But I never got to watch the show.
Because as soon as I came in the door, the phone rang. It was a reporter from the Portland Press Harold who had interviewed me after Ashley's death looking for comment on a story. Another murder suicide of someone with autism by their parent. But this time it was just a few towns away from me.
GRAY - A father shot and killed his autistic son Tuesday at their home on Yarmouth Road before turning the rifle on himself, Maine State Police said.
Cumberland County sheriff's deputies found the bodies of Daniel McLatchie, 44, and his son, Benjamin McLatchie, 22, in the family's driveway at 227 Yarmouth Road around 2:30 p.m.
The driveway, which is several hundred feet long, slopes down from Yarmouth Road -- part of Route 115 -- before ending at a white, two-story, Cape-style home surrounded by woods.
State police Sgt. Chris Harriman said the sheriff's deputies responded to a 911 call. He did not say who made the call.
He said it appeared that Daniel McLatchie was upset about what would happen to his autistic son after he and his wife died. He was a stay-at-home father, Harriman said...
It was a punch in the gut.
I didn't know the family. It is tempting to speculate on what exactly was going on and what drove him to it, but that wouldn't be fair. It is fair to assume that he was despondent and lost all hope. It is horrible, tragic, evil, a total disaster... there aren't words strong enough for how bad it is that this happened, and keeps happening. I wish I could be more eloquent, but honestly I am at a loss. It is just grievous.
And this is the third premature death of someone with autism that we have heard about during autism month, following the drownings of two wandering children. (correction, this is the fifth premature death this month). But is PBS running documentaries on how many of our children are dying from seizures and from drowning or from being abused by caregivers or shot by police or even murdered by the people who might even love them most? Are there stories on how children with autism cannot get life insurance until they turn ten because the insurance companies know damn well how likely our kids are to die young and don't want to pay out that kind of cash? No. Frontline is worried that children might get chicken pox and measles again.
But of course Frontline thinks that science has spoken and vaccines are good and never bad, and that the vaccine/autism connection belief is the fault of the internet and thinks that vaccine preventable illness is the greater risk and that it is the duty of every parent to enlist their child in the war on it, sacrificing them as needed. And of course they do, because:
The Vaccine War is a FRONTLINE co-production with the Palfreman Film Group. Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a major grant-making private foundation based in Chicago that has awarded more than US$4 billion since its inception in 1978.
Jamie S. Gorelick
John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation - director
Central Intelligence Agency National Security Advisory Panel - member
Council on Foreign Relations - member
Fannie Mae - vice chair
Sallie Mae - lobbyist
http://www.muckety.com/Jamie-S-Gorelick/2302.muckety
Robert L Gallucci
John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation - president
Georgetown University School of Foreign Service - dean
Intelligence and National Security Alliance - director
Council on Foreign Relations - member
http://www.muckety.com/Robert-L-Gallucci/152184.muckety
Donald R. Hopkins
John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation - director
CDC Foundation - board member
http://www.muckety.com/Donald-R-Hopkins/30160.muckety
John M Deutch
Central Intelligence Agency - director
Citibank, N.A. - director
U.S. Department of Defense - deputy secretary
http://www.muckety.com/John-M-Deutch/4562.muckety
Schlumberger Limited
John M Deutch - director
Jamie S. Gorelick - director
Ruth J Katz
CDC Foundation - honorary board member
George Washington University School of Public Health - dean
http://www.muckety.com/Ruth-J-Katz/86637.muckety
J. Veronica Biggins
CDC Foundation - honorary board member
Kaiser Permanente - director
David Satcher
CDC Foundation - board member
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - director
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation - trustee
Johnson & Johnson - director
As was pointed out by an autism dad posting on The Age of Autism.
And another astute observation posted by another dad of a vaccine injured child points out that:
If anyone thinks PBS can be fair with their underwriters as potential litigates in court...
So yes... PBS is right about one thing. People believe that vaccines cause autism because they can go on to the internet, find that all of the supposedly objective research clearing vaccines of widespread damage is bought and paid for by people with very special interests, financial and otherwise, in seeing the vaccine program flourish. They can, like I did, go to the government's own research database and find that the vaccines their child got just before they regressed have never even been studied to see if they are associated with autism. No Hep B vax autism studies. No DTaP vax autism studies. No Pnumo vax autism studies. No Polio vax autism studies. No HIB vax autism studies. And no studies to see if giving a child Hep B, DTaP, Pnumo, Polio and HIB simultaneously will increase their chance of autism. Not even any studies comparing fully vaccinated children to unvaccinated children to see who has more autism.
And they can go the web site of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, look at the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program's table of recognized injuries and see that the vaccine induced "encephalopathy" that is caused by DTaP and MMR is just an alternate description of a child with autism:
(1) Decreased or absent response to environment (responds, if at all, only to loud voice or painful stimuli);
(2) Decreased or absent eye contact (does not fix gaze upon family members or other individuals); or
(3) Inconsistent or absent responses to external stimuli (does not recognize familiar people or things).
And they see the government pay Hannah Poling, and Baily Banks and Madison Hiatt for their vaccine induced autism, while claiming that they are not paying them for vaccine induced autism.
And they can watch Julie Gerberding claim that vaccines both do and do not cause autism, then leave her job as CDC chief to become the head of vaccines for Merck.
And they can see that "autism" can be so hard it can even lead a parent to spiral down so low that they would do the ultimate evil to a child they love. (And then condemn them self to the ultimate judgment).
And they see pleadings of the pharma paid media to vaccinate and their indifference to what happens after vaccination. And they can see that the main stream media is not even reporting the truly important and dramatic parts of this story.
For example, MSNBC is very concerned with the two children that have died following pertussis infection this year, but has not commented on the 11 who died following pertussis containing vaccines this year, and no big stories on how our children are dying early and demanding actual progress on autism be made.
Yep... it is clearly the internet's fault. Not the MSM for their embarrassingly transparent bias and constantly being caught withholding vital information, not CDC's for telling stupid lies about vaccine injury, not the AAP's for pushing inadequately tested vaccines in untested combinations on untested populations, Not public heath's for yawning at the autism epidemic while spending billions and screaming "EMERGENCY!" over a mild flu, not mainstream medicine's for not even researching regressive autism or GI problems or any of the treatments that make our childrens' lives better, not Pharm'a fault for constantly getting caught knowingly poisoning people while trying to cover their tracks and kneecap docs who point it out and not FDA's fault for approving vaccines when makers openly admit that they don't even know how some of them work.
It is the internet's fault for letting you find out about it all. BAD INTERNET! If only there was a way to prevent parents from discovering all the immoral, unethical and illegal activities of the MSM, HHS, CDC, FDA, Pharma, AAP and Public Health. Clearly we need to turn off the internet for the sake of the children.
And the shocking thing is that MSM and PBS and MSNBC and AAP and CDC and VCIP and Public Health and all the usual suspects who are bemoaning the falling vaccine uptake rate seem to see no correlation between it, and their own "parents are stupid and we don't give a shit about vaccine injury or the struggle of autism families or the suffering and dying children (and young adults) with autism enough to actually do anything that would actually put us out in any little way" attitude.
Let's see... I can swallow the clearly BS story that vaccines are in no way associated with autism and risk a vaccine injury where I will spend my life trying to keep my child alive, fight with the school system to get him educated, fight with doctors and insurance companies to meet his medical needs, not sleep for the next thirty years, become alienated from family and friends, cease participating in society, be told that I am a crazy person for thinking vaccines cause my child's autism, be called a baby killer for warning others about my child's vaccine injury, cry every day while wiping poop off of every surface of my home and possibly attend my child's funeral when he elopes and drowns in elementary school...
OR
I can feed my child lots of organic veggies and vitamin D, educate myself on how to spot disease early and treat it effectively in my child.
Clearly parents who choose the later are deluded and dangerous!
Risk of dying from polio at the height of the polio epidemic - 1 in 30,000.
Risk of having a child with autism today - at least 1 in 100, probably higher.
I am sad and disgusted and angry and horrified.
And I will ask the question again... the same one I have been asking for years...
What is your plan? CDC, AAP, MSM and the rest of "The Empire"... The more bullshit you pump out, the faster the trust levels of the public fall, the more people come to believe that vaccines cause autism and widespread damage. And vaccine rates continue to fall and vaccine preventable illness are coming back, but they are not causing the mass death that you try to keep scaring people into believing will happen if they don't adhere to the CDC recommendations, so you are looking a bit foolish there too. How long are you going to keep this facade up? Till autism is 1 in 20, hundreds of our kids are dying per year and half the population decides to quit vaccinating all together? Have you marked out the point at which you will abandon this garbage and issue a mia culpa?
How long will you say, "Let them eat cake?"
Addendum: Dr. Jay Gordon posted the following comment on Facebook:
I attempted to post on PBS' website and they refused my post.
"PBS documentary omitted every single word of the two hour interview they did with me and their interviews with Dr. Robert Sears and all other doctors who supported the idea of questioning the current vaccine schedule and supporting parents who do so. Read my response."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-gordon/pbs-frontline-show-about_b_554691.html
Jay N. Gordon, MD,
FAAPAssistant Professor of Pediatrics, UCLA Medical School
Former Senior Fellow in Pediatric Nutrition, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute
Update 4/30/10
How long will they say, "Let them eat cake"? Apparently for a long time to come.
HHS Sec Kathleen Sebelius, who openly admits that she asks the media for favorable coverage on the autism debate (did she ask PBS to make this propaganda piece?) has appointed new members to the IACC, the government group that coordinates research into the causes and treatments of autism. All of them are people who have a long history of not making any progress in making progress for our kids, drugging them, looking for genetic causes that never materialize; except for one, who believes that autism is a natural variation, and that causes and treatments should not be researched, nor 'cures' given... Appointed to THE government committee tasked with finding a cure for autism.
This is the biggest middle finger yet that the Obama administration has given to our community. This may be the biggest that any administration has given us.
Clearly we are on our own.