By Jake Crosby

Remember Amy Wallace? I sure wish I didn’t. For those lucky enough not to, I apologize for ruining your day. Ms. Wallace was the willing entertainment business “reporter” who was front writer for millionaire vaccine industrialist Paul Offit in a cover story she authored for Wired Magazine last year. She was completely duped by the drug industry’s most well paid spokesman on the controversy surrounding autism and vaccines, so much so that her entire article was practically ghost-written by him.

The sheer ignorance, and malleability, of Amy Wallace made her the perfect throw away for the job. Her whole background suggests that her career has been based mostly on, more than anything else, sensationalism and being in the right place at the right time, or in this case the wrong place at the wrong time. As she wrote herself in Los Angeles Magazine, her career was essentially launched when local socialite Betty Broderick confessed in an interview with the reporter to shooting and killing her ex-husband and his new wife.

Although someday she will have a very different opinion about it, she probably feels the same way about the Paul Offit puff piece as she did about the Broderick case, especially after bragging on her website, “Just got word that ‘An Epidemic of Fear,’ my Wired story on vaccines, will be in ‘Best American Science Writing 2010,’ to be published soon… Very exciting.” Given the recent episode of the award the CDC helped the Chicago Tribune buy for its drug propaganda, there now seems to be a trend of “journalists” writing government and industry-friendly pieces on this topic and getting rewarded for it by parties with vested interests.

Amy Wallace is hardly an exception. This one line sums up her whole Wired article: “To be clear, there is no credible evidence to indicate that any of this [vaccines causing autism] is true. None.” That’s assuming that your definition of “credible evidence” is tobacco science, not that Amy Wallace would know the difference between the two. That aside, the remaining premise of her article rests entirely on how parents should listen to “experts” like Offit, who admitted himself on “Science”Blogs that he learned all his information about autism from passive newspaper reading and a handful of parents. Most of them were from the lay neurodiversity sideshow. Wallace also alludes to the fear of infectious disease returning as a result of vaccine safety concerns, even though splitting the MMR vaccine into three separate shots does not make them any less effective against preventing measles, mumps and rubella, nor does using other vaccines without mercury. Her whole cover story is bunk.