Lisa, no, they weren't. I couldn't get into NY City in time for a studio appearance. Why? BECAUSE I HAVE THREE KIDS WITH AUTISM!!!! So I was able to appear via Skype. As you can see, I'm no makeup artist. I'm happy to be clean and reasonably presentable. :)

If 1 in 70, or 1 in 110 children were getting cancer, what would the world reaction be?

This is NOT over deespite what one doctor says.

My wife and I trusted the medical community and we DID talk to our doctor and all I can tell you is that before we had our daughter vaccinated, she was typically developing and had high apgar scores. Our daughter was taken from us.

Companies like Merck made $15+ billion in Q1 2009 alone.

Most doctors will not treat children that haven't been vaccinated.

As a parent, it's incredibly frustrating. Who is representing our best interests and the interests of our children? I've lost complete faith in the medical community in this regard.

Kim,
THANK YOU for providing such a calm, cool, articulate, intelligent representation of our community!

Kim, beautiful job, beautiful family. I remember Elizabeth Cohen when she reported on the Poling case. Nothing changed-she's still a mouthpiece for pharma and the government.
Maurine

Kim, thank you for all you do. Your arguement was procise, logical, and intelligent. That is more than what we can say for the doctor. This isn't rocket science. So is it that they can't find a link or they REFUSE to find a link. BECAUSE I FOUND THE LINK!!!!-He's my beautiful little blond haired, blue-eyed boy who was talkative and outgoing at one time in his life and is now lost in his own little world. As we speak, he sits in a special-ed. classroom re-learning everything he already knew before his MMR vaccine.

Thank you for your sane and effective interview. Keep fighting!

Lisa;
I thought the same thing just because I feared they were trying not to give this debate an even playing field. But it came off to Kim's advantage. First Kim is a natural beauty, and second she is a mother of three sick kids - A REAL PERSON - that has REAL RESPONSIBILITIES that is really in the trenches, and she does not have time for such silliness of wrapping pearl beads around and around and around her neck.

Kim - Besides being a knowledge-goddess. I am most impressed by your ability to keep your cool. Well done.

Kim, you were absolutely beautiful and extremely well-spoken.

Let's get real, folks. The face of medicine in Britain is a committee that has agreed it is preferable to have children suffer bowel disease over taking any and all measures to alleviate the suffering. Period. You have a child? Your child is ill? We, the GMC, will restrict the research and restrict the treatment of your children in any way we see fit to protect and insure lucrative kickbacks from Pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and anyone else who wants to market a product to use in and on your children regardless of the lack of safety data and regardless of anecdotal, personal experience or case data to the contrary of marketing hype. Period, end of story, that is the face of medicine in Britain.

In the US we have a slightly different face, although still close enough to be kissin' cousins. The spokespersons crowding our screens do not treat children with autism, do not research the causes of autism and do not care to come anywhere close to children with autism. They would not soil their hands examining the stool of a child with bowel disease - they reserve soiling their hands for blood money.

The face of US mainstream medicine is fully delusional in the thought that they, and not the parents who pay their fees, are in charge. So docs, here's something to chew on. It is time for a new type of medical ethics tribunal. Not of medical personnel, but of persons who seek competent medical care. We witness psychotropic compounds being dispensed to children too young to even be in kindergarten, we witness practitioners' disdainful looks when our chidren are taken to a pediatrician for answers on their illnesses, we witness the outright lies told to parents about their children, and we witness the frantic scramble of misinformation every time someone speaks out who has seen and witnessed autism and associated physical illness happen literally overnight in their own children.

Given that the parent consented to the vaccines, only to see the change in their children afterward, it stands to reason the parent is far more qualified to judge what is and isn't ethical treatment in the search for a way to heal the child. On the other hand, a medical license that has never witnessed, treated or even come in contact with autism as the judge and jury on ethics is, in and of itself, ludicrous.

Medicine and medicine's spokespeople here in the US choose to withhold treatment of children with autism. The excuse being they are waiting for someone to tell them what autism is, even though they all seem convinced, without ever doing on nanosecond of research themselves, of what is it not.

I'm torn between being flabbergasted these people don't know how utterly ridiculous and fake they are to thinking people everywhere as they fumble through opinions on a subject they have never personally encountered, disbelief they seem to be convinced that if they just get nastier they will be more believeable, and an overwhelming sense of disgust that the message to the public is that autism isn't serious enough, prevalent enough or debilitating enough to be pursuing every avenue that is open and forging new avenues when the existing ones hold no promise in the pursuit of understanding all that autism is.

What we do know, without doubt, is this. Someone is going to look exceedingly stupid at some point in the future, and it won't be Dr Wakefield and the others who listen, research and actually find solutions. Saying we have to focus on the real causes when one wouldn't touch autism with someone else's ten-foot pole is job qualification number one for the competition for spokesperson of the stupid.

There is an interesting statistic at the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Statistics. In 2006 there were approximately 660,000 practicing physicians, of all disciplines, in the US. The prediction for 2018 is there will be approximately 880,000. Why is this interesting? It's interesting because there are more people with autism in this country than there are practicing physicians. So one last thought for those docs who go on TV or answer the newspaper or magazine interview solicitation, there are more than twice as many parents of children with autism as there are people with medical degrees. No wonder you all look and sound so desperate and frantic. Y'all put all your eggs in the genetic basket thinking you wouldn't ever need to actually encounter autism. Tsk, Tsk, tsk.

Turns out, we parents aren't the fringe as suggested. I'm reminded of a scene from one of my grandson's favorite movies. It's the grasshopper scene from Antz.

Hopper, the grasshopper bully, is telling the other grasshoppers there are more ants than grasshoppers and if the ants ever figured that out, the grasshoppers would be in big trouble. Of course the movie ends with the ants standing up for themselves and prevailing in the end because they did figure it out.

so did we.

Kim, You Rock! You are so well spoken and represented our reality so well. Thank you.

Kim,

Thanks for being so prepared and informative for the interview. You did a great job.

I for one am afraid, this is really an all out assault. It is being pushed hard by the media with sound bites from our side from parents not doctors to refute the arguments of doctors. I appreciate Kim and Mark's work but I do believe that a doctor or research scientist is what is necessary to argue our points back with authority.
People have sympathy for parents but do not value their opinion as much as a doctor.

Kim you were fan-frickin-tastic! You said so much in so little time.

And look what I found after exactly two seconds of Googling Dr. Schaffner. Somehow, CNN forgot to mention this...

Disclosure: William Schaffner, MD, has disclosed the following relevant financial relationships:
Served as an advisor or consultant to: Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Inc.; sanofi-pasteur; GlaxoSmithKline; Novartis
Other: Merck & Co., Inc. (member of data safety monitoring board for experimental vaccines)

This just in from:

Dr. Paul & Nancy "car chat." They have met with their friends Dr. Tom & Dr. Shaffner.

They plan a study to see if the Toyota accelerator problem is caused by the "whole car suddenly moving backwards" which then causes the accelerator to move forward...

Study should take about 9 years and about 11 billion to their favorite universities.

God bless you Kim.

Elizabeth Cohen, the senior medical correspondent, was not prepared for you, Kim! I think she was a little shocked!

OH MY GOSH THAT WAS AWESOME KIM. Both correspondents look shiny and moronic. I wish you would have said "I'm sorry, did you need to look at your notes one more time to confirm what story it is that you're focusing on? Ya still on the prius precious? I'll wait patiently though I am "passionate" as you mentioned NUMEROUS TIMES, while you struggle to enunuciate autism spectrum disorder"
FUMING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I couldn't even watch the doc. All I know is, you did a stellar job.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving our children a voice Kim:)!
I wonder if the other lady choked on her way out of the studio. She did have a lot of beads around her neck.
Hahaha! Shaffner... How much are you getting paid by CDC and Barbara Chan to push those vaccines down everybody's throats? H1N1 vaccine was kind of a fiasco.

Kim, you did an awesome job.

And you were SO polite after hearing Don Lemon say “You can see why she is so passionate about …”

He obviously couldn’t give us a clue as to whether he understood any of your excellent articulation of the issue.

Kim,

First off, you are the best.

For my second point I have to bring a bit of politics in.

It depends on your politics what your take away was on Obama's "quetion time" meeting with the GOP the other day, but most have said it was a mistake for the GOP to go live with the whole thing.

I think I have to agree with JB Handley, that any time we are in the news we win. The only people that think the other side won those debates are those who have a stake in the demise of our cause or those without any way of linking their personal experiences with ours. (no kids?)

It is like what I heard about the Dateline NBC "A Dose of Controversy" that aired in late August. People told me they thought Offit and Deer looked like someone caught in a lie, or at least someone who realized they could not prove they were right anymore. Their only hope was to talk louder and more irrationally, like a toddler caught with his hand in the cookie jar and cornered in the kitchen by a grandmother he thinks will believe anything he says.......

(not that it has ever happened to me....;0)

Great Job, Kim!!!

Kim - you did a FANTASTIC job - WOW!

I have been saying that Toyota analogy all day Kim. Get out of my head.

My wish - that autism would get 1/4 of the money and attention Toyota sticky gass pedals would get.

Great job Kim. Your girls are beautiful.

Ok, what was up with those pearls? Kim, you are a ROCKSTAR!

Kim, forgot to ask, as I am curious. I thought it odd that CNN had you in your own home, without fancy makeup, lights and camera, while everyone else was all done up in their studio settings. Do you think they were trying to make you look like an amateur or something?

Kim you were wonderful, not once did you stumble!
I loved your smile, and you still got your points across. I was impressed with Mark's interview and I am impressed with yours too!!!!

Great job, just great!

With people as talented as you and Mark I have hope that I have not had in a long time.
Longer even than this new ruling on the Dr. Wakefield's trial. I really was expecting just exactly what happened - that ruling disappointed me but did not surprise me. A bunch of bought judges sitting on some medical board in England trying to axe the hero! It is a story based in all the best fantasty novels.

The old goat from Tenn better watch it, because karma might just catch up with him.

Kim,
You were calm, cool and brilliant! Both of these people, Elizabeth, and Dr. "all the research has shown vaccines are safe" are again, being echolalic by repeating the same untrue facts, over and over. It is mind boggling that this type of behavior- not actually knowing what they are talking about- is acceptable for CNN.

A bizarre highlight, and one in which those who are trying to understand the facts, most likely noticed was when you said that there are legal cases that have won showing vaccines caused autism, and then when you are done, Dr. impulsive comes on and completely lies, and I mean tells a huge falsehood by saying "it has been proven through numerous studies that vaccines do not cause autism."

How does one get a job broadcasting inaccurate and full fledged lies to millions of people? I think this ploy, of trying to erase Dr. Wakefield, his research, and deny these vaccine legal cases that have won is going to blow up right in their faces.

The historical magnitude of this continues to grow like a malignant tumor.

Thank you Kim! Fantastic and amazing job. The vaccinators should only be so calm and poised...and smart!

Great job! You were clear as a bell, really direct and eloquent. Shaffner was a shadow after that. He seems shifty and uncomfortably invested (in ways that obviously weren't stated) in comparison.

I try to see these things through the eyes of the uninitiated and I don't think anyone could walk away without thinking twice.

GREAT JOB KIM!

That was an awesome job Kim! you did great! thanks for being there for all of our kids!

Well said!! Thank you for all you do Kim!!