Huffington Post s continued belief in autism-vaccine link: Why won t it go away?

By ACSH Staff — Feb 14, 2011

Apparently, the Huffington Post hasn’t caught up with the times. Nearly a year after The Lancet retracted Dr.

Apparently, the Huffington Post hasn’t caught up with the times. Nearly a year after The Lancet retracted Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent study linking the MMR (measles mumps rubella) vaccine with autism, the Huffington Post published an article by David Kirby in which he perpetuates the worries of those who still believe in the debunked theory. In the article, entitled “The Autism-Vaccine Debate: Why It Won’t Go Away,” Kirby calls for a change in the generally-recommended childhood vaccine schedule because he believes the issue of vaccine safety is still open for debate.

[M]ore and more parents join the ranks of the devastated but convinced. There is nothing that anyone can do or say — not you, not me, not any scientist on earth — until definitive proof of all the true causes of autism is found. But that appears to be years, or decades away.

But one doesn’t have to prove the exact causes of autism to know that vaccines are not the source, says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross. “This is nonsensical, unscientific tripe, and as Dr. Paul Offit, Chief of Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has said many times, the number of antigens kids are exposed to everyday by rolling in the dirt and sharing toys far outnumber those they are exposed to in the vaccine schedule.”