Ellen Gray: Taking sides in 'The Vaccine War'

FRONTLINE. 9 tonight, Channel 12.

I PROBABLY EXPECT too much from PBS' "Frontline," whose willingness to tackle complicated issues I've long admired but which every so often sets my teeth on edge, as it does in tonight's presentation, "The Vaccine War."

Written, directed and produced by Jon Palfreman, who's been to war before for "Frontline" - his many credits include "Diet Wars," "The Other Drug War" and "The Last Battle of the Gulf War" - "The Vaccine War" examines the standoff between parents who see a link between childhood immunizations and autism and scientists who've found none and who fear a drop in the percentage of children being vaccinated could bring back diseases like whooping cough and measles. There's not much new here in terms of facts.

It's hardly surprising that Palfreman, whose films often pit popular belief and emotion against established science, is again siding with science. And I get it that you can't always clarify a contentious issue without revealing a point of view: Spend enough time researching any topic and you're bound to reach a conclusion or two that gives greater weight to one side or another, which is why it's difficult in any kind of explanatory journalism to be as open-minded coming out as you were meant to be going in.

But if I were one of the parents who still worry that there's some as yet undiscovered tie between the sharp rises in the recommended number of immunizations and diagnoses of autism, I might not be comforted by "The Vaccine War."

Particularly not when Jenny McCarthy is presented as the face of a movement I recall hearing plenty about years before I'd ever heard of McCarthy herself.

Anyone new to the issue might take from "Frontline" that it's activism by McCarthy and her now-former boyfriend Jim Carrey, and a YouTube video of a Washington Redskins cheerleader who allegedly had a toxic reaction to a flu shot, that will bring back polio.

Never mind that McCarthy, who announced a few years ago that her son, Evan, had been diagnosed with autism, is something of a controversial figure in that community, too, as much for her belief that she might have found a "cure" as for her stance against vaccinations.

Or that while vaccine opponents are criticized for shifting their targets from mercury to other substances or to the number of shots children now receive, the public health experts interviewed by "Frontline" don't seem to have been challenged on what science might not be able to tell us about the long-term effects of the vaccines introduced in the past 20 years. Not to mention whether, for instance, it's fair to argue for immunizations for things like chicken pox while mostly showing clips of an infant with whooping cough struggling to breathe. (The example cited of a case of chicken pox gone badly wrong isn't likely to be as compelling.)

University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Art Caplan, who notes he had polio as a child, and Dr. Paul Offit, chief of the infectious diseases division at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia - and the inventor of a rotavirus vaccine - are pretty big guns to throw up against an ex-Playboy Playmate and some mothers in an Oregon town with a lower than normal immunization rate. Anyone still need a thumb on that scale? As unlikely as it now seems that there's a direct tie between immunizations and autism, "The Vaccine War" appears a bit too willing to dismiss the very real concerns parents have for their children as selfishness toward the rest of us. *

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