Poll: Is Autism and Aspergers a result of vaccinations?

Post Reply New Topic

Explain why or why isn't vaccines the cause of ASD for those who are interested.

it isn't caused by vaccines. we know that due to several large studies showing zero correlation between vaccines and autism. just a tidbit: my dad was never vaccinated and he was autistic. polling on such things is irrelevant, because as john oliver so aptly put it: should we have a poll on whether owls exist?

Autism is not the result of vaccinations.

Because (1) incidents of autism have actually increased in countries than do not use mercury compounds in vaccines; and (2) ignorant people - such as one woman whose sole claim to fame is that she once posed nude for a porn magazine - have tried unsuccessfully to refute science; and (3) the Wakefield Study has been thoroughly disavowed of any credibility after it was proven that Dr. Wakefield falsified his results in exchange for money from anti-vaxxers; and (4) millions of people have been exposed to mercury and mercury compounds without becoming autistic; and (5) as soon as the anti-vaxxers start attacking the people like me, who have made similar claims, then it is safe to assume that the anti-vaxxers are more interested in being believed that in telling the truth.

I don't want to sound curt but given the fact that the association has already been disproved, the poll is irrelevant. It would be kind of like taking a poll to decide whether epilepsy is caused by a brain condition, or demons.

I am supportive of free speech and such, but this had been disproved again, and again, and again. By peer review. By lots of very good scientists. What's the bloody point of this? Reality does not care about your opinions.

By now, anyone even BRING UP this banal point is quite frankly, flogging a pile of rotting flesh that once upon a time, was a dead horse.

Heck, to appease the ignorant crowds, doctors had to make dangerous compromises. Too many, IMO. The mercury bullocks (thimerosal), for example, was used as a preservative for vaccines: it has antiseptic and antifungal properties. Allows them to be stored for longer. Does not do more harm than the sodium and chloride in your table salt (which you don't see people going hysterical over). Since they had to take it out due to public opinion (read: brain fart), vaccines are more expensive. Not much of a problem with wealthy countries, but the poorer nations suffer.

An informed citizenry would make the world a much better place. So please do your part.

Heck, it's not like those teary-eyed anti-vaccers treat us ASD people with any respect either.

I don't believe vaccines cause autism, but i don't necessarily believe everyone should get vaccines. Many state specifically that if you have X allergies or weak immune system, etc. you should NOT get the vaccination, yet many kids are given such vaccinations before allergy tests are even allowed to be given to them. My son is allergic to eggs, a few vaccinations say that people allergic to eggs should not get them...but he had them before we were allowed to test him for allergies at age 3...makes me wonder.

Here's a few additional bullet points against the autism-MMR vaccine connection, pulled from this Oxford Journals literature review (http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/48/4/456.full)
--Wakefield's study had numerous flaws in it (lack of control subjects, lack of blind testing, quite a lot of unproven theories about the brain-enflamed gut theory (remember that Wakefield was a gastroenterologist, not a neurologist)
--No difference in autism rate in the UK between vaccinated and non vaccinated children, or children vaccinated after 18 months
-- The rate of autism diagnoses is increasing in spite of the fact that vaccination rates stay the same (one would think autism diagnoses would plateau if they were linked). Autism diagnosis rates continued to increase even when vaccination rates decreased in Canada.
-- One would think there would be a spike in autism cases around vaccination times, but there aren't. The story of the kid turning blue and regressing the night after a vaccination is sometimes just a myth. Wakefield was trying to make out like this was happening all the time, when autistic symptoms were being reported months after vaccination. He fudged the data.
--The symptoms and brain scans of mercury poisoning are very different from those of autistic people.
-- In Sweden and Denmark, rates of diagnoses of autism continue to rise even though thimerosol (the suspected cause in vaccine) was removed from vaccines in 1992.

When the thimerosol theory proved to not hold water, the anti-vaxxers shifted gears to the "too many vaccines" theory (in which bundling vaccines overwhelms the immune system), which doesn't make a lot of sense when you consider the number of viruses a child is exposed to in a daycare center or on a kitchen floor.

Then the anti-vaxxers actually went to assert that the thimerosol (or whatever) was passed from vaccinated mother to child, so the child was sickened by proxy. Considering that the original exposure was equal to about a quarter of a teaspoon, 20+ years prior, that sounds a bit farfetched.

Why are we seeing an increase in autism diagnoses? Well, the standards of what an autistic person IS have become much wider--the definition is much broader, and more diagnosticians are trained in what to look for. It's not that there are more fish in the sea. The net has gotten bigger.

That's my understanding too, and I recall reading a paper comparing the number of former "mental retardation" diagnoses (changed around the beginning of this century usually to "intellectual delay") and other DXs as compared to ASD diagnoses....there are far fewer combined MR and other DXs (I think sociopathy was one? Can't remember) and far more ASD diagnoses but the total number is still very similar to prior to ASD becoming "an epidemic" as some say as research has revealed that many people who would formerly have been considered to be intellectually delayed OR have a condition such as sociopathy may actually be at least average intelligence and/or not have a neurosis but ASD. So IOW, to a degree (fairly significant degree, not all cases, naturally) diagnoses are simply being swapped out (roughly) for ASD diagnoses.

Combined with more children being assessed overall than in the past when they "sank or swam" as well as, as noted, broader criteria and the inclusion of DX for children who would never in the past have been assessed and simply have been considered to be "odd" and antisocial but functional, the number was largely different but nowhere near so significantly significant as to label ASD as "an epidemic."

I wish I could find that paper. It was on my old comp and God only knows where that is now. I'm going to do some research with various search terms to see whether I can unearth it again.

Changes in society as well. I remember John Robison mentioning how non-verbal ASD people would do just fine in farming communities (makes logical sense) in the past. Now, at least in certain nations, you stick them a city full of millions of people and make them work in a glorified box. Circumstances had changed, making their differences stick out like a sore thumb.

So logically, a combo of greater awareness and changes in human society means more people hit the ASD list.

Yes! Indeed, people who "don't fit the mold" are more visible period, simply due to families not actively hiding them (us) away anymore.

If I had been born and had children 50 or more years earlier than I did, there's a strong probability that the doctors would have taken me aside to gravely and sympathetically inform me that my (moderately autistic) son was "too severely ret*d" to "ever be able to function" in society and therefore, they recommended I put him into an institution where he could be "with others like himself and happy." (Where he thenceforth would have rotted.)

And I would have had the choice either to do that, or keep him in an upstairs room with all his little-boy toys and he would have been a neighborhood secret and scandal, seen occasionally by the gleefully frightened children as he peeked wistfully through the curtain.

We just see autistic people more. Because they are right here. We are right here. In supermarkets, in parks. Here we are, in a way we never were in the past.

This doesn't account for actual numbers, but it does account for perception. Much as there was a "sudden epidemic of learning disabilities" when children stopped being called stupid and underachievers and started having their dyslexia diagnosed and receiving tools for it. And perhaps all through history; for example, I'd bet my bottom neuron that when epilepsy began to be truly researched in a scientific way, demonic possession went down even as "all of a sudden" there were "tons" of people with epilepsy (though it would not have been noted in such a global nor sensationalist way as we note such changes today, simply because today we have at the touch of a button access to huge amounts of information and news).

The "sudden" cholesterol "problem" is similar to these as well, with its drastic rise coinciding, you guessed it, with probably inadequate interpretation of studies which resulted in more screenings...hence more DXs...hence "all of a sudden, tons of people with high cholesterol, what are we doing wrong??"

The list goes on, really.

I have AS and never got the shots. I had severe allergies to some ingredients so they never gave them to me. I've had a tetanus shot as an adult but no others. Therefore it can't be what causes it.

However they can rarely cause dangerously high fevers which can cause brain damage that can look like autism. I know a lady who was hurt in a car wreck while pregnant and her baby was brain damaged and he's pretty much indistinguishable from the low functioning autistic kids who went to the same special school as him. I'm sure a very high fever and resulting brain damage could look the same. It's rare for that to happen though.

It can probably happen and as you said, it's probably on the rarer side.

My father I believe was almost certainly an Aspie...I know, I know, I'm not qualified to DX anybody but seriously, if you look up "autism" in the dictionary you'd see my father's picture next to the entry. He conformed to the sterotypes about autism almost as if he'd been reading them from a book and copying them. That's in restrospect, but I believe I genetically inherited my HF autism from him, and my sons inherited their ASD from me (one probably HFA, one with "autistic-like characteristics" in special ed and one moderately Kanner/classic autistic) and from my husband, who has always had "his little weirdnesses" as he calls them and never was able to make friends until senior year of high school - there's much more to it than that but you get the gist. Once our older son got his DX and we started putting two and two together, a lightbulb went off...my husband and I now semi-joke that together, we're the perfect genetic autistic storm. Anyway...

From my familial side of the equation, of these generations:

* It's doubtful my father received more than one or two vaxes during childhood. Even the polio vax wasn't out yet when my father was a very young child. He was born in 1941. IF he did receive any vaxes, AFAIK, in those days kids would receive them at about school age...much later than he, according to my grandma's old stories, would have been very very clearly been showing signs of autism. (Insistence by age four on calling all of the flowers in her garden by their Latin names, meltdowns if he had a change of schedule, demanding from late toddlerhood on that his clothes all appear in the same order in his drawers and folded a certain way, obsessive attention to orderliness and specifically placing collective items in a certain order, meltdowns if a certain day of the week didn't have its "proper" dinner food for that day, meals at a specific time of day without variation, "talking like a little grown-up," the "cute" little stories Grandma told about Daddy were all very Big Bang Theory-esque...She told them all because she was proud and thought that meant he was mature for his age. Then in adulthood, forget it, SAME stuff, he even required that his underwear be rolled in a certain way and placed properly in order of color in the drawers, would freak out over loud sounds, told "jokes" nobody ever understood, very very flat affect, "robot voice," etc.)

* I was vaxed several times during childhood. I was born in 1967. At that time we'd receive I think three our four throughout the school years? - and then boosters on certain ones such as tetanus. NOT during infancy/toddlerhood! IIRC we were to have our first (individual) vax to get into kindergarten? So, years after I was showing my own signs. I KNOW I never received the MMR as those were diseases children were "expected" to have as a rite of childhood passage and I did in fact have measles, German measles, and mumps during childhood. I don't remember either measles. but I clearly do remember chicken pox! (Definitely no vax for that at that time either, that was way later, I think the early 90s? Even my oldest son didn't have the chicken pox vax, he was born in 1986 and had the actual chicken pox at age 3).

* Next generation: my oldest son (probable HFA/former AS) had more vaxes than I did, but still only a handful as I recall.

* Next generation (my oldest and youngest are 20 years apart): loads and loads of vaxes.

ALL different vaxes, ranging on, as we go backward in history, down to either a max of two, or possibly zero (never did ask my father) and ALL autistic.

And from the other side of the coin, children on the same vax schedule in my family weren't ALL autistic. For example, my sister and I were on the same very light vax schedule. So was my brother, more or less (think he received 3-4 more than my sister did?). ONLY I am autistic out of the three.

And my father was almost certainly autistic but his sister, absolutely not, a far as I can tell, they are (or were, father is now deceased) practically diametric opposites.

Vaxes Are the Debbil advocates would say, "Of the siblings, that's because only you and your father had the genetics to be predisposed to react negatively to vaxes." I say, "Of the siblings, only I and my father had the genetics to predispose us to autism, period." The latter seems far more logical and would even if there weren't some pretty concrete evidence against a vax/autism relationship.

The moron who claimed it was caused by vaccines got his medical license removed following this ridiculous claim.

Also, just because things are correlated does not mean one caused the other. You can find unrelated correlations in everything. Or related, but there's a cause hidden in there. My favourite one is: the more fire trucks sent to a house fire, the more damage to the house. Using the "logic" that correlation = causation, you could claim that fire trucks cause damage to houses and therefore we shouldn't send any. There's a hidden cause in there. The larger the house fire, the more fire trucks are needed to put it out. The larger the house fire, the more damage to a house. So one thing is actually causing both.

Same for autism rates and vaccine rates. The cause is advances in medicine. The vaccines were made more widely available and free, so more kids got vaccinated. Signs of autism became more widely understood and the criteria loosened so more kids got diagnosed autistic. Then some idiot puts the two rates on the graph and says "look, they're correlated, vaccines cause autism" and now kids are dying of easily preventable diseases. Pisses me off.

I think the MMR vaccine is to blame for my Asperger's, for the following reasons:-

-my mum has always kept a diary and in the year I had the vaccine (1991 I think it was), she's got it written down that I had a fever straight after the vaccination for a couple of days, but she took me to the doctor and he said that I didn't have a virus

-nobody in my family has any ASD, I have a lot of cousins and I can confidently say that they are all NT, no ASDs or other non-NT conditions. And that also includes my parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc

-I had a healthy birth, was actually born 4 days after my due date, and weighed about 7 pounds, and was a healthy baby


I think the MMR vaccine did cause me to suffer this curse. So I could have been NT.

To be clear, he didn't lose his license because he made a ridiculous claim that was disproven. He lost his license because he fudged the data to draw attention to his handy-dandy "Autism-free" anti-flu elixir.

The real tragedy is that we've spent many millions of dollars in research funding to disprove a ridiculous claim. Money that could have been spent solving real medical problems.

Ok. The REAL tragedy are the kids that have died of preventable diseases because their parents were idiots, or the people who have legitimate medical conditions preventing their vaccination getting unnecessarily exposed because kids who could get vaccinated aren't.

You had a fever and then you got diagnosed with ASD. Case closed.
Fevers don't cause autism. No correlation. None.