Defending vaccines in the autism debate

Offit is a champion of childhood vaccines to protect children from crippling and sometimes fatal disease. He has served on the committee that advises the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which sets immunization policy for the nation's children. Along with colleagues Stanley Plotkin and Fred Clark, Offit was the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine made by Merck & Co. It aims to prevent a disease that kills 2,000 children a day, most of them in developing countries.

But Offit is also a world-class scientist who knows that, if the data aren't there, they aren't there. To act on unfounded claims that vaccines cause autism is to put children and communities at risk.

For fear of autism, more American parents are refusing to have their children vaccinated; there has been a bump up in measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases. Autistic children have been subjected to expensive, ineffective and sometimes dangerous treatments to reverse the damage supposedly done by vaccines, and research dollars that might be spent on investigating the true causes and treatments for autism have been squandered on junk science.

Offit, who has not been afraid to speak out before, has done it again, this time in a book that names names and calls nonsense nonsense. Even before the book came out, the anti-vaccine lobby was all over Offit, calling him a dupe of the drug companies and much worse. Veiled threats of physical harm against him and his children have arrived in his inbox and voice mail. For understandable reasons, there will be no book tour for Autism's False Prophets.