 I'm a little upset that Jenna McCarthy got more of an applause than I did, but I guess I'll have to live with that. And a lot of you are probably wondering what a neurologist, an oncologist, a flight surgeon, and a clown are doing talking about vaccines. There is an actual pediatrician on our panel. We had to have one. Somebody who actually gives vaccines to patients. But personally, I got involved with this issue a number of years ago, about five or six years ago. I had written an article for a local paper, the New Haven Advocate, about the MMR vaccine, Mumps, Muses, and Rubella, and autism, which was the first modern or recent theory linking vaccines to what is a very, in some ways poorly understood and variable neurological condition of autism, now called autism spectrum disorder. A British researcher, Andrew Wakefield, started the MMR autism scare, as we called it, with a very poor paper that was published in the Lancet, later recanted by some of the authors and withdrawn by Lancet itself, and shown to essentially be a bogus if I could use that term study. But that was enough to set off a scare, which caused MMR compliance in Great Britain to plummet, and subsequent Mumps, Muses, and Rubella diseases to soar. And I wrote an article reviewing the evidence. It was a brief piece, but basically concluding the science by then was in on MMR. There's no link between MMR and autism. This is a false scare, and it's causing a lot of harm. And I got the usual kind of responses from parents and people who were convinced that the MMR caused autism in their kids. But I also received an email by a journalist by the name of David Kirby. And David Kirby told me that MMR is not the issue. It's thimerosal. Thimerosal is a mercury-based preservative in some vaccines, although even by the time this was happening, it had already been removed mostly from vaccines in the United States, certainly from the routine vaccine schedule. But he had just published a book called Evidence of Harm, and he wanted me to know that there, in fact, is a lot of evidence of a link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism. So I said, okay, I have to do a follow-up article, and I had a discussion with my editor, and we decided we would do a much longer feature piece. And I actually researched this issue for about three or four months before I wrote the article. So this wasn't kind of a one-off blog post that I write in 20 minutes. I spent a lot of time really trying to wrap my head around this issue. I started actually by reading David Kirby's book Evidence of Harm. And although it's a terrible piece of journalism in my opinion, he did, in fact, bring together a lot of the factual information. So it was a good place to start factually. And I really tried hard to go into my research without the conclusion already set in my mind. Sure, I had an inkling that, you know, if there were a legitimate connection, I think I probably would have heard about it before. So I definitely went in skeptical. I said, you know, at this point I was playing the role of a journalist, and I'm explaining a complex and controversial science topic to the public, so I wanted to get it right. I didn't want to come down on the wrong side of this issue. So I said, I will be willing to be convinced either way. And starting off by reading a book which makes a strong case, at least in the author's mind, for a connection. You know, at that point I'm like, you know, I'm not really sure at this point. There may be something going on here. I really have to delve deeper into this. You know, if you get exposed to one side of any argument, it could seem compelling. But then when I actually started systematically going through the published research, seeing what the evidence really showed, by the time I finished my research and felt that I was ready to write the article, I was convinced that there really is no link between thimerosal and autism. The science has pretty clearly shown that there is no link. The last nail in the coffin, as it were, this was a few years ago, about 2005 that I wrote the article, was the fact that thimerosal had been removed from the routine vaccine schedule in the United States by the end of 2002. Pretty much it was all gone. And David Kirby said, you're going to see autism rates come down because, you know, increasing vaccine schedule led to increasing autism rates. Now the thimerosal is taken out, wait a year or two, and you're going to see autism rates plummet. They're going to plummet back to pre-1990 levels. I said, you know what, if you're right, that in fact is what should happen. And if I'm right that there's no connection, then I predict we're going to see a continued rise in autism rates. That's probably going to hit a ceiling at some point. You know, as you increase surveillance and diagnosis, their true rate doesn't appear to be increasing. It's probably just an artifact of diagnosis. So we're probably going to increase until we hit some ceiling sometime down the road. Well, now it's four years later. It's 2009. And guess what? Autism rates have continued to rise at the same rate they had been rising without even a blip. I mean, there isn't even a statistical blip in the numbers. That to any, I think, rational critical thinking person was the final nail in the coffin in the thimerosal vaccine. And autism hypothesis, David Kirby responded, and again, I personally interviewed him on this issue. He's also been on record in the public. He responded by moving the goalpost. Well, all right. It's not by 2006, but by 2007 you're going to see them come down. All right. Well, by 2008, you know, because there was maybe still some doses out there. There's a lag in the recent, whatever. And now, by this point in time, really there's no more room to move the goalpost. There's so much time has gone by that really you have to say thimerosal is not an important contributor to the autism numbers that we're seeing. Very few people are still grasping to the thimerosal hypothesis because it's just really not tenable anymore. But the anti-vaccine movement is bigger and more vibrant than ever. As the evidence has piled up against them, they have only grown. And they are having unfortunately a very significant impact as the Jenny McCarthy Body Count website will attest. So that is a very brief overview of sort of my exposure, my introduction to this. Now, this is a topic about which I continue to blog regularly to keep up to date. And I've fortunately met a lot of other science bloggers like David Gorski and now Harriet Hall is also blogging on this issue. Each time a new study comes out, a new claim is made, we're right there to try to keep on top of it. And it's been a very interesting, very enlightening, and in some ways rewarding topic to cover as a science blogger because I do think it's one that has such a dramatic, a very significant importance and I think where we are dramatically needed to counteract this really campaign of misinformation being spearheaded by Jenny McCarthy really as a face person but by many others like Generation Rescue and other organizations. So that is really what this panel is about. We're going to go through some very brief introductory talks by the panel members, some of whom have slides, and then we're going to try to leave the bulk of our time at the end for a panel discussion and questions and answer from the audience.