Vaccination Debate: Autism, Parental Choice and Public Health

As the number of confirmed cases of measles in the U.S. rises above 100, “Democracy Now!” speaks to a doctor, a law professor, and a legal scholar who believes her child developed autism as a result of vaccination.

The guests in the hourlong segment are Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law and coauthor of the report “Funding the Costs of Disease Outbreaks Caused by Non-Vaccination”; Mary Holland, a mother who believes her child, who has regressive autism, was injured by the MMRvaccine (Holland is also a research scholar at New York University School of Law and co-editor of the book “Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children”); and Dr. Paul Offit, chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Offit is author of “Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure” and “Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All.”

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.