Steve Silberman

speaker

584 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2018 last heard Jul 2022

Steve Silberman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children · TPP 091: A Conversation With Steve Silberman About His Book “Neurotribes” · 16 Jan 2018 podcast

You know, the anti-vaccine people were angry at Big Pharma.

And I had written about Big Pharma for Wired.

I was a senior science writer for Wired for like 15 years.

I knew that Big Pharma was very capable of doing terrible things.

But were they doing a terrible thing about vaccines?

And the more that I looked into that, you know, Andrew Wakefield is a liar.

Let me just say that up front.

But when I started my book, I did not take that approach.

I thought that Andrew Wakefield might be a very sincere and earnest scientist who tended to be sloppy because everyone knew that.

his study was badly run and that there were ethical concerns and that it came out that he had a patent for an alternate vaccine formulation that he hoped would be adopted after the MMR was made the object of fear and terror.

But the more that I studied the history of autism, which Andrew Wakefield continually misrepresented, it was very obvious to me after several years of research that

that what Andrew had done was I had him on tape saying, I didn't know anything about autism before I did my study, you know, his famous study.

And so what he did was he really, he read this book called The Age of Autism that was put together by the biggest anti-vaxxers on the web, and he just appropriated their history, which was wrong.

And how do I know that?

Because I read the same papers that they did, and they continuously misrepresented them.

So after a while, I stopped thinking of Andrew Wakefield as a true believer and just started to think of him as a fraud.

But the problem is that the anti-vaccine movement and Andrew Wakefield did something that was very useful for parents in a way, in that everyone knew that for some set of unknown reasons until my book came out, the number of diagnoses that

started to soar in the early 90s.

Everyone knew that, but no one knew why.

And so there was sort of a vacuum of, in a sense, storytelling about what had happened to produce that startling spike in diagnoses.

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