I am the mother of a young man with an autism spectrum disorder. I am writing to urge you to get your children vaccinated. Please worry about real medical concerns, and not about some “science” put out there by a total sleaze who has been resoundingly discredited and lost his license to practice medicine.

Andrew Wakefield was paid to do a “study.” Before the study even began, the conclusions were agreed upon. An enormous amount of money changed hands. A big pharmaceutical company was involved. According to the report of England’s General Medical Counsel, there were dozens of charges proved against him. They ruled against him on all issues. They said that he showed a “callous disregard” for children.

So how has this person got such a hold on the thinking of perfectly intelligent parents? It is because there are stories, frightening stories. Please listen to me. If you sneeze and the phone rings, you can understand that it isn’t cause and effect. It’s simply two things that happened at the same time. In just that same way, there is not a cause and effect relationship between autism and vaccines. As with the telephone and the sneeze, there are two unconnected things taking place at about the same time. No one in the whole world, and I mean large numbers of people doing real science, has found any connection — and they have looked and looked. It just isn’t true.

But the frightening stories are out there, so I will tell you of my own experience. If you get a terrible diagnosis concerning your own small child, your brain stops working. So much trouble is coming at you so fast that your head explodes. The doctor who brings you this devastating news is a monster. Very possibly, the last time you saw him was to vaccinate — he put a needle in your baby who screamed. You remember it so clearly. Now he has sent you to his very good friend, the autism specialist, a total stranger to you. They’re in it together, and what they are telling you (in the case of autism) is that not only is there no way to fix it, but there isn’t even an explanation.

Those doctors have absolutely nothing to offer, go home and good luck. That’s all you can hear. You need somebody to hate, to hate more than you ever thought was possible. It can’t be the child, and I hope it isn’t the other parent. So who better than the pediatrician? The link feels obvious: vaccine to autism: it explains the unexplainable. Emotionally, that pattern makes perfect sense.

But the fact is that it isn’t true. Emotionally, yes, absolutely. But the science just isn’t there — in fact the opposite has been shown again and again. One person started that vaccine story, and it is our children who will now pay the price. There are contagious diseases out there that haven’t been seen in America since the days of our great-grandparents — the days when it was actually a normal expectation that a family would lose a few kids along the way.

So please do vaccinate your children. And if you also want to donate some money to autism research, that’s an excellent idea.

Linda Garberson
Vineyard Haven