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Widespread belief in possible or actual autism-vaccine link

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ASPartOfMe
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23 Aug 2018, 2:07 am

Autism and vaccines: more than half of people in Britain, France, Italy still think there may be a link

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But new doubts keep being layered on, with points about freedom of choice from Italian political parties muddying the waters, and more than 20 tweets from the US president, Donald Trump, suggesting a link. This is despite many reviews that fail to find any link, including a 2014 meta-analysis of records from over 1.25m children.

Have these unfounded fears stuck with the public around the world? Our first ever multi-country study, in 38 nations, on vaccine misperceptions suggests they have. Around one in every five people believe that “some vaccines cause autism in healthy children”, and 38% are unsure whether it is true or not.

The proportions positively believing it is true ranged from an incredible 44% in India, down to 8% in Spain.

But there are majorities in many countries who think it’s true or are unsure: in France it’s 65%, in Britain it’s 55%, in Italy it’s 52%. And even in countries where it’s not quite a majority who think it’s true or are unsure, it’s often only just below: in Sweden it’s 49% and in the US and Germany it’s 48%.


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Kraichgauer
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23 Aug 2018, 3:34 am

How about that! Americans aren't the only ones who are dumb!


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Seff
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23 Aug 2018, 4:49 am

People are so ignorant.

In China they think autism is contagious!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-wales- ... us-disease


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Fnord
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23 Aug 2018, 8:23 am

Teleological thinking at its finest. :roll:


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RandomFact
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23 Aug 2018, 3:15 pm

I am not sure what it will take to fully reverse the anti-science/anti-intellectual bent in ascendency at the moment. Humanity spent millennia at the mercy of infectious diseases. And after what is only a few generations of being less at their mercy, we now have a large chunk of society ready to unwittingly march itself right back to living in the infectious disease stone ages.

Specific to the persistent false beliefs about autism and vaccines: I do wonder if scientists and public health officials have done a disservice by simplifying what is said about autism in communications to the general public. Prior to a relative’s recent diagnosis, I knew the basics about ASD, including that vaccines could not cause it. But I was not aware that one of the known developmental arcs for children with ASD is to have relatively subtle symptoms in the first year of life (many of which are not noticeable to someone unfamiliar with ASD), and then to experience a more overt onset of symptoms (which may be accompanied by a regression in learned skills) around the second year of life.

Ever since learning this information, I have wondered how it contributes to the perpetuation of the vaccine-autism myths. Random chance alone will mean that there will be a subset of children who just happen to get a vaccine right before their ASD symptoms become more overt. At the individual level, it will mistakenly look like the vaccine “caused” these cases of autism. Those who argue for a vaccine-autism link are able to capitalize on this reality, whether or not they realize they are doing so. They cannot predict that any one child will be the person who just happens to get a vaccine before autism symptoms become overt. But they can be confident that a certain number of such cases will occur reliably over time. And that reliable occurrence gives them a steady stream of new parents willing to tell the story of how their child began showing overt autistic symptoms in the months after they got a shot.