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Vaccine Damage Denial and the British Press

 

This hysteria was putting a good family in danger. If left unchecked the groundless

chatter about murder could grow like a weed, spreading through the community,

unsettling people, making them question one of the fundamental

pillars of the new society (Soviet Union 1953): there is no crime.

Tom Rob Smith. Child 44. Pocket Books UK, Simon & Schuster, 2008

 

Since the rising count of autism began in the late 1980s, newspaper coverage of

autism has principally related to 'an interesting' but esoteric illness, posing inevitable

questions about perspective and interpretation. While the story of an autistic child,

portrayed as an unhappy genetic accident, might pull on reader's heartstrings, a story

that specifically blames vaccine manufacturers for an uncontrollable child with

regressive autism is a different matter.

 

Over the last twenty years few press articles in Britain have attempted to join

up the dots between mercury, measles virus, nutrition or, for that matter, any other

environmental challenges and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). There seems to have

been a natural reluctance amongst journalists and commentators to investigate rising

rates of autism within any environmental context.1 The story of Dr Andrew Wakefield

the serious white coated research doctor who since the mid 1990s, has been at the

heart of the confrontation between the parents of vaccine damaged children, the

vaccine industry and the government in Britain, has had an intermittent airing, while

the story of the maverick Dr Wakefield challenging the establishment with cheated

science has had a more regular audience. Nothing apparently, however, completely