Autism and Vaccinations 'Debate'

Post Reply New Topic

I need some help from science brains with this issue.

I've been drawn into an argument with a group of NT women I know who keep perpetuating the notion that vaccines cause autism. I should just leave them to it, but for some reason this really offends me and I can't let it go. One of them is now telling the others that I don't know what I'm talking about and citing the paper linked below as proof of the link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism. I feel like they are trying to tie me up in knots and bury me under science that I doubt even they understand.

Can anyone more able in this field tell me whether the claim that this article shows a link between vaccines and autism is correct or not. If it doesn't, can you explain? Thanks.

http://www.autismus-ads-behandeln.ch/ad ... 0-%202.pdf

At first glance, the paper's title suggests the study concluded the neuro-toxin effects of compounds found in vaccines are restricted to certain breeds of mice, based on varying levels of auto-immunity. So, already, we're not looking at vaccines, we're looking at vaccines-when-given-to-certain-individuals.

It would seem to me the extrapolative ramifications for developing human brains is...dubious, at best.

More importantly, why would these women conclude the vaccine is responsible, as opposed to the differences in auto-immunity and some third, endogenous variable?

Do these ignoramuses think Autism can only be observed in industrialized countries (with vaccines)?

Here's the real gem:

"The human study was not
designed to measure pharmacokinetic parameters
and missed important early sampling times, leading
to possible underestimates of maximal infant exposures.
Neither study had sample size sufficient to
investigate toxicity as a function of heritable influences.."

They think that autism has different causes, which I find a bit weird because surely that would mean they are different conditions. I'm not confident enough in my own knowledge to stand up to them, but at the same time feel disloyal to myself as an autistic person if I ignore it.

They're a group of mums who don't think they should sacrifice their own children to autism by vaccinating them for the greater good of those who cannot be vaccinated. And of course they know someone whose child was perfectly fine until they had their vaccinations and now has severe autism and I'm insulting them by insisting there is no link.

The study mentions environmental susceptibility genes which means there is a genetic component. It is possible the toxin load threshold could be much lower in people with these genes. To me it doesn't sound unreasonable. Living creatures are susceptible to changes in their environment. It can trigger mutations in genes or can cause some genes not to function properly. Right?

I found the article below which says that there is no link, which came after the one they sent me. I'm trying to get my head around the opposing positions. Is it as ValentineWiggin said, the first was on mice whereas this one refers to research done on humans? So it doesn't matter what the mice one says because the research involving humans shows no link? Sorry, I don't mean to be dim.

http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/48/4/456.full

Thimerasol has not been in children's vaccines for years. If thimerasol was a cause, we would have seen a drop in autism rates in the years since it has been discontinued in children's vaccines (as advocates of this hypothesis publicly predicted.) As this has not been the case, thimerasol has been effectively ruled out as a causative factor.

Two books I would recommend to give you a better background are:

Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure by Paul Offit, that discusses much of the bad science among the anti-vax crowd and how they have made lucrative businesses out of promoting these.

The other is Unstrange Minds: Re-Mapping the World of Autism by Richard Roy Grinker, an anthropologist who looks at perceptions of autism in different cultures. Of particular importance is his explanation of the changing diagnostic criteria to demonstrate that autism diagnoses are increasing, but autistic people have been around for human history, thus negating the whole "autism epidemic" claims that underlie most of the ant-vax movement.

If these people actually want to base their beliefs on data, there is a lot of good material from these two books you could share with them. If they're just looking for data to support what they have already decided to believe (which is a form of religion or politics, not science) then they are probably not worth speaking with in the first place.

ask them this:

"does it make sense that medicine would cause people to get developmental problems?"


if they say yes then they probably would believe anything they read on the news :/

How can anyone know where the truth lies when everyone has something to gain? They aren't going to be objective when millions if not billions of dollars are at stake.

Face it, everyone has something to sell.

Perhaps much bio science is flawed because of this startling realization.

This is why objectivity and careful scrutiny not to mention research (but I did anyway) is paramount!

I cannot wait until the day people stop calling a few money-hungry, intellectually-dishonest holders of science degrees "science".