The mercury militia isn’t going to like this very much…

…because Paul Offit’s written a book:

AUTISM’S FALSE PROPHETS
Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure

Paul Offit, MD
Columbia University Press
September 2008
Genre: Non-Fiction/Medicine
Format: Hardcover

AUTISM’S FALSE PROPHETS will show the reader the incredible history of how greedy lawyers, doctors, and unknowing parents have helped prevent the search for the real cause of autism. As these forces conspire to blame vaccines or the preservatives used in vaccines for causing autism, the search for a real cure is hampered while millions of dollars go chasing after the wrong causes or, worse, to support misguided legal actions. Children are dying because of quack treatments that desperate parents agree to have inflicted on their children. How on earth did we get here?

In AUTISM’S FALSE PROPHETS, Dr. Offit carefully outlines the faulty science that allowed one British doctor to turn the world of autism on its head and allowed the return of diseases that had rarely been seen in Britain and the United States for decades. He also tells the story of perhaps the greatest fraud on the autism community: facilitated communication. By reviewing the history of how the vaccines-cause-autism movement began, Dr. Offit skewers the logic and the science of those associated with the vaccines-cause-autism front and demonstrates how, all too often, greed was the motivating factor behind “scientific” conclusions.

British Rights: Columbia University Press
Translation Rights: The Zack Company, Inc.
Audio Rights: The Zack Company, Inc.
Film & TV Rights: The Zack Company, Inc.

Too bad it’s not being released until September. It’s about time someone answered nonsense like Evidence of Harm and Jenny McCarthy’s book with a book like this, and I can only hope that Offit goes on an extensive book tour and manages to show up on TV a lot to promote it. (I also wonder if Dr. Offit would be willing to send little old Orac a review copy before it comes out.) He may well manage such a tour, ironically enough, thanks to the very antivaccinationists who have, unfortunately, publicized their agenda so well. There’s been very little in the way of effective countering of the antivaccinationist message by scientists, and that has to change.

Antivaccinationists are probably already gearing up to slime Offit and use the “pharma shill” gambit against him heavily. I know he has a thick skin, but this sort of thing could provoke antivaccinationists to new levels of craziness.