A senior executive of the world's largest autism charity has resigned in a dispute about whether vaccinations could be a cause of the developmental disorder that affects an estimated one in 100 children.
Alison Singer says that numerous scientific studies have disproved the link first suggested more than a decade ago and that Autism Speaks, a US-based organisation committed to funding further research, needs to "move on".
"If you keep looking under the same rock, you're going to keep finding the same thing," said Singer, who was the charity's first chief executive when it was founded in 2005 and, until her resignation last week, its senior vice-president of communications and strategy. "Over and over, the science has shown there is no causal link between vaccines and autism. It's time to look for answers in new and different places."
Her departure is the latest phase of a battle that has raged since British scientist Andrew Wakefield made claims of a connection between autism and the combined MMR (mumps, measles and rubella) vaccine in a 1998 paper.
Wakefield's controversial research has since been discredited, and studies in Europe and the US into MMR and mercury-based preservatives in other childhood vaccines have failed to find any link. But parents were not convinced, prompting the British government to launch a campaign last summer to lift take-up rates of the MMR jab and head off a measles epidemic.
Last week the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), the US government agency tasked with formulating strategy to tackle the disorder and of which Singer is a member, voted against committing money for two new studies. It was her vote, against official Autism Speaks policy on funding research into vaccine safety, that prompted her decision to quit.
"There isn't an unlimited pot of money, and every dollar spent looking where we know the answer isn't is one less dollar we have to spend where we might find new answers," said Singer, who has an 11-year-old daughter with autism. "The fact is that vaccines save lives; they don't cause autism."
Singer also rejected the "celebrity culture" surrounding the issue. She was critical of the actress Jenny McCarthy, who has claimed that her six-year-old son Evan "recovered" from autism, which she believes was caused by a vaccination soon after birth. "We need to listen to experts and not to actresses," Singer said. "There's too much attention paid to people like Jenny McCarthy, who is not a doctor. When you listen to her, she doesn't speak in facts."
Autism Speaks, whose administration is separate from that of its sister British charity of that name, has criticised the IACC vote in a press release but said it had no further comment.