And on the Undercard, Kirby Versus Fineberg!

Got phone calls from as far away as Florida to watch "Meet the Press" this morning, b/c David Kirby was on. I have to say, Fineberg, the head of the Institutes of Medicine, didn't come off so wonderfully. For starters, here he is on autism:

MR. RUSSERT: For a layman, in a few words, how would you explain autism?
DR. FINEBERG: Autism is a severe neurodevelopmental disorder that is characterized by social withdrawal, by repetitive behaviors and by some kind of focal attention in its classic form. Basically, it's an inability to relate to others.

Um, not exactly, no.

And then he came across as unnecessarily contrarian when Kirby suggested there was a lack of transparency: I think he came on with the mission not to give any quarter to Kirby or to dignify any of what he was arguing:

KIRBY: ....I do think there has been a lack of transparency and I would think Dr. Fineberg would probably agree with that statement. In this entire process...
MR. RUSSERT: Do you agree with that?
DR. FINEBERG: I don't agree that the lack of transparency had had any bearing on conclusions, and I'm not sure what we mean by a lack of transparency.

Kirby had an answer for that (in general, he gave the impression of being better prepared to counterattack): a few minutes later, responding to another question, he slipped in this zinger:

Just getting back to transparency for one second if I could and this whole safety data base that we're trying to get access to from the report that Dr. Fineberg cited, it says right here, "The lack of transparency of some of the processes also affects the trust relationship between the NIP, the National Immunization Program, and the general public." The lack of trust and the lack of transparency is what's threatening the vaccine program, not talk about mercury. So the doctor's own committee said that there was a lack of transparency again inside this process of analyzing this data that was presented at that conference in Georgia.

And finally, Fineberg sounded way too dismissive of parents (or Kirby's response certainly framed it that way):

DR. FINEBERG: Tim, autism is a complicated illness, and children with a variety of treatments and non-treatments show improvement over time, which is all to the good. But when you have a single story and a repeated story of an experience that a parent has with a treatment like chelation, you have to keep in mind that the history of medicine is strewn with discarded treatments that people at one time believed in very, very strongly. When you have one case after another, it's one anecdote after another, and the plural of anecdote in scientific terms is not evidence.

That's a good sound bite, but it comes across as dismissive. Kirby's response about regressive autism didn't convince me as an argument--I've read any number of articles in mainstream literature that acknowledge regression is a real phenomenon (I can't recall ever seeing anything saying "Some parents report regression, but this seems doubtful")--but he did score debating points by referring to a recent study confirming parent reports of regression:

We need to listen to these parents as well. And I think that they've gotten a lot of dismissal from the scientific community. Parents were telling scientists that their children were born normally and then regressed. A lot of people dismissed that and said that couldn't be the case. We now know from a brand- new study from the University of Washington using videotapes of one-year birthday and two-year birthday that is indeed the case. If the parents were right about regression, maybe they're right about chelation.

Again, I'm not particularly convinced that thimerosal is behind all this, but the government response has been less than sure-footed.