Temple Grandin is wrong on vaccines and autism [View all]

[SidDithers]

Temple Grandin is undoubtedly one of the most famous women with autism of our time. Trained in animal science, Dr. Grandin is a widely read author and noted speaker on autism. April is National Autism Awareness Month, and Dr. Grandin has a new book out, “The Autistic Brain.” Together, this must have seemed like a good time for the New York Times to interview her. Unfortunately, the interview is superficial and not very illuminating, and what Dr. Grandin does say is disappointing. Her take on vaccines and autism, which apparently is elaborated upon in her new book

Q: In your new book, “The Autistic Brain,” you seriously entertain possible links between vaccines and autism in children, links that scientists have vehemently dismissed.

A: Well, there’s only one vaccine that could possibly be a problem, and that’s the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. Now that they’ve changed the vaccine, it has fewer antigens, and that would make it a lot safer. But with the old version of the vaccine, I have not yet come across a study that looked at regressives — when a child had some speech but lost it.

Q: There has been a highly emotional battle between mothers of autistic children and the scientists who dispute their theories.

A: I have talked to maybe five or six of those mothers, and that’s the reason I don’t pooh-pooh it. Those mothers have all described the same things. They all have the vaccine, and then they talk about fevers and the weird wailing that started in just a few days. When I brought this up to an expert and asked, “Have you ever studied the regressive group separately?” I got silence.

This is the problem when scientists speak about areas where they’re not experts. I got a lot of flak for my post to my dad addressing vaccines, with people accusing me of being condescending and underestimating his intelligence, but this shows it’s not an intelligence thing at all. Grandin is obviously intelligent. She’s educated. She has a PhD in another field. But she’s not an expert in vaccines, as her comments show, and that’s the problem with scientists who speak outside of their area of expertise. Even the very educated amongst us can’t know everything, and it becomes problematic when we use our reputation as scientists to promote something that we don’t have the background knowledge to really understand.

More at link: http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2013/04/15/temple-grandin-is-wrong-on-vaccines-and-autism/

I'm really becoming a big fan of Tara Smith. Her writing is clear, no-nonsense, and factually accurate. The quality of science writing in today's media is abysmal. It's good to see scientist bloggers picking up where the MSM fails so badly.

Sid