalism!” But then, I’m biased so I just let it go. Didn’t give it another thought. What good does dwelling on something like this do? No good. I did spend a few moments after reading the article coming up with interesting uses for the wasted paper…

1. I could line a rodent’s cage with the article… if I had a pet rodent… but then I realized, the toxins from the glossy paper would probably kill the rodent - or cause it it have little autistic rodent babies. And I have too much to do taking care of my little autistic baby, I don’t think I could handle a gaggle of autistic rodent siblings on top of everything else.

2. I could let the puppy use it as a piddle pad… if I had a puppy… and then I realized the puppy would probably eat the paper, then poop out the paper, which would then allow the Time article to fulfill its destiny as a piece of crap.

3. I could let my son eat the article… he does that… eats paper… we’re working on fixing that problem… it sure would be ironic if he ate the article and then (as I said in number 2) allowed the article to fulfill its destiny as a piece of crap.

4. I could use the paper for my latest paper-maché project… if I had time for such things… but then I realized it wouldn’t be worth the effort, and besides, the only thing I could think of making was a pile of crap…

5. I could put the entire magazine in my recycling bin… which I did. The end.

[Away with these people]

This is how it comes across to me -

Shame on these parents and their problem kids for getting autism and other associated problems. Why did they need to go ahead and do that? See, now our entire public health policy is at risk. Its their fault all along - first they get sick, then they decide to stop vaccinating, then they put the entire society at risk, and then they tell other people to stop vaccinating. And then finally they have the gall to tell us, yes US, that there is something wrong with public health policy!!

Their is NOTHING WRONG with public health policy, its all *their* fault. Them and their faulty genetics. I really wish they could go away and let the rest of us live in peace. I wish we didn't have to deal with these people, they are a menace to the rest of us in the world.

[Tanner's Dad]

Headline on Autism Speaks News...Autism theory gains support

Geraldine Dawson, chief scientific officer of the advocacy group Autism Speaks, declared that the Poling case "shines a spotlight" on the issue of unusual sensitivities.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/daily/20080529_Autism_theory_gains_support.html

Who would have thought... Right there in black and white... Hannah, Dr. Healy, the words "vaccines cause autism", and Autism Speaks all in the same article