Vaccine Science Taken Hostage? Paul Offit Responds

'Vaccine Science Taken Hostage'

On August 4, 2018, Melinda Wenner Moyer published an article in the New York Times titled "Anti-Vaccine Activists Have Taken Vaccine Science Hostage." Moyer seemed poised to discuss how millions of dollars have been spent on studies showing that vaccines don't cause autism, diabetes, hyperactivity, multiple sclerosis, autoimmune diseases, and a host of other ill-founded but commonly held beliefs about the harms of vaccines; and how, despite the findings in those studies, some people have remained unconvinced that vaccines are safe. But that wasn't the case in her article. Instead, Moyer has claimed that scientists are suppressing studies showing that vaccines are harmful, and that this "conspiracy of silence" is "eroding the integrity of vaccine science."

Flu Vaccine and Spontaneous Abortion: A Nonstarter

Ironically, one of the studies Moyer highlighted, which was published in the journal Vaccine,^[1] directly contradicted her claims. Moyer criticized scientists who felt that the Vaccine study shouldn't have been published because it might frighten people. In this, Moyer had misread scientists' reactions to the study. Scientists weren't concerned that the study had uncovered a rare and frightening problem—spontaneous abortion caused by influenza vaccine; they were concerned that the study was, for many reasons, critically flawed.

First, six previous, large, well-controlled studies