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The Lancet Recants Study Linking Autism To Vaccine
JamJam writes "The Lancet, a major British medical journal, has retracted a flawed study linking the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to autism and bowel disease. British surgeon and medical researcher Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues originally released their study in 1998. Since then 10 of Wakefield's 13 co-authors have renounced the study's conclusions and The Lancet has said it should never have published the research. Wakefield now faces being stripped of his right to practice medicine in Britain. The vaccine-autism debate should now end."
...but it won't. Because the birthers *know* that the face on mars means that aliens ate my buick. ...In other news, Jack Sprat seen eating lean cuisines... details at 11.
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Wasn't it peer reviewed?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Yeah, right. Since when have facts ever got in the way of a 'good' conspiracy theory?
...when it's scientists debating fat midwestern housewives whose "evidence" is nothing more than sad anecdotal stories. Fucking retards holding back progress.
Even if he loses his medical license, at least he'll be a budding star in any modern media corporation.
Q.E.D.
If you read about it in other places besides here, what you'd more likely see is just endless mockery that would blind people to anything that really *could* go wrong with vaccinations. It is like discussing fertile land turning to desert in rural Africa, then hearing someone chime in that global warming is a hoax because it is snowing outside his window right now.
Can someone outline the flaws in the study? I know we here at /. are experts at things like that. But I also don't want to RTFA.
So why exactly should I not believe the original study? From where I stand (which is little to zero knowledge on the subject) I could conclude that each of the co authors one by one were persuaded by the various pharmaceutical companies which standed to be harmed by this research.
Hey, it's okay, these things happen. At least they caught it before it could cause any major damage or start some anti-vaccine movement or anything. Good job, guys.
Here my neck of the woods, I've heard countless mothers talk about how they would never get their kids vaccinated for seasonal or H1N1 flu, because of "what if..." syndrome. As in "What if.. the vaccine wasn't sufficiently tested, or what if my kid has a reaction, or I'd rather he get the flu than have a side effect.
Of course if their kid gets sick and gives it to the kid's entire 25student classroom. The mother doesn't give a shit, because atleast she didn't get the side effect.
My favorite is, "We have no idea what the side effect is of this vaccine in 10 or 20yrs."
Everyone knows autism is caused by plastic contaminated foods.
Vaccines? Is that guy crazy? Maybe he ate too many of those cheese & cracker snacks you could make tunnels in the cheese with, using that little red cheese spreader knifey thing, all of which was made of plastic.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Here's the actual retraction, rather than reporting on reporting on the retraction:
The Lancet, Early Online Publication, 2 February 2010
doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(10)60175-7
Retraction—Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children
The Editors of The Lancet
Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council's Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al(1) are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation.(2) In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were "consecutively referred" and that investigations were "approved" by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.
References
1 Wakefield AJ, Murch SH, Anthony A, et al. Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. Lancet 1998; 351: 637-641
2 Hodgson H. A statement by The Royal Free and University College Medical School and The Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust. Lancet 2004; 363: 824.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Lets see... by using threats they got 10 out of 13 of the co-authors to renounce a study which had a result they didn't like, and it took them more than a decade to do it. It sounds more like the Inquisition than science. The study itself may have been flawed, but the current result is purely a political thing which doesn't prove anything one way or the other.
They can just advertise that he lost his licence because the powers that be want to supress information and they are doing it by silencing this guy. So spend $29.95 a month to sign up for our web site and learn what the man doesn't want you to know. (You know it'll work out just like that.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
The problem is exactly what is written above, although not in the way the author thinks.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Like that matters. It should have ended a long time ago, but facts don't stand a chance against people who would give Lupron to children. Consider Boyd Haley's recent business of selling an industrial chelator (for cleaning up SuperFund sites) which doesn't even have an industrial MSDS for medical administration to children as a "dietary supplement" (wink, wink.)
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Are you referring to what I wrote, to what ak_hepcat wrote, to what JamJam wrote, or to the original article?
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC, and the WHO have long since agreed that there is no credible proof for link between autism and vaccine. The 1998 study has been under intense fire for over a decade, with most of the doctors having pulled their names from it long since. We've been at the point of next to zero proof for a long time and yet the "debate" drags on. I would postulate that the cause is tightly linked the timing of childhood vaccinations in relationship to the symptoms of autism first becoming apparent. Unfortunately, I think that means that the debate is far from over.
I think the fact that no other researchers have managed to get anything like the results Wakefield did should be influential in forming opinions about this.
There is more anecdotal evidence to prove vaccines don't cause autism, so wouldn't that push the debate into being over, if anecdotal evidence is the measuring bar?
After reading TFA, as far as my medically ignorant mind makes out, the study was withdrawn due to ethical issues obtaining the samples for the study, not due to issues with the conclusions drawn. I can see how this would lead Wakefield to be deregistered due to ethical considerations however how does this disprove his conclusions? The logic seems to go "your study shows there may be a link between autism and vaccines, you obtained samples unethically, therefore this proves once and for all and hereby ends the discussion that there is conclusively no link between autism and vaccines". I always pay extra close attention when a scientific discussion starts descending into claims of absolutes, a statement like "the possibility is laughably remote that there is a link between x and y" makes sense, "there is no link between x and y and nobody is to suggest there is" smacks of dark ages medicine rather than science.
I would love someone more medically inclined to provide more background as I sense a lot of info was missing from the story / article.
Click on Dr. Wilson's link to see his copy of a graph showing the slight drop in MMR vaccinations resulting in a sharp increase in measles cases. Fortunately, a mere thousand or so more per year will only mean a couple of deaths, blindings, sterilizations, and so forth. Words fail me.
Just because one side of the debate has used bad data and judgment doesn't mean there is no merit to the debate.
It does when the only reason the debate ever started was because of that bad data.
Nope, it doesn't work like that.
It only takes one exception to disprove a rule, but to prove a rule you need to prove it for all cases.
Friends of ours have a daughter who started descending into autism one week after the MMR vaccine.
However I think the larger issue here is the weakening of the human race - as we continue to vaccinate, use antibiotics, and fix defects with surgery, we're allowing weak genetic traits to propagate that would otherwise be bred out. Nevertheless I still get my kids vaccinated.
It's amazing what results you can get if you keep repeating the experiment until you get the results you want.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The debate over the autism link is being stirred by personal injury lawyers, it has nothing to do with science:
Among the dozens of charges the GMC deemed proven against Wakefield are that he provided a research proposal to a lawyer seeking to sue vaccine manufacturers for causing autism.
suck it, Jenny McCarthy & Oprah!
I had the MMR vaccine and never have been diagnosed with autism.
To remain clear, I didn't say that it was the measure of truth, only a measure of continuing debate.
There are lots of people who drink and drive who have never been in an accident. Does that push that debate to being over? Of course not.
It's statistics. If a drug or vaccine is unsafe for a small population, it needs to be restricted or banned. At issue is a large group of parents of autistic children who blame the vaccines. It doesn't matter to them if vaccines usually don't cause autism. They each see their own child as evidence that vaccines can cause autism. They band together and support each other's beliefs. Rarity doesn't matter to them. (as it shouldn't, statistically.)
Additionally, autism is on the rise, and nobody quite knows why. Sometimes, anecdote is all that we have. (unfortunately)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
You're asking for a detailed fisking in a /. comment? Those details are out there, have been for years. Just read -- my favorite is scienceblogs.com/insolence -- partly because Orac is a damned sharp cookie, and partly because he dials up the snark to 11.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
With the gov't, media, and pharma all so interconnected, it is incredibly obvious that there is never any pressure on any party in that group to do things (e.g. threats to revoke license to practice medicine, legally protecting pharma from lawsuits, etc.) that might benefit the other. I mean, when has corruption in any of those parties ever existed?
What does that mean? And because the local ethics committee didn't approve it does that mean the results are invalid? (Granted assuming the tactics didn't skew the results, they could still be valid)
Sounds like mudslinging to defame them.
It did pass a previous investigation after all.
Check here.
There are many cases like this. I don't make any claims, but this study isn't the only reason for the debate.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
No, autism *diagnosis* is on the rise. It is a subtle but important difference.
Oh, and it's "Autism Spectrum Disorder" now, which includes everything from very slight Aspergers to the very profoundly autistic. This is a good measure of the increase, if not most of it.
Just because one side of the debate has used bad data and judgment doesn't mean there is no merit to the debate. The other side does too. The trick is finding the truth in the whirlwind of lies and deceit.
Anecdotally, my brother works for a hospital. Everyone who works in the Emergency room was offered the H1N1 vaccine as soon as it became available. Each of those who got the vaccine came down with swine flu. Most of those who were unvacinated didn't.
These companies do make mistakes. Like any large organization with money at stake, they want to believe they can handle these problems quietly without large payouts. Is there a link between vaccines and autism? I don't know. I don't believe for a moment that the debate is over.
I readily acknowledge that the debate isn't over as Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy have obviously yet to concede.
But the scientific debate has been over for years. There are definitely cases where pharmaceuticals have done unethical things, but the questions of vaccines and autism has been studied far too thoroughly by multiple scientists for that to be the case.
It's like using the fact that dirty judges exist to make the claim that the US legal system is staffed entirely by members of the Illuminati, conspiracies just don't scale like that.
There's way too much anecdotal evidence, even if there is no merit.
The plural of anecdote isn't data.
Anecdotal evidence can provide motivation for scientific research, but the moment you get good scientific research that addresses the issues and accounts for the anecdotes you can forget about the anecdotes.
Also, not to engage in Ad-Hominems, but when your movement is led by an unethical doctor with massive conflicts of interest and airhead former playboy models, and every study you try to publish has massive and obvious flaws, than it's a pretty good indication that the movement is full of BS.
I stole this Sig
Granted, but the decline in undiagnosed cases is only one theory. I want to believe that's all it is, but I don't. I do believe it is a significant contribution to the change, though.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Is there a link between vaccines and autism? I don't know. I don't believe for a moment that the debate is over. There's way too much anecdotal evidence, even if there is no merit.
What does that even mean? "There's too much anecdotal evidence, even if there is no merit"? So, like, we both know that anecdotal evidence is crap, and the science all says otherwise, but because there's "too much" spouting off of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies, it has to mean something? Yeah, it means most people are incapable of making good observations, have no understanding of statistics, and are more than happy to let confirmation bias run wild.
Also, anecdotally, none of these geniuses I've ever seen discuss the issue have any understanding of history, and of the suffering the human race endured before vaccination existed. Whatever tiny increase in autism they think actually exists, even if it turned out against all reason and evidence to be true, wouldn't be worth going back to that.
I swear, if there's ever an outbreak of smallpox, and these retarded fuckers refuse to get vaccinated, I'm going to start taking them out for the good of humanity.
The enemies of Democracy are
"Descending into autism" is an awfully broad term. It's sure as hell not scientific. Just right for anecdotal evidence really.
The scientific studies conducted over hundreds of thousands of people that showed no evidence that MMR caused autism may carry more weight than what your friends say.
me too, but that's my point which you might be missing. You can't take one healthy MMR-vaccinated person and prove that all MMR vaccine cases will never cause any side-effects.
It only takes one person with a side effect LINKED to the MMR vaccine to prove that they're all potentially dangerous. Note the link has to be well proven.
I'm not saying it is or isn't a good vaccine, I'm just talking about proofs.
Like what others here stated, the diagnosis is on the rise, not the incidence of autism.
I was diagnosed with ALL three months after my MMR. Does that mean MMR gave me Leukemia? Of course not. Does that mean there should be a debate on vaccinations and ALL? Of course not.
This study has already been thoroughly discredited. If evidence didn't sway the anti-vaccine movement, having a paper pulled from a "big-pharma shill" journal probably won't help either.
or else!
The trick is finding the truth in the whirlwind of lies and deceit.
The truth appears to be that the peer-reviewed study that is the basis for arguments that autism is linked to vaccines... isn't valid. Against that are numerous studies which did not find a link, and clear and obvious health problems with not vaccinating children. Specifically brain damage, blindness, death.
So basically the "don't vaccinate your kid" side now only has old playboy models and paranoia going for it. Forgive me if I think the "whirlwind of lies and deceit" is actually all on one side of the "debate."
Conclusions should never be drawn from anecdotal observation, conclusions drawn from research which is instigated by anecdotal observations. Case in point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death anecdotes are rife with observation and sampling biases and are not reflective of a total sum of truth. Also your analogy between drunk driving and vaccines causing autism is not really parallel, drunk driving research has not been unsubstantiated.
...I for one am waiting to see what Jenny McCarthy has to say about this.
or else!
since swine flu is hard to tell from seasonal flu, and anyone who has had the vaccine already has swine flu antibodies, isn't it hard to say whether they all came down with h1n1? Part of my thinking is that there was, in fact, a study in canada that seemed to show a link between higher seasonal flu infection rates, and having been immunized against h1n1. Canada acted on it and stopped recommending the vaccine for low risk groups. Anyway just my two cents.
It's either false dichotomies, or the terrorists win, you decide.
There are many cases like this. I don't make any claims, but this study isn't the only reason for the debate.
Yes it is. Blaming it on the vaccine makes about as much sense as blaming it one whatever she had for dinner, and would be as likely if it weren't for the "OH NOES THE VACCINES ARE CAUSING AUTISM" crowd.
Or its proof there was something else wrong with the person who took the vaccine and it was all coincidental that they showed symptoms after being vaccinated.
The night before I showed symptoms of ALL, I had been playing with a late 1970s Han Solo blaster pistol in my uncle's unfinished basement. Dose that mean a toy gun, an unfinished basement and/or playing are linked to ALL?
There's way too much anecdotal evidence, even if there is no merit.
The plural of anecdote isn't data.
Get off your high horse for a moment. I didn't call it data, and I said that there may be no merit. Please refrain from strawmen arguments. I merely said that debate would continue because of it. Nothing more.
but when your movement is led...
It's not my movement. It's a movement that I watch with concern, but it's not one that I've sided with. I'm interested in the claims and facts from both sides.
Also, not to engage in Ad-Hominems, but...
Followed by an ad hominem. Cute.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
If this is real, I'm sorry to hear it. I hope you're gonna be all right. I know someone else who was diagnosed 11 years ago with it and is still going strong, but it hasn't been easy. May you be well.
Sorry I have to post this as an AC, but I've already moderated in this thread.
-PopeRatzo
I have an anecdote too. I got an H1N1 vaccine from my doctor and I didn't get swine flue. Therefore 100% of people I know for sure to have been vaccinated did not get sick.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
"Descending into autism" is an awfully broad term. It's sure as hell not scientific. Just right for anecdotal evidence really.
I'm not trying to use it as scientific evidence. I said "descending" because she wasn't diagnosed until much later, but the symptoms started then.
If you talk to autistic children's parents you'll find they often describe it as a descent. Changes don't happen immediately, or from birth, but they often reach a developmental point and then start going backwards, hence my use of the word
The scientific studies conducted over hundreds of thousands of people that showed no evidence that MMR caused autism may carry more weight than what your friends say.
Of course, but I never claimed to:
- be a scientist
- conduct studies
- believe the link between MMR and autism
I was previously talking about proofs. I used an example because I have a close relationship to the story.
The problem is that most people don't understand statistics, numerical significance or even the scientific method. This leads the unwashed masses to jump to conclusions that are based on anecdotal evidence, un-normalised data comparisons and non-causal correlations which sound quite reasonable on the surface.
When a study is properly performed and analysed to remove various biases and incorrect assumptions, it usually involves counter-intuitive statistical analyses.
Unfortunately, due to a lack of understanding of the scientific method, and despite the fact that a denouncement has been widely reported, many people will still be given media time to promote their ignorant contrarian claims.
When discussing high profile scientific studies like this one, I keep hearing people argue with reasoning like 'well that is just another point of view'. I intentionally used the word 'claims' and not 'view point' in the above paragraph. A view point implies that a contradictory, but valid alternative explanation exists. In the case of scientific study, a falsifiable hypothesis can be shown to be true or false. If it is deemed false it may still be correct in some of it's underlying elements. In that case it would be revised and a more accurate hypothesis developed.
Some people seem to think that if they personally don't understand the complex reasoning process behind a peer reviewed scientific conclusion, then they should feel free to jump to their own. Because of this, many kids have not been immunised over the last ten years, and now we are seeing the fall out of what happens when too many people decide against the recommendations of the medical establishment.
(1) I admitted anecdote.
(2) I don't believe the vaccine in general is bad. I do believe the hospital got a bad batch.
(3) I don't have hard numbers, but I can tell you that my brother lives in Redding CA. I'm not sure which hospital he works for, or even if it's in Redding. If you really care, I'm sure you can find it.
(As a side note, the vaccine that first came out was a nasal variety that was supposed to be weakened, live flu. It was still supposed to be safe for those without a compromised immune system. The shot in the arm is a different beast altogether.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
There are many cases like this.
Yes there are many cases of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
It's a very common fallacy.
Our brains are highly optimized for pattern recognition. Unfortunately this ability is overzealous, and not something we can turn off. It takes reason, logic, and in some cases careful observation to discover how this ability has led us astray.
In any case, "I took my kid to see Avatar and a week later they were autistic!" is not in any way a scientific data point. It also doesn't even make sense -- autism is a developmental disorder. If your kid is showing signs of autism a week after you accidentally insulted a gypsy on the subway, then the developmental disorder was already present and the gypsy had nothing to do with it.
The enemies of Democracy are
Exactly. It is like penicillin, which to most of the world is a life saver, but to me and my GF it would be a death sentence due to anaphylactic shock. If only 1% of the children given the vaccine end up with autism because of it that is STILL a pretty damned big number of kids. As a parent I can understand those that prefer to error on the side of caution, because even with 1000 to 1 odds against it happening that is still your kid that you are risking.
And honestly with the amount of money these drug companies make if they did find something horrible happened to 1 out of 1000 I wouldn't be surprised if they just kept their mouth shut. The "screw everything but the quarterly earnings report!" attitude of the major corps doesn't exactly make them the most trustworthy of sources, you know?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I don't know if autism is correlated with vaccines. I am not familiar with modern medicine. But my instinct tells me that if someone on the internet tells me how I should feel about the science, I would like to see his qualifications.
It only takes one person with a side effect LINKED to the MMR vaccine to prove that they're all potentially dangerous.
Well, the trouble here is, how do you prove that the MMR vaccine "caused" or even influenced the development of autism? Thus far, scientists have been unable to show any causative factor, and the only "evidence" anyone really has is anecdotal. That's not to say we should simply dismiss anecdotal evidence, it's just to say that anecdotal evidence by itself isn't enough, and until we have more than that we shouldn't make decisions based on it.
Has anyone considered that maybe the age we start vaccinating and the age some kids start to develop autism are the same, so there are bound to be cases where the two happen close together? It would be interesting to see statistics comparing average age (in days or weeks) when autism begins to develop with average age when various vaccines are received in various demographic groups.
There are also other things to consider. To those who advocate banning vaccines in an attempt to lower the rate of people developing autism, have you considered whether the rate of autism development might be much lower than the death rate from the diseases against which we vaccinate? Is it really worth allowing X children to die of $DISEASE in order to spare Y children from autism, if X is much larger than Y?
I don't know if X > Y, but I rarely see anyone bring up the idea at all in discussions on this topic.
these people are putting other peoples kids and the population as a whole in great danager due to dropping vacination rates, which completely contridicts your point that autism rates climbing is some how linked - after all if less people are vaccinating how can autism be increasing if it's the cause?
we are lowering whats called herd immunity. at the moment the rest of the herd is still largely immune to things like polio and mumps, this keeps those who aren't immune safe because no one around them generally has the virus. once this drops to a critical number (which is VERY close to happening, and has already happened with hooping cough) large numbers of kids are going to start being killed or crippled by preventable diseases. if you think the health care system is under strain now try adding an outbreak of polio. not only will kids get it but they will pass it on to adults as well.
when i see idiots refusing to vaccinate their kids, i just want to grab them and shake the bastards while shoving pictures of the 1920's polio outbreak in their face.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Sadly, while this should end debate, it's unlikely to do so.
A lot of times the media, or hysterical people trying to find a "cause" for something, extrapolate from a few anecdotal things they've heard.
For example, today I saw a scientific article misinterpreted by the news as saying Vitamin E will get rid of ADHD. The sample size was too small (81 total subject, of which I think 44 were not controls) to really "say" anything like that.
Does it justify further study? YES. Can we say that Vitamin E (fish oil) will cure ADHD in young kids? NO.
There just isn't enough data.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'd suggest looking up the mortality rates of the diseases you're failing to immunize against.
You don't think some scientist out there wouldn't love to be the guy who figured out autism, and make a fortune as an expert witness at the hundreds of thousands of lawsuits?
Yes, drug companies are no angels, but they are not omnipotent.
Or its proof there was something else wrong with the person who took the vaccine and it was all coincidental that they showed symptoms after being vaccinated.
And you're telling me this because...?
Let me say it slowly: I. Agree. With. You.
I'm not drawing any links between MMR and Autism. I was just talking about proofs in and of themselves, nothing to do with MMR / autism.
The night before I showed symptoms of ALL, I had been playing with a late 1970s Han Solo blaster pistol in my uncle's unfinished basement. Dose that mean a toy gun, an unfinished basement and/or playing are linked to ALL?
If that's what you want to think, but that's going a bit far.
More thoroughly than AGW.
No brain, no pain.
Of course, but I never claimed to: - be a scientist
- conduct studies
- believe the link between MMR and autism
I was previously talking about nonsense.
Fixed that for you.
Seriously. You aren't claiming anything, you're just suggesting something that you are denying having said you even believe. So why are you saying anything at all?
Exactly. It is like penicillin, which to most of the world is a life saver, but to me and my GF it would be a death sentence due to anaphylactic shock. If only 1% of the children given the vaccine end up with autism because of it that is STILL a pretty damned big number of kids. As a parent I can understand those that prefer to error on the side of caution, because even with 1000 to 1 odds against it happening that is still your kid that you are risking.
Putting aside the fact that there is no evidence linking vaccine to autism, are you saying that this hypothetical risk outweighs the very real risk of deadly diseases such as measles and mumps? As a parent, it infuriates me to see scientifically-illiterate parents put my vaccinated children at risk by contributing to the failure of herd immunity.
One side used a con artists absolutely moronic and quickly debunked study. The other side, well, they're the ones that debunked this quack's nonsense. They did it years ago. WTF was wrong with Lancet? They should have withdrawn it as soon as the extent of Wakefield's incompetence and dishonesty came to light. What it's done has generated several years worth nuisance lawsuits, parents tricked into believing there was someone out there to blame for their children's problems and posed a substantial risk to public health. Wakefield should be publicly drawn-and-quartered and Lancet owes the world an apology.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'd suggest looking up the mortality rates of the diseases you're failing to immunize against.
Negatory ghost rider. Statistics mean nothing to the individual, only to large groups. According to statistics, both my kids should have had Down Syndrome (from the scans) but neither of them have. That doesn't disprove the measurement theories for early detection of Down Syndrome, just that in my case we had 2 exceptions.
If he wants to ignore the vaccine, and go with the consequences, then that's up to him, so long as he accepts the consequences whatever they may be (including death).
Related, Wakefield was recently found to have acted unethically by the General Medical Council. The full report is up on Scribd. Some analysis and summarizing, as well as some of the crazy response from the anti-vaccine community can be found at Orac's blog.
Those who argue against vaccination based on the risk of autism may well be on shaky ground, but there are PLENTY of studies linking vaccines to other ill effects, here are a (very) few:
MMR VACCINE
Pancreatis Caused by Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccine Pancreas vol. 6 no 4 1991 [2] :86 [4 pgs.]
Mumps Meningitis Following Measles, Mumps and Rubella Immunization Lancet July 1989 [1 pg]
Optic Neuritis Complicating Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination American Journal of Opthalmology 1978
A Prefecture-wide Survey of Mumps Meningitis Associated with Measles, Mumps and Rubella Vaccine (Infec Dis J 1991 Vol 10 pg 204-209)
Risk of Aseptic Meningitis after Measles Mumps and Rubella Vaccine In UK Children (Lancet April 93 Pgs. 979)
A Prefecture -Wide Survey of Mumps Meningitis Associated With Measles, Mumps and Rubella Vaccine Pediatri Infect Dis J 1991; 10 [6pgs]
Guillain-Barre syndrome after measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine Lancet jan 1 1994 Vol 343 [1 pg]
RUBELLA VACCINE
Two Syndromes Following Rubella Immunization (Suggests a polyneuropathy in both syndromes) (JAMA 1970 Vol 214 no 13) [5pgs.]
Chronic Arthritis After Rubella Vaccination Clinical Infec Dis. 1992 15;307-12 [6pgs]
Acute Arthritis Complicating Rubella Vaccination (ARTHRITIS AND RHEUMATISM 1971 41) [4pgs]
Joint Symptoms Following an Area Wide Rubella Immunization Campaign Report of a Survey Am J of Public Health Vol 62 no 5 [4pgs]
Polyneuropathy Following Rubella Immunization Am J Dis Child 1974 Vol 127 [5pgs]
Postpartum Rubella Immunization: Association with Development of Prolonged Arthritis, Neurological Sequelae, and Chronic Rubella Viremia (THE JOURNAL OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES 1985 vol 152 no 3) [7pgs]
MEASLES VACCINE
Thrombocytopenic Purpura Following Vaccination With Attenuated Measles Virus Amer J Dis Child Jan 1968 Vol 115 [3pgs]
Investigation of a measles outbreak in a fully vaccinated school population including serum studies before and after revaccination (Pediatr Infec Dis J 1993 12) [8pgs.]
Risk of Aseptic Meningitis after Measles, Mumps , and Rubella Vaccine in UK Children Lancet 1993 Vol 341 [4pgs]
An Explosive point-source measles outbreak in a highly vaccinated population (American Journal of Epidemiology 1989 Vol 129 no 1) [10]
A Persistent Outbreak of Measles Despite Appropriate Prevention And Control Measures ( American Journal of Epidemiology Vol 126 No3) [13pgs.]
Measles Vaccine and Crohn’s Disease Gastroenterology vol. 108 no 3 1995 [3pgs]
Aseptic Meningitis after Vaccination Against Measles and Mumps (Pediatr Infec Dis J 1989 8 pg 302-308) [7pgs]
Measles Vaccine Associated Encephalitis in Canada Lancet Sept. 1983 [2pgs]
Guillain -Barre Syndrome Following Administration of Live Measles Vaccine Amer J of Med 1976 Vol 60 [3pgs]
Pancreatitis Caused by Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccine Pancreas vol 6 no 4 [2pgs]
Measles Vaccine and Neurological Events Lancet May 1997 [2pgs]
MUMPS VACCINE /evidence for large scale vaccination failure Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 1995 Vol 149 [5pgs] Summary: 54 students developed mumps --of those 54, 53 had been fully immunized.
Mumps Outbreak in a Highly Vaccinated School Population
Aseptic Meningitis as a Complication of Mumps Vaccination (Ped Infec Dis J 1991 Vol 10 No 3) [5pgs]
Guillain -Barre Syndrome occurrence following combined mumps- rubella vaccine Am J Dis Child Vol 125 1973 [2pgs]
Mumps Vaccines and Meningitis/ Heterogeneous Mumps Vaccine (more on Urabe strain vaccine) Lancet Vol 340 1992 [2pgs.]
Flu Vaccine
Neuropathy After Influenza Vaccination (this deals with Swine flu vaccine) Lancet Jan 29, 1977 [ 2 pgs.]
Isolated Hypoglossal Nerve Paralysis Following Influenza Vaccination Am J Dis Child 1976 vol 130 [2pgs]
Guillain -Barre Syndrome Lancet Sept. 1978 [1pg]
Relapsing Encephalomyelitis Following the use of Influenza Vaccine Arch Neurol Vol 27 1972 [2pgs]
Optic Atrophy Following Swine Flu Vaccination Annals of Opthalmol
The only other real path that's shown any sort of empirical evidence is genetic. That's where it will pan out, most likely. Genetic changes can be caused by a wide variety of things, but again, it's hard to say anything real about ASD in terms of causes, because ASD encompasses a variety of *very* different disorders.
Still when your child starts acting weird, and stops talking within days after getting a shot it is easy to draw a conclusion. Then when going on line there is lots of others who seem to have had the same thing happen it seems like more evidence. .edu sites which agreed with the autism MMR link. Generally along the lines that some people just couldn't handle being injected with 3 live vaccines at once, which caused intestinal problems and also seemed to lead to autism.
At the time there also seemed to be quite a few incomplete studies found at various
Some of the studies were pretty simple, graphing autism rates compared to when the MMR vaccine was introduced. These should be easy to redo if the data is still available.
I know the meme that correlation is not causation but in my experience there often is a correlation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
"It's statistics. If a drug or vaccine is unsafe for a small population, it needs to be restricted or banned. At issue is a large group of parents of autistic children who blame the vaccines. It doesn't matter to them if vaccines usually don't cause autism. They each see their own child as evidence that vaccines can cause autism. They band together and support each other's beliefs. Rarity doesn't matter to them. (as it shouldn't, statistically.)"
That's the problem in a nutshell. You don't understand what the statistics are telling you. The stats say there is NO CORRELATIOM between MMR and autisim, therefore there is absolutely zero evidence MMR causes autisim. But statistical evidence doesn't seem to matter (or is incomprehensible) to a large section of the population, those people will continue to draw suspect conclusions based on anecdotal experience.
You cannot compare it to drink driving since those statistics show the opposite, ie: a high correllation between drink driving and car crashes.
I also object to you banning penicilin simply because some people are allergic to it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
As a parent I can understand those that prefer to error on the side of caution, because even with 1000 to 1 odds against it happening that is still your kid that you are risking.
But anyone looking at the statistics would see that erring on the side of caution would be to get the vaccine. Those diseases can cause serious complications or death, and while there is no actual proof of the whole autism claim, there is overwhelming proof of the effectiveness of the vaccine in providing immunity.
Even starting with the premise that the vaccine does have a 0.1% chance of causing autism, measles has a mortality rate much higher than that, especially in undeveloped countries. And it is HIGHLY contagious.
Still when your child loses the capability of speech and starts acting much different within days of getting a shot it does seem like causation.
In my case, the last time my son called me Dad was on the way to the Doctor for a shot. 12 years later he still hasn't called me Dad.
I've also seen too many supposed scientific studies that turned out not as scientific as the studies claimed. Usually these are studies done by people or organizations with an agenda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
... and the disclaimer was longer than the ad itself. A long list of possible side-effects, including the fatal one; death.
Ok, autism was not included.
Sure -- there are no studies proving aliens at area51, and yet there is "debate"; nor are there studies on various other crackpot schemes.
But this was the only somewhat credible (or so it was thought...) piece of research suggesting any correlation. That is why it is important, since without such research, claims for vaccination-induced autism does not rise above level of "jesus-on-tortillas" schemes.
Part of the problem is here is that this is related to a very big problem (of child becoming autistic), and the other part due to human brain developing "analogitis" (finding cause/consequence relationships in noise). Come to think of that, the tortilla folks are not all that far removed from autism-vaccination folks; it's just that "think of children" is replaced with religion.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
I remember seeing charts where the rise in diagnosis closely followed the introduction of the MMR vaccine. Wish I could find the charts now, unluckily after over a dozen years I've lost my bookmarks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
That would be an interesting study, though it might be difficult to set up. It would need to include a study of children who came down with autism despite not receiving vaccinations. Otherwise, you'd not be able to come to any conclusions about any correlations that were found.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Insightful comment that (wo)man. This retraction is a bit weasly.
It does not say "the statistical methods used were bollocks".
However, on reflection it says a lot without saying it specifically - "...consecutively referred..." I think means:
"The authors of this paper encountered a slack handfull of similar diagnoses in a vanishingly small sample of patients during a vaccination epidemic"
Also "...ethics committee...proven..." might mean:
"The authors jotted down their My Little Pony Diary entries verbatim into a letter to the Independent and this ended up in the Lancet due to an unfortunate addressing error".
>> tactics skew the results
Are you having a laugh? 12 children specifically chosen because of their having a specific diagnosis in a population of >60 million people in the middle of a mass innoculation are diagnosed with a similar syndrome.
Don't children who have not been vaccinated also develop autism? Didn't it exist long before vaccines?
They are like any other group of rabid fanatics, they will always refuse to acknowledge any information that does not already conform to their preconceived delusions.
It is sad sight indeed, when rational though is in short supply.
even with 1000 to 1 odds against it happening that is still your kid that you are risking.
so you basically are ok with not risking a totally hypothetical autism issue in order to go for a for SURE (numbers from wikipedia) 2-3/1000 death rate and 5-105/1000 complication rate (blindness, deafness, other issues)? It never ceases to surprise how irrational people can be, but then again there always have been people scared to death of flying that will have no issues crossing the street or driving a car...
-- the cake is a lie
Also your analogy between drunk driving and vaccines causing autism is not really parallel...
Sigh. Have I really got to hold your hand?
There is more anecdotal evidence to prove vaccines don't cause autism, so wouldn't that push the debate into being over, if anecdotal evidence is the measuring bar?
There are lots of people who drink and drive who have never been in an accident. Does that push that debate to being over? Of course not.
"Wyatt Earp (1029)" made a bad argument. I was attacking the form of his argument. I was NOT drawing a parallel between drunk driving and autism.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
At some point, Psychology has dug itself into a hole. Or, perhaps the conspiracy theorist would love to jump on my belief below when it comes to their ideas of world domination. But, the facts are present to some degree the following:
1) It seems that with every pill from the pharmaceutical companies comes a new mental disorder
Now, granted if we all were to believe that most people are stupid, then by nature being smart would not be the norm and thus disorderly. But, when combined with the word 'mental', is such connotation really necessary without an assumed agenda?
Now, I prefer to cling onto the classics in regards to mental health, and yes I'm willing to disregard whatever numerical claim psychologists would like tag on to their years of clinical studies. First off, the only clinic like structures in mental health I might easily recognize is the traditional asylum, which brings me to my second point. Unless you are incapacitated, drooling and banging your head against the wall, you aren't "crazy". Just because some people might resist social etiquette doesn't mean they have a disorder beyond that of not being sheep.
Autism is no different, and it too has such classical definitions. So here it is. If you aren't a human calculator, you don't have autism. If you need a visual, Rain Main, rent it, watch it, observe it, cherish it as very few children are ever that gifted in such narrow subjects.
Psychology is still an art, not a science, and psychiatrist are nothing but licensed professional front-men to pawn off drugs to half-wits while charging the insurance companies that cover mental health. With all these categorical labels mental health, has more tools for lawyers to get the murderer off the hook from a capital punishment trial, but more disturbing can be used as a case to take away the rights of someone, who isn't banging their head against the wall, drooling and incapable of much anything else; never mind even aware of rights or able to competently voice an opinion regarding their own rights.
The most disturbing to me, is all the new autisms that are propounded about the psych industry and media. What ticks me off, than all the shades of insanity that might exist. Is now, people who are rather gifted and not Rain Man gifted, are claimed to have some sort of autism, a mental disorder. Perhaps if they weren't so smart they'd cease to be autistic? Maybe the autism wouldn't be detected? Seriously, I've seen the pretty dumb blond so stupid that her inability to do anything is shadowed by some of those I've seen who were officially committed. But productivity or capability may not be indicative to insanity or mental disorders some would suggest. So even if I accept this obvious contradiction, it can only be that damn near everyone has a mental disorder, and everyone who is dumb and docile must be the only sane and desirable people! And who decides this qualification of "disorder"? They never give examples of people who have no disorders. So what system are they using as a comparison?
It sure does seem to be an agenda. Make people want to be dumb, docile and conformant out of fear they'll be considered to have mental issues. Ultimately, make them feel they are in constant bombardment of this threat so they purchase more Zanax or Paxil, Prozac or any number of quality name brand seritonin re-uptake inhibitors on the market to boost their mood and keep a smile on their face even in the most dire circumstances.
I'm sorry, but astrology is more scientific than psychology. Makes me wanna go burn their books they put so much faith into.
We're talking about profound changes in behaviour within a day of getting a vaccine. When your child stops talking right after injecting a bunch of live viruses into their body there is a tendency to blame it on the live viruses.
Much like if they ate something that they never ate before then puked, there would be a tendency to blame the food for them getting sick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Everyone in my lab (I work in healthcare) who got the vaccines (one or the other; most got both) failed to get the flu this season. Whoops, nice work anecdotes!
I have no intention of reading through all THAT.
However it is quite well known that just about ALL medicine have side effects, however more often than not the side effects are uncommon enough, or less problematic than the ailment they are supposed to cure. No one can argue that any side effects there may have been on the smallpox vaccine weren't acceptable, seeing that it prevented a disease with a near 90% fatality rate.
Fixed that for you.
Seriously. You aren't claiming anything, you're just suggesting something that you are denying having said you even believe. So why are you saying anything at all?
wait, which one is the car?
*sigh* I'm not suggesting that MMR vaccine causes autism. This is my last post, if you guys don't get it then too bad.
I am saying "anything at all" because originally there was a comment
There is more anecdotal evidence to prove vaccines don't cause autism, so wouldn't that push the debate into being over, if anecdotal evidence is the measuring bar?
This comment in itself is wrong. Let's disengage the issue and analyse it. Paraphrasing:
"There is more anecdotal evidence to prove x doesn't cause y, so wouldn't that push the debate into being over, if anecdotal evidence is the measuring bar?"
Answer: No.
Reason: let there be a theory that f(x) = f(y) for all values of x. You could try and prove it by substituting numbers for x. You could show that thousands of values of x are consistent with your theory. This does not prove it.
You could find one value for which the theory does not hold. This does disprove it.
I am not saying that therefore the MMR - autism link is proven.
I am not saying that any child with autism who's had an MMR vaccine proves the link.
My original mistake was to use a personal anecdote in my post. I thought people might find it interesting. I'll take care not do to that in the future.
Goodbye.
How about instead we just determine risk vs reward. Creating a couple autistics vs kids dieing of Measles, Mumps or Rubella. Worry about this is like worry about dieing in a terrorist attack, a stupid thing to waste your time on since the odds are far on your side.
This should be old news. Wakefield's hypothesis has long since been jumped on, ground into the dirt, ignored, badmouthed and laughed at by a lot of autism caregivers (unfortunately, not all... and the new big thing in autism care is "alternative" treatments, which is a whole other can of worms). The argument's not going to end, though. As another poster said: people need something to blame, and this is one thing that everyone's "heard" from someone, reputable or not.
As someone who works with autism on a daily basis (I am a behavioral therapist in early intervention wraparound services), it frustrates me endlessly that we're focusing on something so trivial as finding a single cause for autism when it's beginning to look more and more like there are a constellation of causes, each one probably dependent on the presence of several others and a genetic predisposition toward autistic behaviors. I'd rather see funding go toward long-term care; more and more of these kids are growing up without the right care and intervention, and those kids when they reach adulthood will be the ones you'll see on the news: vagrants because the state won't provide care any more, filling our jails because of misunderstandings caused by a lack of socially appropriate behavior, or worse - violent and hospitalized because their caregivers can't or won't take care of them any more. What happens when that cute kid with autism grows up to be that 6' tall, 250lb adult with autism? I know one of those kids. He's in and out of the hospital because he can't take care of himself and abuses his spineless mother. When she dies, he'll be a constant drain on the system. And here we are debating the vaccine link.
Waiting for the news that more states are approving funding for Autism care and proven wraparound services under mental health/disability guidelines...
Do you have any links instead of a copied list? I did some search on a few of them and the only hits where lawyers and anti-vaxxers.
Just to be clear, no one is saying there is NO risk, only comparing the very low risk of insident( about .0001% ) vs, the very high likely hood of getting some serious diseases.
There is always risk, it's about mediating it. I mean, just sticking a needle into carries a risk. One the is reduced by using sterile needle, swabbing the injection point, and using gloves.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Did she have anything to eat that week? Or maybe have some of that dangerous Dihydrogen Monoxide in something she consumed?
Maybe she rode in a car?
When the issue first came up the fix was considered to split the vaccine into multiple vaccines. Inject one live virus at a time, let the immune system adjust then vaccinate for the next virus. Not stop giving vaccines.
Anyways there seems to be lots of evidence that whatever was wrong with the first versions of MMR has been fixed now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Statistics mean a lot, the individual who ignores them is an idiot.
Risking infecting others with a dangerous disease should not be up to them, unless they plan to compensate anyone injured.
I heard you raped and murdered a 12 year old girl in 1990, not that I believe it though.
See, two can play your game.
Back when this first came up the fix was considered pretty simple.
Split the 3 live viruses up into 3 vaccines, space them out a bit to allow immune systems to catch up. Not stop giving vaccines. A little bit more pain in getting more shots, exactly the same reward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Are you having a laugh? 12 children specifically chosen because of their having a specific diagnosis in a population of >60 million people in the middle of a mass innoculation aren't diagnosed with a similar syndrome.
yes of course, and I think you meant "aren't"? A lack of ethics approval is different to a specific ethics committee disapproval (which appears what they got, for valid reasons).
But the large volume of anecdotal evidence should be enough to get the vaccine manufacturers to consider stopping the use of thimerasol as the preservative. Perticularly when there are other alternative preservatives that are not under suspicion. The FDA has yanked drugs off the market with far, far less circumstantial evidence. It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.
It's quite likely that some small percentage of people are unusually sensitive to mercury, and a large dose can trigger autism in them. We've certainly seen lots of cases of unusual allergies in people that are not present in the general population.
Also, consider that we are far more eager to diagnose autism and put a label on kids as its the only way to get help from the state. 30 years ago, we'd just call Johnny a lottle slow. Nowadays, he's ADHD, autistic, aspergers, something or other.
I think he just broke under pressure. There is supposedly evidence from a survey preformed in the US in 2007 that supports Wakefield's findings. http://www.generationrescue.org/survey.html I am only interested in this because I am about to have a child. Where I am from we get vaccinated a lot later than in the US. I think I got vaccinated around 9 or 10, not before 2 like in the US
Do you mods have any idea what reading that could do to a grammer nazi? It could kill a man.
If a vaccine prevented a disease that kills 1 in 100 kids who are infected, but the vaccine kills 1 in 10 million. The vaccine should be given out to everyone.
Autism is on the rise as rates of "retardation" are dropping. Ever thought those two facts might be connected?
Which would have been at the same time we stopped calling them retards and sending them off to the nuthouse.
That is important because simply being paid to do research by people who have an interest in the results is not so much of a problem.
It's where someone will gain personally from their own unexpected and potentially paradigm changing results -- results which are unable to be reproduced by others -- that you have problems.
First, the problem with statistics is that they deal in huge quantities to be accurate, and, the human body is sufficiently complex that lurking behind any "outlier" might exist a causal relationship for just that person.
Second, the medical establishment has made some spectacular mistakes through the years and people simply do not trust them.
By anyone's admission, the number of medical mistakes and fatalities from them are so enormous that literally every family has a story where the doctor screwed up. Advice given out by the medical community has changed, as well.
At one point in time, the medical establishment advocated a diet of four food groups, one of which would turn out to be loaded in cholesterol. At one point in time, antibiotics were hailed as the end of bacterial infections, and now medicine is essentially backpedalling against a resurgance in diseases once thought "cured".
Most damningly though, is, the whole question of whether or not medical science is actually worth the expense. Some studies have shown that once you factor out hygeine and nutrition, the lifespan of humans has not actually changed in 100 years. Essentially, if you get a virus, you will either recover or not, and bacterial infections are actually not common enough to really effect the larger course of affairs.
Finally, the politicization of science has happened even in medicine. The whole concept of the university, and by extension, the doctor was of someone who earned a decent living but was removed from the field of genuine wealth in order to be free from not only its temptations, but its distractions. Now, we have very real cases where doctors are rigging double blind studies in order to try and sell stock in their biotech company, manipulating the lives of real patients solely to cash in.
Who do you trust in medicine these days? Who do you trust in science? As soon as universities started amassing huge patent warchests and enormous funds, as soon as science got -expensive-, it became political, and because it is political, it cannot be trusted, as much as nothing else political can be trusted.
This is my sig.
Still when your child starts acting weird, and stops talking within days after getting a shot it is easy to draw a conclusion.
"For every problem, there is an answer that is simple, obvious, and wrong."
It's not my movement. It's a movement that I watch with concern, but it's not one that I've sided with. I'm interested in the claims and facts from both sides.
The problem is that the anti-vaccine folks only have claims, but no evidence or data to back up those claims. To keep sounding this alarm and scaring parents into not having their children vaccinated with absolutely no evidence to base their claims on is just reckless and dangerous for everyone.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
We're talking about profound changes in behaviour within a day of getting a vaccine. When your child stops talking right after injecting a bunch of live viruses into their body there is a tendency to blame it on the live viruses.
Who's talking about this? That post said a week, now it's the same day for a developmental disorder to suddenly transform the child? Are there any cases of this in any of the studies where children were given vaccines and then observed? No? Huh.
And since the effects of the live virus, and mercury poisoning (if it was the kind of mercury that could poison you) are well known, and aren't spontaneous autism, that leaves me with another hypothesis:
Parents ignored the symptoms before, but suddenly became aware when sensitized by fear of vaccines. Their fear and paranoia probably just make the child's already existent symptoms (i.e. introversion) worse.
Granted I have no evidence for this theory applying to any particular case, but it has one big advantage of at least being consistent with the existing scientific evidence.
Much like if they ate something that they never ate before then puked, there would be a tendency to blame the food for them getting sick.
Even if they'd been feeling a little queasy before but wrote it off as nothing. Even if it turned out that they had the flu and the food had nothing to do with it.
Yes, I know people have this tendency. However that tendency often leads to incorrect conclusions.
The enemies of Democracy are
You cannot compare it to drink driving
I didn't. Explaination here.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Once the celebrities start spouting the nonsense, it's too late.
The female 18-50 market segment won't let go of it for another five years.
Thanks Lancet! Thanks Hollywood!
What?
just a bunch of links that said they had viruses, so I didn't click
Schizophrenic?
In the case of the vaccine autism link, I had been skeptical of the vaccine's safety but I must agree that the weight of evidence is firmly against any connection to autism. Given that, the risk/benefit seems to favor that particular vaccine. It's not that one side or the other has used bad data from time to time, it's that where good data was used, the link was disproved.
Of course, different vaccines have differing effectiveness and risks. I am considerably less convinced of the various flu vaccines. For starters their effectiveness is limited to one year at the best. Given that each year brings a newly created flu vaccine, it seems impossible to ever characterize their risk to anywhere near the certainty of MMR. Even if their risk is the same they still lose on the risk/benefit since the benefit is an order of magnitude (at least) shorter.
WRT your brother's anecdotal report, it's not the first time it has been suggested and there is at least one study indicating that immunization against one strain increases vulnerability to another. While the plural of anecdote is not data and anecdotes don't constitute proof, they do raise their hands, bounce in their seats and go "OOH! OOH! OOH! look over here!". It's certainly worth a good unbiased look.
The varicella (chickenpox) vaccine given to children is just incomprehensible to me. When children get it it's annoying and itchy but overall harmless and they get a lifelong immunity. When adults get it, it is many times more dangerous and likely to lead to complications. Meanwhile, the vaccine at best offers about 10 years of immunity. So we protect when the danger is minimal and there is a low risk chance for lifelong immunity only to leave the person vulnerable when immunity is far more important. it looks like a "negative value proposition" to me. If someone gets to adulthood without catching chickenpox, THEN it might make sense as long as the risks don't increase for adult recipients (since it is a live vaccine, they might be substantially higher).
Companies DO make mistakes, and profit motive is the perfect setup for a strong confirmation bias. That's even discounting a more cynical deliberate suppression of negative results (which certainly HAS happened too many times where pharmaceutical companies are involved).
I was supporting the argument I was getting ready to make: "These companies do make mistakes." and pointed out a bad batch of H1N1 nasal vaccinations. Continued here.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
"Exactly. It is like penicillin."
No it isn't, your comparing apples to orangatangs. The difference is that there is a statistical correlation between a penicilin jab and the ill effect, ie: that claim is based on evidence. There is no such correlation found in MMR vs Autisim, ie: the claim is based on anecdote and ignores cotra-evidence.
The fact that penicilin can be deadly to some people and the fact that some people are greedy parasites does not tell you anything about MMR and autisim.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I mostly hate how all /.'s assume they know better than those "crazy dumb shits out there" when they themselves admit knowing little information..
If you think life was better before vaccination, or would be better without them, then there's no if's and's or but's -- you're a crazy dumbshit who admits to knowing little information. Who is endangering everyone else. This is not tolerable.
So get your damn kids vaccinated. Once you do that, if you want to talk about maybe finding a way to take the aluminum out of vaccines so that the benefits of vaccines can be even better, then we can talk!
The enemies of Democracy are
If a vaccine prevented a disease that kills 1 in 100 kids who are infected, but the vaccine kills 1 in 10 million. The vaccine should be given out to everyone.
That is horribly oversimplified.
You also need to look at rates of infection, "at risk" groups, and other forms of vaccination for the same disease. There are people who are at greater risk of autism than others. If these vaccines are a contributing factor, there may be people for whom this is not the best solution.
Autism is on the rise as rates of "retardation" are dropping. Ever thought those two facts might be connected?
Yes. Besides, Knara beat you to it.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
There's way too much anecdotal evidence, even if there is no merit.
The plural of anecdote isn't data.
Get off your high horse for a moment. I didn't call it data, and I said that there may be no merit. Please refrain from strawmen arguments. I merely said that debate would continue because of it. Nothing more.
Yes you said there may be no merit, you implied that the scientific community was as deceptive in their research as the anti-vaxxers, you suggested that the pharmaceutical industry might be engaged in a massive coverup.
The problem is you're essentially using the old "there are two sides to every story and the truth lies somewhere inbetween". Well if I'm a member of the flat earth society does the planet suddenly become less round?
In this case there is a very reliable way to ascertain the truth, the scientific method, and this method has shown that vaccines are almost absolutely certain not to cause autism.
but when your movement is led...
It's not my movement. It's a movement that I watch with concern, but it's not one that I've sided with. I'm interested in the claims and facts from both sides.
Bad pronoun on my part, I meant "you" as in "say you are walking down the street", I didn't mean to imply that you were an anti-vaxxer but was talking about a hypothetical person who was.
Also, not to engage in Ad-Hominems, but...
Followed by an ad hominem. Cute.
Not quite. An ad hominem is basically attacking the messenger, not the message. Instead what I'm doing is pointing out that all the messengers are unethical, uneducated, or quacks, and can't be relied on to be right about the question in point. Ad hominems are wrong because your attack only works if you happen to find a representative who is flawed for some reason other than the message, but good representatives exist.
My attack was valid because ALL the anti-vaxxer representatives are fundamentally flawed, in a way that questions their ability to be a reliable expert on vaccines.
For instance if one teller at a bank was convicted of murder and you claim that teller means the bank is crooked, that's an ad-hominem.
If instead the entire board of the bank is being investigated for fraud, bribery, and embezzlement. Well you might have reason to think the bank isn't legit.
I stole this Sig
Don't even give it a second thought. I've got a friend who didn't give her kid any vaccines and yet he's still placed on the autistic spectrum. Anyone who thinks it's due to the vaccines is, quite simply, wrong.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
A close friend of mine has a son who NEVER has had vaccines yet he's placed quite firmly in the middle of the autism spectrum. Vaccines aren't the cause, sorry.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Sorry, I jumped to my own experience, where the changes started within a day.
Before my son lost his capability of speech (for 5 years) I was a very firm believer in vaccines. It also took quite a while after this to accept that the boy who was starting to talk, even called me Dad, was now incapable of speech.
He still hasn't got to the point where he was the day before the vaccination though after his most recent evaluation the psychiatrist was quite amazed at his improvement. For most things he is about average now excepting communication, both spoken and written.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Rain Man is Hollywood fantasy. The family in the apartment next to mine has an autistic 10-year old son. He has no special abilities. He's not a math whiz, musical prodigy, nor is he at all artistic. He does however have profound disabilities. He can't talk. He probably won't, ever. His interactions with the environment is limited to hitting things, vaguely staring at them, and if he likes it, clapping. If he doesn't like what's going on, he'll scream. Loudly. For the next half hour. His usual state is to wobble along and make farting noises, occasionally banging on something, favorites being the windows or my wall. I don't think he recognizes people as being people. Basically, his parents are grateful they managed to potty-train him.
Still when your child starts acting weird, and stops talking within days after getting a shot it is easy to draw a conclusion.
"For every problem, there is an answer that is simple, obvious, and wrong."
Which logically means the above is wrong. Which logically proves the above is right.
Seems your statement leads to infinite recursion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Anyways there seems to be lots of evidence that whatever was wrong with the first versions of MMR has been fixed now.
Well, there's a lot of evidence that there's no problem now, at least.
Anyway, score one for rationality. Please vaccinate your kids!
The enemies of Democracy are
I do not want to join a fight about all this. I am convinced, that the drug industry is doing a lot of evil things, and that most bodies like the FDA are actually ment to protect the interest of drug companies (e.g. drugs with same ingredients cannot be sold if they are from India, Canada, etc..) and not the end users'.
So I recommend making a search on your favourite torrent site or even youtube for "Are Vaccines safe" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhndCkEfJQg) and make up your mind.
This video offers an alternative view with some traceable medical facts, and educates you that you have a choice in most states and some countries to chose not to vaccinate.
Here is the CNN Larry King special on vaccines : http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=larry+king+vaccines&search_type=&aq=f - this one is about the MMR cocktail as well.
By the way they want to make H1N1 shots obligatory in Costa Rica - where I live - and there will be a huge resistance to it as everyone is scared of the shots' side effects, and the fact that it had very little - if any - testing.
You can also make a search for flu shots and alcheimers, shots and tumors and find a scary amount of hype and facts....
Of course the Autism study was DEFINITELY flawed. DEFINITELY flawed... Uh oh, almost time for "The People's Court." DEFINITELY five minutes until Wapner...
"Nature bats last..."
They're relying on us 'taking the risk' (not that I believe there is one) with our children so that their children will be protected. I agree. It frustrates me too. On the other hand: What about banning children who aren't vaccinated from public places? That way we can avoid them becoming ill or transmitting something for which they're a carrier but naturally immune? Hmmmmmmmmm...that would have to include their parents. LOL
It's the Sun of medical journals. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/
you suggested that the pharmaceutical industry might be engaged in a massive coverup.
They're certainly capable. Has one taken place? I don't know. They have motive. It's not enough for any kind of decision, but I'm open to the idea. I'll wait to see if anyone claims evidence.
You seem to be under the impression that this is wacky and impossible.
... an unethical doctor with massive conflicts of interest and airhead former playboy models...
Instead what I'm doing is pointing out that all the messengers are unethical, uneducated, or quacks, and can't be relied on to be right about the question in point.
Am I supposed to laugh or cry?
Oh, and it is still ad hominem. If every round-worlder were an idiot, it would make the world no less round. Attacking every messenger does not absolve you from faulty logic.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
As I've posted at least twice in this discussion: I have a friend whose son *never* received a single vaccination but has been diagnosed firmly within the autistic spectrum.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
That isn't quite correct. Your friend's son's condition proves that vaccinations are not the sole cause of autism. It doesn't prove there is no link between autism and vaccinations.
Not that I think there is one, but we don't want to overreach do we now?
meh
Exactly!
To give an example that's been around for years is the GM (genetically modified) corn that has it's own pesticide being claimed it kills monarch butterflys.
The 'test' done to show that it would kill the caterpillars had a problem, the caterpillars wouldn't eat the corn pollen and thus never ingested the insecticide it harbored.
To prove their point that the GM corn pollen was a threat to the caterpillars that wouldn't eat it, they force fed it the pollen. It died. Duh....
Of course, the caterpillars on the milkweed plants around the GM corn fields aren't threatened by that at all since they NEVER eat it.
You'd be amazed how many people still try to pull that piece of b.s. out to 'criticize' any GM crop.
Personally I have no issues with GM foods in general, although the ones with pesticides worry me some, but the ones I've looked into have had less residual pesticides after washing in them than the normal ones do. (No, I haven't been able to find stats on all of them, nor would I be anal enough to try.)
What you are saying is that we should assume that vaccinations are not to be trusted because there exist cases of children who develop autism at some point after vaccination (given the relatively high rate of vaccination, isn't that just a few hairs short of "autism exists, therefore vaccinations might cause it"?).
Wouldn't the obvious converse that should also be true if it's specifically caused by vaccines be that there be no cases of autism in unvaccinated children ever? What about in places where any especially suspect vaccination is given at a later age, are rates of autism dramatically lower among those populations?
This doesn't help unless you tell us how old he was when symptoms started. (and it's still anecdotal, it just swings the other way.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
you suggested that the pharmaceutical industry might be engaged in a massive coverup.
They're certainly capable. Has one taken place? I don't know. They have motive. It's not enough for any kind of decision, but I'm open to the idea. I'll wait to see if anyone claims evidence.
You seem to be under the impression that this is wacky and impossible.
It's a question of scale, and of who to believe. I know of a lot of medical researchers who are very critical of the pharmaceutical industry, and they don't think there's a remote possibility of a cover-up. (and they think the anti-vaxxers are nuts)
Are they that gullible? Are they bought off? Or are these researchers, experts in their field, missing the possible cover-up for some other reason?
... an unethical doctor with massive conflicts of interest and airhead former playboy models...
Instead what I'm doing is pointing out that all the messengers are unethical, uneducated, or quacks, and can't be relied on to be right about the question in point.
Am I supposed to laugh or cry?
Oh, and it is still ad hominem. If every round-worlder were an idiot, it would make the world no less round. Attacking every messenger does not absolve you from faulty logic.
My logic is not faulty, you misunderstand Ad Hominem. It's an absolutely valid argument to attack the credibility and the expertise of the anti-vaxxers. There's a very good reason why they don't have any credible experts, it's because they're wrong!!
If every round-worlder was an idiot it would be evidence that the world is not round. If none of the intelligent experts think the world is round that's pretty convincing evidence that it isn't round to me.
If you aren't going to use credibility and expertise as evidence how are you going to make a decision on what's truth? Do you really think you have the ability to evaluate every controversial claim on the planet and come to a better conclusion than the experts? Or everytime someone comes up to you and says "I think the world is a tetrahedron!" are you going to think, "hmm, maybe NASA is wrong!"
I stole this Sig
If your children are vaccinated, how exactly are they at risk? Did you give them a placebo? While my kids got the measles and mumps vaccines they will NOT be getting the H1N1 shots, period. The kids that did get the shots in my area ALL ended up sick, two in the hospital, and the ones that didn't? couple of days of hacking for the worst, no illness at all for my kids.
But you see that is one of the great things about this country...we have the freedom to believe in what we will, and to act accordingly. What YOU do with YOUR kids is YOUR business, and what I do with MY kids is mine. See how nicely that works out? I personally prefer deciding for my own kids what is best VS trusting a government that can't even balance a checkbook and for whom bribery is SOP to make the choices for our kids, don't you?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Studies have pretty convincingly shown that people who work with children with autistic spectrum disorders (such as my wife) are about 95% accurate at diagnosing the disease based upon video of their 1st birthday parties. In other words, they where showing symptoms before the vaccines in question were given. Parent may not recognize the symptoms until their child hit 30 months, but the symptoms where there all along. Parents often will deny the diagnosis (and get mad at the diagnosing physician) after it is made. It's understandable why they do so. It's also understandable why the need to find someone or something apart from their own genome to blame for the disease.
One study is at this site. It is by no means the only one, but just the first one that showed up in a Google search.
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Vaccines can cause harm, so one denies that. Vaccines aren't about magically making the chance you get hurt go away, they are about reducing the risk. People got hurt, and some probably died, during the smallpox vaccination period, but guess what, the end result saved way more than it hurt. Also, there are studies out there 'proving' homeopathy or 'disproving' evolution. A study in and of itself means nothing. On that's been put through the ringer or peer review, and duplicated, those are what you want. How many of your studies have been thoroughly reviewed and came up saying that the risks of vaccines outweigh the benefits? I'm betting none.
Friends of ours have a daughter who started descending into autism one week after the MMR vaccine.
As I point out here their daughter was already autistic. Most autistic children go through a period of regression around the time the MMR vaccine is usually given. This happens whether they get the vaccine or not and is not related to the vaccine.
110 million people got the swine flu vaccine. It is inevitable that some will die within a day of getting the vaccine. That doesn't mean the vaccine caused their deaths.
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Well then I'm definitely not saying anything about what you were thinking or theorizing as to what has really happened in your case. I'm sorry for hardship, but glad he's improving.
All I'm going to say is that if you took the vaccination out of the picture, that's not that atypical a story about autism -- a kid who seems normal at first but then between the ages of 1 and 3 suddenly seems to take a turn. It's a developmental disorder, it has a large genetic component, and is about neuron organization and development. The process is not instantaneous, even if symptoms seem to come about rapidly. No autism is not fully or even particularly well understood. It's just that "vaccination causes spontaneous autism" doesn't match anything that is known. It doesn't match any of the research that's been done on the very subject. The one study that supported the idea that there's any correlation at all has been shown to be a misconducted sham.
I have a relative who was a kid at a time when autism diagnoses were very rare because the disease really wasn't understood, so I don't know for sure... but for years he was withdrawn and silent, and when he tried to talk, it was in a weird language nobody but his parents could figure out. He would get obviously frustrated that he couldn't communicate, and then simply withdraw further. Today, he's out partying at college while he busts the curve in science class.
If he'd caught measles instead, who knows if he'd be around. So, I'm sorry, but as tragic as autism can be, and as tragic as the hypothetical reality where vaccines are causing it would be, the evidence for the risk of autism and the evidence for the risk of disease in the absence of vaccines is not even close to a tough call. We can talk all you want about the hypothetical dangers of vaccines and the need to improve them, and I'll be with you, until your advice is to not vaccinate. That I simply cannot support, and no amount of anecdotal evidence will sway me, because real evidence (like history) is so strongly opposed to that idea.
The enemies of Democracy are
What's really mind boggling is that some people still believe in that guy.
But the large volume of anecdotal evidence should be enough to get the vaccine manufacturers to consider stopping the use of thimerasol as the preservative.
According to the CDC, "Since 2001, no new vaccine licensed by FDA for use in children has contained thimerosal as a preservative, and all vaccines routinely recommended by CDC for children under six years of age have been thimerosal-free, or contain only trace amounts, except for multi-dose formulations of influenza vaccine."
And even better, from later down on that page:
"Unfortunately, we have not seen reductions in the numbers of children identified with autism indicating that the cause of autism is not related to a single exposure such as thimerosal."
It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.
Really? From childhood.com: "An infant who is exclusively breast-fed will ingest more than twice the quantity of mercury that was ever contained in vaccines and fifteen times the quantity of mercury contained in the influenza vaccine."
And: "Thimerosal — a preservative still used in the influenza vaccine — contains a different form of mercury called ethylmercury. Studies comparing ethylmercury and methylmercury suggest that they are processed differently in the human body. Ethylmercury is broken down and excreted much more rapidly than methylmercury. Therefore, ethylmercury (the type of mercury in the influenza vaccine) is much less likely than methylmercury (the type of mercury in the environment) to accumulate in the body and cause harm."
Are you going to argue that we should stop breastfeeding our children, since through breastfeeding children ingest a larger quantity of a more harmful form of mercury than was ever contained in vaccines?
And where are you getting the OSHA limit from? All I can find on their website is a limit on the air concentration of mercury, which is an entirely different issue.
It's quite likely that some small percentage of people are unusually sensitive to mercury, and a large dose can trigger autism in them.
What do you mean by "large"? According to this chart, the vaccine with the most mercury (Influenza-A) contains only .025mg of mercury, and is a one-time dose; this is much lower than OSHA's air-exposure limit of 0.1mg/m^3 per work week, if you somehow managed to ingest all of that mercury vapor.
And, as noted, most vaccines now contain zero mercury.
So much for your point ;)
If every round-worlder was an idiot it would be evidence that the world is not round. If none of the intelligent experts think the world is round that's pretty convincing evidence that it isn't round to me.
Well, at least I can see what your problem is, even if you can't.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
If your children are vaccinated, how exactly are they at risk?
Vaccines are not 100% effective. Parents who refuse to vaccinate threaten herd immunity, which puts my children at greater risk.
But you see that is one of the great things about this country...we have the freedom to believe in what we will, and to act accordingly. What YOU do with YOUR kids is YOUR business, and what I do with MY kids is mine.
Actually, that's not how it works. Try withholding medical treatment (or food, for that matter) from your kids and see what happens.
irrelevant because that's not considered the ONLY source of autism. Please don't repeat for a third time.
Of course - did anybody expected something else? In a society where the standard child is desired, pushed trough the system to develop an ultra-selfish, short-minded personality so that for his whole existence will be enslaved for the benefit of the holy *Corporate* trough his insatiable, primitive void - this is the desired future citizen not the type which has the courage to think and stand up. Holy crap brainwashed nation what future I foresee for you ...
It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.
Except, no it can't. It could if it was elemental mercury, but it's not.
It's kinda like how chlorine gas is deadly, and mixing ammonia and bleach is a bad idea, but you can consume crazy amounts of sodium chloride and never experience symptoms anything like chlorine poisoning.
Also, consider that we are far more eager to diagnose autism and put a label on kids as its the only way to get help from the state. 30 years ago, we'd just call Johnny a lottle slow. Nowadays, he's ADHD, autistic, aspergers, something or other.
Yeah, that's a lot of it right there. The growth in autism is really a growth in understanding what it is and who has it.
The enemies of Democracy are
It's because they read site like this:
http://www.westonaprice.org/Autism-and-Vaccinations.html
I have a couple of friends who are adamant about this stuff. Btw, any help knocking points on that website would be nice.
Maybe people will stop letting their kids go vaccinated because of !science. Nah, that won't happen....
This is only to a point. Just put your right right to your business to the extreme and see if you still have the right.
If there was something that was truly as common as the cold but was extremely deadly, say killing 1 in 5, but we have a vaccine that has adverse reactions in say 1 in 1000.
In an extreme case I believe vaccination should be mandatory. I know that sounds radical but think if the above scenario was actually happening and some people are refusing vaccination because it's against their beliefs or whatever. Not that safety concern aren't a valid issue, but when someone raises the religious flag that really bugs me.
Just saying that under extreme circumstances you should lose your right to a choice for the greater good.
If every round-worlder was an idiot it would be evidence that the world is not round. If none of the intelligent experts think the world is round that's pretty convincing evidence that it isn't round to me.
Well, at least I can see what your problem is, even if you can't.
I'm sorry, would you care to elaborate?
Are you thinking that you tricked me into defending a ridiculous claim thus exposing a flaw in my logic? If so you've missed the point.
Ignoring the fact that the world isn't a perfect sphere (so the non-round statement is semi-defensible), all you did was posit an alternate reality where the expert consensus was in favour of a non-round earth, a reality that clearly isn't this one.
I stole this Sig
They let the findings stand only his methods were thrown out. Why is this such a big story? MMR still links to autism.
Even starting with the premise that the vaccine does have a 0.1% chance of causing autism, measles has a mortality rate much higher than that, especially in undeveloped countries.
I was doubting your claim of a "much higher" mortality rate for measles, but after a quick web search it appears you're right - if we're talking about worldwide mortality. One UNICEF article states that "measles infects 25 to 30 million children each year and kills over 345,000", which is about 1.15%, an order of magnitude higher than the 0.1% chance for autism you stated (from which source, btw?). On the other hand, in countries where professional medical care is more advanced and/or more available to the general public, the mortality rates are much, much lower. According to this article, the mortality rate for acute (!) cases in the U.S. was about 0.25% - 0.28%. Between 1993-1999, there was only one reported death. Given that the complications of a measles infection can generally be handled when adequate medical care is available, and that autism is (as far as we know) "final", the decision isn't quite as clear-cut as you present it.
That's assuming that your 0.1% figure is accurate. FWIW, I'm not in any way opposed to the MMR vaccination, and I'm not buying the autism scare either. Where I live, this vaccine is administered to children systematically, and hardly anybody ever opts out.
CJ
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
when i see idiots refusing to vaccinate their kids, i just want to grab them and shake the bastards while shoving pictures of the 1920's polio outbreak in their face.
Exactly. Oh man, we are so on the same page on this. These fools obviously have no idea of the kind of human suffering they are avoiding because of vaccines.
The enemies of Democracy are
Sorry, I mixed up the links... the second one should point to this page.
CJ
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
Out of sight, out of mind.
This is way the flanders don't use them.
also for the mind control in the flu shots.
For an apology from Jenny Mcarthy. After all, it has been the primary study she has been touting for years as her "evidence".
http://wwww.zerospeaks.com
As a parent I can understand those that prefer to error on the side of caution, because even with 1000 to 1 odds against it happening that is still your kid that you are risking.
Let's grant, for a moment, the completely incorrect assumption that the MMR (mumps, measles, rubella) triple vaccine actually does cause autism at a rate of 1 in 1000.
The mortality rate for measles in developed nations is about 3 in 1000, with those who survive at risk of significant morbidity - including brain damage and blindness.
The mortality rate for mumps is quite low, but about a third of adult males who are infected will develop acute inflammation of the testicles. Half of those will develop permanent testicular atrophy, and a fraction will suffer complete sterility. Infection with mumps during the first trimester of pregnancy will cause spontaneous abortion in about a quarter of women; infection may cause inflammation of the ovaries and in rare cases causes sterility in women as well.
Rubella (German measles) is generally a relatively mild disease in children and adults; its primary danger is to the unborn. Intrauterine infection of a fetus during the first or second trimester often causes congenital rubella syndrome. CRS causes deafness, blindness, and heart defects (each with more than 40 percent probability) and risks a host of other health problems.
How do those odds look now?
~Idarubicin
Measles might well be the most contagious disease known to man. On top of that, the serious complication rate is much higher than 0.1%, even with world's best standard healthcare.
Hey you can't call them 'retarded'! They're 'mentally challenged'!
But correlation causality.
The classical example being number of refrigerators ^v number of sons (they both correlate to income, in fact).
Maybe autism and vaccination correlate both to a 3rd variable, say, level of education -- or e.g. parents absence from home.
To be clear, the "0.1% chance of autism" was not based on anything more than the parent post, in which it was a made up figure as well. Personally I don't believe there is any link at all. I was just pointing out even if there was, vaccination is STILL worth it.
Oh and the reason there was only one reported death in the US in that time period is *because* MMR vaccination is so prevalent, of course - there were very few infections. You have to look at the percentages, not the absolute number. I think it's further proof of the effectiveness of the vaccine, and makes it even more clear cut, not less.
(3) Wakefield is not a disinterested party; he has received a great deal of money from those who stand to profit from his conclusions.
Yes, this has never happened before.
Any argument that attacks a person in order to discredit an idea is an ad hominem by the very definition of the term. It doesn't matter if the conclusion is true or false. It doesn't matter how many individuals are attacked.
Truth is truth regardless of who promotes it, or who fails to.*
Hopefully, one day you will see this.
*(I am NOT making a statement about autism here. I am making a statement about epistemology)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
>
Even starting with the premise that the vaccine does have a 0.1% chance of causing autism, measles has a mortality rate much higher than that, especially in undeveloped countries. And it is HIGHLY contagious.
You're missing some key points:
0.1% overall risk can be 0.0001% risk in the general population combined with 10% risk in 1% of the population. If you have reason to believe you're in the 1%, is 10% a good risk to take with your child?
In developed countries, herd immunity protects the non-immunized.
Underdeveloped countries (those without pollution and "modern" conveniences like a diet of HFCS and factory raised GM beef) don't have the same autism risk as the developed world.
Yeah, I'm showing loony markers, but anyone who takes a moment to consider Western society objectively should come to the conclusion that we're all a bunch of loonies.
In other news: Predisposition to autism in children may cause parents to avoid vaccines irrationally -- story at 11!
There are plenty of things wrong with this:
* A large volume of anecdotal evidence is still worthless, except as an impetus to do a study or survey, or unless you have a known mechanism associated with the evidence
* Even if a study indicates a risk with the vaccine, there's nothing indicating that thimerosal is the problem, so removing it isn't necessarily helping anything
* The vaccines haven't contained thimerosal for quite some time now; removing it *definitely* won't help anything.
The primary reason thimerosal is mentioned is that it contains mercury. But the effects of mercury are not similar to autism. "Mercury causes brain problems, and autism is a brain problem" does not mean "mercury causes autism".
Yes, but that same 1% of the population with 10% risk also has a 75.8% risk of dying from measles, mumps, or a severely ingrown hangnail, and can in fact contract all of those from sunlight as well, so it's very dangerous and herd immunity does not apply.
And underdeveloped countries have significantly more dirt and fewer shoes, and as everyone knows lots of dirt and lack of shoes can cause autism.
Wow, this debate gets a LOT more fun when you stop bothering with provable facts. I can see people still keep it up! Thanks!
If everyone actually considered things *objectively*, by definition there wouldn't be loonies and this whole issue would not even be debated.
It's a different group of people who are against vaccines. Please keep your labels for conspiracy nuts straight in the future.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.
It doesn't. The OSHA limit is for chronic exposure to methylmercury. Thimerosal exposes you (via breakdown) to ethylmercury, and only once. It's the wrong substance and is a non-chronic exposure. There is not an established toxicity for ethylmercury, as far as I recall -- it is generally thought that the toxicity is lower than methylmercury, and so the limits for methylmercury are used. (But again, the limit you are referring to is the chronic-exposure limit.)
Yes. In fact, the common myth is that the Amish, who don't vaccinate their children, also don't get autism. Those who study autism know this isn't true: the Amish are useful as a study population because of their limited interaction with modern medicine, and there are still Amish with autism.
Speciation by natural selection, the moon landing, the spherical earth and the holocaust have today been conclusively proved authentic. The debate should now end. Film at eleven.
Okay, first Ad Hominem is completely valid when the messengers credibility is part of the argument.
When Dr. Wakefield says "I did a study that shows vaccines caused autism" it's completely valid to argue "But there's evidence you fabricated data and had a massive conflict of interest!"
When Jenny McCarthy says "vaccines made my son autistic" it's completely valid to say "but you have no training as a doctor, how are you qualified to make that assessment".
Those are both ad hominems and they are both very correct logic.
The truth always exists, and is always the truth. The trick is to find the truth. If you insist on believing only absolutely provable truths than you won't believe anything outside of mathematics. And if you don't use strategies like delegating some of that reasoning to trustworthy parties you won't even believe most of what we've proven in math.
I'm not saying that because the experts believe X that X becomes true. I'm saying that all the experts believe X is good evidence than X is much more likely to be true.
I stole this Sig
On the other hand, there are PROVEN bad reactions to almost every vaccination. The next opportunity you get to watch a doctor stick needles into an infant or a young child, STAY ALERT. You will see that the legal guardian is offered brochures on each and every vaccination. Take those brochures, and read them. Take the information from them, and research.
Writing stuff like this makes you look rather silly. When you go and get vaccinations the doctor plainly tells you what the risks are and if you are interested you can ask for more information. You don't have to STAY ALERT - you can just follow what the doctor tells you and keep an eye on potential symptoms. There are potential side-effects to all medicine, including vaccines, this should not be a surprise to anyone.
As for mercury in vaccines - you now don't believe what the "huge corporations" tell you even though they are the ones that print the PROVEN side-effects on the vaccines, and the brochures. The same procedures that discovered and reported on the side-effects would have also found any negative effects from the mercury. You can find more information about mercury in vaccines here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
When the editor sends your paper to "peers" for review, that's not scientific peer review in the big sense. That's editorial review and as the poster comments, is to catch glaring errors, missing things, etc.
Peer review is a longer process, that over years, other scientists either confirm what's in your paper or refute it, perhaps proposing new theories to explain the observed data, or identifying previously not-understood or not-known confounding factors in your measurements.
Peer review is, for example, why people believe Einstein or Newton was right. It wasn't part of the process by which someone publishes a paper or book. One can always find a patron or independent means to get published. It's whether someone says, 20 years later, "hey, that guy was right, because of A, B, and C". Publication status is more a matter of money or friends.
Peer review is the arbiter of "success in the market place of theories and ideas"
It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.
Really? From childhood.com: "An infant who is exclusively breast-fed will ingest more than twice the quantity of mercury that was ever contained in vaccines and fifteen times the quantity of mercury contained in the influenza vaccine."
And: "Thimerosal — a preservative still used in the influenza vaccine — contains a different form of mercury called ethylmercury. Studies comparing ethylmercury and methylmercury suggest that they are processed differently in the human body. Ethylmercury is broken down and excreted much more rapidly than methylmercury. Therefore, ethylmercury (the type of mercury in the influenza vaccine) is much less likely than methylmercury (the type of mercury in the environment) to accumulate in the body and cause harm."
Are you going to argue that we should stop breastfeeding our children, since through breastfeeding children ingest a larger quantity of a more harmful form of mercury than was ever contained in vaccines?
And where are you getting the OSHA limit from? All I can find on their website is a limit on the air concentration of mercury, which is an entirely different issue.
All true, although the comparison of a single exposure to a lifelong exposure is a bit of a stretch. Particularly, since as you pointed out, since ethyl mercury is expelled from the body pretty quickly compared to methyl mercury which tends to accumulate.
What do you mean by "large"? According to this chart, the vaccine with the most mercury (Influenza-A) contains only .025mg of mercury, and is a one-time dose; this is much lower than OSHA's air-exposure limit of 0.1mg/m^3 per work week, if you somehow managed to ingest all of that mercury vapor.
And, as noted, most vaccines now contain zero mercury.
So much for your point ;)
The OHSA limit is 0.01mg/m^3 for long term occupational air exposure. The EPA daily intake limit is 0.1 micrograms/kg/day. Prior to 2000, the average round of vaccines for a 6-month infant contained 187.5 micrograms of thimerasol, almost three times the calculated exposure limit of 65 micrograms, based on this EPA guideline. (ref AAP, 1999, interim report; United States schedule, Tables 1 and 2). It's even worse for a small, underweight child.
Even the FDA cites isolated cases where far lower exposure has caused neurological problems http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/ucm096228.htm#guid.
As you pointed out, the FDA placed restrictions on the use of thimerasol in child vaccines. A large portion of vaccines like the flu shot still do. It's not uncommon to see pneumonia and flu vaccinnes administered to kids outside of the official guidelines from the drug maker. In some cases, thimerasol-free child versions of some vaccines simply are not available.
I'm not saying I agree that thimerasol is causing autism. In fact, I'm a bit skeptical. I'm saying that there is no concrete data proving it's absolutely safe for 100% of the population. Given the doubts and some conflicting data, it's safer to be conservative.
As another interesting point of data. I recall reading that 5% of contact lens wearers are sensitive to thimerasol containing saline solutions. I'm not how this compares to internal injection though.
The famous vaccine / autism link was based on the fact that vaccine preservatives were mercury-based. And there is much validity in this link. Consider: Mercury is known to be bad, especially for the brain, and, it can be assumed, especially for developing brains. Mercury is known to have been a component of vaccines. To expect no side effects would be criminally negligent. And to deny a possible link between mercury-laden vaccinations and brain deficiencies, similarly so. It's like trying to deny a link between a known mass extinction 65mil years ago, and a known impact of extinction-assured magnitude, also 65mil years ago.
I was both ignorant and complacent about the risks of those inoculations, until I met in person a mindless little vegetable who was the victim of early childhood vaccinations. The staff at the children's hospital had no doubts as to the cause of the child's condition.
The "staff at the children's hospital"? Who? The cleaning woman?
"No doubts"? Sorry, man, a lack of doubts is not evidence.
Present your hard data.
Trolling is a art,
Yeah, and generationrescue is a totally unbiased source.
They can make all the anecdotal claims they want, where are the peer-reviewed publication and reproducible results? They have none. Oh, but wait, they do have Jenny McCarthy...
Trolling is a art,
I think
No, you're not. You're using specious logic based on the timing of one child appearing autistic withing a week of being vaccinated. You could use that logic to claim that vaccines may cause death in car accidents because one child died in a car wreck within a week of a shot. I'll wager that has more weight than the autism links.
Trolling is a art,
"...but there are PLENTY of studies linking vaccines to other ill effects, here are a (very) few:"
As others have noted, there can be side effects of vaccines. But titles of articles do not provide EVIDENCE. You actually have to read the articles to see if they link vaccines to any ill effects. Many of those articles you provide likely do the opposite. And even if they do, many of those papers contain anecdotal data (case reports) which is fairly weak evidence.
Um, thimerosal has never been used in MMR shots and thimerosal hasn't been used in other vaccines since the early 90s, however rates of autism still increased after the use of it stopped. Go figure. No link at all.
Antivaxxers wrongly targeted thimerosal as a health risk, and thimerosal was removed from vaccines in 2001, but no reduction in autism spectrum disorder diagnoses occurred. In other words, thimerosal is not linked with autism.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
I swear, if there's ever an outbreak of smallpox, and these retarded fuckers refuse to get vaccinated, I'm going to start taking them out for the good of humanity.
Why would you need to take them out? Wouldn't the smallpox outbreak do that for you? Since you seem to believe in the vaccine, you and the people you care about would be vaccinated and protected anyway.
No, there is *an* answer does not mean it is the only answer, or even the only obvious answer.
"In my case, the last time my son called me Dad was on the way to the Doctor for a shot."
Well, then, there's your causation, he called you "Dad". And developed autism.
I imagine that he also went to sleep within a few days of getting the shot. Sleep must cause autism.
I assume you also fed him. Food must cause autism.
There has been extensive study on vaccines related to autism. No links. Not so for any number of other factors. Yet it must be the vaccines.
The fact of the matter is that your son was already suffering from autism but the brain wants to find a pattern and it does.
It certainly raises a red flag for me when you consider that a single vaccine can give a child an exposure 5-10x the OSHA limit for mercury poisoning.
It doesn't. The OSHA limit is for chronic exposure to methylmercury. Thimerosal exposes you (via breakdown) to ethylmercury, and only once. It's the wrong substance and is a non-chronic exposure. There is not an established toxicity for ethylmercury, as far as I recall -- it is generally thought that the toxicity is lower than methylmercury, and so the limits for methylmercury are used. (But again, the limit you are referring to is the chronic-exposure limit.)
The FDA hasn't established limits on ethyl mercury and has several articles suggesting that the methyl mercury limits be used for chronic exposure. See my other post showing one daily exposure limit was being exceeded by 3x for a typical 6-month getting his vaccinations.
Except that the consequences are not his alone. Humans have developed "herd immunity" due to vaccines; there is not enough prevalence of the pathogen for infection to pass amongst the population. By not vaccinating your child, you are compromising the herd immunity and that may lead to the illness or death of someone else's child who could not be vaccinated for other legitimate reasons, like allergy.
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
Um, thimerosal has never been used in MMR shots and thimerosal
I never said it did.
and thimerosal hasn't been used in other vaccines since the early 90s
Wrong. It's use in vaccines targeted at children in the US was limited in 2001 by the FDA. It's still used in lots of vaccines such as the flu shot.
He was about 5 or 6 that *I* know of and his mom may have noticed something long before that but we didn't have a lot of contact with him back then so I can't say for certain. And yes, it is just anecdotal but since there's a much, much stronger correlation of autism in children who live in humid environments than vaccines, I'm not really gonna be persuaded to the other viewpoint without some incredibly compelling and verified evidence.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
> In my case, the last time my son called me Dad was on the way to the Doctor for a shot. 12 years later he still hasn't called me Dad.
I am so sorry to hear that. The same thing happened to my son, a week or so after the vaccine he lost his words, and was diagnosed a few months later. It's now a couple of years on and he's doing better, he now calls me daddy and my heart melts to hear it, I didn't hear it for so long. He's still not good at paying attention, or focusing on tasks, but he knows me, and that's enough.
It wasn't the vaccine that caused this. I know you want to believe it. I wanted to believe it. But it isn't true. That would be such an easy answer, there would be something to blame. You'd have done something *wrong*. But you didn't. I don't know what causes it, genetics, environment, who knows ? No one knows - yet. But I have hope that science will discover it someday - maybe soon enough for a cure for my son - maybe soon enough for a cure for yours. I just hope no one wastes more time or research money on demonizing vaccines. In the meantime, therapy and hours of directed play with him are slowly but surely making a difference.
Don't lose hope, don't blame yourself. Don't take the easy way out of blaming the vaccine.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6890106663412840646&ei=XRZpS7qHBIbL-Aazy6DzCw
There is too much anecdotal evidence that Earth is flat too.
Anybody who thinks that vaccines cause autism in 100% of the cases is wrong. Anybody who thinks that the argument is that autism is *ONLY* caused by vaccines is wrong. You clearly fall into the 2nd camp. In 2007 the federal "vaccine court" found that the MMR vaccination *DID* cause autism in a child by the name of Bailey Banks in that the vaccine caused an inflammation of the brain that led to PPD-NOS. In 2008 this same court found that in the instance of patient Hannah Poling the vaccine caused "autism-like" symptoms by aggravating a pre-existing condition. (Autism-like? If it quacks...) In the vast majority of cases the vaccine is safe - the numbers don't lie. HOWEVER the vaccine appears to be safe if and only if the child is neurotypical and, as there is no incentive, nobody is working on determining just how atypical one must be and in what manner before the vaccines are unsafe. The prevailing attitude is "sit down, shut up, you cannot decide what risks are acceptable for your child, we don't care if it is safe in this particular instance and if it turns out to destroy your family's life then oh well." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-and-david-kirby/vaccine-court-autism-deba_b_169673.html
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Just lurk around, folks.
.
I rest my case.
- Ecsad Essemal
The Hexadecimal TV-REMOTE!
I remember hearing a bit of research a few weeks (months?) ago. It showed that Autism is related to the time it takes the brain to analyse signals. Someone with Autism hears differently than other people. They found that someone without autism can hear the entire word "Acceptance". Someone with autism only hears "Ac". The brain truncates the rest. Its one of the first clinical tests to determine another symptom of autism, apart from the classical. If signals are being lost, it could be related to a structural difference in the brain, leading to a genetic difference, possibly caused by disease or virus. I'm reminded about research into artificial hearing done by berger-liaw: see http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/36013.htm where they found that computers that have clock cycles (like yours and mine) make crappy neural networks even if there are 10,000 nodes, when it comes to speech recognition, but when you can maintain an analogue time base, you only need a neural net of 6-10 nodes to achieve superhuman speech recognition, even in extremely noisy environments, and even pick out 3-4 different speakers simultaneously. The noisy environment was so noisy that human listeners could not understand (jack hammer in the background, aircraft overhead, busy freeway nearby, etc.) yet the speech recognition software could understand perfectly, and unlike crappy software where you have to say each word separately, with theirs, you would ramble your words together (normal speech), and it would understand no problem. If timing is such a vital factor, the autistic problem is a real big problem.
Back when this first came up the fix was considered pretty simple.
Split the 3 live viruses up into 3 vaccines, space them out a bit to allow immune systems to catch up. Not stop giving vaccines. A little bit more pain in getting more shots, exactly the same reward.
Tell me, what evidence do you have which makes you believe that the 3 vaccines in question overwhelm a young immune system if given at once?
Do you even understand what vaccines are, and how the immune system works? I kind of doubt it.
It's horrifying really. The risks of not taking the MMR jab and dying from Measles, Mumps or Rubella are very real and many children have died all over the world because of this one paper. However it get's worse. The crazies that are convinced that the MMR jab causes autism will continue to preach their garbage for many years to come. They'll convince even more parents to not protect their children and those kids will die too.
Dr Wakefield deserves more then just being struck down in the part he played. He didn't just release a paper. He actively went around telling people not to take this vaccine on national television. It's his actions that have killed so many children of completely preventable diseases.
Actually many pregnant women receive multiple mercury-laden shots even to this day. That 25-50mcg of mercury, plus formaldehyde and other toxic ingredients do reach the baby in the mother's womb as well. Autism may not always show up right away but this is a factor to consider. Also consider this: nobody has absolute proof that vaccines DON'T cause autism. Many studies favor institutional or political bias, especially as the majority of studies are funded by institutions who financially benefit from vaccines. Also, the U.S. government has settled hundreds of lawsuits over the past few decades with parents whose child became autistic or died immediately following a shot. Another question is what causes SIDS? Again, mothers are injected with mercury-laden shots while pregnant, up to 50 mcg per shot, even though pregnant women are warned to stay away from any type of mercury including trace amounts in tuna fish.
This is very misleading because the "MMR vaccine causes autism" paper was released in 1998 so I very much expect that if you look at the numbers from 1998 to 2010 you'll find them to be much higher.
True enough. The problem is that when hundreds of millions get some treatment, quite a few of those WILL (for entirely unrelated reasons) fall ill shortly after the treatment, thus the existence of these people prove nothing at all.
Like a doctor commented: If 10 million people get the H1N1 vaccine, you'll have around 8000 that die within a month after getting the vaccine. Proof that the vaccine is dangerous ? No, just the result of the fact that in a sample of 10 million, around 8000 will die EVERY month. And if you offer the vaccine first to the weakened, the elderly, those who are typically the most at risk, then the death-numbers will look even worse.
Besides, the question is never if something is entirely safe. The proper question is, is it safer than the alternative. Even if a vaccine -does- have side-effects (and all of them do, to varying degrees) it can still be totally worth it, if the total suffering from side-effects is significantly smaller than the suffering from the disease would otherwise be.
And a witty saying proves nothing. Thanks for sharing your universal truths with us, smithy.
Grammar Lesson: you're is a contraction of "you are"; your means you possess something; yore means days gone by.
I developed an Autism/Aspergers Spectrum Scale Score generating formula as a part of http://www.hiddencorrelations.com/
Anyone who answers the associated/included questions gets a score online instantly. No valid email required.
The site is also geared towards answering this exact type of question, (Vaccine vs Autism) and I've even added some new vaccination questions to eventually look for correlations to answers from existing Autism/Aspergers questions and the Autism/Aspergers Spectrum Scale Score that is a composite value for each profile.
Always looking for more participants or any ideas!
Well it's certainly not the group of nuts who thinks President Obama is a foreign national.
I don't see how that got set as troll, He was clearing responding to the argument with a valid point and with some info to back it up. It is a flawed argument to assume that one is false just because someone developed autism by a means provably not of vaccines, the flaw is assuming a condition we do not know the cause of , has in fact only one cause when it could have many.
The 20-30 year horizon might give various subtle changes that are hard to register as result of vaccination. Effects like toxoplasmosis has may well be there and change significantly life quality later in life. Subtle gene expression changes rise autoimmune decease probability, chronic inflammation from adjuvant boosted autoimmune reaction throws balance bit more off and there you have slow cascade to diabetes. Mechanisms involved are complicated and variables are numerous enough not to give conclusive statistics using current data gathering methods. Even acute reactions to vaccine are not always connected to vaccine and dont make it to VAERS and similar databases so data gathering for longer time horizons is serious problem. Main point - actual risk evaluation for individual is different from risk evaluation for population, especially considering genetic deviations.
Few interesting links:
http://www.physorg.com/news127915025.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090331183755.htm
http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/9/3121
"The vaccine-autism debate should now end".
Wasn't SCIENCE supposed to make any debate possible (as opposed to RELIGIONS where the facts can't be discussed)?
Why more and more in our lives (Politics, Finance, Economy, Science, Markets, etc.) is now locked as debating about those issues becomes illegal?
When regulators are mere employees of the industry, even the most elementary principles of logic are betrayed.
Some of the studies were pretty simple, graphing autism rates compared to when the MMR vaccine was introduced. These should be easy to redo if the data is still available.
I know the meme that correlation is not causation but in my experience there often is a correlation.
This reminds me of the graph showing a strong correlation between decreasing numbers of pirates (sea pirates) and global warming.
The problem with this approach is that in practice not all parents get round to taking their children to the doctor's for each of these separate vaccinations - even worse if several doses are required for full immunity. Net result is a significant proportion of children who are not fully vaccinated. Once again we balance the vanishingly small (and as of yet unproven) risk associated with vaccination against the risk of death or long-term side effects of Measles, Mumps and Rubella.
I would like to point out a particular risk of contracting measels at young age. I think it is called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subacute_sclerosing_panencephalitis where a child under 2 has a measel infection and then lives on normally for a few years (Wikipedia talks about 6-15) and suddenly the brain breaks down. So you see a fully functional, normal child grow up and then degenerate to a state of complete mental disfunction. "Death usually occurs within 3 years."
The risk is 1 in 100000 if you get measels. In addition to putting up your own child to that risk, you put other parents childs at risk, that may have specific medical reasons for not getting a vaccine.
You need to assess for yourself if you suspect the risk of vaccination as being higher than this and other possible complications.
Well, as a layman, it seems the goal posts for autism diagnosis are widening considerably.
Take for example, this online autism screening quiz for concerned parents:
http://pediatrics.about.com/od/autism/l/bl_autism.htm
It's virtually impossible NOT to get a positive result, which tells you "Your child does seem to have some of the signs and symptoms that should prompt and evaluation for autism or other communication disorder."
For example, I ran through it based on my nephew. He's not autistic. I answered all the questions honestly. And these two were sufficient to trigger "he has the signs and symptoms" bullcrap.
# has language skills or speech that is delayed.
# throws intense or violent tantrums.
His language skills are delayed because that's typical for a child being reared in a bilingual house. :)
And violent tantrums? I think he gets that from his mother.
Actually i think stupidity is, although there's serious questions about the causes of said stupidity.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
To clarify what it means: If you make something idiot proof (just get the fraking vaccination), you spur the evolution of a vastly more ignorant and incompetent idiot (well, you know....).
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
You know, your little paranoid rant would be a lot more convincing if there actually were any meds to "cure" or "treat" autism. And no, I don't know of anyone diagnosed with autism that has been prescribed Zanax or Paxil unless they had really serious anxiety problems, and those exist regardless of whatever the diagnosis may be.
Like it or not, for a lot of people a proper diagnosis can help a lot, not as a crutch to explain one's failings, but as a way to glean insight into what the fuck is wrong in your head and how to go about dealing with it. Especially the milder forms of autism can be compensated for to some extent(the negative effects anyway, being a human calculator is fun).
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Moderators, please remember that Troll != I disagree. While his anecdote may have or not have merit, there is nothing trolling about the comment above.
The 'fall in vaccination uptake' issue was never about medicine, it was about government credibility - New Labour insisted that MMR was safe in just the same way that they insisted beef was safe, or that CIA torture flights weren't using British airports, or that Saddam could attack Britain with biological weapons at 45 minutes' notice. 'False in one thing, false in all,' thought British parents.
Those who argue against vaccination based on the risk of autism may well be on shaky ground, but there are PLENTY of studies linking vaccines to other ill effects, here are a (very) few:
Next time you get a prescription for anything, stop and take the time to read that sheet of paper that comes with it. Even the most commonly used drugs have long lists of possible side effects.
The question isn't "could something bad happen?", but rather "what are the risks of taking this vs. not taking it?". Unfortunately we sometimes underestimate the risks and people die horribly.
Still, from where I'm sitting it looks like modern medicine does far better than causing random effects. Unless you're in an at-risk group, or are taking other medicines known to have a harmful interaction, or your physician is incompetent, you're probably better off taking the medicine despite the long list of possible side effects. People suffer or die from *not* taking medicine sometimes too, you know.
It's all about weighing the risks.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Rain Man is Hollywood fantasy.
Amusingly, reality deniers of all stripes are quite fond of citing movies as evidence for their beliefs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The Amish usually vaccinate their children.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
I wonder if those parents have kid(s) in the public (U.S. anyway) school system? If I don't show proof that my kid has his latest vaccinations then he isn't allowed back into the school until that is taken care of.
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
How is that evidence for anything? If the claim was that vaccination is the only thing that leads to autism, only then your claim would make any sense. Although I haven't read the study in question, I suspect that it merely suggests that there is a correlation and causal link between autism and vaccinations. So as it is, it's just an anecdote.
Think about this - people who never smoke and are rarely if ever exposed to smoke get throat and lung cancer. Does this mean that smoking doesn't increase the chances of these types of cancers?
-mobby_6kl
Seriously though, these vaccines are not floating in pools of liquid mercury - they contain a preservative which contains atoms of mercury as part of its chemical structure. Something which is hazardous in one chemical form is not necessarily hazardous in another. The mass removal of thiomersal from vaccines was mostly a measure to allay public fears because of the scary associations that could be drummed up by saying "mercury!" There is no rigorous epidemiological evidence for a correlation between thiomersal and most of the conditions it is claimed to cause.
And with regards to the "safer" comment - a sense of scale is sometimes lost here. People warn about the "one in a million" chances of something going wrong with your vaccine, while overlooking that not taking the vaccine exposes you to a much greater chance of dying from wholly preventable diseases - hundreds of un-vaccinated children have died from diseases which should have been prevented since this "controversy" started. There is no conceivable risk-benefit analysis where the risks of giving your child some of the panel of common vaccines are greater than the risks of not doing so.
Last week, my youngest baby very suddenly came out with a rash across his whole body (which fortunately faded away pretty quickly). Two day's LATER he was given the swine flu vaccine. If my local doctors had set their vaccine day three day's earlier the two events would have lined up - entirely randomly. This is why 'The plural of anecdote is not evidence'. Unfortunately you have observed a possibly correlation between two events, we have to use statistics to see if it's likely there is a correlation of if it's just random chance. To my knowledge huge effort has been put in to researching this since the original scare and the overwhelming result has been negative.
(1) Wakefield performed at least some parts of his study in an unethical manner.
Wait, so let's say I have the following theory:
"If you punch people in the face, they get angry."
Then I go around, punching people in the street in the face, and have some trained observers look for signs of anger (wanting to retaliate, displaying particular facial expressions, waving their fists at me, etc.).
As it turns out, everybody gets angry at me when I punch them in the face.
Clearly, punching people in the face is a bad thing to do. But that doesn't make the theory wrong.
Wakefield acting unethically in his medical experiments is a good reason for not letting him perform further medical experiments. Possibly also for not letting him be a doctor. But is it really a reason for not trusting his conclusion?
If you want to attack factual claims, attack the reasons for believing in them: poor experimental design, too few data points (back this up with statistical arguments!), lack of controls for confounding factors, selection biases, reporting biases, wild off-the-wall interpretation of observations (to name a few). Don't attack the moral character of the experimenter to argue against the factual claims. Attacking the moral character of the experimenter serves a different purpose.
That doesn't happen in the UK, hence the rise in cases of all three diseases in some area - particularly London.
A policy of coercing the public into any kind of medical intervention here is very unpopular. Unfortunately when we're up against highly misleading reporting of science and health scare stories in the popular press, there's not a lot of alternative.
What does that mean?
The original paper claimed that the subjects were selected because they had all been referred to Wakefield within a certain time period, and all the patients referred in that time period were used as subjects, i.e. a close-to-random process that Wakefield could not have influenced.
On investigation, it turns out that Wakefield hand-picked the test subjects on the basis (IIRC) that their parents suspected the links with the MMR vaccine, i.e. a non-random process that would heavily skew the results.
This is enough to invalidate any results reported. The ethical considerations are secondary, but definitely worth reporting.
Advice given out by the medical community has changed
Do you think the advice has change from more to less accurate, to equally accurate, or from less to more accurate?
I trust the scientific process when it is allowed to work properly. I don't know "fershure" that it has, though.
At one point in time, the medical establishment advocated a diet of four food groups, one of which would turn out to be loaded in cholesterol.
But they don't any longer, right? Doesn't that mean they learned from the mistake and chose to not repeat it?
The medical establishment has made some spectacular mistakes through the years and people simply do not trust them.
Who is this "medical establishment"? Practising doctors? If so, what does that have to do with medical researchers?
If your point is that most people don't make that distinction, fair enough. So they distrust medical science for irrelevant reasons. Good on them o_ô
I think people have a hard time coming to grips with the new DSM V "Spectrum Disorder" regime, we are all somewhere on the autism spectrum, and OCD, and paranoiac, etc. What needs defining are the limits where it becomes a problem. You can't just slap a number on it because it's high order multi-dimensional, plus the social environment you live in has more to do with whether its a problem than your own personal "symptoms."
If they could come up with a single number, I think you would see the histogram growing on the "problematic" side of the limit, but that limit could move considerably if society learns to cope with people who have the symptoms. Things like tantrums usually come when the rest of us are being insensitive clods, stop doing that and the kids will have fewer tantrums.
Still when your child starts acting weird, and stops talking within days after getting a shot it is easy to draw a conclusion.
When your child goes to church for the confirmatio* (age ~13) and soon afterwards starts drinking beer and/or having sex, it's easy to draw conclusions about what effect your priest has on the local youth.
But that would be wrong; it's just normal to (want to) do those things at that age, and two things happen to coincide, timing-wise.
(* confirming what your parents said on your behalf when you were baptised: "I believe in God [...]". We have that in Denmark, in the protestant church. I don't know about the rest of the world.)
Similarly for autism: the age of onset coincides with the age of vaccination. Combine that with people not telling stories about how their kid got the vaccine and didn't stop talking, and people not counting the stories not told, and you get people believing there's a causal connection.
Yes, let's start by graphing the diagnosed cases of autism in the USA, where the MMR was introduced in 1971. See that rise in incidence ... oh, wait, it's rising 10 years after the vaccine's introduction. What's happening? What changed just before the rise started?
What happened was the 1980 publication of new diagnostic criteria (the DSM-III) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders which caused diagnostic substitution. Many children who would previously have been called "mentally retarded" are now diagnosed as having autism.
It is common for a new diagnostic system, or a new discovery, to create a "new" disorder or radically change the reported incidence of an old one by changing the labels. Legionella's discovery, for example, moved a whole bunch of pneumonia cases from the bucket labeled "pneumonia of unknown origin" to the one labeled "Legionella pneumonia" and the total number of pneumonia cases stayed about the same. Way back in the early 1900s one southern USA state (I forget the name) was reporting thousands of cases of malaria a year. They changed the diagnostic criteria to require that a malaria parasite be seen in a blood smear of the patient .... the next year, there were no cases of malaria reported.
(from Wikipedia) Japan provided a natural experiment on the subject: combined MMR vaccine was introduced in 1989, but they stopped using it in 1993 and only single vaccines were used thereafter. In March 2005 a study of over 30,000 children (278 cases) born in one district of Yokohama concluded "The incidence of all autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), and of autism, continued to rise after MMR vaccine was discontinued. The incidence of autism was higher in children born after 1992 who were not vaccinated with MMR than in children born before 1992 who were vaccinated. The incidence of autism associated with regression was the same during the use of MMR and after it was discontinued." The authors concluded: "The significance of this finding is that MMR vaccination is most unlikely to be a main cause of ASD, that it cannot explain the rise over time in the incidence of ASD, and that withdrawal of MMR in countries where it is still being used cannot be expected to lead to a reduction in the incidence of ASD."
Developmental disorders become apparent when a child fails to reach expected milestones, or regresses ... and in the first 3 years of life there are many milestones. Teething was previously blamed for causing "fits" and "idiocy". Vaccines have taken over the role of scapegoat, but the evidence is slowly mounting that the causes are genetic, probably combined with some external factor, because the brain structures that are different in autistic children are developed early in gestation (at 6-8 weeks AFAIR).
I'm not anti-vaccine, but your logic is hurting me. The one thing known about the cause of autism is that there is not 'a' cause, but many contributing factors; this makes sense when you look at the massive variation in symptoms. So your friend's experience can't possibly apply to all autism. Even if it was always caused by something in the vaccines, chances are your friend's child could have been exposed to it in other ways.
I think the vaccine stuff is essentially wrong, too, but the activists aren't your standard conspiracy nuts. Autism is poorly understood, and severely autistic children can be very hard to deal with. Some of these 'fucking retards holding back progress' (I know you didn't say that; just a response to others' contempt for autism-MMR activists) are going to spend the rest of their lives taking care of their extremely difficult child. They want to know why; some have spent decades waiting for an answer. Is it so strange that they're not acting entirely rationally?
True enough. The problem is that when hundreds of millions get some treatment, quite a few of those WILL (for entirely unrelated reasons) fall ill shortly after the treatment, thus the existence of these people prove nothing at all.
That's definitely the case, and it was even more pronounced here, because the vaccines were given at exactly the stage of a child's development when the symptoms of autism would manifest. Couple that with the fact that diagnosis of autism has increased (almost certainly this has more to do with better diagnosis than any causal link to vaccination) and it's easy to see how some people jumped to the wrong conclusions.
The debate was probably worth having, Wakefield was undoubtedly wrong in the manner he collected his data and presented it, but my view is the media should take the lion's share of the blame, here. There were huge scare stories running at the time, pretty much presenting the link between MMR and autism as proven. This is the same press which is now demonising Wakefield in order to hide their own hypocrisy. It's the same with every health story, everything gets blown up out of all proportion, every new virus is going to be a global pandemic, nothing is newsworthy anymore unless it's apocalyptic. There's no balanced view presented, there's no useful information, and when it transpires they were wrong or overreacted they brush it under the carpet or find a scapegoat and move on.
It's completely irresponsible journalism and, worse-case, leads to injury or death (people not immunising their kids, people buying prescription drugs online to combat the next pandemic, etc) yet they're never held to account. Politicians are too busy trying to curry the favour of big media to want to be seen criticising it.
There shouldn't be a debate about drinking and driving. It's just plain stupid. Even if you mean 'a debate about the maximum quantity of alcohol you can take before driving', which by now is a pretty much solved problem everywhere.
Oh, and between an epidemic of measles, pox or rubella that wipes off half of the country, and a statistical nullity of children with autism, I'd choose the latter. Call me callous.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
The FDA hasn't established limits on ethyl mercury and has several articles suggesting that the methyl mercury limits be used for chronic exposure. See my other post showing one daily exposure limit was being exceeded by 3x for a typical 6-month getting his vaccinations.
The flaw in your argument is less the specific threshold and more the use of a chronic exposure threshold to judge an acute exposure.
For example, the occupational radiation dose limit is 14 mREM/day. A hip X-ray gives you about 65 mREM, but there's no evidence of anyone getting cancer, radiation poisoning, or radiation burns from a single hip x-ray. Few people believe that a single cigarette will cause lung cancer, although there is excellent evidence that chronic smoking does, even chronic exposure to second hand smoke.
On the other hand, in countries where professional medical care is more advanced and/or more available to the general public, the mortality rates are much, much lower. According to this article, the mortality rate for acute (!) cases in the U.S. was about 0.25% - 0.28%. Between 1993-1999, there was only one reported death. Given that the complications of a measles infection can generally be handled when adequate medical care is available, and that autism is (as far as we know) "final", the decision isn't quite as clear-cut as you present it.
That still doesn't paint the full picture, because if there was no MMR vaccination, medical care would be overwhelmed, these diseases are ridiculously infectious, access to drugs and treatment would become much more costly (or else would be paid for at the expense of treatments for other illnesses) and as a result the mortality rate would increase, or unrelated health care would suffer.
Even worse, there's no stupidity vaccine.
Got any online links to any of this ?
Well the issue is, one parent thinks... hmm, there's a very small chance that the link between autism and the vaccine is true, but there's almost a zero chance of contracting measles, mumps or rubella. Ipso facto, I don't immunise my kid and I'm doing them a favour. On the face of it, they're right. Of course, the problem is when the majority, or even a significant minority, of parents have the same idea. Mass vaccinations only work if everyone is on board. The people who don't get their offspring immunised are endangering everyone else's.
That is a good point. Herd immunity provides protection for those who choose to not vaccinate, but herd immunity only kicks in at certain level of coverage.
When making a decision we have to consider those who cannot be vaccinated. We can't just pump vaccines willy-nilly in to newborn children, so until we vaccinate them their protection comes from those around them being vaccinated, thus reducing the chances of them coming in to contact with pathogens. Also, there are people with compromised immune systems, and they too rely on herd immunity for their protection.
I'm fine with people rejecting medical treatment on rational grounds, but I consider vaccination to be one of those things we do if we want to live within a modern society. It's like locking doors. Someone living in shack in the middle of nowhere can happily light fires around their house without harming anyone but themselves, but someone living in a city doesn't have the same luxury.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
"I'm going to start taking them out for the good of humanity."
Just don't mention those words in the same context as the word "airport" or you'll get arrested...
You're making the same reasoning error that the vaccine fighters do: you make absolute and far reaching statements based on a single, anecdotal case or a small number of cases, while in the given subject matter only hard statistics and exhaustive research can give any significant conclusions.
A case of a single kid tells us absolutely nothing, no matter what it is.
So what you're saying is that despite the existence of quality studies to the contrary, anecdote should continue to drive the debate? So, what will it take to prove that climate change research has been deliberately buggered? I bet if someone found a cache of emails detailing deliberate fraud it would change people's minds! Oops! Never mind!
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
HOW?
I haven't seen anyone mention that the growth in Autism spectrum disorders may be partially due to geek lovin'.
Still when your child starts acting weird, and stops talking within days after getting a shot it is easy to draw a conclusion.
Yes, the old "post hoc ergo procter hoc" logical fallacy
Some of the studies were pretty simple, graphing autism rates compared to when the MMR vaccine was introduced. These should be easy to redo if the data is still available.
Like the study of 30 000 Japanese children that showed no correlation between autism and MMR (more specifically, withdrawing the MMR vaccine had no effect on autism rates).
It's the intersection of capitalism and journalism. What you get is constant scaremongering to get people to look at their show so they can sell those people to advertisers.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Also consider this: nobody has absolute proof that vaccines DON'T cause autism.
Also consider this: nobody has absolute proof that my rock DOESN'T repel tigers.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
"For every problem, there is an answer that is simple, obvious, and wrong."
Apparently, for TPTB, that answer was to get The Lancet to recant.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
an order of magnitude higher than the 0.1% chance for autism you stated (from which source, btw?)
There is no source, because vaccines don't cause Autism. He was saying that EVEN IF there was a 0.1% chance, it would STILL make more sense to get the vaccine.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
My personal experience has been that pediatricians in three states have done little to explain any risk, and many times a nurse is administering the vaccine long after the doctor has left the room. Most hand you the papers after they've injected your child and leave it up to you to ask questions. From your rant it appears that you do not have any children.
At the time there also seemed to be quite a few incomplete studies found at various .edu sites which agreed with the autism MMR link.
citation please!!
I work at a University, and I've never seen any of those "Incomplete" studies you've mention. However, I have seen plenty of journal articles and write ups on those articles in the press showing no detectable connection between the 2, so if you want to make a bold assertion like that you are going to need to back it up with links.
I've also got an alternative explanation for the tenuous connection you are so sure is causational. Children are getting vaccinated every couple of months like clockwork, when is there a gap of more than 3-6 months between regularly scheduled vaccines during the time in which children are most likely to begin presenting signs of Autism?? The publicity this "debate" has garnered over the years makes it so parents are paying closer attention, whether they realize it or not, in the immediate wake of each round of vaccines thus making them more likely to notice the signs closer to a vaccination than in the couple of months between. (anecdotally, my wife and I both found ourselves thinking of autism when our daughter went unusually quite for 3 hours about a week after her last vaccination. Turned out to be nothing, but does anyone bother to record their anecdotal false positives??) That the first scape goat Thimersol, has been removed from virtually all children's vaccines without altering or slowing the rate of Autism diagnosis is pretty strong evidence that if the connection is real, they don't have the correct culprit yet. That epidemiological studies using a much more powerful sample size (ie much greater than an N of 12) have found no evidence of a causational link between vaccines and autism is further evidence that the temporal connection is due to a combination of observational bias (arising from the controversy itself), frequent vaccination throughout the period of time when autism is most likely to be diagnosed, and the fact that most autism screenings (Autism screening: 9, 18, and 24 months) are scheduled during the same visits in which vaccines are administered (Vaccine schedule: 1, 2, 4, 6, 12, 15, 18, and 19-23 months, 2-3 and 4-6 years ).
I know the meme that correlation is not causation but in my experience there often is a correlation.
It's isn't a MEME, defined as "an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by peers, information media, and entertainment media)." This is a fundamental principal of statistics and what helps differentiate scientific data from a collection of anecdotes. That you don't understand this is why you will continue to argue against all of the valid evidence.
Some of the studies were pretty simple, graphing autism rates compared to when the MMR vaccine was introduced.
This statement is further evidence of your lacking qualifications to contribute meaningfully to this discussion. The MMR vaccine was introduced in the mid 1960's and caused a precipitous drop in measles and rubella cases. The first 20 years of licensed measles vaccination in the U.S. prevented an estimated 52 million cases of the disease, 17,400 cases of mental retardation, and 5,200 deaths. What percentage of those 5,200 deaths were in children that would have been autistic? or those 17,400 cases of mental retardation from the measles that could have been masking cases of Autism? Or what about the confounding factor of increased screening, and the inclusion of more mild forms of autism that would hav
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
All of these vaccines are given to children at two months of age, please read the vaccine schedule before you post.
When considering combined vaccinations against multiple single vaccinations, it's not just a "little bit more pain", you need think about:
And finally, as has already been pointed out, the chance of a child completing the full set of shots is significantly reduced the more shots that are involved and hence impacting on both the immunity that that child has and the herd immunity of the community that help protect those for whom the vaccine either didn't work or who cannot have the vaccine for whatever reason.
Overall, comparative studies show that the combined MMR vaccine is safe (for all reasonable meanings of 'safe').
From 1923 to 1953, before the Salk killed-virus vaccine was introduced, the polio death rate in the United States and England had already declined on its own by 47 percent and 55 percent, respectively. Statistics show a similar decline in other European countries as well. And when the vaccine did become available, many European countries questioned its effectiveness and refused to systematically inoculate their citizens. Yet, polio epidemics also ended in these countries. In fact only about 1 in 1000 people were "paralyzed" by the virus, most just had flu-like symptoms and stiffness, then recovered just fine with permanent immunity afterwards.
In some cases the odds stated on those sheets of adverse or fatal reactions are greater than the odds of not surviving the disease. So no, looking at the statistics doesn't always lead one to see that vaccines are the safest choice of action.
I am intrigued by the possibilities that your magic rock presents to us, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Also, does your rock have the endorsement of Jenny McCarthy or Oprah Winfrey? If so, I'm sold.
It sucks what happened to your son, but feel free to prove the studies wrong. Get your degree, dedicate your life to medical research, and perform a study with hundreds of thousands of people. Prove several other of these studies wrong because "Big Vax"? was in the way. Go ahead. I'll wait.
The reason it seems causative is because the shots are given around the time language begins to develop. So do the first really noticeable signs of autism. There is no link other than time, as shown by several major studies.
I actually said that: there's not an established toxicity for ethylmercury, it's thought to be less toxic than methylmercury, so the limits for methylmercury are used.
These are chronic exposure limits, though. It is acceptable to exceed the chronic exposure limit in a single day, provided the average over a reasonable time frame is still below the chronic exposure limit.
This is good news to eaters of tuna: the daily chronic exposure limit of methylmercury is met by a quarter pound of tuna.
The problem here is two fold:
Essentially, anecdotal evidence cannot be taken as a basis for decision, only as the basis for hypothesis that is then tested. Here the hypothesis has been thoroughly tested and shown to be false.
Except that they haven't used Mercury in vaccinations in years.
Your 1 in 20 million anecdote is not compelling - far more people would have died for not being vaccinated if the vaccines were removed. But further, which staff at what children's hospital? Care to provide a link? Because I think that kind of adverse reaction would have been all over the news and I've never heard of it.
Read the link he provided on Thiomersal. It has not been used in vaccines in the US in ten years, and further was never proven to cause autism in any published, peer-reviewed study. Per the original article, the first author who published a 1998 article linking thiomersal in vaccines with autism was financially involved with alternative technology. He wasn't trying to save children, he was trying to get rich.
Then there should be studies demonstrating that children who are not vaccinated have lower incidences of autism. Where are they?
Going for funny, huh? No stupid, not the cleaning lady.
One of my son's doctors also tended on the little vegetable. I also struck up a freindship with the boy's father (mother abandoned father and son soon after the boy was diagnosed, and she understood his future). We had some rather open discussions during the few weeks that my son was in Children's hospital.
As I said, the staff was VERY CERTAIN what caused the boy's condition. He was a healthy little kid, he got some shots, and he collapsed into a writhing heap within a few hours. They saved his life - if you can call it a life. The kid just drools on himself, doesn't recognize anyone, reacts to almost nothing, and is fed through a tube.
All from a little reaction to vaccinations.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"Your 1 in 20 million anecdote is not compelling - far more people would have died for not being vaccinated if the vaccines were removed."
And, what precisely did I post, originally? I posted that the inoculations weren't completely safe - but it was safer than doing without them. Go back, and reread, and you won't look so damned silly repeating the same thing I said, just to argue with me.
As for links - what did I post? READ THE DAMNED WARNING BROCHURES THAT ARE OFFERED WITH EVERY SHOT!!! If you are literate, then you will find a notice much like this one. ESPECIALLY NOTE the final side effect: o Permanent brain damage
MMR vaccine side-effects
(Measles, Mumps, and Rubella)
What are the risks from MMR vaccine?
A vaccine, like any medicine, is capable of causing serious problems, such as severe allergic reactions. The risk of MMR vaccine causing serious harm, or death, is extremely small.
Getting MMR vaccine is much safer than getting any of these three diseases.
Most people who get MMR vaccine do not have any problems with it.
Mild Problems
* Fever (up to 1 person out of 6)
* Mild rash (about 1 person out of 20)
* Swelling of glands in the cheeks or neck (rare)
If these problems occur, it is usually within 7-12 days after the shot. They occur less often after the second dose.
Moderate Problems
* Seizure (jerking or staring) caused by fever (about 1 out of 3,000 doses)
* Temporary pain and stiffness in the joints, mostly in teenage or adult women (up to 1 out of 4)
* Temporary low platelet count, which can cause a bleeding disorder (about 1 out of 30,000 doses)
Severe Problems (Very Rare)
* Serious allergic reaction (less than 1 out of a million doses)
* Several other severe problems have been known to occur after a child gets MMR vaccine. But this happens so rarely, experts cannot be sure whether they are caused by the vaccine or not. These include:
o Deafness
o Long-term seizures, coma, or lowered consciousness
o Permanent brain damage
Note: The first dose of MMRV vaccine has been associated with rash and higher rates of fever than MMR and varicella vaccines given separately. Rash has been reported in about 1 person in 20 and feverin about 1 person in 5. Seizures caused by a fever are also reported more often after MMRV. These usually occur 5-12 days after the first dose.
This information was taken directly from the MMR VIS Adobe Acrobat print-friendly PDF file [PDF - 54KB]
(This information taken from MMR VIS dated 3/13/08. If the actual VIS is more recent than this date, the information on this page needs to be updated.)
Browse side effects for other inoculations here:
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/side-effects.htm
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
My 2-month old son was vaccinated yesterday, and interestingly enough, they specifically warned his behavior may change or be unusual the rest of the day. However, they also recommended a "fix" for the behavioral change - tylenol. Get jabbed with a needle is a bit traumatic, according to my son's red-faced screams.
I wonder if a good bit of the "my child changed overnight" is from pain aggravating the pre-existing behaviors enough for the parents to notice it for the first time.
Because it's wrong:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/03/the_hannah_poling_case_and_the_rebrandin.php
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
If the other people are vaccinated then who is being unfairly put at risk?
I find it particularly amusing that the wiki article for fallacy uses vaccines and autism as the example for post hoc ergo propter hoc.
You said it.
Depresses the hell out of me, though.
The enemies of Democracy are
If there's an outbreak of smallpox, and there are too many for you to take out, just give me a yell and I'll give you a hand.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Also, anecdotally, none of these geniuses I've ever seen discuss the issue have any understanding of history, and of the suffering the human race endured before vaccination existed. Whatever tiny increase in autism they think actually exists, even if it turned out against all reason and evidence to be true, wouldn't be worth going back to that.
I'm going to start off by saying I'm in complete agreement with you.
With that said: the people who are choosing to not vaccinate their kids are, even if they don't know it, making a rational choice with reasonably good odds: they observe that there are side-effects to vaccines, and observe that most other people have gotten their kids vaccinated, so they choose to not get their kids vaccinated to avoid those side-effects. They're essentially shifting the risk of side-effects onto other people's kids. As long as enough other people get their kids vaccinated, it's a winning risk-minimization strategy on the part of the parents who don't.
As a car analogy is always good, these people are running red lights, betting nobody else will. It's an immoral strategy, but it's a good one as long as the odds are on their side.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
we stopped calling them retards
This is an interesting comment. My mother worked with mentally challenged kids for many years before retiring from the school division. Recently she was visiting while some friends had come over with their son. Afterwards, she asked if we knew if he had been diagnosed as autistic. We (my wife and I) said that our friends wouldn't believe that and some "holistic" doctors had told them that he was just sensitive to some preservatives and that was what was causing his issues... now, of course, he has gone into pre-school and his teachers are skeptical about this sensitivity. Our friends still refuse to believe there is anything else wrong. So, I agree, people having spent time working with these kids can easily pick out others with the same problems (my wife and I also figured he was too... Personally, I think it is very obvious and our friends are desperately avoiding the issue).
Why would you need to take them out? Wouldn't the smallpox outbreak do that for you? Since you seem to believe in the vaccine, you and the people you care about would be vaccinated and protected anyway.
That's not how vaccines work. Vaccines do not confer complete immunity to everyone who takes them. They confer pretty good immunity to most people who take them. They are only truly effective when everyone is vaccinated and it becomes difficult for the disease to get a foothold in the population and spread.
If smallpox broke out, the disease would spread through the non-vaccinated population readily, which would increase the exposure to the vaccinated population, overcoming the immunity of many. Who then would have a chance to spread it further. The herd immunity that vaccines provide would be broken.
So that's why I would need to take them out. Because their existence would endanger everyone who wasn't a suicidal idiot too.
The enemies of Democracy are
As long as enough other people get their kids vaccinated, it's a winning risk-minimization strategy on the part of the parents who don't.
Well that's the whole problem, isn't it? This only works as long as the number of non-immunizing parents is very small. Once their numbers increase beyond a certain threshold, then the probability of an outbreak of a serious disease goes up tremendously, and by the very nature of the issue the disease will hit the non-immunized population first and hardest.
With Jenny Fuckface McCarthy appearing on fucking Oprah telling people not to vaccinate their kids, I think it's safe to say that they are not utilizing the strategy of keeping non-immunization to an acceptable minimum. This is clearly a movement.
If they succeed, then they will be the first to suffer the consequences of their stupidity. So... how is this a rational decision again?
And that wouldn't even bother me, except that it affects everyone who isn't an idiot too.
The enemies of Democracy are
The odd tard for the betterment of the species is not a bad thing.
True, but since non-vaccinating idiots damage herd immunity and thus impacts everyone, what would it say about our evolutionary fitness when our children die from nearly forgotten diseases as an indirect effect of not making the issue idiot-proof?
The enemies of Democracy are
Which logically means the above is wrong. Which logically proves the above is right.
No, it does not. I think you need to work on your logic.
Or us vastly underestimating their proficiency as idiots....
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Actually many pregnant women receive multiple mercury-laden shots even to this day. That 25-50mcg of mercury, plus formaldehyde and other toxic ingredients do reach the baby in the mother's womb as well. Autism may not always show up right away but this is a factor to consider.
That is called a non sequitor . You say one thing then another without showing they are linked. The studies I've heard about found no link between mercury and autism. Mercury and other nervous system disorders, yes, but not autism. Do you have something to show otherwise?
Also consider this: nobody has absolute proof that vaccines DON'T cause autism
True. And there is no absolute proof that this rock keeps away tigers either. This is specious reasoning
Let's have Lisa Simpson explain it for you.
Many studies favor institutional or political bias, especially as the majority of studies are funded by institutions who financially benefit from vaccines.
Wow. Don't know what to say about that one. You've basically resorted to ad hominem rather than show how the studies were flawed. When the tobacco industry engaged in research to support their views, the studies were very quickly found to be either a) flawed, b) unreproducible or c) faked. Other than Jenny McCarthy, do you have some sources I can accept to prove your contention that the studies proving no link were flawed, unreproducible or clearly forged data?
The onus is on you to prove they are wrong because the autism-vaccine link has been investigated by hundreds of researchers over thousands of patients, and they've been remarkably consistent in their findings.
Also, the U.S. government has settled hundreds of lawsuits over the past few decades with parents whose child became autistic or died immediately following a shot.
That's true, but how does settling a lawsuit change the science?
Another question is what causes SIDS? Again, mothers are injected with mercury-laden shots while pregnant, up to 50 mcg per shot, even though pregnant women are warned to stay away from any type of mercury including trace amounts in tuna fish.
Again, another non sequitor. SIDS is relatively rare, so if all pregnant women are exposed to the same levels of mercury, why such a low incidence?
You seem to be suffering from tin-foil hat thinking, and frankly, it's unconvincing.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I wonder if a good bit of the "my child changed overnight" is from pain aggravating the pre-existing behaviors enough for the parents to notice it for the first time.
Maybe. I'm intrigued by another poster's comment that experienced medical professionals familiar with autism can diagnose the symptoms long before the parents have any clue. I can definitely imagine that's the case, especially since nobody really expects or even wants to think that their child might be autistic. So, the symptoms become noticeable to them for the first time, and they assume that means the symptoms and thus the disease only just started.
The enemies of Democracy are
Some of the studies were pretty simple, graphing autism rates compared to when the MMR vaccine was introduced.
The problem is that there have been lots of other changes besides the introduction of the MMR vaccine. I mean you could publish a graph comparing the rate of autism with the introduction of color television, and you'd probably get a similar result.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
If you're that concerned about this, you should do a little more research on the topic. There are two different kinds of mercury: ethyl mercury and methyl mercury. Thimerosol includes ethyl mercury which is in fact perfectly safe to inject into the muscle tissue. The kidneys are constantly filtering out bad things from the bloodstream, so the miniscule amount of ethyl mercury in an intramuscular innoculation of MMR vaccine containing thimerosol is flushed out of the body (even a tiny child's body) within a matter of hours.
The really bad stuff is methyl mercury, which can seriously damage the central nervous system, particularly when ingested into the digestive tract by, say, eating contaminated seafood. This is slowly aborbed into the bloodstream through the stomach and intestines, where it lingers for a long time. And the more bad fish you eat, the higher the levels of methyl mercury accumulate in the body, and the longer it takes to get rid of, increasing the potential damage to the nervous system.
But neither of these has anything at all to do with autism, which is an ill-defined syndrome, a medical mystery commonly referred to as a "diagnosis of exlusion." This means that when a physician observes certain behaviors and symptoms in a patient that cannot be explained by any other diagnosis, they use the umbrella term "Autism spectrum disorder" which means they don't know what the hell causes it. Over the past few decades, the number of symptoms categorized as characteristic of "autism" has grown enormously, which is why the number of autistic patients appears to have risen. The medical establishment keeps moving the goalposts so that many conditions previously called something else (e.g. "restless leg syndrome") are now lumped under the many hundreds of symptoms called "Autism spectrum disorder."
This doesn't necessarily mean that there are more autistic people in the population now than there have ever been in the past, it just means that doctors are now classifying the sypmtoms differently, which makes the numbers appear to be going up.
Full disclosure: I am not a doctor, but I am married to a nurse, who knows a helluva lot about this kind of stuff because it is her job and she is damned good at it. Ask her about the health care system, ask me to fix your goddamned computer or network.
The FDA hasn't established limits on ethyl mercury and has several articles suggesting that the methyl mercury limits be used for chronic exposure. See my other post showing one daily exposure limit was being exceeded by 3x for a typical 6-month getting his vaccinations.
I know you're an idiot who likes to argue for no reason, but I will point out that a "daily exposure limit" is that amount you are allowed to be exposed to every day ad infinitum. To calculate an approximate single exposure limit you would take that daily limit and multiply it by the half life of the substance in the body.
The half life of methyl mercury in the body is about 80 days, so a single exposure limit would be about 80X the daily limit.
The half life of ethyl mercury in the body is about 8 days, so if the EPA actually determined a daily limit scientifically, you would expect it to be about 10X the daily limit for methyl mercury.
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No, he seems to be pretty clearly saying that that the other guys stated large number of anecdotal cases aren't proof of a non existent link. The link may still not be there but the other guy isn't offering proof.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
"until I met in person a mindless little vegetable who was the victim of early childhood vaccinations. T"
I've read the story from many people, yet no one has ever given specifics.
" The staff at the children's hospital had no doubts"
Yes, and hospitals staff also believe they are buier during full moons, and friday then 13th, even though they are no busier then any other time.
"As for inoculations containing mercury in any form - I'm against them."
\Then you are ignorant or stupid.
A) Ca you name the two types of mercury? if not, you are ignorant, read up.
B) The two type of Mercury, one has never shown evidence to remain in the body. Care to guess which one is used in Vaccines?
Please stop spreading stupidity.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I have two children. one born in 98 and another in 00.
I have been given the literature before every single vaccine.
I ironically I am already well aware of the potential risks. The fact that we need literature to explain vaccines is pretty sad in and of itself.
If you really cared, you would have asked for literature before getting you children vaccinated, anyways.
Hmm, just to be clear, I don't mean 'if you really cared about your children', I mean 'if you really cared about the incredibly low risks of vaccines'.
Sometimes that kind of subtle distinction is lost.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
All the studies I have read either were poorly done, or the 'conclusion' in the abstract didn't actually match the data.
You need more experience.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
errr..no.
Anti vaxx has been around for decades. The wakefield report gave those morons a flag to wave, and of course Oprah was more then happy to help create a manufactured controversy to profit from.
So it went from 'Vaccines' Cause Autism, to mercury in vaccines cause autism, to Thimerisol causes autism, to combined shots causes autism, to 'they have radiator fluid in them and that causes autism'
ALL of which is stupid because there is no evidence at all that any vaccine or multiple vaccine cause autism.
Based on the evidence, you would have to be a son of a bitch to give a child multiple shots instead of just one.
A) It's an increase in pain and traumatic events for the child. What kind of evil bastard wants that?
B) Getting a shot has a risk. Any time something punctures the skin there is a risk. In the US that risk is very low due to clean sterile needles, glove, and swabbing the injection site.
Still there is a slight risk. Now the risk is usually just swelling and slight infection, but increasing the number of times a child has to endure that risk is just stupid.
Doing individule shots also increase the chance the child won't come back for the other shots.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Liar.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
???
Did you just make exactly the same argument that I did? (that debate will continue beyond discredited researchers)
As a side note, do you (or anybody) know which "quality studies" were funded (directly, or indirectly) by the pharmaceutical companies in question? I don't care if they're quality studies if they're not independent studies. In fact, nobody in this entire thread has mentioned another specific study. It's almost as if people are saying: "well, there must be some -- er, somewhere". I'm sure there are, but I'm sick of the assumption.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Yes, it is. There have been dozens of other research programs launched in response trying to replicate Wakefield's findings and not a single one has been able to do so. The scientific method requires independent verification of results and recommends that your study group and control group be a little bit larger than twelve, yes, 12 children to have any validity at all. On top of that, Wakefield is not a pediatrician nor an immunologist, but a gastroenterologist (or at least he was until last week, when his license to practice was revoked).
Except, as someone else has said, the MMR vaccine was introduced in 1971. The increase in autism diagnosis coincided with the 1980 release of DSM III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), which changed the methods of diagnosis so that many patients that previously would have been considered 'mentally retarded' were now considered autistic or suffering from an autism spectrum disorder. So no, the rise in diagnosis followed the introduction of the MMR vaccine by a decade.
I also have a chart, by the way, that shows a direct correlation with the decrease in pirates and the increase in global sea temperatures. :)
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
When an adult gets varicella, it's called "shingles" and it is absolutely miserable, painful and takes weeks or even months to heal. The additional risk of secondary infection with other pathogens can be deadly. Any vaccine available to prevent varicella, whether as a child or an adult, is worth the effort to acquire.
I think there are some trolls with mod points who are still upset over a previous post of mine. They had no reason to be mad then either. They went on a rampage moderating down every post I had made in every thread that was still open. There's nothing that can be done about it. I just hope they get meta-modded accordingly.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Yes, it is a very good reason for not trusting his conclusion, when you examine the nature of his "unethical" actions.
He lied in his paper, stating that the children involved had been referred to him for stomach problems. In fact, he knew that approximately half the children he used in his "study" were already involved in a lawsuit involving a vaccine, he approached them himself, and he paid them to participate.
All by itself, lying in your paper about how your samples were obtained is grounds for dismissing the conclusions. In this case, considering that his choice of samples would certainly -- not maybe, not possibly, but almost certainly -- skew his results does call the paper into question.
Use PubMed to find scientific research in peer-reviewed journals. Here's the one I would immediately reference, as it was not funded by any pharmaceutical company, but by the State of California's Department of Public Health (your tax dollars at work): http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/65/1/19. You can even contact the authors directly, if you have follow-up questions.
There are, however, many, many, many others. Again, use PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) instead of Google, as google ranks hits by popularity, not by scientific sources.
Anecdotal evidence is not really evidence. That is why scientific studies were created in the first place.
When, a week after strange lights in the sky are observed, 4 people start talking about alien abduction and anal probes, should we take them seriously? It has happened. But when questioned and studied more objectively, their stories did not hold up to scrutiny.
Thimerosol has not been present in the vast majority of vaccines for years now. So where is that mercury supposed to be coming from? I would be interested to hear.
And here is a FACT for you: nobody has absolute proof that Santa Claus does not cause gifts under trees, either. But most adults still doubt it. I wonder why?
Particularly, since as you pointed out, since ethyl mercury is expelled from the body pretty quickly compared to methyl mercury which tends to accumulate.
The quickly-expelled one is the one found in the influenza vaccine.
The one that accumulates is the one found in breast milk.
What, exactly, was your point?
Given the doubts and some conflicting data, it's safer to be conservative.
That's exactly what they did 9 years ago ;) And as the CDC's website says, there has been no measurable decrease in autism rates since the use of thimerasol was discontinued. That would indicate that thimerasol does not cause autism.
Whether it has other unrelated side effects in some tiny percentage of the population isn't really relevant to the autism/vaccine debate... you can always find someone allergic to something.
Heck, not just that (although the vaccine thing is one of your more important ones), but the general irrational CAVE people, denialist, and magical thinking mentalities displayed by a lot of people. I mean, there's the anti-nuke guys, the anti-GMO guys, the alternative medicine guys, moon landing guys, the people who think they're allergic to radio waves and every single chemical, astrologists, all flavors of paranormal believer...truthers, birthers, and creationists, oh my! The GMO thing really get me down since I plan on going into that field when I graduate, and there is just so much misinformation and fear mongering in that field, and even good ol' /. posts baloney on that one. I guess we just do what we can though.
That's exactly my point! If you get actual chickenpox as a child you gain lifelong immunity with very little risk. If you get the vaccine as a child, you get as little as 6 years immunity such that you are left vulnerable as an adult.
Thus my suggestion that the vaccine should be used only on adults who by chance didn't get chickenpox as a child (unless the vaccine's risks in an adult are significantly higher).
I am glad to have had chickenpox when I was a child. I'm fortunate to have been a child before the vaccine was in use.
There are some theories that there are immune-related problems that occur in people with autism spectrum disorder, which make the symptoms worse. This is supported by the fact that some people with ASD have symtoms reduced or even eliminated by removing things like wheat and dairy from their diets. Both are common food allergens, and of course, gluten plays a major role in an auto-immune disease, celiac. People with mild food alergies sometimes have what appear to be mild symptoms, but it keeps their immune system tied up, making it difficult to fight off other infections.
So the theory goes that vaccines are fine. The problem is that if you give too many at once, the immune system and the liver (processing toxins) are overwhemled and it takes a long time to get over it. If you were to spread out the vaccines, then they'd have less trouble.
This theory seems to be held by a lot of alternative medical practioners... DO's, nutritionists, etc. I know one nutritionist who refuses to have her kids vaccinated. I'm definitely going to have mine vaccinated, but I may see about having them spread out, even if costs more. Why not be cautious?
"I've read the story from many people, yet no one has ever given specifics."
Imagine that I actually had ACCESS to the patient's charts. Imagine that I posted those charts, complete with opinions, facts, diagnosis, and prognosis. Imagine me going to jail for violating the kid's privacy, not to mention the family's privacy. Maybe what you want to do is to alert some journalistic investigator to the concept that some children die or are badly damaged by inoculations of various kinds. I posted a good source of information in an earlier post. Yes, the MMR vaccine actually causes brain damage. Rarely, but it does so.
"Please stop spreading stupidity."
Not a bad idea. Go get the facts for yourself. Visit any Children's Hospital. You are unlikely to find better doctors anywhere. You are unlikely to find more information anywhere. Go, visit, get up close and personal with the men and women who actually care for kids. Get their opinions on vaccinations.
Bottom line? Inoculations kill kids. They kill only a small percentage of the kids who WOULD HAVE DIED of the diseases that the inoculations are meant to prevent - but still, they kill kids. There is plenty of empirical evidence - enough to convince impartial, serious researchers.
Disprove that last statement, if you can. Otherwise, it is you who is spreading stupidity.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The half life of methyl mercury in the body is about 80 days, so a single exposure limit would be about 80X the daily limit.
And you're calling him an idiot? That's definitely not how single exposure limits are set. Sadly, the daily occupational exposures are not determined very scientifically. They are a best guess based on the acute toxicity level, elimination rates, long term damage potential, and unfortunately politics. They often get tweaked up or down, and often EPA,FDA and OSHA all have different limits.
You are right though, that a single acute exposure limit is usually much higher than the PEL.
The half life of methyl mercury in the body is about 80 days, so a single exposure limit would be about 80X the daily limit.
The short term skin exposure limit is 3x (niosh) or 4x (osha) the 8 hour time weighted average exposure limit. http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npg/npgd0384.html.
I'm not saying "Don't distrust Wakefield". Nor am I saying "Ignore all unethical acts when deciding whether to trust Wakefield or not". I'm saying "Evaluate all his actions and distrust him for the right reasons".
He lied in his paper
Then you should distrust him because what he's saying isn't true, not because his lying is unethical.
In this case, considering that his choice of samples would certainly [...] skew his results
Again, his science isn't wrong because he punched people in the face. His science is wrong because of his choice of people to punch in the face. That is, selection bias.
Fraud is unethical, but one should not distrust him because the fraud is unethical, one should distrust him because fraud is fraudulent.
(unless there's some meaning to the word "unethical" I don't know...)
It's not only journalism, it's also fundamentally human.
We're hardwired to remember the spectacular more than the mundane, the extraordinary, more than the everyday.
So, we notice when a jet-airliner crash into a building -- but ignore it when the average weight of the adult American creep another 2 pounds upwards, despite the fact that the latter provably kills a hundred times as many.
Or if you argue, that the latter is self-inflicted, so thus less serious, then consider that salmonella is significantly more deadly than terrorism, and ask yourself, where's the $X00-billion war on salmonella ? A -tiny- fraction of the war-costs would lower salmonella-deaths a lot.
We're just not very good at evaluating risk. The same thing in reverse, can explain why human beings have a tendency to play lotteries.
wrong != troll.
If you encounter a post that is factually wrong, the correct thing to do is to reply, quoting the relevant parts and presenting a well thought out refutation, preferably with links or citations. More often than not, you will be modded up since the system (mostly) works.
Downmodding has the effect of hiding the post from some of the viewers. In effect, you are saying that the post you modded down has no place in the conversation because it only serves to derail it.
Moderation-as-censorship is an old /. tradition but it is still wrong.
I agree... but apparently a fair number of people felt that the original post was so egregiously wrong that no individual capable of writing coherent English could have honestly held that position... and hence the poster was being deliberately wrong.
In a way, it's a backhanded compliment. :->
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Read the link he provided on Thiomersal. It has not been used in vaccines in the US in ten years,
That is false. The linked article does not say that. Thimerosal is used today, in many many vaccines. That is stated in the article you linked to, and according to the CDC, Thimerosal it is used in H1N1 vaccines used today
Also consider this: nobody has absolute proof that vaccines DON'T cause autism.
There you have it - why Popper is so, so, so wrong.
I understood. And you are entirely correct.
More from CNN
What about the poor kids who wind up with mumps, or whooping cough, or .... before they are fully immunized?
Those children are dying directly at the hands of parents who refuse to immunize.
Maybe, just maybe, some of us are more susceptible to toxic things (bell curve anyone)? Coming from someone who has gotten severely sick after each of my immunizations with thimerosal, losing my ability to speak and becoming autistic. Then again, that's just anecdotal, which means about as much as my recovery.
You did not temporarily become autistic and then recover, and it doesn't sound like mercury at all.
Which the hell vaccinations did you have that even have thimerosal? Flu?
It's actually quite common to get sick from vaccinations, but that's due to the virus, not the preservative agent.
Autism is something you can recover from since it really is just a different way of perceiving and focusing, something that we should in fact all be capable of doing.
BTW, i love how you state everything as fact when you have no evidence to back up your claims. Lack of evidence to the contrary is not evidence for your claims.