66 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
READING FRAMESS
o far, the year 2018 has been a
good news/bad news story with
regard to vaccinating the world’s
children. On the positive side, Gavi, The
Vaccine Alliance, recently announced
that it’s on track to immunize 300 mil-
lion children in developing nations
within Africa, Asia, and Latin America
by the year 2020. But in Europe and the
United States we’ve seen a slip in vac-
cine programs. The World Health Orga-
nization just announced that Europe
experienced more than 40,000 mea-
sles cases during the first half of 2018—
largely attributed to a lack of immuniza-
tion—while in the US my collaborators
and I identified communities in some
states where large numbers of school-
children are not being vaccinated. The
situation in both Europe and the US
exists mostly because of well-organized
antivaccine movements alleging that
vaccines cause autism.
I wrote Vaccines Did Not Cause
Rachel’s Autism in response to the rapid
acceleration in vaccine exemptions across
the US and especially in Texas, where I
develop neglected-tropical-disease vac-
cines as a pediatrician-researcher work-
ing at Baylor College of Medicine and
Texas Children’s Hospital. My book
explains in depth why vaccines do not
cause autism, based on the epidemio-
logic evidence refuting any links between
autism and vaccines and also on the science
of the developmental neurobiology of
autism and how it begins prenatally. In
parallel, I tell a deeply personal story
about being a dad to Rachel, my 26-year-
old daughter with both autism and sig-
nificant intellectual disabilities, and her
struggles living and working in our
Montrose neighborhood of Houston.Like many people on the autism
spectrum, Rachel was first diagnosed
as a child. At the time of her diagno-
sis I was a new assistant professor at
Yale University setting up my vaccine
research laboratory, while my wife Ann
(and sometimes I) took Rachel to psy-
chiatric visits at the world-famous Yale
Child Study Center. The book relays
some difficult periods, first in Connect-
icut and then in Maryland and Texas,
as we tried to understand Rachel’s
behavior and come to grips with her
significant disabilities. But it also con-
tains moments of humor and joy, both
from Rachel and the people who gravi-
tated towards her.
In 1998, when Rachel was six years
old, The Lancet published the now
infamous, and ultimately retracted,
paper asserting that the MMR vaccine
was linked to pervasive developmen-
tal disorder, or what we now refer to as
autism spectrum disorder. The paper
launched a 20-year antivaccine move-
ment that severely jeopardizes pub-
lic health in the US and Europe. Anti-
vaccine activities are on the verge of
becoming global and reversing many of
the public health gains that began with
the launch of the UN’s Millennium
Development Goals.
I wrote Vaccines in the hope that it
will educate vaccine-hesitant parents
and support pediatricians, nurses, and
other health professionals who are
faced with the prospect of defending
vaccines on a daily basis. Vaccines pro-
vides tools for both parents and health
professionals dealing with an aggres-
sive and well-organized antivaccine
lobby. At the same time, the book offers
a glimpse into the world of autism andautism parenting by portraying an hon-
est and forthright story of one girl, her
siblings, and her mom and dad. By
alternating the science with our fam-
ily’s story, I hope the book provides a
unique, compassionate, and visceral
understanding of both vaccines and
autism, and also autism’s associated
comorbidities. gPeter Hotez is the dean of the National
School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor
College of Medicine in Houston and the
director of the Texas Children’s Hospital
Center for Vaccine Development. Read
an excerpt of Vaccines Did Not Cause
Rachel’s Autism at http://www.the-scientist.com.Johns Hopkins University Press, October 2018In a new book, a vaccine researcher describes the scientific facts
and personal anecdotes behind his family’s experience with autism
and its comorbid disabilities.BY PETER HOTEZScience and Sensibility