A month ago, the momentum appeared to be going against parents who claim vaccines or the preservative thimerosal caused their children’s autism, but that seems to have shifted with the government’s recent concession that a child’s autism was the result of vaccines.

This is the government’s November statement in the case of 9-year-old Hannah Poling of Atlanta:

“[The government] has concluded that the facts of this case meet the statutory criteria for demonstrating that the vaccinations Hannah [Poling] received on July 19, 2000, significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder.”

The U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in a March 3 statement insists — sort of — that no such concession was made:

 
“HRSA has reviewed the scientific information concerning the allegation that vaccines cause autism and has found no credible evidence to support the claim. Accordingly, in every claim submitted under the Act, HRSA has maintained and continues to maintain the position that vaccines do not cause autism, and has never concluded in any case that autism was caused by vaccination.”

I’m not a doctor and have no idea if vaccines or thimerosal cause autism. But as a writer, I feel entitled to draw attention to the evasive language and tortured logic the government and, sadly, the medical establishment use to bludgeon critics.

In this instance, what immediately jumps out is a hair being split between “aggravated” and “caused,” which may well be a distinction without a difference because significant aggravations are compensable under the Vaccine Act. Moreover, “aggravated” suggests Hannah was already sick and the vaccines merely made her sicker, which is not the case. She was a healthy child meeting or exceeding all developmental milestones until the vaccinations, after which she became severely impaired. It may be “aggravation” under the Vaccine Act, but to a layman it sounds a lot like “caused.”

The government is also trying to place maximum semantic distance between the words “vaccines” and “autism.” The vaccines aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which in turn predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, which in turn manifested as a regressive encephalopathy which, oh, by the way, just happened to have features of autism. And that weaselly phrase “features of autism spectrum disorder.” Is the government slyly denying she is even autistic? One prominent vaccine champion took it a step further: Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said Hannah is "not a typical autistic child," according to a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The careful parsing of words characterizes many government statements about vaccine safety. For example, the CDC’s position on multiple vaccinations: “The available scientific data show that simultaneous vaccination with multiple vaccines has no adverse effect on the normal childhood immune system.” “Normal” being key, but not being defined.

One of the government’s first acts after the Polings went public was to spin out misinformation by allusion to that well-worn political scapegoat — judicial activism: “The court apparently made the decision,” said Dr. Julie Gerberding, chief of the Centers for Disease Control. In reality, the court made no such decision and had scheduled this case for trial in May. Medical officers from Gerberding’s own department, presumably in cooperation with attorneys from the Department of Justice, made the decision that for reasons of their own they did not want to defend this case at trial.

The potential billion-dollar question is, how many other children have Hannah’s mitochondrial condition and how many of them are autistic? The government treats us to more careful language: the condition is “rare,” by which the government presumably means rare among the healthy general population. David Kirby, author of "Evidence of Harm - Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic, A Medical Controversy" (St. Martins Press 2005), says 10 to 20 percent of autism cases may also involve mitochondrial disorders, a far higher percentage than in the general population. And, if that’s the case, should children be tested for such underlying disorders before being given vaccinations, including ones mandated by law?

It is long past time for the government to stop hiding behind vague and insulting language and come clean on what it knows about vaccines, thimerosal and autism. Further stonewalling could create crisis of confidence in the entire vaccine program with catastrophic consequences if, as a result, large numbers of parents refuse to vaccinate their children.