Edward Yazbak

F. Edward Yazback, M.D., F.A.A.P., is retired pediatrician who writes regularly about autism and vaccines, particularly on websites. He was a well-known pediatrician in Greater Woonsocket and school physician in Woonsocket and North Smithfield, Rhode Island,before retiring several years ago. He is now based in Falmouth, Massachusetts, where he studies the medical histories of children with autism spectrum disorders.

Yazbak is a leading proponent of the theory that vaccination of young children and pregnant women is a risk factor for subsequent development of autism. Yazbak is thus in the movement which contends that there are flaws within the current medical understanding of the diagnosis, pathogenesis, and treatment of autism. He is the grandfather of a boy with autism, who has what Yazbak describes as 'autistic enterocolitis' (a syndrome first postulated by Andrew Wakefield in a controversial 1998 study published in the prominent medical journal Lancet). Yazbak was a school physician for 34 years, and has published numerous review and comment articles, largely focusing on regressive (or late onset) autism. In addition to his recent review articles on autism, in 1966 he co-authored an article on the Apgar scores of twins.

Yazbak contends the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, when given to pregnant mothers and infant children, is a factor in the perceived increasing number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders. Yazbak's first research on pregnancy and MMR involved seven women, contacted by email through vaccine groups, who received the MMR, and their children. His results were published on a website rather than a peer-reviewed medical journal. "All of the children who resulted from these pregnancies have had developmental problems, six of the seven (85 percent) were diagnosed with autism and the seventh seems to exhibit symptoms often associated with autistic spectrum disorders," he wrote in the article.

Yazbak stands in opposition to the strong medical consensus, which is that scientific evidence provides no support for the hypothesis that MMR plays a role in causing autism. However, the theory that MMR causes autism has led to a drop in vaccination rates. A 2005 measles outbreak in Indiana was attributed to children whose parents refused vaccination. After vaccination rates dropped in northern Nigeria in the early 2000s due to religious and political objections, the number of measles cases rose significantly, and hundreds of children died.

Yazbak has also questioned the logic behind supporting research to develop new vaccines designed to deliver disease immunity to both the mother and her infant in utero.