On a warm October day, Victoria Rodriguez tried to soothe her restless daughter as the girl fidgeted on an examining table of a West Texas children’s clinic. Pia Habersang, the registered nurse who runs the clinic, leaned closer. “How is her speech?” she asked.
“She doesn’t talk,” Ms. Rodriguez said, paused and then added, “She is kind of saying ‘no’ more.”
Ms. Rodriguez was insistent that her daughter, diagnosed with autism, needed care from the Pediatric Wellness Center of Amarillo, where parents are greeted with messages professing the side effects of vaccinations and possible connections to autism — connections that medical experts say have been debunked in several medical studies.
Dr. Habersang is a registered nurse with a doctorate in child and youth studies from Nova Southeastern University, but is not herself a medical doctor; she runs the center with her husband, who is a physician. She begins her initial medical sessions with new patients’ parents by discussing her concerns about vaccines, the addition of aluminum salts to shots and the rise in autism diagnoses that she insists is connected to vaccination rates.
If a child has a genetic predisposition to autism, she tells parents, early exposure to a vaccine that contains small amounts of aluminum salts, as well as factors like a diet high in saturated fats and sugar, can accelerate toxicity in the body and worsen the condition.
“If you look at lists like that, the autism increase, there has to be a reason,” Dr. Habersang said.
Virtually all immunologists, pediatricians, virologists, microbiologists and other medical experts have rejected her ideas and have hailed vaccines as lifesavers, extending life expectancy, improving childhood health immeasurably and saving millions of people from life-threatening or debilitating diseases like measles, polio and cervical cancer.