CathyB
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NYT Article: ABC Drama Takes on Science and Parents
LOS ANGELES — A new legal drama making its debut this month on ABC is stepping into a subject that is the source of heated debate among some parents — the relationship between autism and childhood vaccines — and seemingly coming down on the side that has been all but dismissed by prominent scientific organizations.
The drama, “Eli Stone,” scheduled to be broadcast at 10 p.m. on Jan. 31, centers on a lawyer who begins having visions that cause him to question his life’s work defending large corporations, including a pharmaceutical company that makes vaccines.
The title character of “Eli Stone,” adopting the message of his visions to fight for the little guy, takes his first case: suing his former client on behalf of the mother of an autistic child who believes a mercury-based preservative in a vaccine caused her son’s autism.
For the last decade some parents and advocates for autistic children have championed the theory that a mercury-based vaccine preservative called thimerosal, developed in the late 1920s and used in many childhood vaccines until about seven years ago, is a primary cause of autism in young children.
Autism often is diagnosed in children between their first and fourth years, during the time that many children begin receiving regular rounds of vaccinations.
But reams of scientific studies by the leading American health authorities have failed to establish a causal link between the preservative and autism. Since the preservative was largely removed from childhood vaccines in 2001, autism rates have not declined.
While police and legal dramas often use ripped-from-the-headlines topics as the basis of episodes, rarely do broadcast networks allow themselves to stray into the middle of heated debates that contain such emotional touchstones for large segments of their audience, if only because another big segment of a network’s audience is likely to be on the other side of the debate.
With “Eli Stone,” however, neither ABC nor its ABC Studios production unit has expressed any qualms about the story, according to Greg Berlanti, a co-creator and an executive producer of the series, who said he believed that the script showed both sides of the argument. “I think they wanted us to do our homework about all of it, which we did,” he said.
But the script also takes several liberties that could leave viewers believing that the debate over thimerosal — which in the program’s script is given the fictional name mercuritol — is far from scientifically settled.
Through a spokeswoman, ABC declined to offer an executive to discuss the show.
The issue is a potentially delicate one for ABC. Eli Lilly & Company, which developed thimerosal, and the two companies that now make the bulk of childhood vaccines used in the United States, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Aventis, spent an estimated $138 million for advertising on ABC last year, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, though little to none of it was spent advertising vaccines.
Representatives of all three companies expressed dismay about the series, of which they said they were unaware until called by a reporter.
Nancy Pekarek, a spokeswoman for GlaxoSmithKline, said the episode raised public-health concerns. “If parents watching this fictional series make that incorrect conclusion about a link” between vaccines and autism “and as a result choose not to vaccinate their own children, the consequences could be devastating,” she said.
Doctors have previously expressed fears that the popularity of the antivaccine movement could have adverse effects. In Britain a widely publicized — and since discredited — research paper published in 1998 started a scare over the safety of the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, drawing a potential link to autism. Though the premise of the research did not concern thimerosal, vaccination rates plunged in Britain. Over the next two to six years, outbreaks of measles soared in Britain and Ireland, causing at least three deaths and hundreds of children to be hospitalized.
Among the organizations that have studied possible links between autism and the preservative in vaccines are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Institute of Medicine, the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Each of them has largely dismissed the idea that thimerosal causes or contributes to autism, and five major studies have found no link.
Since 2001, no vaccine routinely administered to children in the United States had more than half a microgram of mercury, about the amount found in an infant’s daily supply of breast milk.
But plenty of parents, as well as groups like SafeMinds, continue to say that a link exists. “We feel it is still an open question,” said Theresa Wrangham, president of SafeMinds, a nonprofit parent organization. Their position has been supported in recent years by some members of Congress and by public advocates including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The initial episode of "Eli Stone" posits that the child received a flu vaccine containing the preservative; in recent years vaccine makers have produced new versions of the flu vaccine for children that do not contain the mercury-based preservative.
“Is there proof that mercuritol causes autism?,” Eli Stone says to the jury in summing up his lawsuit against the vaccine maker. “Yes,” he says. “Is that proof direct or incontrovertible proof? No. But ask yourself if you’ve ever believed in anything or anyone without absolute proof.”
The script also draws a parallel with research linking smoking and cancer, saying three decades passed between the first lawsuit charging a connection and the first jury award against a tobacco company. After the dramatic courtroom revelation that the chief executive of the vaccine maker did not allow his daughter’s pediatrician to give her the company’s vaccine, the jury in “Eli Stone” awards the mother $5.2 million. (In each episode Eli Stone takes on a different cause; in other episodes sent to television reviewers for preview, he wages court battles against a pesticide maker and a priest.)
In the last two years Mr. Berlanti, who created “Eli Stone” with Marc Guggenheim, has become a major contributor to ABC’s primetime lineup. He also is an executive producer of “Brother & Sisters” and “Dirty Sexy Money.” Mr. Guggenheim is a lawyer who has worked on several law-related series, including “The Practice” and “Law & Order.”
In interviews both men said they did not have any personal ties to the subject of autism and childhood vaccines. Mr. Guggenheim, who has two young children, said he had questioned his pediatrician about the number of vaccines his children were receiving. “I haven’t vaccinated them as aggressively as I could,” he said.
Both of the producers also said that they wanted “Eli Stone” to provoke conversation.
“A lot of TV these days is not talking about the same things that the nightly news is talking about,” Mr. Berlanti said. “As a show, we want to keep the conversation going after people turn off the television.”
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