Merck & Co., which manufactures the MMR vaccine touted as life-saving medicine in the Private Practice episode that AAP doctors helped write, donated to the AAP in the “$350,000 to $499,999” category.

Given the enormous amounts of money to be made from manufacturing vaccines, parents wonder how health officials and even the AAP can be impartial.

he could no longer stand up in his crib, lost interest in walking, and started having bad diarrhea. “I just thought it was because his legs were sore,” Debold remembers. “But within a couple of months, I noticed that his speech had stalled out.” Before he turned three, Sam was diagnosed with autism. 47

Although Debold had once browbeaten her sister into getting her daughter vaccinated, she now believes that her own child was damaged by vaccines. “I think it’s really hard for people who have actually given vaccines to think something you did could have caused injury,” Debold explains. “Vaccines are something that I willingly participated in for my son. The natural defense as a mother and a nurse is that I didn’t do anything wrong.”

But the more Debold researched the issue, the more skeptical she became. When she went to the library to find articles that proved the efficacy and safety of simultaneously receiving multiple vaccinations, she was shocked to find almost none. “The more I looked, the less I found,” Debold says. “As a nurse, I had just assumed that everything we had been asked to do was based on good, solid science. But the gaps in the science are, frankly, what we’re still dealing with now.”

These gaps in the research about
vaccine safety remain a concern for
parents. The CDC now recommends

that children receive no fewer than 50 injections against 16 illnesses by the time they are 18 years old48, 49—more than four times as many injections (including oral polio) as when I was growing up in the 1970s50—but there have been few, if any, scientific studies comparing the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated children, 51 and to date, no scientific studies of vaccine safety that include a statistically significant control group of children who have received no vaccinations at all. 52 Dr. Robert W. Sears would like to see studies done with from 10,000 to 100,000 unvaccinated children, but such studies do not exist. “In the absence of facts, doctors and others are trying to frighten people into vaccinating or not vaccinating,” writes Dr. Jay Gordon. “That fear includes the notions that unvaccinated children pose a great threat to others and that parents of these children are not being responsible. In fact, these parents are choosing what they consider to be the safest course of action for their children and pose very little, if any, danger to other children and adults.” 53

The bottom line is that there’s still a lot we don’t know about vaccine safety and the long-term effects of vaccines on the body’s immune system. “It’s one of those topics where there is fundamental disagreement even about what counts as a fact,” declares John

47. This and subsequent quotations: personal communication ( 13 January 2009). 48. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Recommended Immunization Schedule for Persons Aged 0 Through 6 Years—United States: 2009”: www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/schedules/downloads/

child/2009/09_0-6yrs_schedule_pr.pdf. 49. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Recommended Immunization Schedule for Persons Aged 7 Through 18 Years—United States: 2009”: www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/schedules/downloads/ child/2009/09_7-18yrs_schedule_pr.pdf.

50. According to Barbara Loe Fisher, in the late 1970s, most children received five DPT shots ( 15 doses of three vaccines) and five doses of Oral Polio Virus at 2, 4, 6, and 18 months of age, and between 4 and 6 years, plus one dose of MMR bet ween 12 and 15 months. More information about vaccine licensure dates can be found at a website operated by the Immunization