- JB Handley

Please bookmark and read JB's blog each day - here's an excerpt of his take on the NYT op-ed that none of us can believe was published.  You can pre-order his book How To End the Autism Epidemic here.

Underneath one of the more absurd cause-and-effect conjectures ever undertaken by a reporter lies a treasure-trove of truth about vaccine safety science. If the study results implicate vaccines, scientists are pressured to suppress.

NEW YORK, New York—I just got finished reading Melinda Wenner Moyer's Op-Ed in the New York Times, Anti-Vaccine Activists Have Taken Vaccine Science Hostage, and I must say that was one of the more unusual and contradictory pieces of journalism I've ever read in my time as an autism activist. While a casual reader may in some way leave the article thinking that "anti-vaccine activists" are ruining the party for everyone, I think many more will leave puzzled, confused, and suspicious. 

On the one hand, Ms. Moyer tries to convince her reader of one of the more preposterous cause-and-effect relationships I've ever seen. Namely, she wants you to believe that the reason scientists studying the safety of vaccines are scared to publish negative results is because anti-vaccine activists will exaggerate or spin the results and scare the public. This strains credulity to the point that I think if you surveyed 1,000 people and asked this question:



You'd get 997 people to choose "A" and three people—Ms. Moyer, Dr. Paul Offit, and Dr. Peter Hotez—would choose "B." The pharmaceutical industry is the most financially powerful and ruthless commercial opponent the world has ever seen. I know that sounds dramatic, but consider the recent news that pharmaceutical executives knowingly conspired to create an opioid addiction epidemic. In their compelling critique, “The Opioid Epidemic: Fixing a Broken Pharmaceutical Market,” Harvard medical scholars Ameet Sarpatwari, Michael S. Sinha, and Aaron S. Kesselheim put the behavior of pharmaceutical companies in painful relief:  READ MORE HERE.