Parents seek ballot initiative on autism-vaccine link
Posted By Phyllis on November 29, 2009
The battle lines have been drawn for at least five years now, and not much is happening. Many parents of autistics are convinced that vaccines may be to blame. The trend of more and more autism, after all, tracks with the trend of more and more childhood vaccines. Now it’s 1 in 100 kids in America that have autism, according to some measures, compared to 1 in 10,000 40 years ago.
And the medical establishment, convinced that vaccines are safe, looked into a couple of sub-theories about vaccines and autism (that the measles virus in the MMR causes autism, and that mercury in vaccines causes autsim), declared them invalid, and apparently isn’t planning to do anything else.
In particular, the medical establishment isn’t doing the obvious study: comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated populations and checking autism rates. Why would they? They’re convinced vaccines are safe. And the mainstream media is parroting the CDC and others. Why wouldn’t they? They’re convinced doctors know what they are talking about.
But many, many parents of autistics are convinced that the doctors and vaccine-makers don’t know what they are talking about, and that vaccines caused their child’s autism. (After all, no tests have been done of the safety of multiple vaccines, just individual ones.) In many of these families, subsequent children have remained unvaccinated–and are not autistic.
So how many of these families are there? Nobody knows. The study looking for autism cases in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations has to be done, and some autism parent groups are teaming up to try to get it done. They’re also hoping to get a viable national dialogue going.
Generation Rescue, Age of Autism, and Talk About Curing Autism, three of these autism advocacy groups, are teaming up to gather donations to put the issue into the public square. According to Age of Autism’s Kent Heckenlively, liability concerns limit how much exposure a talk show host wants to give here-say items like parent reports on vaccinations. But once the item becomes a political issue, as with a ballot initiative, it becomes fair game.
Organizers hope the vehicle will be a ballot initiative in Oregon, a plan announced November 16. Exactly what would be on the ballot isn’t determined yet. There is a long list of possibilities in Heckenlively’s article. One of the major ones, though, is requiring the government of Oregon to fund a study that compares autism rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. Another is permitting waiver of vaccine requirements because of individual philosophy. A third is requiring that the MMR vaccine be made available as three separate vaccines, to be taken at least a week apart.
Why Oregon? The organizers favored California but decided that a campaign in Oregon would cost a lot less–”just” $2 million to $5 million. So they’re asking for donations from people like you and me to get the issue into the public arena.
Why is this initiative a good idea? The other venue, the vaccine court, isn’t proving a good place to air the issue. The vaccine court was set up by Congress as it created a liability shield for vaccine makers. The court controls a liability fund. In a Feb. 12 decision, the vaccine court ruled that lawyers for three cases, representing 5,000 autism vaccine claims, had not proven that autism was caused in these cases by MMR or thimerosal. (These are the two sub-issues that have been examined and rebutted by studies.) But the court had required that the lawyers come up with a specific causation theory. It couldn’t handle the case that vaccines could be causing autism, but no one knows exactly why at this time. This is where we stand. One hypothesis is that there appear to be “too many, too soon”–too many shots (35), too soon in a child’s life (starting on day 1). But that’s not specific enough for the vaccine court.
The autism parents are trying to get the whole issue out into the public square. They’re not the richest folks in the world–most of them are strapped, trying to pay for supplements, gluten-free diets, and so on. Can you help?
You can donate at Generation Rescue’s website. When you get to the donation page, click that you want to make the donation in honor of somebody, then during Step 2 place the word “Ballot” in the personal note section so your donation can be directed to this cause.
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