Olmsted on Autism: Paul Offit, False Prophet

September 13, 2008
Olmsted on Autism: Paul Offit, False Prophet
By Dan Olmsted http://www.ageofautism.com/2008/09/olmsted-on-au-1.html
Paul Offit is the Philadelphia cream cheese of the autism debate -- he
smears so effortlessly. It was on page 149 that I finally had enough of his
latest smear-fest, Autism's False Prophets. I put the book down and thought
of attorney Joseph Welch's famous rejoinder to Sen. Joe McCarthy at the
Army-McCarthy hearings:

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or
your recklessness. . Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have
you left no sense of decency?"

Here is the passage that brought me to this point. Offit, chief of
infectious diseases and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, is talking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
who was telling Don Imus how his concern about environmental mercury
contamination led him to look into the mercury used in vaccines.

"In his explanation to Imus, Kennedy had omitted a few facts about how he
had became an activist," Offit writes.

"In 1983, following a conviction for possession of illegal drugs, Kennedy
was sentenced to two years' probation, periodic drug testing, mandatory
supervision by Narcotics Anonymous, and 800 hours of community service. He
satisfied his community service by working for the Hudson River Foundation,
now called the Hudson Riverkeepers. Later, Kennedy became its chief
prosecuting attorney."
Get the picture? Apparently Kennedy cannot be taken seriously because, a
full 25 years ago, he got busted for possessing drugs. His entire public
career is fruit of the poisoned tree -- drug addiction! Gotcha! Who knew?
Never mind that his uncle, and then his father, had been assassinated on
national television, that another uncle who has devoted his life to decent
health care is currently dying from a brain tumor; never mind that he has
since been involved in good works, and that the merits of his argument rise
and fall independent of his resume. Nope, it's good dirt and we're gonna
fling it -- Kennedy "omitted" telling Imus he was a drug addict with a
criminal record a quarter-century ago; Paul Offit will be glad to remind
you.

This is how the doctor operates -- character assassination. Anyone who
disagrees with him, and dares to say so or even let someone else say so, is
ripe for the Kennedy treatment. The list of those who violate Offit's Law is
therefore endless, running from the usual suspects like Andy Wakefield to
the late Tim Russert (who never should have had David Kirby on, only the IOM
president), from Neal Halsey (who never should have pushed to phase out
thimerosal from childhood vaccines) to Joe Lieberman (who never should have
said parents had an argument worth listening to). Bernardine Healy and the
Polings? Nowhere to be found -- that would amount to picking on someone
Offit's own size -- but no doubt they have been dispatched to the dustbin of
history as well.

Offit's approach is not only ad hominem -- against the man, not the
argument. It's also extreme and inaccurate. There is no analogy too wild to
wield against those whose scientific crime is holding a different opinion.

For instance, by the time he is done talking about the outrage of removing
thimerosal from vaccines, he devolves into describing a woman trying to
slash her breast with a razor blade. And what does this have to do with
whether ethyl mercury is a good thing to inject into pregnant women? Well,
because silicone breast implants were once taken off the market, even though
there was nothing wrong with them, and one woman was so freaked out by the
irresponsible media coverage that she took a razor blade and . you get the
idea.

Then there are the plain old errors. As a journalist, I always look to see
whether the things I know most about are correctly characterized, even if
the author then goes on to analyze them differently than I would. If the
facts I do know are right, that gives me confidence that the author is
playing straight in areas I know nothing about.

Based on that, I've got no confidence in False Prophets. To start close to
home, Offit spells my name wrong -- it's Olmsted, not Olmstead. Also, I have
practically memorized Leo Kanner's 1943 study of 11 children, "Autistic
Disturbances of Affective Contact." So I knew something was wrong when Offit
says it starts this way: "There has come to our attention a number of
children whose condition differs so markedly and uniquely from anything
reported so far ." I checked my dog-eared copy. The first sentence ever
written about autism, and arguably the most important, starts like this:
"SINCE 1938, there HAVE come to our attention ." Picky, picky? You make the
call.

One reason Offit seems to feel free to attack others mercilessly is that it
has been done to him. I for one have no personal animus toward him -- I'm
sure his views are strongly held, based on what he believes to be the best
interests of children and the importance of science versus uninformed and
dangerous criticism. While the fact that he is a vaccine inventor and
receives money from pharmaceutical companies needs to be taken into account,
he's been reasonably upfront about that (and the veiled and not-so-veiled
threats he says he has received are despicable). I'm much more interested in
opening up the scientific and advisory process to more sunlight and more
groups -- including parents and independent researchers -- than I am in
banishing Paul Offit because he invented a vaccine (banishing people from
the autism debate is Offit's strategy, actually).

He's just wrong, that's all, and not just on minor things. He says that
mercuric chloride -- an inorganic mercury salt -- was used as an antiseptic
starting in the 19th century but it was "unfortunately an irritant. Early in
the 20th century, a new, more effective, less toxic derivative of mercury
came into favor: ethylmercury."

That is pure fantasy. No toxicologist would assert or agree that an organic
alkyl mercury compound such as ethyl mercury is less toxic than an inorganic
formulation like mercuric chloride. The two compounds are often used in
scientific studies as exemplars of the vastly greater toxicity of organic
mercury. This is not an arcane or complicated issue (in Offit's language, it's
not really subject to question).

Offit in the past has made unsubstantiated statements that ethyl mercury is
far less neurotoxic -- in fact, "a gentle bacteriostat" -- when compared
with methyl mercury, the kind that gets into fish that pregnant women are
warned not to consume. That's folly, too (see Burbachet et al. about the
greater amount of ethyl mercury that settles in the brain, or just recall
Boyd Haley's folksy formulation that the difference between them is "Oink"
and "Oink oink"). But this is so demonstrably uninformed that it undercuts
Offit's entire argument. He simply doesn't know what he's talking about, and
it's plain to see on page 62. The guy's a doctor, not a toxicologist, and
the limits of his knowledge are everywhere on display.

Yet armed with a deep sense of outrage and a profound misunderstanding of
fundamental facts, Offit believes he's entitled to shout the rest of us
down, smear those who won't shut up and end the entire debate over autism
and vaccines.

Thank God for the First Amendment. I have a feeling it's one of Dr. Offit's
least favorites, and I bet he's got enough dirt on the Founding Fathers to
make a pretty strong case against it. Did you know Thomas Jefferson owned
slaves?
--
Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism

JOHN wrote:
(Channeling Dan "no autistic Pennsylvania Dutch" Olmsted)

That is pure fantasy. No toxicologist would assert or agree that an
organic alkyl mercury compound such as ethyl mercury is less toxic than an
inorganic formulation like mercuric chloride. *The two compounds are often
used in scientific studies as exemplars of the vastly greater toxicity of
organic mercury. This is not an arcane or complicated issue (in Offit's
language, it's not really subject to question).

LD50 for mercuric chloride: 1 mg/kg
LD50 for thimerosal: 75 mg/kg

Sources:
http://msds.chem.ox.ac.uk/ME/mercury_II_chloride.html
http://msds.chem.ox.ac.uk/TH/thimerosal.html

So, as Dan writes:

Then there are the plain old errors. As a journalist, I always look to see
whether the things I know most about are correctly characterized, even if
the author then goes on to analyze them differently than I would. If the
facts I do know are right, that gives me confidence that the author is
playing straight in areas I know nothing about.

Yup, let's apply Dan's standards to the rest of what Dan writes about,
when he's so sure of himself that he doesn't even do some basic fact
checking and goes off on at least a 75:1 error.

--
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