A special US court overseeing a vaccination-liability fund recently ruled that the parents of an autistic girl, Michelle Cedillo, won't get any money from it. The judge put a pretty firm kibosh on the argument that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine – or the mercury preservative, thimerosal – had caused Michelle's disability.
As the parent of two children with autism, I say this news is good – very good. A few more legal flops may finally put an end to the cockamamie vaccine-causes-autism theory's sole success: diverting attention from the cataclysmic failure of the US healthcare system to care for people with autism.
US parents seeking help for their autistic children face a maddening maze of rules and regulations propounded by big-government bureaucracies and mammoth corporations. These organisations frequently display an indifference and social ineptitude eerily like that of autistic children themselves. The overused term "Kafkaesque" is extremely apt when insurance companies, exploiting the still-nascent state of autism research, scandalously restrict coverage for the few therapies that work – and then arbitrarily cut those off when the child is still very young.
Notable among these therapies is applied behaviour analysis, an intensive one-on-one treatment that can consume as many as 40 hours a week. In our case, insurance paid for the psychologist who put together plans for Chloe and Ethan – but not for the energetic undergraduates who did the daily work.
In a classic instance of the old American story – private profit, public cost – parents sometimes get their state to pay for what the insurers won't but should. Sometimes. It all depends on your state, and the shape of its social services budget the year you happen to apply. But Michelle's parents weren't exactly blazing a cheap path to the Benjamins, not with lawyers costing upwards of $200 an hour, even in this sickly economy. Whether taking on big pharma, big insurers or a big government bureaucracy, the awards all too often accrue not to the most deserving but to the parents with the time, resources and know-how to mount an aggressive campaign.
One person with all three is Jenny McCarthy, the former Playmate of the Year who has launched a lucrative second career writing best-sellers blaming vaccines for making her son autistic. The key point here is not McCarthy's colourful resume but her wealth, which allows her to finance son Evan's esoteric therapies while she cameos in classics like Witless Protection. Meanwhile, back in the real world, hundreds of thousands of parents face very hard choices about what, if any, therapies they can afford.
A few, however, are actually doing something about it. While Larry King is telling McCarthy what a crackerjack mom she is, thousands of parents flying under the big-media radar are waging a state-by-state guerrilla war to require insurers to cover their kids' treatments. Such is the populist outrage that laws have been passed in laissez-faire bastions like Arizona and South Carolina. The iron grip of lobbyists is weakening, as even conservative Republican governors like Texas's Rick Perry realise that ticking off the insurance industry isn't nearly as scary as the cost of institutionalising untreated children for life.
The thing is, I totally get where Michelle's parents are coming from. A petulant god on Mount Olympus couldn't have designed a disability better suited to driving pragmatic, commonsensical Americans crazy. Even after years of research, no one knows for sure what causes autism, or what the best treatments and their likely outcomes are. When your beautiful infant starts exhibiting odd behaviours (first sign: not looking you in the eye), you quickly become very adept at kidding yourself that she's fine, totally fine. Really, she's fine. And even when you finally cotton to a problem, you flail around in the dark, desperately looking for something, anything, that might explain it all and make your child better.
Michelle's parents could never win, not when more than a dozen studies have thoroughly demolished any notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism. To my mind, though, the most powerful argument of all is that autistic traits can be detected as early as four months. The MMR shot is given at 18 months, an age when most parents can no longer pretend that everything is all right with their child. And, if you're wondering, yes, this is the voice of experience speaking.
