Oh, that thing about the link between vaccines and autism? Never mind!
My beautician is a conscientious mother who tries to do what is right for her two kids. In January, 2009, she had her second child, a boy. Since then, she has engaged in an ongoing battle with her conscience about whether she should have him on the regular schedule of preventative vaccines for young kids. You see, she has heard rumors and seen rants on the Internet about how vaccines are the cause of autism in children. The last time I talked to her about it, she was still delaying. The source of the rumors and the concern about a link between vaccines and autism is a study authored by a Dr. Andrew Wakefield and published in the British medical journal, The Lancet , twelve years ago. In his article, Wakefield maintained that he had found such a link. That was enough for some of the paranoiacs who are always looking for conspiracies and postulating that all authority figures are trying to pull the wool over our eyes. That paranoia has been further fed by people like Glenn Beck and...