The legacy of Andrew Wakefield continues

[SheilaT]

1. I have a son with Asperger's.

I can tell you that from the day he was born he was not like other babies. I didn't fully understand it, because he was my first child, and all of you who have children know that your first kid, unless very VERY noticeably different, just seems normal, just the kid you and the other parent happened to produce.

I want you to know that he was a wonderful baby. He never cried. Really. The extremely rare times he cried I was at a loss about how to handle it. Once, when he was maybe six months old, a friend stopped through on her way somewhere else, and in the morning when she woke up she marveled, "He hasn't cried once!"

His developmental milestones were completely normal. He walked, talked, did most things right when he should. But he was slow at learning to wave goodbye, and NEVER pointed at things. Those last two are absolutely classic Asperger's. But my son was born in 1982, so we didn't know about it yet.

He had the normal vaccinations at the normal times. He never had more than the mild, expected reactions to them. He was no different after a vaccination than before.

I get furious at people who try to blame my son's autism on vaccinations, or who swear that someone else's kid was just fine until the first MMR or whatever. I can tell you that it's easy to ignore, or overlook, or even be in denial about how your kid is different. And not just different in the way that we all are precious, unique human beings, but profoundly different.

Meanwhile, my son has grown up. He's thirty now, and has had his own successes and setbacks, as everyone has. Getting through college has been a huge challenge, even though he's incredibly smart. Recently he has returned to school to get his degree in physics.

I am fortunate, he is fortunate, that Asperger's is a relatively mild form of autism, and he does not have some of the worst parts of it. If you were to meet him you'd simply see a shy but very smart man who also happens to look a little different because he has alopecia areata, an auto-immune disorder that causes hair loss. He lost all of his hair when he was four years old. So he has spent his life looking and being different.

But whatever caused these things, it wasn't vaccines.