The Vaccine-Autism Wars

There is an article in this month's PloS Biology titled, "A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine–Autism Wars." It does a nice job of explaining how the recent controversy over vaccines and autism came to be.

Now, more than ten years after unfounded doubts about vaccine safety first emerged, scientists and public health officials are still struggling to set the record straight. But as climate scientists know all too well, simply relating the facts of science isn't enough. No matter that the overwhelming weight of evidence shows that climate change is real, or that vaccines don't cause autism. When scientists find themselves just one more voice in a sea of “opinions” about a complex scientific issue, misinformation takes on a life of its own.

The article would have been even better if it had listed the main studies addressing the autism question along with summaries of the findings. But since it didn't, I found a site that has at least some of them: The National Network for Immunization Information.

• Studies on MMR and autism
• Studies on thimerosal and autism

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