Best of AofA: Why Progressives Don't Get Autism

Managing Editor's Note: We first ran this post in November of 2010 - it's apropos this week with the debate.

By Dan Olmsted

The midterm elections have ushered in a period of reflection and reckoning for the nation’s liberal-left movement that today usually describes itself as “progressive.” As The Huffington Post bluntly put it, “Progressive Heroes Go Down to Defeat.” Especially given health care reform’s big role in the election debate, this reckoning ought to include the biggest health problem facing the next generation and hence the nation: Autism.

But first, progressives have got to come to grips with their abject failure to “get” the autism issue.

Progressivism, the idea that government can and should intervene to improve the lives of its citizens, arose early in the last century in response to the Darwinian excesses of Industrial Revolution, laissez-faire capitalism – child labor, abject poverty in the elderly, untaxed corporate profits that went right back into the pockets of the richest. It peaked during the New Deal, then plummeted during Reagan – “Government is not the solution to the problem, government IS the problem,” he famously said.

While this political philosophy waxes and wanes, as it should, I would argue that the word has a wider meaning now – that our country, great as it is and has been, faces challenges and problems that can be addressed by doing something, by making progress, sometimes but not necessarily led or funded by government. So it’s not so much a left-right issue as one of the static status quo versus the impulse to improve on it.

One key part of the progressive agenda of the last century has been improving health – and especially children’s health – through mass vaccination against deadly diseases.  And now come a new group of people, autism parents, who allegedly want to roll back all this progress so long in the making. And how do they want to accomplish this nefarious (and nebulous) goal? By questioning the consensus that genes cause autism, and by claiming that the environment – and plausibly some aspect of the very same mass vaccination campaign -- is implicated in autism’s epidemic rise. Cleverly labeling these concerns “anti-vaccine” and, implicitly, anti-progress, makes it easy to ignore a fundamental truth -- that every ideology including progressivism can go too far, get hijacked by forces that should be its natural enemies, and fail to understand what is required at a particular historical moment.

At THIS moment, what’s required of progressives is a willingness to listen to literally thousands of these parents, and hundreds of scientists and doctors, who are trying to tell the medical industry – trade organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, government public health officials at the FDA, the CDC and NIMH, pharmaceutical companies – that something is badly amiss. The message is pretty simple, really: In creating an undeniable public good, those responsible for taking care of children’s health inadvertently unleashed a monster – epidemic levels of developmental and chronic illnesses in this generation of children.

Not surprisingly, they don’t want to hear it. But while all elements of the medical industry – the medical-industrial complex that develops, regulates, administers and protects the recommended national immunization schedule – are equally accountable, the leadership needs to come from the government. It alone is directly responsive to individuals – citizens, voters – and it alone has the authority to make, not just ask for, changes. Government is not here to make a profit but to protect and serve the citizens who elected it. Its shareholders are the people.

This – a truly progressive response to a national health crisis, a response that can only be mounted by a government responsive to the concerns of citizens -- is what needs to happen now. Government needs to untangle itself from the interests and involvements with private industry and technological development that have tied it down like Gulliver, and take back control of science and policy. It needs to get past the gerberding of government, in which revolving regulators like CDC director Julie Gerberding went from recommending vaccines one day to running the vaccine division at Merck 365 days later.

Mainstream journalism is another example of this abject failure. While not necessarily biased toward big government or liberal candidates, journalism itself is inescapably progressive. None of us got into the business to make sure nothing changes for the better; rather, it’s about comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable and using the extraordinary freedom granted by the First Amendment to look for power gone mad – and get it back under the people’s control. At least, that’s what the Framers intended.  Newspapers that print lengthy investigations are elated when they can follow up with reports of government action -- that “federal prosecutors have opened an investigation…” or “congressional leaders vowed to take swift steps against …”

So please, don’t paint me with the anti-science, anti-progress, know-nothing brush that too many progressives love to wield whenever this issue comes ‘round to the undeniable implications of autism’s recency and rapid rise. Mark Blaxill and I have just written a 300-plus page book with 700-plus footnotes, laying out the history of the disorder and its roots in the commercialization of a new mercury compound in the 1930s (“The Age of Autism – Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic”). Just because, starting in the 1930s, unregulated businesses decided to use that toxin in vaccines as well as in agriculture products doesn’t make us anti-vaccine or anti-science, any more than it makes us anti-fungicide. (The government had the good progressive sense to ban mercury in agriculture in the 1970s. It’s still in the flu-shot at your favorite grocery store, though. At least in 1930 they didn’t know any better; today, government abets and enables this disaster.)

It’s doubly disappointing to see traditionally progressive outlets – from Salon to Daily Kos to The Atlantic to National Public Radio and PBS – ignore the evidence presented in our book and so many other places, twist the facts they can’t deny, belittle those who believe otherwise including beleaguered autism parents, and glibly trumpet tired reassurances that the concern over vaccines has been “asked and answered,” that “study after study” has refuted any relation, and that continuing to point out disturbing patterns of evidence to the contrary endangers children and infants.

What really endangers children and infants is sloppy and self-interested thinking by those who should know better, based on second-hand assurances that all is well – that there is no problem, nothing to fix, no need for a progressive response. The implication is that the State and the Corporations will take care of it on their own, no oversight required because, after all, they are “the experts,” the power elites – hardly a point of view that political progressives or serious journalists have adopted in the past. The Obama administration – already responsible for a totally wasted opportunity to implement the Combating Autism Act as Congress intended – went over to the Dark Side when HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius told Reader’s Digest her agency “reached out” to media outlets to discourage them from even giving the other side of the issue.

We’ve seen this Big Brother approach ourselves in real time. When we appeared on The Leonard Lopate Show on public radio in New York City, we were told the New York health department had called the day before to warn them our message –a careful, five-year historical investigation of five centuries of mercury poisoning that suggests mercury is a cause of the autism epidemic – was discredited and dangerous.

The irony could not be richer. In our book, we describe how the first widespread use of mercury in vaccines came in 1931 with the diphtheria vaccination campaign in New York City and state (the first case of autism was born the same year). For the time, that was truly progressive: Universal preventive health care for what was called “childhood’s deadly scourge.” The impulse was exactly right; but the commercial implementation, using a preservative made with ethyl mercury in the form of thimerosal to permit manufacturing and shipment of multi-dose vials, was tragic.

Progressives ought to be able to make this distinction, to tease out the fundamental public good from an inadvertent and ongoing disaster and the long failure to confront and fix it. If for no other reason, they should do this because when public action fails due to mismanagement, it plays into the idea that the public sector can’t run anything as well as  private business, and the progressive movement inadvertently validates the conservative critique. Instead, public health officials are now trying ever harder to stifle the debate, preserve the status quo and their own careers and credibility; in doing so, they betray not only the children they are charged with protecting, but the progressive values that led to mass vaccination in the first place.

It’s time for a reset, as the pundits say. The way forward is not complicated: Progressives need to pay attention to their own first principles and to primary sources and patterns of evidence and evasion  – parents who describe regression, federal agencies that quietly compensate vaccine-autism cases while denying that’s what they’re doing, media outlets too timid, too tied to Big Pharma and too cozy with Big Government to dig up the truth for themselves. They need to take the side of consumer safety not producer profits. And then they need to act.

One reason they need to do so is simple political expediency – recent polls show very high numbers of Americans concerned about autism, its possible relationship to vaccines, and the need for more vaccine safety research. This genie is way out of the bottle despite the best efforts at suppression.

And the debate will get even louder. As traditional media outlets shrink and become more beholden to dwindling advertisers and less likely to investigate for themselves, the emerging multiplicity of platforms works in our favor. We’ve gotten excellent coverage from The Washington Examiner, which wasn’t around a few years ago to counter the Washington Post’s vacant approach to the issue; from Deirdre Imus at Huffington Post, the leading progressive outlet that will give this issue a fair hearing, and from James Grundvig of The Epoch Times, an internationally circulated print and online outlet that, again, is relatively new. Grundvig captured the progressive point perfectly:

“Where has the government been in all of this? Protecting the vaccine makers, chirping the frivolous claim that ‘autism has always been there, just its definition has broadened.’ If all the skeptics were persuaded to read this book, perhaps they will finally admit that not all forms, practices, and medicines developed by empirical science through the ages have done no harm, when it’s clear that they have left a long, painful debris trail on human history.”

The best major-media reporting recently on this issue has come from conservative Fox News, which has taken to running almost weekly reports. The network seems to have been prompted by the government’s strange concession in Vaccine Court – that autism was not “caused” by vaccines but autistic symptoms “resulted” from the vaccinations – which a reporter called “fishy legal language.”

Is that really what progressives and mainstream journalists want? To watch the most important health problem of our time covered best by the most conservative news outlet in the country? Indeed, the progressive agenda of the past few years – perhaps misspent on bailing out huge financial firms, bottomless funding of giant “defense” contractors (Halliburton, call your Oval Office), and an enormous patchwork healthcare reform bill that almost no one seems to like – may have shifted to the Tea Party, which captures the populist and trust-busting impulses of progressivism.

Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor positioning himself to run for president, said on TV the other day that “there’s a coalition of bigness that needs to be busted up.” That sounds like the iconic progressive himself, Teddy Roosevelt, and it applies 100 percent to what’s wrong with children’s health policy today and how to start fixing it. Progressives could begin grabbing this energy back by embracing autism as an issue in which consumers have been betrayed by an unholy alliance of pharma giants and a captured government doing their bidding. Bust ‘em! Put the people back in charge!

Several million Americans touched by the age of autism would eagerly vote today for anyone willing to do that, whatever their party or philosophy is called.

--

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism.

Comments

[Jeannette Bishop]

Jen,

So no candidate said something like (this is my just my personal fantasy):

"Parents want answers on vaccine safety concerns! They want research they can trust. They want independent research. You know I love the pharmaceutical industry as much as anyone, but you wouldn't fully trust myself or my opponent for that matter to research the effectiveness of my own or his own proposed budget plan. You'd want an independent party to weigh in. That's what I think we need. If I'm elected/re-elected president, I will propose commissioning an independent study comparing the health of never vaccinated individuals with the health of the rest of us. It can be done, and I think it should be done, if for no other reason than to reassure parents and remove the burden on health officials defending an untested and therefore experimental program!"

Then we could watch the industry reaction to the idea of accountants or other some non-medically trained professionals comparing diagnostic codes or taking surveys without the "proper training."--end of fantasy

There is a third party debate next week. It was open to the top six, but for some reason only four will attend. Maybe one or more of the candidates or the moderator(s) will not shy away from such a topic?

http://action.freeandequal.org/debate-rsvp/?utm_source=dp&utm_campaign=dp_post_debate

[Jen]

Jeanette Bishop - you didn't miss much if you didn't watch. I mean God forbid they would allow a question to do with autism and healthcare be asked with the autism numbers being so high.

[oneVoice]

To no vac,
if big pHarma is able to figure out how to destroy/,damage our children's ovaries,testicles & blood brain barriers - then they win -as the future the "seeds of the future are destroyed".Before hitler died this was the message he gave
to pHarma"Destroy their seeds".This why we need independent doctors and researchers before it is too late.Gardasil had not been checked for genotoxicity or infertility.

[Jeannette Bishop]

Thanks (I think) for a re-posting of these commentaries. Two years ago I'm sure they didn't quite read the same. Where is the bottom of the rabbit hole?

I'm debating whether or not to watch tonight's puppet-show (just about too late now anyway). It likely will only make me angry as some most vital issues, such as stopping the poisoning of the U.S. population, the crushing national debt and destructive monetary policy, or perhaps the ongoing removal of Constitutional protections by our governmental bodies (all four pillars facilitating, instead of checking), will not get even a passing whisper. To me it looks like the U.S., just a little more than two centuries old, is undergoing a huge regression onto the fascism spectrum, a condition which, though I'm sure susceptibility has always been there and which, unlike autism, is all too normal, I'm also sure our country was not born with.

It seems to me our children may truly not even have the freedom to publicly speak of vaccine injury (among many things), let alone avoid it. We are under attack from many different fronts usually under the guise of security or preventing disaster. If more wake up on other fronts, maybe more will see the over-the-top vaccine push as a force driven by the same (Was the Ely Lilly rider truly just a rider or more like a fitting part of the Homeland Security Act?), but in the mean time, while feeling overwhelmed on how to prevent vaccine injury and neglect of the injured, it feels like we also have a lost future for an entire generation to restore.

[Benedetta]

Sarah;
It went in front of the Supreme Court just last year and was up held.
So we have Congress having lotteries and we have the Supremen Court up holding it.
SATs scores comes out the lowest in 40 years.

[Garbo]

Just as it took a Nixon to go to China, it will take a pro-government progressive liberal to address vaccine safety and autism. Anyone else would get slammed as an unscientific luddite.

[Jen]

cmo- 10 to 20 million votes is a lot in a close race! Pharma couldn't stop them now and one of them should stop the insanity. Many are now one issue voters. Vaccine policies and safety surveillance are completely out of control. And it's costing the country many millions of dollars.

[Angus Files]

Joined up politics... was a phrase coined by the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair he was asked to explain but never did ..so far to say it doesn't matter who we vote..gets in ..in the US the politics shall remain the same you need to vote the alternative whatever it is but not the lead parties...my view on it.. what about The Canary Party..

Angus

[Joy B.]

The fact is, displayed prominently by the issue choices of the progressive "community", that "progressivism" is a false platform. Almost without exception, those who self-define as progressives, in the blogosphere and real life are sedentary authoritarians; pro-"humanitarian intervention", pro-status quo, pro-hucksterism, and ANTI-REASON; Daily Kos and their topic-banning/mass-shaming model as a prime example.

Not that there aren't philosophical progressives out there, but they damn well deserve another categorization, don't you think? Real progressivism is egalitarian, it doesn't dedicate itself to supporting unregulated Corporation A over unregulated Corporation B. Real progessives aren't a socio-economically definable group. Some don't even have the time to blog all day. I think a real awakening will have to happen organically(relatively slowly) and within this framework, where semi-accessible technology is being used to disseminate the official line (early theocratic society, anyone?) to select reinforcers and road blockers. Expect more inquisitions etc.

What I find terrifying is the blind assumption by most that since vaccinations are required(to enter school, be a nurse) they are by definition doubleplusgood. And I worry that most Americans might never allow the thought that their government would harm them to enter their heads until a critical mass of "facts" present themselves.

[Sarah]

Benedetta,

I wonder if the Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 has ever been challenged as unconstitutional. I think it should be afterall, it because of this act that our vaccine injured kids are denied basic constitutional rights. This act is designed to protect industry. It also denies standard due process for compensation through the US justice system. No other industry has this kind of special protection. It is a bad law and should be repealed at least challenged. Since it has been in place for 26 years, we've had plenty of time to see the ill effects.

[Mary R.]

I could not agree more Dan. Although I find myself mostly in the same political company with conservatives and progressives alike on the issue of autism. . .that is IF they also have a child with autism. We all GET IT when it is affecting us or those around us. How much closer to home does it need to get before we unify on the solution, not just the cause. And when will be finally take the protective fence away from the sacred cow of vaccines.

The ones who drive me crazy are the parents who know their child was potentially harmed by the vaccines but for "the herd" they continue to vaccinate because it's what society needs them to do. That's not progressiveism. That's child abuse.

[Ted Van Oosbree]

We have the worst of both worlds: the bureaucratic health machine beloved of establishment leftists serving the selfish interests of the pharma corporations beloved of the corporate right(I avoid the term conservative because corporations are not interested in conserving anything but their profit margins).

[jen]

Yes, Benedetta, and a panel discussing the election recently all joked that "pharma owns congress" when one of them mentioned the steroid/meningitis problem. How is that f'g funny!

[cmo]

Will either candidate EVER decide to play the "A card or the V card" ???

...and promise to investigate the CDC vaccine program and determine the cause of Autism Epidemic ???

I would guess it might be worth 10 to 20 million votes. What better place to play the card than in a live debate...

[jen]

Maybe it's wishful thinking or maybe things have hit that critical mass but I swear I think that if one of the candidates had the balls to state that pharmacy needs way more scrutiny and less involvement in politics- it could be the tipping factor that one of them needs. Forget what Dr. Wakefield or Michelle Bachmann said. So many people know someone affected by autism or girls who have been harmed by vaccines like Gardasil. Can you even imagine the contacts of one of those girls who have been damaged badly by Gardasil- they have lots of friends, teachers, docs, their parent's co-workers, friends etc. THAT is what people are starting to pay attention to.

[Benedetta]

This is Congress fault!
This is because of Congress's decision in 1986.
It was when Congress made the ruling that some will be damaged from vaccines, that was just the way it was; and then just threw up their hands and accepted it with out a fight, with out money thrown into the research of why.
They were lazy, they took the easy way out, and the way out was cold and callous.

What Congress decided upon was a lottery - just as bad as any society in history that for what ever reason decides to Sacrifice humans to any god

[no vac]

Dan,
I would not count on politicians. They are mostly hopeless, selfish and greedy. I agree that this children holocaust by Nazi-owned big pharma is deliberate. Their goal is to permanently destroy the US in revenge for lost WW II? In Germany vaccines are only voluntary and very few people vaccinate their children. This in not by accident, this is by design. However, the criminal participation of US federal bureaucrats and politicians in this genocide of Americans is unforgivable. The Nuremberg II process is badly needed for these people.

[cia parker]

Excellent article. It's completely reasonable to recognize and applaud the admirable original impulse to combat deadly diseases by the simple means of vaccines. I think, however, that there's a lot to be said for being completely anti-vaccine. Even when the vaccines fail to discernibly cause brain, digestive tract, or immune system damage, even if they work just the way they're supposed to, they prevent the immune system from developing to become a strong, skilled, flexible system that rapidly and effectively deploys to combat pathogens. It would be much better to train more people to use homeopathy effectively, and work with the body's systems rather than against them. Homeopathy proved its effectiveness in curing most of those who used it who had been sickened by diseases such as cholera and yellow fever in the nineteenth century, and should be more widely used now.

[Bob Moffitt]

"Government needs to untangle itself from the interests and involvements with private industry and technological development that have tied it down like Gulliver, and take back control of science and policy."

Unfortunately, the "government" cannot "take back control of science and policy" by predictably appointing career politicians to oversee federal regulatory agencies (CDC, HHS, FDA, FAA, etc) .. which by ANY standard .. progessive or conserative .. have become .. now more than ever .. in the wise words of Ronald Reagan .. more "problem" than "solution".

Consider the lesson to be learned from the recent labor dispute between the National Football League (NFL) .. representing the owners of the 32 professional football franchises .. and .. the NFL Referee's Association (NFLRA) .. representing 121 professional football referees.

Almost immediately, NFL coaches and players began testing the inexperience of the replacement officials .. testing their limits and ability to officiate the games using the same professional standards the NFLRA had firmly established over decades. In less than three weeks, the "integrity" of the game had been greatly diminished .. spurring a national outrage by sports-media and fans demanding the immediate return of professional referees.

Unfortunately, unless government stops appointing career politicians to oversee the regulatory agencies .. those powerful industries .. just like NFL coaches and players .. will continue destroying the "integrity" of the regulatory agencies responsible for controlling them.

[NeSSuM_200]

Dan , they did know better in 1930 ! The perils of Hg toxicity has been known for hundreds of years (as I know you know .)

Another reason why the Autism Holocaust has to be a deliberate act of genocide against the people .