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“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
~ Gloria Steinem

I am the mother of a seven-year-old. My son was born during an upsurge in the debate over vaccination.

I weighed the opinions of smart mothers on both sides, women who were dedicated to making good medical decisions for their children.

And when it was time for my child’s vaccination, I took what I had learned and went with what I thought was best.

It wasn’t until recently that I investigated how the controversy began, and I was stunned.

The entire vaccination-autism dispute started with just one male doctor:

One man led the study that suggested a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.

Two years before the study was published, this man began to accept money (to the sum of more than $600,000) to help a consortium of lawyers sue the manufacturers of the MMR vaccine.

This man did not disclose to his fellow investigators or to The Lancet, a world-renowned medical journal (where the study was published) that he was involved in the lawsuit and that he was being paid off.

This man did not disclose that parents of several of the children in the study were clients of the lawyers who were organizing the lawsuit.

During the study, this man intentionally misrepresented and omitted data on all patients involved, including two important facts—that most children in the study did not have autism and that many of the medical concerns had been reported before the vaccine was given.

This man subjected the children in the study to unnecessary testing, including colonoscopies and lumbar punctures.

All of the co-authors of the study retracted the results, as did The Lancet, but this man still backs the findings.

This man will not concede that his study of only 12 children was faulty and that the findings were erroneous, despite the fact that more studies with thousands of children have shown that there is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

This man—Andrew Wakefield—was a British physician whose medical license was revoked because he was found to have conducted research fraud, treated children unethically, and had a financial conflict of interest.

Have you heard this story before?

Have you heard that the vaccine scare is fraudulent and was born out of corruption?

Did you know that it was one man’s greed that caused us to question our doctors and historically good medical practices?

I certainly didn’t know. And I keep asking myself, how did I not?

I’m connected. I’m well read, media savvy and in the habit of researching medical decisions. I’m a medical writer, a mom, and a Gen Xer who stays in touch with evolving world views.

And yet, the news, social media, blogs, and Jenny McCarthy were able to drown out the truth.

Why?

It took a while for news of the fraud to break.

Journalist Brian Deer of the UK’s The Sunday Times conducted an eight-year investigation, “the longest media investigation into medicine for a generation,” to help reveal the true facts.

Between 1998, when the Wakefield study was published, and 2004 when Deer first reported his findings, opinions of the vaccine began to change. Good parents who wanted to protect their children began to refuse the vaccine and the diseases began to pop up in areas where they were once all but eradicated.

It wasn’t until 2010, after considering Deer’s reports and reviewing confidential data regarding the study, that the UK’s General Medical Council announced that Wakefield had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly.” He was found guilty of serious professional misconduct and was removed from the UK’s medical register.

So there were at least six years in between the publication of the study and Deer’s first report, and then an additional six years until Wakefield was banned from practicing medicine.

That is a hell of a lot of time for bad information about vaccines to spread.

And yet it’s 2015, and news channels, the blogosphere, and mothers are still talking about the link between vaccines and autism, while new studies continue to support that there is no link.

In fact, just last month, the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the top medical journals in the world, published a study that included 95,727 children (compared with Wakefield’s 12 children).

The investigators concluded,

“In this large sample of privately insured children with older siblings, receipt of the MMR vaccine was not associated with increased risk of ASD [autism spectrum disorders], regardless of whether older siblings had ASD. These findings indicate no harmful association between MMR vaccine receipt and ASD even among children already at higher risk for ASD.”

Despite these findings, the fraudulent acts of Andrew Wakefield continue to form the conversation we have about how we care for our children. The media has not given studies like this the same airtime as they did when the vaccine scare began.

We are at a tipping point in history, a place where parents—and statistically mostly mothers—will decide the future of the health of our children.

These diseases kill thousands. The active choices we make right now as women, as the gatekeepers of our children’s health, will determine if these mortality rates continue to increase or begin to descend.

Mothers hold the key to how history will unfold. That’s why vaccinating our children is a feminist issue.

It’s up to us to shred Wakefield’s propaganda and begin to formulate our own dialog. We cannot allow him to continue to influence the decisions we make for our children. We do not need to follow the centuries-old patriarchal demand that we be quiet, good girls.

We can speak out against the injustices this man has caused, just like our foremothers did for women’s right to vote, women’s right to make decisions about their own bodies, women’s right to equal pay.

Let’s make this a movement, become activists, a choir of voices in support of our children. If we band together, we can emancipate ourselves from deception and become a megaphone for change. We are the linchpins in determining if these diseases will become an epidemic again or if they will remain a thing of the past.

We also have the opportunity to start re-examining what we consider to be counter-culture and working against “the man.”

This vaccine scam caused a lot of smart women to mistrust information the medical community has been giving us for years. And rightly so. We, as a society, have been deluged by Corporate America’s lies, special interests and bottom-line values.

Not supporting vaccines was one way for us to fight against profits and greed. This choice became synonymous with shopping at small businesses, choosing non-GMO foods, and using cloth diapers.

But in a way, choosing not to vaccinate our children could fall in line with the unethical business practices we hate.

If we don’t vaccinate our children, we are taking the side of Andrew Wakefield. We are contributing to the cycle of lies that he and the media have generated.

We are not speaking from a place of truth.

In the end, we need to become radical feminist mothers in support of the health of our children. We need to vaccinate against measles, mumps and rubella and stop the spread of these diseases. We need to begin to use our voices for the greater good.

If we truly want to manifest our intentions of preventing autism, then let’s join together to support those who are doing credible research.

Let’s consciously redirect the energy we had been using against vaccines and turn it into positive energy to help the children who are at risk of this diagnosis.

It will be then that we no longer live our lives through fear mongering and instead work toward the betterment of our society as a whole.

Finding truth, living through it, and therefore protecting future generations from another epidemic is radically feminist.

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.

Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fearless.”

~ Marie Curie

 

 

Sources:

Journalist, Brian Deer: The Brian Deer Reports

National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine

 

 

 

 

Relephant:

This is Why I didn’t give my Toddler the MMR Vaccine

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Author: Kristin Bundy

Editor: Renee Jahnke

Photo: SUARTS/Flickr