The science is largely complete. Ten epidemiological studies have shown MMR vaccine doesn’t cause autism; six have shown thimerosal doesn’t cause autism; three have shown thimerosal doesn’t cause subtle neurological problems; a growing body of evidence now points to the genes that are linked to autism; and despite the removal of thimerosal from vaccines in 2001, the number of children with autism continues to rise. Now it’s up to certain parent advocacy groups, through their public relations firms, lawyers, and celebrity spokespersons, to convince the public that all of these studies are wrong—and to convince them that the doctors who proffer their vast array of alternative medicines are the only ones who really care. (p. 247)

Now that’s a laying down of the gauntlet. Those “certain parent advocacy groups” and their accompanying band of PR firms, lawyers, celebrity spokespersons, and the doctors who “proffer their vast array of alternative medicines” have their work cut out for them, if they mean to thoughtfully contest the claims of the numerous studies Dr. Offit cites.

But the problem is—-based on how the antivaccinationists have responded to the evidence so far—-they’re not going to respond to the science with science. Instead, expect full-page ads (like this one) in which there’s talk of not being “anti-vaccine” but “pro-vaccine-safety.” Expect a lot more moving of the goalposts as autism gets rebranded: So the link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism does not seem “so strong”—then it must be something else, like aluminum. In other words, don’t expect an actual discussion of the studies Dr. Offit cites but succinct slogans with just enough punch (“autism is treatable,” “green our vaccines”), criticisms of “conflicts of interest,” cries of the limitations of the data.

Science is not, perhaps, of any real concern to the antivaccinationists. More and more, it seems that antivaccination belief is something akin to a religious conviction or at least to some kind of faith that is not looking to science or scientific studies for validation. The evidence will mount, children will continue to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders at a rate much much higher than in the past, but someone will still be pointing to a shot or something in the environment as a “possible cause” of autism—-because what’s driving those “certain parent advocacy groups” is something more like……faith? belief? a sense that taking a stand on vaccines and autism is the rallying point for (as a commenter wrote) a sense of “community and identity.” Because, knowing (or thinking that you know) that some particular thing was behind your child becoming autistic, is often seen as the first step in knowing how to help a child.

Or that’s what is thought—-and that’s why parents have tried a dizzying array of treatments, and especially alternative treatments, to “treat” their child’s autism.

Pages 119-124 of Autism’s False Prophets provide a quite comprehensive list of the numerous biomedical and alternative treatments used to “cure” autism:

steroids, cod liver oil, cranial manipulation, chelation therapy, sonar depuration, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, the “body ecology diet,” camel’s milk, “‘foor-soaking machines,’” laser therapy, bacteria-containing nasal sprays, pig whipworm eggs, magnetic clay baths, stem-cell transplantation, the gluten-free casein-free diet, secretin, nystatin, amino acids, fatty acids, di- and trimethylglycine, taurine, melatonin, creatine, digestive enzymes, glutathione, carnitine, activated charcoal, colostrum, Lupron, megavitamins, infrared saunas

That’s not a complete list and it will, no doubt, grow. One reason why parents keep trying to find that elusive “magic pill” is because of something Dr. Offit mentions in the very last sentence of his book: Those who offer that “vast array” of treatments, supplements, potential “solutions” seems to be the “only ones who really care.” Next to the gentle comfort of a mauve-hued waiting room with couches that look like something you’d like in your living room (vs. standard issue office furniture) and photos of nature and smiling children glowing with health in shiny frames—and all in a finely painted Victorian house located not off a major highway, but on a pleasant street in an artsy town—a neurologist who talks about psychiatric medication for a 7-year-old in a generic issue HMO exam room can seems the epitome of someone who really doesn’t and can’t care, who just sees one’s child as a diagnosis, a label, and some really difficult behaviors. And parents who have long days and longer nights with a child who struggles to go to sleep, struggles to talk, struggles to stop sniffing the food at the grocery store, struggles to take his turn in a board game: A little comfort can go a long way.

As a parent who’s had those struggles and who’s sat in plenty of waiting rooms, and who also found herself sitting on (yes, it really was) a mauve couch at a “Center” with a very pretty and quite large crystal sort of thing on the table and a closet full of kits to send samples of various body fluids to the likes of the Great Plains Laboratory—and as a parent who, while sitting on the mauve couch, felt irked that the practitioner (a DAN!) seemed to think there was no need to actually see Charlie, and was glad to rely on my descriptions—Autism’s False Prophets has become an essential reference book in understanding how I ended up sitting on that couch, and why after a few times back, I said good-bye. The couch and the caring can seem enough and I think, in order to successfully counter antivaccination and its false prophets, we need to understand that those are what we’re up against. Orac wrote about the “empathy gambit“: There’s a need, a crying need, among parents to feel and know that they are being listened to, that they’re not crazy, and that they can do something to help a child who seems to be beyond help.

A generation ago it was commonly thought that bad parenting—”refrigerator mothers”—caused their children to become autistic. Mention this theory today and people will shake their heads over how anyone could have believed such a notion. Will the vaccine-autism issue be one day seen as yet another theory about autism for the history books; will we look back and wonder about how misguided we were?

It makes me wonder: What might be a fitting sequel to Autism’s False Prophets?

It’s a story that’s not yet over. The false prophets have spoken and now it’s time to listen to the truth.

Did the Greeks believe their myths?

That is indeed the title of a 1988 book by French historian Paul Veyne. He writes in his Introduction:

Did the Greeks believe in their mythology? The answer is difficult, for “believe” means so many things. Not everyone believed that Minos, after his death, continued being a judge in Hell or that Theseus fought the MInotaur, and they knew that poets “lie.” However, their way of not believing these things is disturbing to us. For in the minds of the Greeks, Theseus had, nonetheless, existed. It was necessary only to “purify Myth by Reason” and refine the biography of Hercles’ companion to its historic nugget…… The purification of myth by logos is not another episode in the eternal struggle between superstition and reason, dating from earliest times to the days of Voltaire and Renan, which would bring glory to the Greek spirit. Despite Nestle, myth and logos are not opposites, like truth and error.

The belief that vaccines or something in vaccines can be linked to autism has been called a myth” of autism. The question gets asked again and again (most recently by Orac in his post about framing and the “‘empathy’ gambit”): Why, in the face of clearly stated, well-supported evidence do people continue to believe that vaccines or mercury or, more recently, aluminum can “cause” autism? Why do people just keep on believing that there “must be a connection,” when the evidence that they keep demanding is handed to them and painstakingly explained?

Dr. Paul Offit touches on some answers to these questions in chapter 10, “Science and Society,” of Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure. One of the epigraphs to his book points to the religious undertone of belief among antivaccinationists; this is the epigraph, a quotation from Thomas Szasz:

When religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine. Now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.

It’s a provocative statement though perhaps—as Orac wrote in his first post about Dr. Offit’s book—not entirely accurate:

Actually, I would quibble about whether religion is actually weak these days. In this country, at least, fundamentalist religion, in particular fundamentalist Christianity, seems stronger than ever, permeating society so thoroughly that it is unthinkable that an atheist President will be elected in my lifetime. Elsewhere, fundamentalist Islam and other religions hold sway. Later in the book Dr. Offit makes the connection between religion and the antivaccine movement, which strikes me as a bit incongruous with this quote. However, the quote does characterize quite succinctly that what we are dealing with in the antivaccine movement is not science. Rather it is more akin to religion, because scientific evidence exonerating vaccines as a cause of autism rarely changes the minds of adherents to the antivaccine faith.

In his book, Dr. Offit points to a religious fervor behind the language of many antivaccinationists and to the zeal they devote to their cause, in the face of science and reason. An egregious example of this devotion is Generation Rescue, whose very name has religious overtones.

In Generation Rescue, Parent “Rescue Angels” are on a “mission” to “rescue” and “save” their children from the dread contagion of autism. The stated “mission” of Generation Rescue is “to discover and share the truth with families about the potential cause of their child’s NDs[ [neurological disorders]. And consider this statement form their website about biomedical treatments:

Biomedical intervention for NDs is based on the belief [my emphasis] that the psychological symptoms of NDs are a product of the physical issues the child is experiencing and that addressing the physical issues will lead to an improvement in those psychological symptoms.

It’s the “belief” of the band of Rescue Angels that something in the environment is the reason for what are called the “psychological symptoms of NDs” (the Generation Rescue website tries very hard not to use the word “autism”). “Belief” is what drives those who’ve drunk the anti-vaccine Kool-aid and joined the cult.

This sort of fervor is one reason that all the scientific studies in the world are not going to convince the “rabid,” dyed-in-the-wool antivaccinationists. But it’s not only those diehard “Rescue Angels” who are having some sort of effect, as suggested by the media’s and even our culture’s continued preoccupation with a supposed vaccine-autism link. Go to parent websites—especially websites for young children, such as Babble—and you’ll find agonized discussion about whether or not to vaccinate, and are vaccines “safe.”

Antivaccine beliefs are as “powerful as a religious conviction,” as Dr. Offit writes in Autism’s False Prophets (p. 212). He discusses Andrew Wakefield (“for [whom], the question of whether MMR caused autism had moved into the realm of faith,” p. 212) and the Reverend Lisa Sykes, an associate pastor at the Welborne United Methodist Church in Richmond, Virginia, who believes her son’s autism was caused by thimerosal in vaccines and whose “judicial advocacy crusade” against vaccines and their manufacturers has been documented by Kathleen Seidel on Neurodiversity. But there’s another voice of religious conviction among the antivaccinationists who provides the second epigraph for Dr. Offit’s book. That epigraph is:

I [started] Evan on vitaming B12 shots twice a week, and I was honestly blown away by what I saw. His speech doubled on the days I gave him the shots.
–Jenny McCarthy, on curing her son’s autism

In her first autism book published in September of 2007, Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism, McCarthy described herself as praying to all manner of saints (including Kateri Tekakwitha) on learning of Evan’s diagnosis. In her latest recent round of media appearances in conjunction with the publication of her book on “mother warriors,” McCarthy has been saying that she talked to God:

When Evan was first diagnosed, Jenny says he stopped speaking and began ignoring the world around him. As with most autistic children, she says Evan’s personality seemed to be locked inside him–and she was determined to help him break through. “I made a pact with God the day Evan got his autism diagnosis,” she says. “I said, ‘God, show me the way to heal my boy, and I will teach the world how I did it.’”

Jenny McCarthy, former Playboy Playmate, has undergone a conversion—-a religious experience—in the effort to “heal” her child from autism and (following her words above, said on Oprah earlier this month). She has, accordingly, been given (I’m following what I gather to be her logic in her above statement) a “mission” of “teach[ing] the world” and thus takes her place beside Andrew Wakefield, Lisa Sykes, and a whole host of others as the false prophets of autism.

And the falsity of McCarthy’s message is all too apparent. A year ago, when her first autism book appeared, McCarthy described her son as “recovered” from autism. More recently, her son has been described as in an “autism battle“; he has been simply described as “autistic.” Is it possible that McCarthy has (I’m just going, again, by her words) tricked herself about the “recovery” of her child from autism?

Or maybe she knows full well what is and what isn’t and is simply saying what the moment calls for: Back in May 2007, in discussing her soon-to-appear book, Louder Than Words, McCarthy did not say a word about autism or vaccines, and talked about crystals and indigo children.

Dr. Offit’s title for his book—-Autism’s False Prophets—is only too fitting. The pages in chapter 10 in which he describes the “religious conviction” about a vaccines-autism in Andrew Wakefield and Lisa Sykes are just the start and I think, given the mention of religion and science, of magic and medicine, more extensive discussion of this topic could shed some light on the fervor with which antivaccinationists cling to their hypotheses, and because of which the public is preoccupied with vaccines and autism, rather than issues like school programs and schools for autistic children.

But from the looks of it, the cult of the antivaccinationists and their false prophets have been hard at work spreading their creed and it would be well of them to look beyond the tenets of their faith and see how thoroughly they’ve mixed up medicine and magic, myth and science, in a biomed elixir.

Image courtesy of t-dot-s-dot.

And come to think of it, here is a reason why I think antivaccinationists really need to read Dr. Offit’s new book. Autism’s False Prophets has a proverbial wealth of information about vaccines and their history and the whole vaccine-autism issue. Antivaccinationists should be grateful that Dr. Offit has put all that—all that evidence—into one book that they can so to speak “rip apart.”

But they have to open the cover first.

For much more extensive coverage of vaccine-injury litigation, see Kathleen Seidel’s Neurodiversity.com blog, the many postings at Left Brain/Right Brain, and Orac at Respectful Insolence.

1) Autism as vaccine injury.
2) Vaccination as an assault on personal freedom.
3) “Green Our Vaccines” and its variant, “We are not ‘antivaccine’; we’re pro-safe vaccine.”
4) Too many too soon.

As the parent of an autistic son, and as someone who communicates regularly with lots of parents of autistic children and with lots of parents period, these are some reasons why people these days seem drawn to such misinformation about vaccines. (Many of the links that follow are to my blog.)

1) Parents hear about the rise in the prevalence rate of autism and vaccines provide a simple and straightforward explanation. Plus, vaccines are something that any parent of schoolage, and of college-age, children has to think about: In New Jersey where I live, children (like my son) entering sixth grade had to have two additional vaccines to enter school in the fall.
2) Parents feel a need to to have control, to have a parental right to choose to vaccinate or not.
3) Parents are hit by a call to “green everything” from cleaning products to lunchboxes so why not vaccines? (Though what “green our vaccines” means, no one knows.)
4) Changing the schedule of vaccines and having vaccines (like the MMR) given in single doses sounds like common sense to parents who’ve had to struggle to hang onto a crying (if not screaming) child–a baby–getting a shot. I still remember the very mixed feelings in my stomach when a nurse used his legs to hold my toddler son down on the examination table, to give Charlie a polio vaccine—these are precisely the images (holding a child down to get a shot that then is believed to “give” a child autism) that the antivaccinationists regularly deploy, to stoke people’s emotions (and it works).

Besides new frames for vaccines, we also need new frames for autism, that counter what those “false prophets” of autism have been saying. The National Autistic Society‘s Think Differently campaign sends out a positive message about autism; I exist is the message that autistic adults do, yes, exist, and that autism is not some disease of recent origin, as the antivaccinationists like to say it is. Some thoughts I’ve had for framing autism:

1) Autism is a neurodevelopmental disability.
2) Autism is lifelong; there are no cures for it. With appropriate education and services, autistic individuals can learn much and thrive in the community.
3), 4), 5)…….. [Yours to fill.]

We’ve heard so much from the “false prophets” of autism. It’s time to hear much more about autism that’s accurate, and true.

As Offit noted in response in his 2nd post for the Science Blogs Book Club:

I wrote the chapters introducing Wakefield and thimerosal without providing any evidence to refute those theories because that was the way it played out in the press and to the public. I thought that this would give the reader a better sense of what really happened during the early stages of the controversy.

When I first reviewed the book’s Table of Contents, my eye was drawn to chaptesr 5, 6, and also 7 (“Behind the Mercury Curtain,” which features Neurodiversity.com blogger Kathleen Seidel) for the use of the word “mercury” in their titles These three chapters form a unit—call it the rise and fall of the Mercury Curtain, if you like—in the three-part structured of the book (noted by Orac). Chapter 5, “Mercury Rising,” introduces a cast of characters who constitute the guiding lights in the charge that vaccines can be linked to autism: Lyn Redwood and Sallie Bernard of Safe Minds; the Geiers, father Mark and son David, and their ever-growing arsenal of studies in favor of a vaccine-autism link; Generation Rescue founder J.B. Handley; psychology professor and author Simon Baron-Cohen; Boyd Haley and Richard Deth, a chemistry profesror and biochemistry professor, respectively, who have done research in support of a mercury-autism connection; Mady Hornig, a Columbia University researcher who (in the words of Offit) “believed she had made mice autistic” using thimerosal (p. 90); Thomas Verstraeten, a CDC researcher who conducted a study of the Vaccine Safety DataLink (VDS) that became the subject of more than a little dispute; environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy; David Kirby, whose 2005 book Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy became a sine qua non read for all of those mentioned in this paragraph.

Orac’s first book club post has more details on all of these characters and characters they—or some of them—were to become in a Hollywood movie. As Offit notes at the end of “Mercury Rising,” this was to be the plot, per Kirby’s website:

“When their children descend into the frightening world of autism a group of parents discover a disturbing link between thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative found in vaccines, and the steady rise in autism. One tenacious mother, Lyn Redwood, risks her family to battle the FDA, CDC, and the American government, despite efforts from pharmaceutical companies and government officials to suppress evidence and prevent parents from gaining restitution for their children’s conditions.” (p. 105)

Conspiracy. Government cover-up. Money. Sick children. And, in particular, “one tenacious mother“—it was all supposed to add up to a Hollywood blockbuster of Erin Brockovichian proportions. But as more and more evidence was brought forward—in the form of more and more research studies—refuting a vaccine or something in vaccines-autism link (the subject matter of chapter 6, “Mercury Falling,” plans for “Evidence of Harm: The Movie” disappeared (p. 127), a point that Offit is careful to note just as chapter 6 is ending. The disappearing movie deal is already hinted at in the last sentence of chapter 5:

So dramatic was the evidence against vaccines [if you believed what the studies of the Geiers, Haley, Deth, and Hornig, and what Redwood, Bernard, Handley, Kirby, and Kennedy had to say] that a major, well-respected production company was going to make a movie about it. Everything was coming together. Everything made.

But the next few years would reveal that it was all a mirage. (p. 105)

Just like Dorothy waking up in Kansas, hopes for an Evidence of Harm movie and for proof of the vaccine-autism hypothesis in the form of the autism rate declining after thimerosal was removed from vaccines were revealed to be all a dream, an illusion, a “mirage.” But, as the rest of Offit’s book argues, the anti-vaccinationists still haven’t realized that they’re back in Kansas and that the technicolor splendor of Oz—of a world in which tenacious autism parents reveal the evil ways of dread Big Pharma, which has the CDC in its back pocket—-is so much imagining.

Consider one of the main characters in the rise of the vaccine/mercury-autism hypothesis, Lyn Redwood.

Redwood is the first figure noted by Offit in chapter 5, a nurse practitioner living in Atlanta who in 2000, along with a businesswoman named Sallie Bernard, submitted a paper to the journal Medical Hypotheses (circulation: 200) that linked autism to mercury poisoning. In the same year, Redwood and Bernard founded Safe Minds, an acronym for Sensible Action for Ending Mercury-Induced Neurological Disorders; the group has continued to claim that mercury can be linked to autism. Both Bernard and Redwood, as well as a number of other anti-vaccine advocates, are on the board of Safe Minds. Originally headquartered in Cranford, New Jersey, its website now locates it in southern California.

Offit quotes a number of statements from Redwood who was “angry that children had been and were continuing to be exposed to mercury, and she was angry that the government hadn’t seen her Medical Hypotheses paper as proof that mercury-containing vaccines were the problem.” As she is quoted:

“We are in the midst of an autism epidemic and children diagnosed with learning disabilities continue to increase daily. The statement [by public health officials] that there is no evidence of harm does not equate with no harm having occurred……..The truth is that we have not adequately looked or we just refuse to see. A recent national news article reported that some say we don’t have a smoking gun. But the truth is the bullets are all over the floor.” (p. 83)

“The statement……that there is no evidence of harm does not equate with no harm having occurred.” This sentence with its triple negative (“no evidence of harm”—”does not equate”—-”no harm having occurred”) might have led the Roman orator Cicero to compare Redwood to Hortensia, daughter of the consul Quintus Hortensius Hortalus and known in the late Roman Republic as a skilled orator. Let’s look at that triple negative again:

“The statement……that there is no evidence of harm does not equate with no harm having occurred. [my emphasis]”

That is, to say that (as numerous research studies have continued to show) there is no proof of a child being “damaged” by a vaccine and becoming autistic (the oft-repeated claim of Redwood, Bernard, the Geiers, et al.) is not to say that some harm did indeed happen. Whatever all those research studies, carefully cited by Offit in chapter 6, may say, according to this statement of Redwood, some “injury” has occurred to a child. Harm—that is, injury—-that is, autism—did occur (says Redwood’s statement) and all the evidence that scientists and doctors and medical professionals can provide just can never add up against the fact, the reality, of a “damaged” child; of a “perfectly normal child” become an autistic one.

As Offit writes, “the phrase no evidence of harm would become an ironic manifesto” for Redwood’s cause. The word “evidence” itself has become a sort of mantra among proponents of a vaccine-autism link and is often deployed by Kirby and others with a sort of “where’s the beef” and “show me the money” intent. Redwood’s graphic, and rather histrionic, statement about the bullets being “all over the floor,” implied that the “evidence” was easily to be sought, in the autistic bodies of children who were said to be “shot” and, therefore, damaged with something as bad or worse than those metaphorical bullets: Mercury, from a vaccine.

Since the early years of this decade when Redwood made these statements, there has indeed been mounting evidence refuting a vaccine-autism link. The Vice-President of Safe Minds, Redwood is regularly quoted in the media in articles about a vaccine-autism link. Further, Redwood is one of only five public members of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), which coordinates autism spectrum disorder (ASD) research and other efforts within the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt appoints the public members. At public IACC meetings, Redwood has stated that she believes there is a national crisis and an epidemic of autism; that vaccines and heavy metals are the cause; and that peer review processes should be changed to allow for the funding of “alternative” approaches like chelation and other “biomedical” treatments for autism.

In other words, despite all that evidence that there is no link between vaccines or something in vaccines in the past several years since her Medical Hypotheses paper was published, and despite the fact that an autistic boy died while receiving chelation treatment in 2005 (the same year that Kirby’s book was published), Redwood still holds pretty much the same position.

And you’d think that someone who speaks so highly, or at least so often, of “evidence,” would wish to consider all the evidence. To paraphrase Redwood’s own words, have the anti-vaccinationists “adequately looked” at the evidence or is it that they “just refuse to see”?

Do they know they’re in Kansas, or do they think they’re still in Oz?

This is the title of one of two follow-up posts that Dr. Rahul Parikh wrote after reviewing Dr. Paul Offit’s Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure and getting the usual treatment by the usual “anti-vaccine/pro-vaccine-safety/mercury militia” suspects: A smackdown by the likes of David Kirby himself, Kirby being the author of the book Evidence of Harm, whose very subtitle proclaims that mercury in vaccines has something to do with a supposed “autism epidemic,” and that this is a “medical controversy.” Since its publication in 2005, Kirby has become a frequent spokesperson, in the blogosphere, on Capitol Hill, and many other places, for the claim that vaccines or something in vaccines can be linked to autism.

I’m the mother of an autistic son, 11-year-old Charlie and while Kirby’s adherence to the issue of vaccines, mercury, and other possible “environmental causes” of autism is notable, I very much believe that the continued preoccupation devoted to this issue in the mass media hurts autistic individuals. Not only does the vaccine-autism theory suggest that autistic children are somehow “damaged” and “injured” and full of toxic substances—mercury, various “heavy metals”—but all the writing and rhetoric about vaccines and autism takes energy and attention away from what is our first task in helping autistic individuals, providing them with high quality education and services throughout their lifespan.

“He’s not just because of a shot.” My husband, Jim, a historian at Fordham University, often says this about Charlie. As each day passes and we learn more about Charlie, learn about how he communicates (he is minimally verbal) and what his strengths and talents are (not reading, not anything academic—Charlie is far behind his peers in school), we see more of ourselves in Charlie. Hyper at night and happiest when in motion: That’s Jim. Able (quite obsessively) to focus on one thing and liking things to be in their places: Ca, c’est moi.

Here I should say a bit more about myself.

First, to make it clear and simple, I’m an autism mother who knows a vaccine did not cause her child to become autistic. (And I’m not the only one, contrary to what many a “mercury mom” and the media might have you think.)

I’m also an autism mother who is very grateful to Dr. Offit for writing Autism’s False Prophets. Lucidly and compassionately, Dr. Offit narrates the history of the past decade in autism science and treatments from the fateful February day in 1998 when Dr. Andrew Wakefield held a press conference to announce that he’d found the cause of autism, the MMR vaccine. Charlie was born in May of 1997 and his entire life, and the time that I’ve known about autism are covered in Autism’s False Prophets. We heard about the vaccine theory almost immediately when learning about autism; we both shook our heads because, when we looked back, we noted how Charlie had lacked joint attention, how he’d been quite content to sit all day with a bucket of baby toys.

Second, not only am I not a scientist: I’m now a Classics professor at a small Jesuit college in Jersey City, New Jersey. My methodological training (such as it is) was in literary theory and analysis, in explication de textes, using the literary-critical tools of deconstruction as developed by, yes, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Belgian-born Paul de Man, a literary scholar with a more than troubled past. I studied “Theory” in graduate school at Yale and got my doctorate in Comparative Literature thinking I’d apply what I learned to rereading classical texts. And then, in the first year of my first tenure-track job, Charlie was diagnosed with autism and before you can say “différance,” I had resigned from my job and spent evenings reading books about teaching autistic children how to imitate sounds–Charlie first learned to talk via sign language—and cutting up magazines for flashcards.

I write frequently about Charlie’s educational odyssey at my blog Autism Vox. To provide him with the schooling he needed, we’ve moved around the country, given up jobs, taken whatever jobs we could find, been lucky, been through much. I let my lit-crit books get dusty and go forgotten in old boxes. I was sorry I hadn’t gone to grad school in something much more practical.

And then I started blogging, first just about Charlie, and then about autism research and treatments and then Evidence of Harm and then every press release, every website, every report in the media about vaccines and thimerosal and mercury and autism; every polemic put out by the likes of Generation Rescue and Safe Minds, by David Kirby and Dan Olmsted. And what did I find but……rhetoric. And what did I do but……. deconstruct it.

I mean, what would Derrida have done with the rhetorical posturings, the self-righteous posings, of the “mercury militia” and the text upon text they produce trumpeting that “there’s an epidemic of autism!” and the “CDC is in cahoots with Big Pharma to poison our kids!” The play of the signifiers! How the antivaxxers have turned words like “autism” and “mercury” into floating signifiers that are affixed to novel meanings: Autism is said to be “mercury poisoning” and/or some kind of “disease brought on environmental pollutants,” while mercury itself has become, more or less, “Public Enemy #1″–though maybe that’s a term some reserve for Dr. Offit.

No surprise—for Dr. Offit in his new book lays the groundwork for a much-needed deconstruction, a critical analysis, of the mercury hypothesis and the ways, rhetorical and otherwise, that its supporters keep it alive, despite what the science says.

So thanks to the whole “mercury militia” for providing me with ample opportunities to revive my long dormant deconstruction skills, and thanks to Dr. Offit and Dr. Parikh for getting the deconstructing started, and thanks to Science Blogs for putting together this panel about an important book, Autism’s False Prophets—it’s way past overdue.

Let the deconstructing begin.