Midseason TV Drama Debuts With Vaccine Debate

The contentious debate over whether the mercury in vaccines could be a cause of autism is going to be getting another, um, shot with the debut next week of Eli Stone, a weird sort of lawyer/supernatural hybrid airing on ABC.

This show has been on my radar for a while, because it shares producers with a show I blog about, Brothers & Sisters. I was aware that it centered on an attorney (played by Jonny Lee Miller, right) who has sort of a spiritual awakening over a case involving an old acquaintance and her child. But I didn't have a clue as to what the case involved until this morning, when The New York Times and blog posts on AutismVox and the About.com Autism site filled me in.

The old acquaintance's son, apparently, is autistic. She thinks vaccines are responsible. And Eli presses her case against the vaccine manufacturers.

The show doesn't mention thimerosal -- it's given the made-up name "mercuritol" so that we don't, I don't know, take the word of a TV drama for anything. But there's already concern that maybe the drug companies that do business with ABC will boycott the show, or that people will be so moved by Eli's arguments that they'll stop vaccinating their kids.

After we've watched the show next Thursday, we'll be in a better position to discuss whether it puts forth anything worth praising or worrying about. But all this talk has put me in mind of another TV drama that dealt with the issue of autism and vaccines -- and did, I thought at the time, a pretty lousy job of it.

It was back in 2001 that I wrote on my personal blog about an episode of ER in which a child died of measles. The mother had failed to vaccinate him due to fears of autism, and Dr. Carter -- our righteous, good-guy Dr. Carter -- pretty much beat her to a bloody pulp with his club of Absolute Certainty that vaccines have nothing to do with autism.

I wished that there could have at least been some discussion, some complexity beyond Medicine Good, Mom Bad. Maybe we can hope for that now from Eli Stone, a show that looks like it will be dealing with faith (they've got George Michael singing "Faith," anyway) and evidence of things unseen. Certainly, although many feel that scientific evidence has ruled out an autism-vaccine connection, there are many who still have unshaken faith that such a connection exists.

It's looking more and more as though the only place there could be a respectful discussion between the two sides is in a fictional world.