[Updated to add: 97 papers citing correlations between autism and vaccines, which should prompt further investigation using unvaccinated children as a control group http://www.scribd.com/doc/220807175/86-Research-Papers-Supporting-the-Vaccine-Autism-Link]
We did not vaccinate our children as infants.
My husband and I (who both have advanced college degrees) made the decision together, influenced by epidemiological studies showing correlations (not causation, just troubling correlations) between increasing infant vaccinations and autism. I am perfectly aware that the epidemiology studies that track the introduction of new vaccines and soaring rates of autism and other neurological conditions are purely descriptive – they are noting a correlation and that is all. That notation is intended to be subject to critical thinking and further investigation. It’s merely a canary.
A 2010 paper continues to confirm a correlation, and nothing more. Is this worth looking into? That is the only question being posited.
The fact that autism is listed as a potential side effect on package inserts is a little troubling, the establishment of the Vaccine Injury Court, the potential for death from vaccines and the curious reluctance of the CDC or any national health organization to investigate the relationship between vaccines and autism using completely unvaccinated children as a control group all led to us deciding we would not begin childhood immunizations until the children were at a body weight and level of development to handle the doses. We further skewed the schedule to spread it out over 12 years (from 6 -18) to minimize potential side-effects, that have neither been confirmed nor denied.
I find it amusing that critics are quick to point out that parents who choose to forgo or delay vaccinations tend to be white, college- educated, well-off married couples equally divided between political spectrums, but who are simultaneously uneducated, stupid, conspiracy-prone, religious fanatics incapable of critical thought.
Or perhaps precisely the sort of people who might read medical package inserts, peruse epidemiology studies and note that if the control group is not unvaccinated your results are limited at best?
The California-Oregon survey was particularly alarming. Jenny McCarthy has now attached herself to Generation Rescue (who commissioned, but did not carry out the survey) but she was not even on the radar when our first child was born. In a survey of over 10K households including 17K+ children (that’s a damn good sample size) with just under 1K unvaccinated children, vaccinated boys had a 155% greater chance of being diagnosed with a neurological disorder than unvaccinated boys. When it comes to ADHD, vaccinated boys from ages 11-17 had a 317% greater chance of being diagnosed than unvaccinated boys.
Telephone surveys are frequently used by the CDC as a preliminary investigation, with startling results generally followed up with more rigorous investigation. To date, the CDC has shown zero interest in investigating differences in neurological (or any other) disorders in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children, despite the existence of a large cohort of unvaccinated children to examine and outbreaks of communicable diseases that might possibly be prevented with mandatory vaccinations, provided the results from the unvaccinated cohorts were not statistically significant. The standard “ethical considerations” claptrap appears to be nothing more than an avoidance technique. Yes, double blind studies are the gold standard for medical research, but we were curiously able to establish a link between smoking and lung cancer without randomly assigning people to smoke or not and then watch who died. Recall the vigorous protests from tobacco backed “scientists” that there was no link between smoking and lung cancer
Let’s not be naïve. There is a lot of money at stake with routine vaccinations. To think that has no influence on vaccine “science” is dangerously ludicrous.
My children did not begin routine childhood vaccinations until 6 years of age and will not complete all vaccinations until they are 18 (Hep B – something you get from hookers, shooting heroin and filthy tattoo parlors. That vaccine is currently administered within the first few days of life because we all know newborns have a penchant for hookers, heroin and tattoos, amirite?). I am not an anti-vaxxer. I am a delayed vaxxer. My husband and I went and got our titres and necessary boosters and allowed our children to develop their immune systems for a few years before introducing serious pathogens.
Our three children have no allergies of any kind, no congenital illnesses, no neurological disorders, no learning disabilities or other sensory processing disorders. They are rarely ill with common cold viruses or sore throats or coughs or any of the normal childhood illnesses. They have never had any of the vaccine preventable communicable diseases and likely never will, because they are in fact, now vaccinated against most (as noted, the Hep B will not be administered until they are 18). This is likely a function of the fact that they are affluent, well-fed, not subjected to any particular stresses in terms of family or social relationships, but not necessarily. There is a small chance it’s because we didn’t poison them with neurotoxins throughout their infancy.
Now, for those people who are going to begin dropping links into the comments proving that there is no causal link between autism and vaccines, look first at the control group. Normally, with these studies, you will see something like this:
Hypothesis: Mercury containing MMR vaccines cause autism
The study will then proceed to round up several hundred children, half of whom had MMR shots containing mercury plus all their other vaccines and a second cohort that had MMR vaccines without mercury plus all their other vaccines and both groups have equally appalling rates of autism and therefore vaccines don’t cause autism.
Those studies will get a big lol from me. All they prove is that the mercury content of a single vaccine does not significantly affect what are undeniably appalling rates of autism.
If you can find a study, other than the California-Oregon phone survey that uses completely unvaccinated children as a control group, I’m interested in seeing it.
Let’s be clear: I am not asserting a causal relationship between autism and routine infant vaccinations. I am asserting that there is a worthwhile question to be explored. If there is no relationship between vaccines and autism, then let us prove that conclusively by taking advantage of the existence of a huge cohort of unvaccinated children and compare them, rigorously, to their vaccinated counterparts.
There is, after all, a strong correlation between autism and organic food sales, too. Pretty sure that one is a coincidence. There are many, many, many parents, like myself and my husband, who are not so sure the correlation between vaccines and autism is mere happenstance. We want proof.
And that proof is reasonably easy to determine given that the control group has self-selected.
So let the CDC get busy and begin. Is there some legitimate reason they might not want to?
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
JB, the correlation of compromised gut biome to autism is far stronger and gaining ground almost daily if you search that instead of just looking for more confirmations for vaccinations.
Moreover, it makes more Occam’s Razor sense. Alors, carpet bombing the gut biome with antibiotics—because runny noses and way more helicopters in flight—is a larger smoking gun and better matches the timeline.
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I’ll check it out
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Thank you. I am getting SO sick of the “anti-anti-vaxer” crowd’s self-righteous spewing and talking about how everyone OWES it to them and everyone else to vaccinate early and often.
And you know what? It should be a choice. Maybe it’s a stupid one, but it’s a choice, and I’m sick and tired of many of the same people who would be appalled if we suggested that women should not be allowed access to abortions (because that would be anyone but herself controlling her body) will turn around and tell the anti-vaxers that they shouldn’t have a choice over what they do with THEIR bodies (and their kids’ bodies, over whose custody they have care).
If you have concerns you should have a right to have them looked into. You make your own decision. If I think that decision is not supported by science, I absolutely have the right to try to educate you, but I shouldn’t be acting like since you didn’t do what *I* would choose, therefore you are unfit and I should make the choice for you.
Anti-anti-vaxers bother me way more than anti-vaxers do right now. The anti-vaxers are concerned about a risk. Maybe it’s real, maybe it’s imagined, but they have concerns.
The anti-anti-vaxers are just self important hypocritical pricks trying to take away the very control over people’s bodies and their own choices that they in other parts of their lives would describe as an inviolate right.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle/2015/01/05/majority-of-autism-increase-due-to-diagnostic-changes-finds-new-study/
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Since the microbiome makes up the majority of the immune system & vaccine injections (uncontrollably) stimulate the immune system, at some point I expect there will be animal models of vaccine induced autism. We are only beginning to unravel this puzzle.
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“And you know what? It should be a choice. Maybe it’s a stupid one, but it’s a choice, and I’m sick and tired of many of the same people who would be appalled if we suggested that women should not be allowed access to abortions (because that would be anyone but herself controlling her body) will turn around and tell the anti-vaxers that they shouldn’t have a choice over what they do with THEIR bodies (and their kids’ bodies, over whose custody they have care).”
There is a difference. One deals with personal autonomy of your body and nothing else. The other deals with public health and the spreading of diseases nearly wiped out of existence now making a comeback, that can harm others or mutate and become epidemics all over again.
The public health menace of pathogens outweighs the personal and absolutely warrants intervention by states looking out for the greater good of society. If you don’t think this is the case, stick yourself with a live round of Ebola and see how fast you get rounded up and deprived of your freedom. You could argue about how it’s your choice, your body, you’re only hurting yourself. Won’t matter. You’ll still be locked away in a plastic bag under quarantine until you’re cured or you die.
Therein lies the difference.
There was once a debate about healthcare in America where it was proposed that people who smoked should have to pay their own way through the system if they got cancer – since it was self inflicted and they chose to forgo the risks and accept the consequences. There would be no way to apply that to the anti vax crowd save for segregating them from the vax society and letting both sides live with the consequences of their choices.. in much the same way i argued that if you took redpill/egalitarians and segregated them from the bluepill/feminists and allowed each to run itself accordingly, the bluepill area would produce nothing, go bankrupt and starve to death in a year while the redpill area would thrive and prosper. I have a feeling a large community of non vaccinated people would be decimated were an old scourge like polio.
That’s my 2 cents. You are free to disagree.
http://www.mnn.com/health/fitness-well-being/photos/8-deadly-diseases-cured-by-modern-science/wiped-out
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Two things: 1) plenty of (likely most) pro-vaccine people are not arguing for compulsory vaccination.
2) It may be a choice, but it’s a bad one, and one that, if popular enough, puts the general population at risk. So people have every right to be concerned. And, moreover, doctors have every right to refuse to treat anti-vaxers as a matter of principle (and because anti-vaxers tend to sue said doctors when their kids get preventable diseases, basically by saying ‘you should have made me vaccinate my kids’; when your kid’s on a slab, you’ll look for anyone to blame but yourself) Private schools have a right to deny anti-vaxers’ kids into the schools; Disney world has the right to only allow vaccinated children into their park.
And the fact that it is a legal choice does not in any justify the notion that others shouldn’t aggressively criticize it at every chance because it’s a bad choice. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, and doesn’t mean I shouldn’t chew you out you for doing it.
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So tell me this: if, in fact, this continued vaccination is so vital to keeping diseases from recurring, then why have we stopped vaccinating against smallpox?
That always bothers me, when someone will say “Look, disease XYZ had been eradicated, but now thanks to the anti-vaxers, it’s back.” And yet smallpox has been “eradicated” and we stopped vaccinating against it.
Also, by the way, I consider my kids safe due to their vaccinations, I don’t really care what the neighbor does, because if there’s an outbreak and their kids get the disease, so what. If the vaccination is so weak in its effect that my kids are not actually safe in that situation, then perhaps I understand the question, am I really sure these things are safe?
It’s a trade off. If you think you’re safer with them, get them, and yes, that’s probably the smart choice. But I do not believe that we have the right to be so self-righteously smug towards the anti-vaxers.
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A lot more of them are than you think. I mean, they may not actually be PUSHING for it, but the number of them out there saying things like “If I had the power, I’d take all the anti-vaxers kids away for being unfit parents and make sure all those kids got their shots”.
And I look at it another way: If enough of the population rejects vaccinations to the point that it really does cause a national health risk, that’s also a much higher percentage of people who would be then compelled to get them against their will. If the population who would have to be compelled against their will is small enough, then the risk to society is small as well. If it’s large enough to be a risk, then perhaps that’s a larger percentage of people than we should feel comfortable compelling against their will.
Rather than being so obnoxious towards people who have different opinions or doubts than you do, perhaps trying to non-judgmentally provide education is the right way to go.
Because I’ll tell you, if I were an anti-vaxer and I saw much of what’s put out there, it wouldn’t make me say “Oh, gee, they’re right, I really should.” It would make me say “Wow, what an asshole, thinking he or she has the right to tell me what I should do for myself and my kids.”
The attitude of the anti-anti-vaxer crowd is serving to further entrench the anti-vaxer crowd, exactly the opposite of the result that they should want.
Compulsion and condescension will not solve this problem. Compassion and education will. And until the anti-anti-vaxers start showing more of the second and less of the first, I’m really not going to blame the anti-vaxers for digging in their heels and saying “Why should I listen to this prick?”
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The rest is probably due to age. Strange that people who are so worried about their kids’ health wait until they are elderly to reproduce
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“If you can find a study, other than the California-Oregon phone survey that uses completely unvaccinated children as a control group, I’m interested in seeing it.”
Well, JB, I’m not aware of any studies released to the public, but Blue Cross/Blue shield have a profit incentive, and they’re aware that autism is basically non-existent in the Jehovah’s Witness community…a community that doesn’t vaccinate their children. The Amish also have essentially no cases of autism but they live in isolated communities, unlike the Jehovah’s witness community.
http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2005/12/07/The-Age-of-Autism-A-pretty-big-secret/UPI-68291133982531/
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> There is, after all, a strong correlation between autism and organic food sales, too.
A blind trial with an unvaccinated control group and a vaccinated test group would be interesting … but we cannot use already unvaccinated children as a control group. There is already a demographic difference between the children that get vaccinated and the children that do not. In order to design a study capable of proving or disproving causation, the children who are not to be vaccinated would need to be selected at random. The test group would have to control for parents who insist that their children be vaccinated (or not vaccinated), since the act of getting vaccinations is correlated to demographics which we already know are related to autism. That organic food correlation is a huge warning sign.
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Another good link, here:
http://preventdisease.com/news/14/091014_One-Third-Nurses-Leaving-Jobs-Losing-Faith-in-Vaccines.shtml
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Smallpox is the only human disease that has been successfully eradicated
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You’re describing the gold standard. But that is not how we arrived at other causal conclusions such as smoking and lung cancer. We observed the existing cohorts and attempted to control for variables. Same goes for asbestos and lung cancer. We didn’t randomly assign people to inhale asbestos fibers. We looked at those who DID and compared them to those who didn’t and controlled for other variables. The entire field of public health essentially works on this model. We don’t randomly assign people to live next to power lines or chromium mines. We look at those who DO and explore the factors of interest.
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Three nurse friends – two ICU and one ER – all refuse annual vaccinations. They can’t be fired in Canada.
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We’re essentially delayed vaxers, too. We’d started out following the medical recommendations with our older daughter, but stopped upon reading some really disturbing stories right about the time when she’d just received her four-month shots. I belatedly realized that since she was exclusively breastfeeding and benefitting from all my immunities, we could have postponed even deciding about the matter until whatever point when she was no longer exclusively breastfeeding, and I will always wonder whether those early shots had something to do with her developing asthma years later.
We didn’t vaccinate our younger daughter at all until just this past summer when she was nine.
We’d reopened the issue because our older daughter had started public school in fall of 2013, at age 13, and at some point just before the end of the school year last spring, started learning about vaccines in science class and got really worried that she wasn’t adequately protected. (In our state, you can get a religious exemption form from the health department and fill it out, without having to give any information about your religious beliefs, and enroll your child in public school.)
With my child being so worried, I decided to sit down and look at the issue from both sides, using “The Vaccine Book” by Dr. Bob Sears. I really appreciated the way he organized the various statistics. I’d previously felt like a child had a much greater risk of suffering a serious complication from a vaccine, than of becoming seriously ill or dying from a vaccine-preventable illness — but after reading the book, I now feel that although both kinds of risks are very, very low, the risk of suffering serious complications from a vaccine-preventable illness were higher than the risk of suffering serious complications from a vaccine.
Also, even though I caught most of the childhood illnesses and pulled through just fine, and therefore feel like my own children would probably be like the majority of children and pull through just fine, too, I now feel a greater awareness of those rare people — such as children born prematurely and people of all ages who have compromised immune systems, and feel like once my children reached an age where they were out and about more and interacting a lot with other kids (basically school-age), I should have helped the herd immunity by having them vaccinated.
So we resumed our older daughter’s vaccines last summer when she was fourteen, as well as beginning the process for our younger daughter. If I had it to do over, I would have given them absolutely no vaccines as babies, but would have started the vaccination process sooner than the ages of nine and fourteen. Since both breastfed beyond the age of four (which is actually pretty average when the child has total say about when he or she is ready to completely wean from the breast), I think we would have delayed it till at least after they’d weaned, and possibly even a couple years longer since they weren’t really in large group settings until they were much older.
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Dear JB. Please treat your audience with respect.
What is the mechanism by which vaccines supposedly cause autism?
It’s the “I have a stone that keeps elephants away” fallacy, no care is given on whether it actually is connected.
Yes, countries with better health systems have an increasing incidence of AD but they also have been getting better at identifying children with AD, that alone explains some of the correlation.
But what worries me is that snippet about Measles Vaccines being deadlier than Measles. WE ARE SMARTER THAN THAT. Including yourself. You know that before vaccines were commonplace diseases like measles were killing a lot of people limited only by the population numbers and travel technology of the time.
Comments like those reflect bad on you.
Also this:
> I find it amusing that critics are quick to point out that parents who choose to forgo or delay vaccinations tend to be white, college- educated, well-off married couples equally divided between political spectrum, but who are simultaneously uneducated, stupid, conspiracy-prone, religious fanatics incapable of critical thought.
This is meaningless. You know that “Women Studies” professors are college educated, well-off people that nonetheless show signs of being ignorant, stupid, conspiracy prone, fanatics incapable of critical thought.
The one thing I can agree with is that thanks to the parents that do vaccinate their children providing herd immunity will your children probably don’t need to be vaccinated. It’s a logical, albeit egoist way to think about it.
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Smallpox was eradicated world wide, due to high saturation of vaccination in most of the world.
Many other diseases have not yet reached this point. Measles was declared eradicated in the US in 2000ish, but that isn’t the case around the world. And as long as it’s not eradicated all over the world (like smalpox) you have to continue larg scale vaccination.
Not everyone in a population have to be vaccinated to eradicate the disease, but enough need to in order to stop spreading.
“Also, by the way, I consider my kids safe due to their vaccinations, I don’t really care what the neighbor does, because if there’s an outbreak and their kids get the disease, so what.”
Okay, well I do care. Because there are people who CAN’T be vaccinated. People on immune dampening meds due to organ transplants for instance. It’s the fact that the rest of us vaccinate that these people are safe.
That was always the trade off, vaccinate ENOUGH people to keep EVERYONE safe. But the more people preache for the abolishment of vaccination the more people are unsafe.
At the same time, even if you have been vaccinated it might not have stuck to you. So you might think you are “safe” but in reality you are being protected by the shield of vaccinated people. (Chicken Pox is supposed to be a one time thing, and then you are immune, and yet there are cases of people getting it twice… just an example)
All in all vaccination is a communal effort, and thinking “I’m safe, I vaccinated” is as selfish as thinking “We don’t have measles in the US, so I will keep my child away from autism by not vaccinating”
All that said, maybe we should reconsider the rate and when we vaccinate. But abolishing vaccination is like going back to the dark ages.
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> A lot more of them are than you think.
No, we don’t. Source. Myself and other people I have talked to.
Of course you have a bias and I cannot just override it. But I can try to balance it by telling no, we are not. Really.
After all its always better to argue with actual people and not just straw men in your head. Which of course applies to all of us.
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I’m an RN (haven’t practiced in a couple of years now though). I got the vaccinations when required, but I’ve never understood the staunch resistance to even question vaccinations. Autism rates have been shooting up dramatically, up over 1,000% percent in the last 40 years. A child today receives about 70 vaccine doses before he’s 18…compared to the half dozen or so doses most people over 35 received.
It’s crazy no one can even question this stuff. The tobacco comparison you made is accurate, IMO. Flu vaccines are the worst…not only are they annual there is no reason to believe they are effective based on an objective evaluation of the evidence.
Look at this, from the Cochrane Collaboration, something of a gold standard for evidence-based practice regarding healthcare decisions. In the report entitled ‘vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults’:
WARNING:
This review includes 15 out of 36 trials funded by industry (four had no funding declaration). An earlier systematic review of 274 influenza vaccine studies published up to 2007 found industry funded studies were published in more prestigious journals and cited more than other studies independently from methodological quality and size. Studies funded from public sources were significantly less likely to report conclusions favorable to the vaccines. The review showed that reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is thin but there is evidence of widespread manipulation of conclusions and spurious notoriety of the studies. The content and conclusions of this review should be interpreted in light of this finding.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001269.pub4/abstract
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Couldn’t find a study with a non-vaccinated control group, could you? You keep your blind faith there, Richard. I will maintain my critical skepticism.
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You’ve presented an all vaccinations or no vaccinations false dichotomy. Which is typical when this subject comes up. Fortuately we live in a world outside of excluded middle fallacy land. All vaccinations or none.
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11:37 does a pretty good job of explaining why ‘autism’ is on the rise.
Much like ADHD.. or the definition of rape.. once you open it up to include a whole swath of new criteria/behaviors, the numbers will of course rise when Autism becomes Autism Spectrum Disorder (including Asperger’s syndrome, Rett syndrome, PDD-NOS, and childhood disintegrative disorder)
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Now that I’m 50, I can tell you that “elderly” is not till retirement age — 67 for me. But I didn’t manage to have any pregnancies that made it past the first trimester after giving birth to my youngest shortly before turning 41. The cases of truly elderly women having babies with their own eggs is extremely rare. 🙂
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Another thing which tends to make my sympathetic to the anti-vaxers and their lack of faith in the medical community is circumcision. We circumcised my first son, because we didn’t know better and because the doctors all said it was the thing to do and was better for him, health-wise, and had no down sides.
Then we saw the procedure. No anesthesia, just strap him down and take hold of his penis and start cutting. INSANITY.
So if you’ve been through that and those same doctors say “Oh, stick this needle into your child’s arm. It’s better for him, and it’s unhealthy for him not to get it, and there are no down sides”, I can easily see where someone, having been bitten once, might say “Um, yeah, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
Again, that doesn’t make it the RIGHT choice, but I can see where they’re coming from. I still resent the doctors for telling us that circumcising my older son was the right thing to do. We didn’t make that mistake the second time around.
Add that to our world with the internet and studies which can show ANYTHING (for every scientific study you can point to that shows no evidence of a link between vaccinations and autism, there’s another site which has studies which claim to show EXACTLY that). Now, one batch of those studies tends to have a more scientific basis, but how is a non-scientifically minded person supposed to tell the difference?
I just refuse to accept the idea from so many people that anti-vaxers are somehow evil or stupid. They’re filtering through the information available to them, having concerns and are doing their best to do what they think is right for their kids.
By the way, we also were delayed-vaxers. I never understood the idea that they tell you that nursing is best because a child gets most of it’s immunity from it’s mother through the milk the first year of life… so therefore the child’s immune system isn’t really fully developed until at least a year of life… and yet we’re going to start shooting his or her body full of vaccines at just a few weeks of age.
It really seems like they should be done later and more spaced out, much like JB did.
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SHould have said, ‘it’s not all vaccinations or none’ with the last sentence. Cost to gains should be weighed, but there needs to be an honest assessment of the risk to reward. That ISN’T happening right now. They just keep adding more and more obligatory vaccinations…often for diseases that are either extremely unlikely and/or non-lethal. THe uprise in the rate of Shingles has been attributed to the mandatory chicken pox vaccination program. There are unforeseen consequences to all of this that aren’t being assessed.
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Speaking of the gut biome, I culture my own keffir. It has around 50 different friendly bacteria for the gut. Much more than yoghurt or cultured buttermilk. I also lactose ferment my own pickles. Cleared my digestive process right up. BTW, keffir processes lactose in milk as I understand it. JB, we’re just walking biological factories. Antibiotics and such kill off the good bacteria. Keffir produces it’s own antibiotics. Real easy to make. I procured my culture from Snowberry thru Amazon. We raised goats as children in New Mexico. My mother kept yoghurt going g year round and made cheese. But keffir is really worth looking into. You can mix in some syrup or strawberry jam if you wish. As to the vax, I see your point. I’m 58, and grew up in a different time. It wasn’t even optional. Your whole family could find themselves quarantined back then. I can remember polio. An iron lung is a slow way to die. If you were lucky, you just ended up severely crippled. No one went swimming in a pool. It had to be a river with good running water. Staggering out the vax makes sense. However, here’s the snake in the grass. Sick illegal children. Polio type diseases showing up again. Yes, again. Not exactly the same, but mutated. So, if I were to tread your path, I’d consider the most likely disease first and start the vax with that. The situation on the ground has changed. Diseases are HERE.
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Many theories making the rounds these days, it’s foolish to rule any of them out. As a *recovering* autist myself I have formed my own hypothesis based on personal experiences to throw in the ring:
1) Autistic symptoms and autistic brain structures are really symptoms of prolonged social isolation during formative years.
2) Social isolation is caused in many ways, one of which is a serious developmental disorder (what you might think of as classic “straightjacket” autism).
3) Higher functioning ASDs (gonna go out on a limb and say most people diagnosed these days) are not really related to the “classic” disorder described in 2)
4) Social changes in the last 50 years have caused more and more children to become involuntarily isolated from their peers and parents leading to a rise in autism. I’m thinking poor parenting, technology, an increasingly aggressive anti-intellectual culture inside and outside of school. Things used to be alot easier for the shy intellectual type, but no more.
What fits? Just off the top of my head:
– If you ignore “classic” autism, people on the spectrum are much more likely to be smart, shy, quiet, consciencious folk. Repeated ad nauseum to make parents/autists feel good/special. If you assume my theory is correct the link is obvious, smart kid + brutal anti-intellectual gangland school culture -> loser kid -> isolated kid -> autism
– Boys more affected by a large degree, I shouldn’t need to explain much about that on this blog.
– Technology. TV was always said to steal away normal human contact somewhat, now we have social media, gaming culture, the internet in general.
– (particularly relevant for earlier diagnoses) Crapola parents: firstly not giving their child enough of the correct attention, secondly being too afraid to intervene if they even notice their child being isolated from other children. Thirdly being caught up in fearful isolationist culture themselves: paedophile hysteria, health and safety hyper-awareness etc, this all rubs off on the kids. Thou shalt play in the streets no more little children.
– Primarily first world problem, yes ok that fits just about every other theory too, but still.
– Higher incidence of (mostly self reported I admit) comorbidity with a surprising variety of mental issues, homosexuality & gender confusion. Maybe it’s in the brain or maybe these seperate issues cause the initial isolation.
Just some rambling thoughts…
//As a side note, perhaps parents who choose not to vaccinate are less prone to making the parenting errors I mention above?
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Meant to say Lacto – ferment my own pickles. You know, how your grandma used to do with brine. Easy. Tasty. Fermented red tomatoes and onions with peppers and spices!
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JB, are you trying to get more death threats than I do!? Lol. I applaud the cojones you display on a regular basis. Keep up the good fight(s). The struggle is real!
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I agree withJB. However, you yourself know that diseases have come here with the illegals. What concerns me are the polio variants that are killing children.
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But, strangely…not on the rise with the Jehovah’s witness community?
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I dunno, it takes a kind of real ‘special’ to go around door to door trying to make others believe your sky daddy has a r.s.v.p for the first 144,000 people… which you think would have been filled up by now and the pearly gates have been shut making those down here still in favor of it even more ‘special’.
And when i say special – i mean the kind where your mom says you’re special special.
Maybe autism is rampant in that community or the Amish community, but because they so fear the outside world, you’ll never get an accurate survey. I think Forrest Gump would have been considered quite normal in the Amish community – they’d just call him Captain Slowly.
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Jehovah’s witnesses (unlike the Amish) go to our schools. If they have autism, they can’t just ignore it….they’ll be tested and either medicated or thrown out of the public school system if the parents don’t accede. They use the same healthcare insurance and blue cross/blue shield actuaries recognize they don’t get autism at anywhere near the rate of the community at large of which they are a part of. This doesn’t make you raise an eyebrow at all? Just chalk it up to them stoopid religious nutters don’t need no meds?
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Well said. I agree that much of this is definitional error, and pathologizing normal healthy behavior (in many cases).
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The big picture: Controlling borders would help reduce our risk of disease too. Since we currently have an open-borders policy, Washington is pushing vaccinations to head off mobs of angry people who realized they got sick from their new neighbors…
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No balanced study between tobacco and lung cancer has actually been carried out and publicized (as opposed to pollution and lung cancer). Statistics are, as usual, bent toward agendas: A person is counted as a “smoker” if he’s smoked cigarettes at any time within the past thirty years. You’ll never see a death certificate that lists the cause as “smoking,” because it’s impossible to prove, even circumstantially.
The “link” between smoking and lung cancer is social engineering at its finest — a long campaign to make smoking “not cool anymore” (which is required for superficial, impressionable Western citizens; health has nothing to do with it, although it makes for a great subterfuge).
So what would be the agenda behind twisting stats and fabricating a link, not to mention the childish and irresponsible “second-hand smoke” hoax? Could it be that the pharmaceutical corporations who have sponsored all of those ridiculous anti-smoking billboards and commercials make billions from nicotine replacements, such as anti-depressants and smoking-cessation products?
The amount of smokers has reduced drastically over the past twenty years, and yet the rate of lung cancer has gone up. Hmmmm.
As with the vaccinations, a realistic study on the risks vs. the benefits of tar and nicotine (two separate substances, of course) has been in order for a long time. But that sort of thing doesn’t get the attention and the funding. Hysteria does.
The (literally) proven benefits of nicotine, such as the prevention of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ulcerative colitis, have indeed been shown in numerous German, Indian, Australian and Japanese studies. You won’t hear that on the American or English news, of course. In the meantime, people who drink alcohol and eat fast food often insist that smokers should pay higher insurance rates. The hypocrisy is uproarious.
These comments aren’t out of the blue. I’m simply drawing a correlation between tobacco, since JB saw fit to include an awesome old Camel ad to illustrate a point, and vaccinations, vis’a’vis the popularized “proof” that isn’t actually based on neutral studies. It’s simultaneously comical and sad to me how many people will pick and choose the subjects about which they’ll resist being gullible. It all hinges on one’s bias toward his own poisons.
I don’t smoke, by the way.
Great article, as usual, JB.
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I tend to agree with JB’s approach BUT it also appears that your children were not subjected to the daycare world which is a breeding ground for all sorts of health issues. So yes, by all means lets look at delayed vaccines but when children are increasingly being pushed into institutional daycare I just don’t know how feasible it is.
The other day I saw the following about the vaccine debate – My son can’t bring peanuts to school because someone might be allergic, but your unvaccinated child can bring in measles, whooping cough, mumps and chickenpox – It seems that we have decided policy and directions that are all over the place.
However I tend to agree with Kate at smalldeadanimals.com when she wrote this piece in the National Post a number of years ago. http://www.katewerk.com/modestproposal.html
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How fascinating!
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Well, how about we close the borders from our side, too, and stop putting their subsistence farmers and artisans out of business by selling them our cheap mass-produced grains and other products? Oh, and legalize recreational drugs like marijuana in order to take much of the profitability out of organized crime? Most “illegal” people would rather stay close to their loved ones and raise their families in their own communities — they just also want their children to be safe and have enough food and enough of the other things they need, and they don’t want to live in fear of being victims of a mass murder anytime they can’t pay the local drug lords their “protection” fees.
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There is a very thorough and very compelling new study out from the Journal of the Royal Science of Medicine which shows an extremely strong link between circumcision pain and the development of Autism and Autism Spectrum Disorder.
This study does NOT specifically claim that circumcision status causes autism, as the critics have suggested, but instead makes a very compelling argument that the PAIN of the circumcision itself and the pain of the up to 6 week long healing process may be contributing to a heightened RISK of developing neurological conditions such as Autism, ASD, and ADHD.
This may well prove a seminal discovery is a much misunderstood disease such as Autism.
Pain seems to be a confounding factor.
Though there are clearly many other risks involved, such as genetic predisposition, environment, chemical reactions, and early childhood diseases, Pain seems to be a very strong triggering factor for developmental damage to the infant brain.
In the USA the standard vaccination protocols call for an infant to receive something like 36 different injections before one year of age, not including various heel pricks, blood tests and other painful procedures, all in the name of “good medicine.”
Vaccination ingredients may well be exonerated when it comes to the development of early onset of Autism, but the PAIN of those injections may well be the most likely issue.
Add to the multiple injections of an ever increasing number of vaccines a brutal circumcision that takes up to 6 weeks to fully heal, and you may begin to see why male babies are at such an increased risk of developing Autism, ASD and ADHD.
Just some food for thought.
Thanks for writing this wonderful article.
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As I personally know a couple of people with severe peanut allergies, and know that a deadly reaction can be caused simply by touching a surface with a residue of peanut oil or breathing in particles in the air, and as peanut allergies seem to be on the rise, I am fully in favor of banning peanuts and peanut butter in all day care centers as well as elementary schools, at the very least.
Both our church’s children’s program and our area homeschool group request that no one bring in any products containing peanuts. I understand that parents of small children with severe allergies will have to watch them like hawks any time they’re out in the larger community — but why wouldn’t other parents care enough to allow those parents and children at least a few safe zones where they can relax a bit? Especially in daycare settings, it’s quite a tall order to expect one teacher caring for ten children to make sure Jimmy doesn’t nibble on Sally’s peanut butter cookie.
At this point, I don’t know of any statistics comparing the risk of dying from a peanut allergy to the risk of dying from exposure to measles — but I just know that as a parent of children with no known food allergies, I’m not putting them at any risk at all by sending them to school with oatmeal cookies instead of peanut butter cookies, whereas you can read the vaccine inserts and see that they all carry at least a small degree of risk.
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Thank you, James. That is a theory that definitely resonates. It seems we have multiple corridors to explore here.
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Here is a link to the article I referenced.
http://jrs.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/01/07/0141076814565942.full
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Those really aren’t compelling examples of how the vaccinated would still be at risk of contagion from the unvaccinated, especially when we’re talking about something as grave as forcing health decisions on people, at the threat of punishment. So Liam’s point stands: by and large, the only people you expose to risk of disease by not vaccinating your kids or yourself are your kids, yourself, and anyone else not vaccinated. Sounds like a clear cut personal liberty issue to me.
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I like and approve of your vaccination stance with a small nitpick. It turns out that lung cancer is not necessarily caused by tobacco but rather tends to be estogen-dependent. Tobacco, in moderation, might even be protective. The Greatest Generation, who were largely smokers, also had the greatest longevity. However, that’s no reason to pick up a pack of stale, additive-laden Camels, particularly if you have any of the modern health conditions.
Admonitions that we should all start smoking however are as foolish as saying that we all need to vaccinate children before they’re strong enough to withstand it. People who are compelled by circumstances to surrender their children to outside authorities before the children even have differentiated personalities will likewise be compelled to sterilize–that is, vaccinate them. That should tell us all something right there.
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http://www.lef.org/Magazine/2014/1/Autism-and-Vitamin-D/Page-01
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Maybe if vaccine induced autism were actually a thing. And no, the immune system is not comprised of the microbiome, to completely different things. The immune system consists of lymphocytes (B and T cells), leukocytes (macrohpages, neutrophils, et al.) and other cells belonging to your body. Vaccines are designed to stimulate the immune system, specifically to induce B or T cells to react to antigen associated with the vaccine (usually dead bacteria of virus particles), form memory cells, and thereby protect the body from future infections.
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People might be more compassionate if anti-vaxers were only potentially harming themselves, rather than just their children, and others who aren’t vaccinated.
“Wow, what an asshole, thinking he or she has the right to tell me what I should do for myself and my kids.”
I can tell them what they should do with their kids: they should vaccinate them. I happen to be right and they happen to be wrong, and I have the evidence to prove it. The can choose to do whatever they want. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be making the wrong choice. A parent might just as well let their kids smoke and say “well, they’re my kids, don’t you think I know what’s best for them?”
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There have been a number of good, thought provoking ideas here. It might be useful to remind folks that kids survived even before vaccination. I find the lack of any attempt to study the significant concerns about vaccination telling – it’s not what they’re saying but what they’re avoiding that worries me. I think the delayed vaccination approach is and excellent idea. I also think that we could eliminate one of the biggest arguments against delay by implementing even more choice – school vouchers. Great, your public school doesn’t want my unvaccinated kid, that means there’s a market for schools that cater to just those children, or perhaps homeschooling might be the better choice – Personally I’d pick either one over public schools – always.
Sounds like an opportunity to me, just need to, as usual, get the busybody government to stop forcing on us what a lot of us don’t want.
Don’t want kids bringing peanuts to daycare – Okay – how about a daycare that doesn’t want your peanut allergic kid. Yet another economic opportunity. Choice is always better than coercion.
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I understand that the VAERS database that you quote, giving 108 deaths ’caused’ by measles, is not cause and effect, rather it simply records events; and no more than that. The 108 figure is misleading.
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When I was 4, I wound up in an isolation ward with diptheria, the probable source of which was the vaccination two weeks earlier. Curiously, the vaccine for diptheria does not protect you from infection, so the herd argument is irrelevant. It protects you from the toxins produced by the organism. Nevertheless, I was pretty damn sick.
Then, bless them, they gave me contaminated polio vaccine. The early batches were contaminated with a chimpanzee virus SV40, which can cause cancer in later life. In fact, a high proportion (70%, I have read) of patients with the asbestos-related aggressive lung cancer, mesothelioma, have been exposed to SV40. Guess what?
I have mesothelioma.
Not only that, but the only treatment is chemotherapy. You are not allowed to discuss or talk about “alternatives” in the UK, in spite of many scientific papers showing the effectiveness of some of them. So, I went forward with the ghastly standard treatment protocol, to abandon it after a few sessions because it made no difference to the tumour.
Unfortunately, it had an effect on me. I am now a “Floxie”, crippled and in pain from an adverse reaction to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin, administered as part of the chemo (which wrecks your immune system). The cancer, so far, is stable, which I put down to my “alternative” regime.
http://www.ciproispoison.com/
The doctors seem surprised when I refuse medications……
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I realize “not everyone who is diagnosed with auism is diagnosed through schools”
and I don’t “think the schools would ‘catch’ every case of autism”
Nor have I stated that. Nor have I even implied that.
It’s not a correlation=causation game.
You realize that most discoveries aren’t made with a “eureka!” but a “hey, that’s interesting…”?
Rates of autism are not up 1000 percent due to new diagnoses. BTW, someone mentioned peanut allergies below…those are up about as much. Do you believe those cases went undiagnosed before too when everyone was serving pb and j sandwiches at schools without a care?
But thankyou for this response…it illustrates exactly what I’m referring to any time anyone mentions that vaccination MIGHT be harmful. Paint the person as a wack job making an absurd claim, rather than actually consider the evidence.
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They know if the mother has hep B, it’s in the bloodwork Mark. No reason to vaccinate tens of millions of newborns en masse.
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““The review showed that reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is thin but there is evidence of widespread manipulation of conclusions and spurious notoriety of the studies. ”
Nonsense. But if somebody said it, it must be true. No need to look at the actual hundreds of well-done studies that have demonstrated flu vaccine effectiveness, we’ll just dismiss all of them as part of the giant ‘social engineering’ or freemason conspiracy or whatever.
That “somebody” is the Cochrane Collaboration and you simply arbitratily dismiss it as “nonsense”?
Case closed.
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Did you even read the italics? IT WAS A SYSTEMIC REVIEW OF 274 PUBLISHED INFLUENZA VACCINATION STUDIES.
(“aw…pish pash yaw….”)
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Just do add…re the CDC…these are the guys who said ebola was “actually hard to get” and “droplet precaution measures will prevent it” right? When everyone in the know was wearing a hazmat suit dealing with the stuff?
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For some reason, I posted below something I intended to put up here:
Re the CDC…these are the guys who said ebola was “actually hard to get” and “droplet precaution measures will prevent it” right? When everyone in the know was wearing a hazmat suit dealing with the stuff?
I could link to medical studies showing that flu vaccination in nursing homes actually decreases life expectancy for the residents but I have a feeling that would be lost and pointless too, if you’re just going to dismiss the Cochrane Collaboration so arbitrarily.
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It IS hard to get. Not impossible, and the consequences are high, but how many incidental cases have their been? If it had been the flu and the same patients, there would have been more of an outbreak.
You confuse precaution with likelihood. The odds are against my ever being hit by lightning, but I still try to take shelter and not stand in open puddles when there is a lightning storm…
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Please link your evidence in which the control group is unvaccinated children. I’ll wait.
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I dumped most of Mark’s comments. No room for condescending zealot assholes making claims he can’t back up.
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Oh, shoot. You know everything. There aren’t new discoveries of the microbiome being made almost daily & it’s implications for the immune system aren’t significant/important/at all relevant. The gut & brain do not effect one another either.
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Liz, I don’t think you mean Jehovahs witnesses. In the 1930’s they railed against vaccines. The have long since abandoned those practices. JW’s get vaccines like everyone else. Trust me, I know.
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I wondered what happened…now I sound monomaniacal though,
with the out-of-context long string of reponses. 🙂
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“Don’t want kids bringing peanuts to daycare – Okay – how about a daycare that doesn’t want your peanut allergic kid. Yet another economic opportunity. Choice is always better than coercion.”
I think virtually all daycares in the U.S. are private, so the reason why many of them are banning peanuts actually IS a business decision and not a case of governmental coercion. I think there are currently more parents of peanut-allergic children telling daycare providers, “We want to feel reasonably sure that our children will still be alive when we come to pick them up” than there are parents of non-peanut-allergic children saying, “If you won’t feed our children peanuts, that’s a deal-breaker and we’ll pull them out and find a center that will accommodate their need for nuts.”
If a significant number of parents actually want so badly for their children to have peanuts at daycare — then, yes, it would be a great economic opportunity for a daycare to open up with the logo, “This is a nut-friendly establishment.” 🙂
I have a feeling, though, that while some parents do indeed gripe about the inconvenience of accommodating children with life-threatening peanut allergies, most of them aren’t really outraged to the extent of changing daycares if they’ve found one where their child is happy.
As to public primary schools, I don’t see it as coercive to have a policy about them being peanut-free, any more than it’s coercive to say that my teenaged daughter can’t bring adult scissors to school in her backpack. As long as you live in a state that allows you the option of homeschooling, submitting to a slew of procedures is purely optional and not something you’re being coerced into.
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I’m so sorry you’re going through that, and I really appreciate your sharing your story here!
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Thankyou speculativemeasures, that’s a fair point.
The article I linked to above is a large sample size, not the overall Jehovah’s witness community at large. Tens of thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chicago that have never been vaccinated and they don’t have autism.
“The few autistic children Homefirst sees were vaccinated before their families became patients, Eisenstein said. “I can think of two or three autistic children who we’ve delivered their mother’s next baby, and we aren’t really totally taking care of that child — they have special care needs. But they bring the younger children to us. I don’t have a single case that I can think of that wasn’t vaccinated.”
The autism rate in Illinois public schools is 38 per 10,000, according to state Education Department data; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the national rate of autism spectrum disorders at 1 in 166 — 60 per 10,000.
“We do have enough of a sample,” Eisenstein said. “The numbers are too large to not see it. We would absolutely know. We’re all family doctors. If I have a child with autism come in, there’s no communication. It’s frightening. You can’t touch them. It’s not something that anyone would miss.”
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BTW, most recent data for autism is 1 out of 80 children. It seems to be doubling every ten years or so. I don’t see how there is any denying these figures are off the charts.
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Here’s an article entitled ‘Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past”
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
From fifteen years ago. And of course the polar ice caps should all be gone now
Wasn’t so long that only an “idiot” would question the government science behind those predictions. Opinions change all the time in the medical field. There was a time when almost everyone got their tonsils out, antibiotics were handed out like candy, there were xray machines in shoe stores. Currently protonix is a core measure standard hospital prophylaxis but this might change soon….since new studies show it greatly increases the risk of C Diff.
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The “I’m right and your wrong” crowd really pisses me off. Are we talking about an engineering question about whether a bridge can handle the weight of the vehicle traffic? That’s easy to prove.
I was arguing with a liberal about two parent families and their effectiveness over single parent families and I got the response above, and I thought: “What an arrogant cunt.” Sorry to be vulgar, but I actually am using that word because of the impact it has.
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Sam, I have no problem with anyone claiming they are “right” about something, but post your evidence and check the methodology before you waste our time with it. Funny how these sanctimonious asshats can manage it, ain’t it?
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Do you mean that the liberal said to cite some kind of study with a control group to prove the effectiveness of two-parent families? I think there are probably an abundance of such studies, but I guess you’d both have to agree on the meaning of the term “effectiveness.”
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The biggest problem with “for the good of society” arguments is that of the slippery slope…
Well, vaccines are necessary to protect the population – so it’s your responsibility to get them…
Well, vaccines are necessary to protect the population – so it’s now mandatory that you get them on this hotly debated schedule, only to find out decades later that they do cause autism, or other diseases or something.
The libertarians are continuously going on about how the government should be less intrusive of our lives, and they’ve got a point. Seat belt laws, drunk driving laws, sure, we can get behind these things – but the government, state, federal or otherwise, are always introducing new laws, or making existing ones more restrictive. This feeds the bureaucracy and reduces personal freedoms. Someone has to draw a line in the sand and say “no more”.
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I just realized that you were responding to my post re ebola, Liam.
I’m not confusing precautions with likelihood. By “droplet precautions” I’m referring specifically to the transmission-based precautions used in the hospitals. The CDC’s initial prescribed precautions were simply wrong. There is no excuse.
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Yeah, and there’s the “All or nothing” aspect of it.
Chicken pox is generally safest when you get it as a child, and for most people, is not a hazard. The vaccine prevents it, sure, but vaccines tend to wear off while having the disease generally doesn’t.
So… I’m of the opinion that you don’t vaccinate for CP as a child, and then if the kid hits puberty and hasn’t had it, THEN you get the vaccine to protect against getting it when it’s truly dangerous.
And what about the HPV vaccine, which protects against about 1/3 of the strains of HPV, not the most virulent ones (last I checked), and by the way doesn’t really do much for boys, but we’re talking about making them mandatory for boys as well, to protect girls. Just imagine how well that would go off, if we started insisting that women do something that was of no benefit to them, solely because it might have a benefit to men?
But there’s no “Polio is vital and you must get it, but Chicken Pox is recommended but not mandatory”, it’s “Hey, we have this vaccine, add it to the list of things you must get.”
And once we get there, are we next going to hear people suggesting that the flu vaccine should be mandatory, even though in about 1 year out of 3, it’s completely ineffective because the strains of virus that end up being prevalent aren’t the ones they guessed at and put in the vaccine?
I’m really not a big fan of taking away people’s bodily autonomy. With kids it’s harder to judge. I’m OK with you opting to die rather than taking a blood transfusion, if that’s your belief system. I’m not so sure I’m OK with you allowing your children to die for the same reason. And so I suppose the anti-anti-vaxers have a point there, to an extent. On the other side of the coin, though, if we force everyone to get them as a child, no one ever has the option to choose when they’re an adult.
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Fair enough. But why do i get the feeling those who don’t get vaccinated would not like to live in a community of other like minded non vaccinated people? If one stepped back into the manosphere argument – our society is currently fucked up because too many women abrogated their ‘gender roles’ and now we have daddy government subsidizing the difference to allow women to ‘play’ like men (and then MGTOW exacerbate it) . Society pays the bills when enough men and women decide to opt out of performing/doing their part for the greater good. If all men decided to ‘opt out’ of working heavy/dangerous jobs, petroleum production ceases, goods aren’t made, transportation ceases, power goes out, women panic and beg for patriarchy’s return.
So too we have the anti vax crowd who enjoy the lull that vaccinations have brought our society, far removed from the time when people were suffering and dying in high quantities due to these illnesses. If enough people are convinced of the anti vax argument – the herd protection ceases, and we’ll get to a time when people are begging doctors to inject them again to protect them from ‘gods wrath’. Society will pick up the tab brutally when enough people decide to opt out of the vac program.
As an aside, there’s some evidence autism actually starts in the womb so perhaps people should start looking at moms diet/natal care/family history/environmental exposure before they start blaming an injection that is safer today than it was was decades ago.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/274655.php
Thimerosal, the suspected culprit, isn’t even used anymore and rates continue to go up? Oh well, if at first you don’t succeed..
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I was about to jokingly suggest that autism’s rise correlates directly with the rise of feminism…
when i suddenly had the urge to Google another pet theory of mine – since the rise of feminism, more women have been sent to work while pregnant rather than staying at home. Especially in the US where mat leave is so hard to come by by all accounts – and women having to endure greater amounts of stress at work (not the stress of overcooking dinner, but managerial stress or gonna get fired if i don’t make my quota stress).. that this stress could directly impact fetal dev.
Sure enough google.. http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/preterm.htm
This links back to the earlier theory that autism starts in the womb during gestation, not something after the fact.
Autism
#thankafeminist
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Gut microbiome participation in immunity is limited to what is ingested and enters through the alimentary canal. By definition it cannot affect things which enter the bloodstream directly (e.g. injection) or through the alveoli. It is literally impossible for a vaccination to affect gut the microbiome.
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I love you Judgy Bitch, but you have just provided a perfect example of how education in one area is utterly useless in another. The fact that educated, middle class people are doing this only proves that people like you falsely assume your education to be applicable outside your wheelhouse. Your reference to mercury in MMR is telling – it hasn’t been used in over a decade yet diagnosis continue to climb.
Thing is, we already know exactly where autism originates thanks to thalidomide: neural tube closure defect in day 10-20 of gestation. There is absolutely nothing that you can do after that point to affect the specific disorder. Sadly, the term “autism spectrum disorder” is blurring the line between etiologies.
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I know enough to understand what a control group is and why it is important. There is an extremely large self-selected control group available. Why is it not being studied?
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A quick google of microbiome & immune system finds us:
Quote from the link…”Understanding how our diet & nutritional status influence the composition & dynamic operations of our gut microbial communities & the innate & adaptive arms of our immune system…”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3298082/
On genes, microbiota & the immune system:
http://www.microbediscovery.org/blog/2014/05/27/new-research-finds-genes-influences-microbiome-influence-immune-system/
“Species Specific Microbes May Be Key to a Healthy Immune System”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/species-specific-microbes-immune/
You may not want to believe that our guts have anything to do with health and you’re free to believe whatever you want. As we learn more about the vast microorganisms that live in & on us, we’re coming to realize how little we actually know. Feel free to learn or be ignorant; the learning will go on with or without you.
I think it’s easy for someone who doesn’t have children, who hasn’t seen it happen, who doesn’t accept that parents are the experts in their children, to say that vaccines definitely do not cause autism. You must then know what does cause it; if not, then you can’t say what doesn’t cause it.
For anyone else who is interested in this & more specifically how birth effects this, here’s more: http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2014/06/birth-canal-bacteria-c-section
Maria Gloria Domingeuz-Bello is leading the way on this aspect of microbiota research. Interesting stuff.
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You answered your own question: “self selected.” There’s a huge problem in that the comparison between vaccinated and non vaccinated needs to stratified. The non vaccinated are very much over represented by upper middle class white leftists. They are often hypersensitive about their children’s health and will go to the ends of the earth to find a doctor tell them what they want to hear. further, their children are often underexposed to sunshine and animals and the outdoors. It would be nice to see a comparison of upper middle class white vaccinated children with upper middle class white non vaccinated children.
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Because it’s a zero-sum world and there are lots of real problems to spend money on. This is not worth the effort.
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Control for variables. Not that hard.
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I am well aware that gut microbiome has much to do with health. But the gut microbiome is not ‘most of the immune system.’ It isn’t the immune system at all. It may be influenced by it in that it responds to elements of it in some auto-immune diseases, but they are two very different things.
“I think it’s easy for someone who doesn’t have children, who hasn’t seen it happen, who doesn’t accept that parents are the experts in their children, to say that vaccines definitely do not cause autism. You must then know what does cause it; if not, then you can’t say what doesn’t cause it.”
This isn’t just bullshit, it’s dangerous bullshit. People abuse and murder their children all the time. Parents neglect their children, male poor choices for their children often. Nothing about being able to reproduce makes a person qualified to do anything.
If you had a kid with heart disease, the cardiologist whose never met your kid can do more for them than you can to fix it. Some people do no more about something than you do. Deal with it.
Oh, and just because I don’t know what causes autism doesn’t mean I don’t know that it isn’t cause by eating mozarella cheese on Wednesday afternoons. Why? Because there’s no convincing evidence that that’s what causes it.
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Well I guess that means everything anyone with them says or ever has said can be dismissed. You seem more interested in whose saying something rather than what they’re saying. So when the Cochrane Collaboration comes out against vaccines, then your appeal to authority would actually be a ‘proper’ appeal to authority. “I know of a study that will show,… but why bother posting it.” Very convincing argument. Doubt this will get posted though since JB has decided to get in touch with her inner Stasi.
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Non-controllable variables when there are no counterexamples.
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Oh, and I looked for the Cochrane analysis. You completely mischaracterized even what they were talking about. I can only assume you are referring to this:
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2013/09/analysis-finds-limited-evidence-hcw-flu-vaccination
In which they find “”We simply don’t have good evidence that vaccination of healthcare personnel prevents influenza transmission to patients.”
In other words, they were examining whether mandatory flu vaccines for healthcare workers reduce *transmission* of the disease within institutional settings. Not whether the flu vaccine reduces the probability of catching the disease.
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My second last paragraph: Who’s, not whose, and know, not know. goddamit.
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Why oh why do the posts where I keep posting links to studies to demonstrate my arguments keep disappearing? Evidence is scary.
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Just to give an example of the hypocrisy of the entire argument, one of my friends on Facebook just posted a link to a blog the title of which was something like “health is not an obligation.”
The idea of the blog post was to argue against fat shaming and shaming people who don’t exercise and shaming people who don’t eat is healthfully as they could. And another one of my friends commented on the post that this blog really resonated with her as a motorcyclist, because people are always telling her she shouldn’t write a motorcycle because of the risks involved and how much an accident on her part would cost others in terms of health care premiums, etc.
And yet both of these people are people I have previously seen post long screeds against the anti-vaccination crowd.
So… if I’m fat, lazy or eat a piss poor diet, that’s my body, my choice, no one should shame my decisions nor expect me to owe them my health… until the subject of vaccinations comes along, then suddenly it’s no longer your body or your choice, and we SHOULD shame people and expect them to owe us their health.
This is why I say, although I’m not an anti-vaccination guy, I find them less odious on the whole (there are exceptions) than the anti-anti-vaccination crusaders.
I hate hypocrisy, and while it may not apply to every a-a-v crusader, these sorts of dichotemies seem to show up a lot. By the way, one of the above posters is also an ardent feminist, who in the context of abortion will argue that NOTHING is more sacred than bodily autonomy… But get her on the topic of vaccinations, and suddenly it borders on criminal that anyone should be allowed to make their own choices or control their own bodies…
And as I think about it, another of my friends who rails about how the anti-vax crowd are “ignoring science” along with his wife… is also close to 400 lbs, his wife has to be over 500, they’ll waddle into a restaurant and order the largest, most heavily caloric, artery clogging meal and down the entire thing, then ask for the dessert menu, I’m not really sure their in a position to argue that anyone else is ignoring science as it relates to health.
Again, I have the right to protect myself and/or my kids as I see fit, I just don’t buy the argument that anyone else owes it to me to make the same choices.
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So many typos and auto-“correct” failures. My apologies. Hopefully the meaning conveys.
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And of course, the problem with the vaccinations vs transfusions argument is clear: the immediacy of the danger.
If you are in a transfusion situation, you are at high risk of death without one. Vaccinations have only existed for 75 years or so and yet the human race survived the preceding thousands of years without them.
I think seat belts in cars and helmets on skiers are a good idea, and I wear both even though I live in a state which does not require them… but I would vote against any attempt to make them legally mandatory.
The problem is, it’s a continuum, and a question of where along the safety spectrum you fall. Most people would agree with the mandatory transfusion as needed to save a toddler’s life. Most would DISAGREE with a mandatory program of keeping that child safe by confining it to a padded room with no access to anything more dangerous than safety scissors. Vaccines fall somewhere in the middle, so why is one person’s opinion on which side of the risk/benefit equation they fall any more valid than anyone else’s?
And once we’ve beaten this horse to death, shall we then proceed to take up the next quasi-religious health crusade: whether fluoridated water is a health boon or a huge health risk?
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Mark “Oh, and I looked for the Cochrane analysis.”
Well, you didn’t have to look very far. I offered the handy link.
“You completely mischaracterized even what they were talking about.”
Did I now? I said: “Flu vaccines are the worst…not only are they annual there is no reason to believe they are effective based on an objective evaluation of the evidence.”
Then I quoted the conclusion WARNING of the report directly. I’ve mischaracterized nothing. Does it truly give you no pause for concern that “reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is thin but there is evidence of widespread manipulation of conclusions and spurious notoriety of the studies”? If not, there really isn’t anything else that needs to be said. That’s the most interesting line in the study.
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Just to add…they’re openly admitting that the results CAN’T BE TRUSTED (excuse me, “The content and conclusions of this review should be interpreted in light of this finding”). They’re analyzed all of these flu vaccination studies, and this is the conclusion they’ve drawn.
This is extremely telling.
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JB, something weird is happening with the response feature…the last two posts were intended to be a response to Mark.
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Mark: “Well I guess that means everything anyone with them says or ever has said can be dismissed. You seem more interested in whose saying something rather than what they’re saying. So when the Cochrane Collaboration comes out against vaccines, then your appeal to authority would actually be a ‘proper’ appeal to authority. “I know of a study that will show,… but why bother posting it.”
Maybe, or maybe not. This is the way things work, in evidence based practice. If you see a trend, you investigate (example: Wow, a lot of people seem to be getting sick with c diff these days, and it used to be obscure…wonder if it’s something we’ve giving them on the floor?). Sometimes the powers-that-be ignore the evidence you see in front of your eyes…often there is some sort of underlying incentive (often profit…but not only that, there’s also save-your-*ss medical practices, and so forth). It’s good to be a critical thinker.
If the CDC, for instance, says ebola is hard to catch, and you turn on your television and watch the guys in hazmat suits handling patients and then hear that many of these people catch the disease in spite of all of these precautions, basic droplet precaution measures probably aren’t going to work very well.
I’d bet a good sum of money I’ve read a lot more studies on influenza vaccination than you, Mark. Instead of just relying on the CDC website, it helps to take a look at the actual studies where they came up with the statistics. Those are more accurate, and this is what I do. I’ve seen them tout studies that supposedly support their assertions for en masse flu vaccination, and when investigated actually says, “Universal immunisation of healthy adults is not supported by the results of this review”.
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This is a very interesting analogy between the benefits of vaccination and the benefits of patriarchy. I meant to respond to it yesterday but got busy reading the other posts and forgot. Your premise, as I understand it, is that both vaccines and patriarchy are really good for humanity, but that both are being eschewed by certain groups of people — parents who don’t trust the medical establishment on the one hand, and feminists on the other hand.
You seem to be saying that if both aberrant groups are allowed free reign to continue their rebellious practices, things will get so bad — in terms of the spread of vaccine-preventable illnesses among non-vaxers, and in terms of technology and the marketplace screeching to a grinding halt, and danger abounding, among non-patriarchal society — that ultimately, non-vaxers will end up begging for vaccines and feminists will end up begging for a return to patriarchy.
The main flaw in your argument is that we don’t have any absolute proof that either vaccines or patriarchy are 100% helpful and 0% harmful to humanity. As I’ve already shared, my husband and I went through a time of being absolutely opposed to vaccination but recently decided to vaccinate our children, and I still agree with J.B. about not vaxing babies. To some extent, I see it as a matter of studying the available information to the best of our ability, and making our most educated guess as to what’s best for our own children as well as for those around them who may be affected by our decision whether or not to vaccinate them.
As for patriarchy, it may have served humanity well in the past — but don’t you think an environment of shared freedoms and responsibilities for all human beings is a better model for today? I mean, if there were a non-invasive healthcare method developed that provided all the benefits of vaccines at a much lower risk, wouldn’t you opt to move on to that method rather than insisting on upholding the traditions of vaccination?
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Lol we just had a case of a 20 year old woman who died of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis after having measles as an infant. It’s quite rare, 1 in 10.000 gets it so it isn’t quite relevant unless we’ll start having a high number of measles infections once more.
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In regards to the Oregon-California study, the data actually in the report doesn’t quite indicate what the site suggests it does. For the record, I work as an analyst, so it is my day job to create, refine, and interpret statistics.
Important intro note: This report is based on the difference between the self-reporting (via telephone survey) of the majority population and the self-reporting of a minority population with atypical views, which opens a big can of worms in regards to bias. While the site specifically states why they think this criticism isn’t relevant, I will (hopefully) illuminate why their defense isn’t valid.
When looking over the data, a few things stood out to me:
1: There was no significant difference between the unvaccinated girls, partially vaccinated girls, and completely vaccinated girls. The (non-mutually exclusive) implications of this are that either vaccines only increase disorders in male children, or there is a reporting bias. We on this site generally agree that there is an over-reporting of ‘behavior problems’ strongly centered on male children. Perhaps people who do not vaccinate are less likely to buy into such over reporting and/or generally require more extreme presentment of symptoms to accept/seek a diagnosis, thus making them biased against reporting problems in male children. This actually would play into the non-vaccinators being better educated on average or engaging in diagnosis shopping. Yet this difference is was what the presenters pointed too as evidence that the report wasn’t biased by the self reporting.
2: There was no significant difference between the partially vaccinated and the completely vaccinated boys. This is a big counter-point to the idea that vaccines cause mental disorders. Very few things in biology are dose-independent. The vast majority are dose dependant, i.e. the greater the dose the greater the impact and the more people that will display symptoms. So if vaccines were causing disorders, the expectation would be a significant increase in reported disorders from partially vaccinated children to fully vaccinated children. My inference from the partially vaccinated group is that these people started a vaccine schedule and didn’t finish, or due to age, haven’t finished yet, thus likely starting the schedule at around the same time as the fully vaccinated children. I am making a very favorable inference here for the idea that vaccines lead to mental disorders. The opposing inference would be another very strong indication that vaccines do not cause mental disorders. This leads to two (once again, not mutually exclusive) likely possibilities; a reporting bias (same reasons as before), or a narrow window for which vaccines can have a negative developmental impact. The latter has some plausibility due to the relative dosage being higher on infants vs. toddlers & preschoolers, but this is only a considered possibility because of the favorable inference I made.
3: The increase was across mental disorders without a lot of shared symptoms. Either you should see a very high co-morbidity rate between these disorders, or this is another indicator that it isn’t the vaccine but something else. If it was the vaccine, it would be *much* more likely that the range of disorders impacted would be limited to those which have similar symptoms. Just like there aren’t many panaceas, there aren’t really any anti-panaceas (harm-alls) either.
So the implications of the study are either: Male children are exclusively at risk from being negatively impacted by vaccines that cause unusually unpredictable developmental problems probably due to exposure during a narrow developmental window by a process that isn’t understood, and/or there is an uncontrolled for reporting bias in the study. Occam’s razor says it is likely mostly, if not entirely, reporting bias.
TL/DR version: The presenter’s conclusions are not well supported by the actual data in the report. A reporting bias problem due to using self-reports among a minority population with atypical views is likely the source for the results.
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Controlling for all relevant variables is surprisingly difficult with a diverse population. You have to know what variables to track and which assumptions to challenge. Just look at the wage gap studies. A lot of people thought that was a smoking gun in regards to sexism in the workplace, when it turned out there was a critical variable that was unaccounted for (career choices) because a lot people made the bad assumption that women had the same general goals as men.
Statistics are indicators, suggestors. Without a provable mechanism to explain why things happen the way they did, it is very difficult to determine if a set of statistics are giving an accurate representation of reality.
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It’s well worth further investigation IMO using unvaccinated children as a control
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Especially if the two samples can have roughly equal numbers of children being conventionally educated in school settings vs. homeschooled. While I realize that severe autism becomes quite evident at a very young age, some less severe disorders that are on the spectrum don’t become obvious until the children start school. Since parents who don’t vaccinate tend to be more likely to homeschool, they have the freedom to allow a more active child to move around and play outdoors more, and even to postpone working on reading until the child shows an interest and readiness, rather than feeling like every child has to be doing exactly the same thing as every other child the same age. Their children are therefore less likely to ever get diagnosed with behavior disorders.
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“Oh, I’m not saying vaccines *cause* autism, I’m just saying they’re correlated.” I thought such insinuations were beneath you — especially with so much at stake.
Sorry, but you can’t just drop innuendos like that. You want our whole society to change our ways and defy established professional opinion? The burden of proof is on you. *You* need to show actual causation.
One thing that *is* well known is that reduced vaccination causes measles, whooping cough and other contagious — and deadly and crippling — diseases. There’s a reason we’re all discussing this right now, you know.
Incidentally, there’s a reason why autism cases have skyrocketed — autism *diagnoses* have skyrocketed especially over the past decade. How many Americans had even heard of Asperger Syndrome a decade ago — let alone two decades ago, when it first entered the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)?
What’s now being recognized — no doubt, even to the extent of some false positives — as autism and autism spectrum conditions, used to be written off as quirkiness, laziness, obnoxity or even out and out malevolence.
(In fact, in various respects you could look at autism diagnoses like rape reports.)
And check out:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/autism-vaccine-myth.html
Oh yeah, one other thing. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that vaccines do cause autism. Is that worse than death? Would we rather see more autistic people or more dead people? (Spoiler: No, and I hope the former.)
Jeff Deutsch — who, by the way, is on the autism spectrum
PS: Liam, we’re talking about vaccinations for *contagious* diseases. Body fat doesn’t jump from person to person. And if some people take a greater risk by riding a motorcycle instead of driving a car, it’s obviously on them and their families. At most, maybe a few dollars get added to others’ health insurance premiums or medical bills.
Even one unvaccinated person, on the other hand, can spread infections that can make many people sick, blind, deafen or cripple a few for life and even kill one or more. (Plus, of course, raise everyone’s health insurance premiums because we’ve all now got a greater risk of getting sick.) And precisely because babies, organ transplant recipients receiving anti-rejection drugs, some cancer patients receiving chemotherapy and certain other people can’t be vaccinated — not to mention also precisely because vaccinations are not 100.00% effective — everyone who can be vaccinated must be vaccinated so as to deny these germs bodies in which to flourish.
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“You want our whole society to change our ways and defy established professional opinion? The burden of proof is on you. *You* need to show actual causation.”
I honestly did not get that from J.B.’s post. What I got was that she and her husband decided to wait until their kids were around 6, and to vaccinate gradually. Presumably, since she is a stay-at-home mom, 6 was the age when her children started interacting with large groups of kids and having a greater risk of exposure to various infections, as well as a greater likelihood of exposing others to their own infections.
I saw J.B.s post as advocating for better studies on this topic — and I really feel like she is not telling other parents what to do; she is just stating what she did and encouraging more openness on this topic rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
I mean, you and (I think) most other vaccine proponents accept that there are certain groups of people who shouldn’t be vaccinated. Would it be such sacrilege to expand that category to include babies and young children who are not in group care settings yet? Maybe stay-at-home moms who nevertheless wanted their babies to have the shots could still get them — but those who didn’t could still go to their doctor visits without being demonized.
It seems reasonable enough for daycares to refuse to accept any children who aren’t up-to-date on their vaccinations (making an exception of those who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons). Having cared for both babies and toddlers in childcare settings, I know how impossible it is for any teacher to make sure that no toy passes from one mouth to another without being properly sterilized. Of course, I never worried about sterilizing anything when my own children were toddlers — but most of the germs they were exposed to were familiar germs, as compared to the daycare setting where the germs of many different children, and their respective families, are all mingling and breeding together day after day after day.
It’s kind of like, many people who don’t feel a need to don gloves to clean their own toilet, would feel a need if they were cleaning the toilet at a Wal-Mart. Some situations require more protection than others, so acting like the toilet at Wal-Mart is no different from my toilet at home is kind of stupid. I feel like it’s equally stupid to act like the risks of being exposed to, and exposing others to, disease are identical in daycare and home settings.
Of course, I realize that the recent measles outbreak occurred not at a school or daycare but at a theme park. It seems reasonable to me that children like Jessica Valenti’s child, who had a compromised immune system due to being born extremely prematurely, would be just as happy spending one-on-one time with their parents while small, and delaying visits to theme parks till they’re about 6 or so. But maybe I’m biased because I was just never in a huge hurry to create more work for myself by taking my baby or toddler to a place like that when they were just as happy playing in the mud or sand in our front yard. 🙂
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/03/feelings-vaccines-child-medical-reality
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You wanted a study?
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa021134
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The control group is not completely unvaccinated children. The control group are children who did not receive one particular does of the MMR vaccine. This is exactly what I am talking about. Missing a single vaccine is not correlated with autism. Great. We still don’t know that rates between completely unvaccinated children and vaccinated children.
Why the hell not? There is a huge group of unvaccinated children. It’s not a hard study to conduct. What are the corresponding rates between unvaccinated and vaccinated children?
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A few reasons. First, as I pointed out earlier, is expense. We live in a zero sum world and there simply isn’t money to be burnt chasing something so unlikely and thoroughly discredited as a vaccine-autism connection.
Second, we don’t have a valid control group or the ability to control for the variables in question. Any sufficient sample of unvaccinated children will consist almost entirely of the homeschooled and various religious nut cases. Most of them will live in well-off suburban or rural areas without the constant press of humanity. This is almost impossible to compare to the general population. Example: the most likely cause of the 1963-2013 violent crime wave seems to have been atmospheric lead, which weighed far more heavily in cities.
Third, what are we measuring to begin with? ASD (nee Asperger’s) is a fuzzy diagnosis to begin with. The existence of IQ is in dispute at its base. Empathy? Communication skills?
Fourth, we already know where autism originates: day 10-20 neural tube closure defects. ASD likely has an entirely different etiology but causes too little harm (see point the first) to spend a great deal of money chasing. If we are seeing more autism the cause lies in toxins absorbed during gestation. The placental barrier has proven to be far less effective than once thought.
Now for my own ideas:
As with ADD/ADHD, autism and ASD *diagnosis* are climbing, we have no idea if the actual *occurrences* are. Incentives matter, and the incentive for both parents and the special education industry is to cast a broad net. I remain unconvinced that we are really seeing more cases generated. Moreover, this diagnostic rate continues to climb even as the supposed culprits (e.g. mercury) are removed from the brew. There are no dots within rage to be connected.
This whole circus stems from one “study” published in Lancet that ultimately proved to be outright fraud by a huckster trying to sell his own formula. Everything you “know” about vaccine danger and every suspicion you carry connects back to that one man’s criminal malfeasance.
Consider your own posted statistic that 108 died from MMR vaxx. How many would have died without it? You are making the good into the enemy of the perfect and putting the rest of the community at risk because of your own narcissism. Such behavior has no place in the conservative mind.
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So in other words you’re terrified there might be a connection and would rather assume the non-vaxxers are “nut cases” instead of highly educated, capable people making rational decisions.
Gotcha.
Not acceptable. Stop making excuses and demand the study. Let’s see what it shows.
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Or if it’s too expensive and difficult to carry out the study, just accept that parents who don’t put their children in daycare should be allowed more leeway to hold off on vaccines until they feel like their children’s bodies are more capable of handling them.
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Nice little verbal flip there, but no…
As with most attempts at gun control, the vaxx scare you are pushing is pure, uneducated hysteria. Some things simply aren’t worth the time and expense to study because those of us that have studied immunology already know the answer. The screechings of the hoi poloi are not an argument, they are just a reason to turn up the stereo.
But let’s pretend, for a moment, that some small connection is found. So what? Everything in life is a cost/benefit analysis, for the community as well as the individual. If I can save 10,000 from crippling by polio at the cost of 100 developing ASD, it’s a win by any standard you care to name. Opting out is just narcissistic anti-social behavior, the same as running to Canada to avoid the draft.
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So nice of you to make that choice for everyone.
If I get a headache, I may take an aspirin. Or I may choose to skip it because it increases the chance (slightly) of a stroke. But that cost/benefit is my choice to make.
IF it turned out that there was a correlation (whatever size), then it would absolutely not be up to you to decide that because YOU find polio to be more of a concern than ASD, therefore everyone should.
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But again, if delaying vaccinations for the first few years of life for children who are not in daycare settings can reduce the risk of autism for even a few of them — while at the same, deciding to keep them out of large group childcare settings, and possibly even to breastfeed them for as long as they want to breastfeed, is bound to reduce the risk of them contracting and spreading diseases to the community at large — this seems like another win-win situation.
Really, advocating for long-term breastfeeding even more enthusiastically than doctors currently are seems like a very effective way to reduce disease among both vaccinated and unvaccinated children. And I think this could solve a lot of the autism dilemma, if doctors presented it as different vaccine tracks — one for babies who didn’t breastfeed at all, for whom doctors would advise getting the shots early on (unless they were kept pretty much at home), and other tracks for breastfed children, for whom doctors would advise starting the shots at whatever point they were mostly or completely weaned.
I think most of the parents who are concerned about vaccines and autism are also already strong proponents of breastfeeding.
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Except it’s not a headache, it a communicable disease that some people cannot be immunized against for several reasons. Whatever you decide to do about your headache only affects you. Carrying around a communicable disease is a threat to everyone’s health. Get over yourself.
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Yet, strangely, we have outbreaks at places like disneyland… Look, if it only affected you and yours I wouldn’t care; I get as twitchy as anyone when the state starts reaching into my household. But that’s not the case here. No one is willing to shut their child in the house until they are two years old.
While the maternal IgG transfer is helpful it only goes so far. Antibody production is based on exposure to a given antigen within the life cycle of memory B and T cells. The odds that you are expressing a sufficient volume of polio antibodies (for example) is somewhere between slim and none.
Further, there is zero evidence of any such causal relationship and **we already know where autism originates.** How many times do I have to repeat that?
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Permitting JudgyBitch to violate the established vaccination schedule without established (as in, objective and verifiable) good cause *is* asking our society to change its ways. We have laws requiring vaccination* for obvious reasons.
Putting aside that keeping a baby/toddler at home can hold him or her back socially and possibly even intellectually — unless you’re in a really small and insular community, quasi-isolation isn’t an option anyway. If you go out into the world, you will pick up germs. If you come home again, you will pass them on to your kid.
And of course vice versa.
JudgyBitch is calling for more studies on the topic. Sorry, we’ve already done plenty of studies. Again, if *you* (JudgyBitch, that1susan, etc) want more studies, *you* have them done. We, as a society, have already jumped through a whole lot of hoops and bent over backwards to assuage legitimate concerns**, thankyouverymuch. The ball is in your court.
[*] And I support their being both broadened and strengthened.
[**] Not a redundancy.
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You can repeat it a million times, if you like. That doesn’t make it true. If you want to conclusively prove there is NO connection between vaccines and autism, you’ll need to cite a study with unvaccinated children as the control group.
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Wow, color me shocked. You are a slave to Big Pharma, and you think babies should be institutionalized. Big surprise there.
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Neither J.B. nor I broke any laws — at least, I don’t know what the laws are in her province, but in my Midwestern U.S. state, it is legal for parents to make this choice. Private schools and day cares can refuse to enroll unvaccinated children, but public schools have to accept them if the parents fill out a general religious exemption form that doesn’t require you to specify your religion — meaning that you can possess personal spiritual beliefs about how the immune system works without being required to explain it to anyone.
And of course, as any religious belief can change with more information, so can a spiritual belief related to vaccines. As both J.B. and I have shared, each of us did ultimately decide to start vaccinating our children (I realize J.B.’s views on vaccines weren’t spiritually-based, so I’m referring more to myself here).
If I had to do it over, I still wouldn’t have vaccinated them as babies. While I do understand that child-led breastfeeding and weaning are not total protection from disease, neither are vaccines, so in my opinion, holding off on vaccines until children are in group-care settings (and breastfeeding them as long as they want to breastfeed) is a good way to minimize risks of vaccine complications by allowing children’s bodies to mature before injecting them with a lot of stuff that we still don’t know enough about.
And no, I wasn’t talking about isolating young children from the world. It’s just been my experience as a mom that the need for large-scale interactions with the outside world is something that emerges during the preteen and teen years.Younger children are often quite happy with their main interactions being with their families and close friends, and with allowing that circle of interactions to gradually expand to include more and more people and more and more outside activities
So if I — like Jessica Valenti (who’s article I previously linked to) — had had a premature and immuno-compromised baby, I wouldn’t feel like my child was being cooped up and isolated if we didn’t make it to the local theme park until she was 6 or so.
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Articles like this one: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/02/fda_inspections_fraud_fabrication_and_scientific_misconduct_are_hidden_from.single.html
…are a large part of why I have trouble faulting the anti-vax crowd.
“Studies show that they are safe”, but then, studies show that our medications are safe, too, until we hear of things like this…
Again, I’m not saying they’re RIGHT, I’m saying I understand having a healthy dose of skepticism, in the face of skyrocketing numbers of autistic children.
Oh, and you can tell me you think the increase is based on better detection and widened definitions, but I remember growing up, there was maybe one or two kids on what we would now call the autism spectrum. Today, it seems like 10% of my friends have noticably autistic children, certainly a lot more than we had in my town growing up.
Small sample, but somehow I doubt it’s all just because we’re looking harder…
So given those two things, I just can’t find it in my heart to be angry at those who doubt, especially those like JB who have actually LOOKED at the studies and recognized their flaws, seen what looks like an attempt to prove a predetermined position rather than an honest attempt at research.
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When I gave birth to my first child a daughter in 2009 I was 24 and completely unaware of the harm or problems that could be related to vaccinations until we experienced them. I had a happy, healthy, alert, loving baby and I was high on cloud 9 as a new mother. We took our daughter to all appointments and followed the Dr.s advice and fax schedule figuring “hey, they’re the professional not us”. Well after her first set of shots she was different, my mother in law said it was typical and she would feel better in a few days. Yes, she did start feeling better but she changed. My daughters eye contact suddenly stopped, she seemed aloof, she wasn’t as engaged and we were told and convinced ourselves that it was part of her personality since her personality was developing.
Then the worst day of my life happened. My husband took our daughter to the Dr. for a typical appointment and shots that I could not attend. He called after the appointment and said the Dr. suspected she may have autism. I was beyond devastated! I began research and trying to learn anything and everything about what it is and the cause and immediately started thinking about that day she had her first shots and how she was never the same. I have no proof that the shots caused this beyond mothers intuition and observations.
When my son was born in 2013 I was smarter, I didn’t trust Dr.s the same way I once had and he was not getting any shots at birth or on the “Schedule” set forth by the medical and drug companies. I have had my son on a “modified schedule” for his shots and he is completely normal, now pregnant and due any day now with baby #3 there will again be no shots given after birth and the same schedule as our son.
It’s a life long struggle and something that effects not only my precious daughter but also our entire family and extended families. I have been destroyed by the guilt of not protecting her like I should’ve as her mother and not being properly informed about something so important. As parents we will spend hours researching something as simple as a car seat, bottles, strollers, and doctors a lot of us don’t spend enough time educating ourselves and doing our own research on things such as vaccines. Doing our own research and learning what is really in the shots that they are giving our children, what the true risks are, and what options we really do have as far as giving them these shots, not giving them or waiting to give them. As parents we need to be more informed and ask more questions to medical professionals and not be afraid to speak up or be judged because we chose something different than the norm based on our own feelings and research.
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JB,
I respect you as a person, but I would never allow my kids in a school, daycare (well, my kids don’t go to daycare, but still), or anywhere I could help it, with your children. This isn’t personal, but I’d like to have all unvaccinated children to be completely separated from vaccinated kids. Our local charter school dealt with the vaccination process as simply as they did the parental induced “food allergy” issue.
For food allergies they required medical documentation of the allergy, and it’s extent I believe, by a specialist. Why? The list of allergies was becoming psychotic. Well meaning parents self diagnosing kids. As a result, they’re the only primary school in the district that the kids can have nuts in the school for food. As a result, every school in the district is looking at implementing this policy.
They also have a strict vaccination policy because of two immune compromised children. Since the Disney measles fiasco, most parents have been getting a bit more careful. In our area parents at two neighboring school districts are calling for setup charter schools for unvaccinated children. You want to have a religious (or personal) exemption? No problem, they’ve got a district school just for your kids.
I’m an engineer not a doctor. I trust my brother-in-law, who is a doctor. He tells us (family members) “vaccinate your kids”. You know why there have been no deaths due to measles, but due to the vaccine? Because we haven’t had anything really but the outlier (person from outside the U.S. as a lone patient carrier) for over a decade!
Do you give your kids Ibuprofen? Any other medications? Do you know how many people are killed by adverse medication reactions each year? Many more than the measles vaccine. I believe, but haven’t researched it personally, that you’ll find kids and the elderly most susceptible to adverse medication (yes, removing vaccines) reactions resulting in death.
Again, respect JB, but think on this as well. As one parent in the neighboring districts sent out in a letter: “Give them their own damn school, just keep them all away from our kids!” Unvaccinated kids are, in many parent’s groups, being seen as (not unjustifiably) plague carriers for the new century. The new “Typhoid Mary’s” of our country is the view being formed, and the kids will likely be the ones that pay the penalty. That’s just the social implications, not the medical.
http://www.antivaccinebodycount.com/Anti-Vaccine_Body_Count/Home.html
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@judgybitch
You are setting an inherently anti-scientific standard of proof as a requirement. If you understood how this works you would know that *nothing* can ever be proven, only disproven in absolute terms. As it stands, despite the ignorant ravings of Jenny McCarthy et al there is no evidence to support your argument. Conversely there is an enormous body to support ours.
That you allude to the long gone mercury, refer to irrelevant statistical comparisons, and dismiss the documented evidence of autism’s origin **without making legitimate counter arguments** demonstrates the irrelevance of your position. The rest of us are not obliged to humor your anti-scientific, crypto-biblical delusions; you *are* required to comply with community mores. That’s why we call it civilization. Eventually we will simply make it mandatory. You will call it unjust, the rest of us will enjoy a life without polio and ignore you.
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I’m fine with not hanging out with vaccinated kids. No problem. But if vaccines work, why would you care? Makes no sense other than a bit of zealotry. The passionate refusal to even consider the possibility from otherwise intelligent people mystifies me.
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Wrong. The California Oregon study offers a correlation and to date your side has ZERO studies in which the control group was unvaccinated children. Zero. Not a single study. Every study obfuscates. Why is that?
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“That you allude to the long gone mercury…”
Mercury is not completely gone from all vaccine brands. I do think most vaccines have a mercury-free option now, but I also think most doctors leave it up to parents to know about this option and request it.
http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/UCM096228
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I am so sorry about all that you’ve been through, and I thank you for sharing this here!
Sadly, I’m afraid that even if a link between vaccines and autism is scientifically-proven, the most fervent vaccine proponents will insist that the benefits of protecting the herd from vaccine-preventable illnesses outweighs the risk of harming some individual herd members. They’ll word it like it’s a choice between autism and death, without bothering to cite the actual statistical risk of autism vs. the actual statistical risk of death.
It’s kind of like when a nurse was trying to pressure my husband to get the flu shot some years back. He told her that he’d heard that getting the flu shot could increase his risk for Alzheimer’s — and she agreed that this was true, and said something like, “But the flu can kill you, so which is worse?” Again, since even driving my car can result in my death, I think it’s very relevant to wonder whether I’m MORE likely to develop Alzheimer’s as a result of repeated flu vaccines, or to die from exposure to influenza?
Since it seems that the bulk of the pro-vaccine community doesn’t look at it the way that I do — but instead simplistically says that whatever complications may be suffered by some vaccine recipients, there are always at least few people who actually DIE from vaccine-preventable illnesses, so even if links are proven, it’s a case of “Would you rather have x happen to you, or DIE?” —
Well, all I can say is that I think we parents each need to look at it for ourselves. Personally, as I’ve already said, I’m in favor of simply starting the vaccine process when children are at least a few years old, except in cases where they will need to be in group care settings before that. I think that greatly lessens the risk of vaccine-induced autism, without posing unduly large risks to the “herd.”
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“the actual statistical risk of autism vs. the actual statistical risk of death.”
i’ll leave you to others to find the statistics on proven risks of autism via vaccination vs. non vaccination.
But we all have readily available statistics on incident rates and deaths to illness during years before vaccination and after.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/vaccines-didnt-save-us-intellectual-dishonesty-at-its-most-naked/
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/whatifstop.htm
“Nearly everyone in the U.S. got measles before there was a vaccine, and hundreds died from it each year. Today, most doctors have never seen a case of measles.
More than 15,000 Americans died from diphtheria in 1921, before there was a vaccine. Only one case of diphtheria has been reported to CDC since 2004.
An epidemic of rubella (German measles) in 1964-65 infected 12½ million Americans, killed 2,000 babies, and caused 11,000 miscarriages. In 2012, 9 cases of rubella were reported to CDC.”
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/polio/dis-faqs.htm
“Polio was one of the most dreaded childhood diseases of the 20th century in the United States. Periodic epidemics occurred since the late 19th century and they increase in size and frequency in the late 1940s and early 1950s. An average of over 35,000 cases were reported during this time period. With the introduction of Salk inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) in 1955, the number of cases rapidly declined to under 2,500 cases in 1957. By 1965, only 61 cases of paralytic polio were reported.”
People have the luxury today of questioning the worth of vaccines in a world were vaccines did all the heavy lifting to make people forget these scourges once existed. Eeerily similar parallel to the feminists who love to claim its the end of men from their cushy a/c offices and life conveniences all built and maintained by men in the background. None of them can ever know or experience what life was like before men created the modern life they solipsistically enjoy. It would take a calamity to revert us back to preindustrial times to see if the ‘equal’ women of today would say men are over and that they don’t need men, in the same vein as those who say vaccinations are a hoax would need to live pre 1920’s to actually see if life was better off without vax than the current day.
I am curious tho.. if ‘vaccines’ are the cause of autism – or that is the belief anyways.. – what purpose would be served by delaying vaccination? If the fear is that the compound itself is doing whatever damage it’s supposed to be doing to trigger autism.. just eschew the shots outright instead of delaying.. the inoculated is still going to be exposed to the same autism ‘risk’ no matter when the shot is injected correct?
As i said, if enough people want to go against the available evidence and sound science and avoid vaccination to follow the preaching of the real profit motive induced homeopathy and natural cures junk science world of Dr. Oz, magic accai berries and gluten free this and that overpriced because it’s ‘good for you’ gibberish.. it’s a free world.
But don’t be surprised when the rest of the world doesn’t want you near them or their children at Disneyland, on transit systems, packed stadiums or office buildings.. etc. If herd immunity is a myth, perhaps segregation should become a ‘thing’ to test it. Perhaps if society reverts to pre-vac practices – we’ll have the ultimate social experiment.. one with far greater implications for our species than feminism has wrought.
forgive the length of this rant.
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The concern is that the amount of trace metal in the vaccines combined with low body weight, and the sheer number of vaccinations might trigger ad adverse reactions and that spreading that metal out over a much, much longer period of time and waiting until body mass is over 50lbs will reduce some of that effect. I spend zero dollars on homeopathic remedies for anything, FYI.
Like many other intelligent, educated people, I have looked at the so-called studies, observed the near hysteria of vaccine proponents and made my own choice. Give me one good reason an infant living in a society that does not have a large HepB transmission group should be vaccinated within the first few days of life?
That’s absurd. How does it hurt anyone to hold off on that vaccine until the child is much, much older?
It’s the pro-vaccine hysteria that borders on almost religious fervor that waves the biggest red flags for me.
This is easy to resolve.
What are the rates of autism in unvaccinated children?
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““I am curious tho.. if ‘vaccines’ are the cause of autism – or that is the belief anyways.. – what purpose would be served by delaying vaccination? If the fear is that the compound itself is doing whatever damage it’s supposed to be doing to trigger autism.. just eschew the shots outright instead of delaying.. the inoculated is still going to be exposed to the same autism ‘risk’ no matter when the shot is injected correct?”
A quick search hasn’t led me to any conclusive evidence regarding the likelihood of a neurologically-normal child developing autism after early childhood, so my suggestion about waiting till kids were a few years old to begin vaccinations (again — only with those who don’t need to be in group-care settings) was based on the fact that most of the cases I know of were diagnosed pretty early in the children’s lives. I guess I’d say that the anecdotal evidence that I’ve seen leads me to believe that children beyond age 4 or so are probably at a lower risk than babies and toddlers for developing autism due to environmental triggers.
Also, it seems pretty much common sense to assume that vaccines and all pharmaceutical products are more easily processed by larger and heavier bodies and by more mature immune systems and other body systems. A 4 year old is many, many times the size of a newborn. But again, I think the risk-to-benefit ratio of delaying vaccines is different for babies in daycare than it is for babies being cared for at home; it’s also different for babies who aren’t breastfed than it is for babies who are.
And again, it’s also been my observation that mothers who don’t vaccinate their children are less likely to enroll them in daycare and school, and more likely to breastfeed them, and to breastfeed them for years and not just a matter of months, than the general public. Of course, none of this prevented the outbreak at Disneyland.
However, it was apparently an unvaccinated adult who started the measles outbreak at Disneyland, and last April (last link below), another outbreak was started by a fully-vaccinated adult. If you can present me with evidence of outbreaks that were started by unvaccinated, breastfeeding, children under the age of 4 who are not in daycare settings, then maybe I’ll have to rethink my current views.
http://www.autismspeaks.org/blog/2013/10/11/are-children-born-autism-or-does-it-develop-later
http://raisingchildren.net.au/articles/autism_spectrum_disorder_diagnosis_teenagers.html
http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/04/measles-outbreak-traced-fully-vaccinated-patient-first-time
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I don’t believe that the simple act of vaccinating is causing autism. I personally believe that the number of vaccinations that are being shoved on our children at one time combined with the fact that they’re immune systems, body weight, age, and development all play a huge factor also.
I don’t believe that an unvaccinated child puts other children at risk for illness either. If your vaccinations are so good then they should be protected right? After all thats what the vaccination is for if I’m not mistaken.
There are lots of other studies I reviewed that have a significant tie to the rise in autism diagnosis such as the use of fertility drugs. The sheer number of shots that a child receives in one visit has increased significantly since I was a child 20+ years ago. The number of women who are using fertility drugs like Clomid are also on the rise and are prescribed by MD’s like pain pills, and mood stabilizing drugs. Can’t get pregnant when you want? Take this pill. Have a headache? Take a painkiller. Feel like crying? Take a pill. The pill business is a multi billion dollar a year industry if not more. With the rise in autism and the “epidemic” as I’ve seen it called, this has created another multi billion dollar industry.
I’m not sure of the specific numbers but autism is on the rise like crazy. I think this is also due to the fact that the so called “screening” or “scoring” system is very broad and open to interpretation by medical professionals that are not that informed about autism.
My children will be vaccinated on my terms and those that don’t like it….oh well. Vaccinating is a parenting choice just like religion, discipline, values and everything else. Even I choose not to vaccinate my children I don’t feel it is the business of everyone else.
Yes, we do things everyday that could kill us. Driving a car could kill us, walking could kill us, why voluntarily do something to ourselves or our children that could harm them because big pharma says we have to? I’ve never been more sick than after getting a flu shot, I no longer get them and I don’t care that the nurses and doctors try and push it on me at every appointment and try and make me feel stupid and guilty for not getting one.
I regret not researching more about vaccines before allowing myself to have my child injected with foreign substances at such a young age. I deal everyday with the consequences of my uninformed decisions and my child will deal with it also. It is the choice that I made, if someone researches and studies it themselves and decides that they WANT to vaccinate and they want to do it the way it’s “recommended” then go for it, just make an informed decision and do your own research don’t just go off what a Dr or the government says you should do.
When we give birth to these tiny innocent babies they have no high exposure to HepB and the other things they want to “protect” them against so soon.
This is just my opinion and my personal experience. Statistically since I have one child with autism my other children especially boys have a higher chance of having autism. My son does not have autism in anyway and we are thankful for that but do not see it as beating the odds, we see it as not introducing his tiny little 6 pound 9 oz body to foreign substances within minutes of his entrance into this world and continuing to do so before his body needs or is ready for it.
Just my 2 cents….
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http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1990567,00.html
A Quick link about autism and Clomid.
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I agree with you that the tiny size of babies may play a huge factor. I also agree that it’s not a simple x causes y relationship, but the more I research the matter, the more I wonder why more doctors aren’t amenable to the idea of parents holding off on vaccinating until their children are no longer breastfeeding, and/or until their children are in daycare or school settings.
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That is NOT what he said.
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Aw, for the love of criminy criminy crap. Anti-vax? Ugh. I’ve poured through tract after tract of that nonsense, and none of it convinced me. Around about the time that the Men’s Human Rights Movement’s OWN scientific literature convinced me so thoroughly that it gave me purpose in life, actually.
Dokey okey, time to break this down. First, Autism Speaks is a horrid organisation with horrid leaders. They’re the feminism of autism organisations. I don’t have TOO much on this (too busy focusing on feminists and SJWs) but this woman breaks it down well for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez936r2F35U – I noticed you sourced them, Janet. Yes, there is some autism that is difficult to deal with. Non-verbals. But they’re NOT drooling vegetables, especially not in the modern age of computing. They can be great artists, or writers. But then there’s the autism that leads one to be keenly aware of inconsistencies between social norms and reality while still being aware enough of other people’s cues to truly care about their suffering.
The kind that leads a young man to spot a thread in an official narrative, and keep on pulling and pulling until the whole feminist tapestry unravels. The kind that causes one to be publicly outspoken about these new revelations despite social disapproval. The kind that SAVES LIVES.
My kind. (Yes, I was talking about myself, even with the “saving lives” part… that made me… so happy. It was utterly indescribable.) Even if vaccinations DID somehow increase autism rates, how is that a bad thing? I mean, it’s not a good thing, because allistic people are just as valuable as autistics. But it’s not bad.
As for the whole “autism vs. death” thing – do you think that it’s only your kid that’s at risk? Herd immunity protects those who have immune systems too weak to fight off an infection that they themselves are immune to. (So what if you brought a Water type to fight a Fire-Ground type if your enemy is 80 levels higher than you?) Imagine surviving cancer only to be killed by measles because some pseudoscientific parent cared more about their kid turning out slightly weird than helping prevent the spread of vicious diseases? Adding insult to injury that you kept up on your jabs, not even getting sick multiple times after touching and even kissing measles sufferers. But then you died from measles because chemo is hell on the immune system.
And, yeah. Medical organisations and individual doctors can and do lie. They lie about male genital mutilation, both for the obvious feminist reasons, and also because baby foreskins rake in those shekels. And anti-vaxxer docs are just as capable of lying! Cure brings in a LOT more money than prevention!
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Being immunocompromised will make you vulnerable even to diseases that you are immune to. That’s why everyone needs to be immune – so that those with strong immune systems can kill diseases before those with weak ones can be overwhelmed, immune or not.
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I understand herd immunity, related to me via the BiL, better than many. Probably because I adapted what he was telling me during the discussion to polymorphic software viruses. Again, I’m not a doctor, but immunity via a vaccine isn’t perfect. The MMR is a good example, because it requires two doses to be as close to perfect as we can get it. Not only that, let’s say my kids are sick from the common cold (no vaccine for that!), as a result their immune system is weakened, therein they could be infected by the measles (or mumps, et al.) because their bodies are already fighting one infection. Since the body is already busy killing one infection, it may not be able to muster up the antibodies for the second in enough “quantity” to kill it all.
Taking that further, a person with the vaccine still isn’t perfectly protected. Strains mutate, fortunately some things mutate less than others, and if it’s in an unvaccinated host organism it’s got a chance to infect (as a result of mutation factor) a healthy vaccinated person. Granted, it’s more likely to infect an unhealthy vaccinated person. This mutation factor can be seen in the world of antibiotics the best, as we’ve got many “bugs” that now take the best we can dish out and keep on ticking. Do we want to see the creation of a new measles bug that can bypass the vaccine?
So, in other words, nothing is perfect JB. The best chance we have to avoid a mutation outbreak is if they can’t get an initial foothold. We need to prevent mutations that might make the vaccine medically ineffective.
I still wonder if you give your kids any medications, because they’re not really any less likely to cause complications than vaccines.
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There’s an over diagnosis of “mild autism” just like boys are over diagnosed ADHD. Kid has issues? There’s got to be a chemical fix! I wonder how much ADHD or “mild autism” is really because kids are cooped up too long in school without physical activity. Kids are full of energy, and it’s easier for them to focus if they burn some of it off. That’s why our charter school rocks: no denying that kids need activity at all. There are two regular recess periods and some more at lunch time, plus gym a couple days a week.
The highest scoring boys in the district go here, and the girls rank up there too. They also have the lowest amount of kids (in particular boys) on any medication AFAIK. This is a K-8 school, so right about when kids would be diagnosed ADHD or autism.
That’s the difference to me, because that’s how school was setup when I was a kid. Most schools today, kids are lucky to get one recess and one gym period per week. We wonder why kids are fat and can’t focus? Kids, boys in particular, need to burn off that excess energy to be able to focus. Kids still need exercise to not be fat, and to be healthy.
Of course we could blame the parents genetically. One place I worked, IBM in Minnesota, it seemed like a large percentage of children (even those who didn’t vaccinate) were in the autism spectrum somewhere. White engineer’s kids in particular. Some have speculated that mild autism is what leads to great engineers. (e.g. The ability to hyper focus)
I wager that, in the future, we’ll find the trigger for autism is like that of Tay-Sachs. There’s a reason many Jewish people get tested before marriage and children. I also eager we’ll see it as a multiple trigger that leads to different levels of autism.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay–Sachs_disease#Society_and_culture
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I feel like you should ask this question to Anti-vaxxers. Why aren’t they getting the funds together to run the study you suggest? Why aren’t these families finding backers to help with these studies? I feel like you’re asking the scientific community to fork over the money to do a study for someone else.
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They’re not the ones with the problem. Anti-vaxxers are happy with their decisions. People who are unhappy are the ones who need to take action.
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JB,
Do you think it would be ethical to do a study with a completely unvaccinated control group? I’m not sure I understand what kind of design you’re talking about — what age to start the study, what age to stop it, whether they could get vaccinated during the study — but wouldn’t you be putting the control group at risk?
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The group has self selected already. Like people who smoke and eat fast food. Tend to die of heart attacks.
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I’d go further: rapidly rising allergies, obesity in children, Type II diabetes (you know, the kind that used to be called “adult onset” before we starting wrecking kids’ bodies so quickly that they could get the disease that used to take decades of bad living at the age of 10), RA, MS, and any number of other chronic diseases are fundamentally caused by inflammation and are essentially autoimmune diseases. It baffles me that people can on the one hand see a massive increase in autoimmune diseases – one that cannot possibly be due to biological factors, because people don’t ‘evolve’ that fast – and on the other hand recognize that the single biggest environmental variable that we’ve changed, with respect to the immune system, is the shitload of chemicals we inject into tiny children to tinker with their immune systems – and yet still not be interested in investigating the link.
Our approach was similar. Beginning at about 5, MMR, DTaP. They’ve had chicken pox so they won’t get that vaccine. Honestly I don’t think I’ll get them Hep B for the reasons you suggest, more or less; when they’re 18 they can, as adults, make their own decisions on the risks and benefits, based on the lives they’d like to leave.
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By the way, another thought I’ve long had is that it may not be just one thing that’s causing allergies and auto-immune problems and inflammation problems and the like, as likely as not it’s a combination of things.
And so if we take out any one of the causes and run tests, of COURSE we don’t really see any difference. “Why, Ma’am, that rGbh we give our cows is perfectly safe in your mlik. Every test we’ve run says there’s no difference in people who drink it and who don’t.”
Think of it this way: Suppose I create a drink consisting of cyanide, arsenic, hemlock and a dozen other powerful poisons. And every time someone drinks some of it, they die.
Someone comes up and says “Your product isn’t safe! It contains hemlock! That’s killing people!” and I say “Nope, it can’t be, because we see equal levels of death in people who drink the product with the hemlock and when they drink a version we make without the hemlock.”
And someone else comes up and says “Oh, your product is killing people! Arsenic in it is the culprit?” and I say “Nope, sorry, we tested that. There are equal numbers of deaths in people who drink the product with and without arsenic in it.”
Only in THAT case, someone is bound to recognize that the question is does the entire drink constitute a poison and it’s fairly simple to compare populations who drink the drink and those who don’t.
But we’re drinking a toxic soup every day, everything from fluoridated water to rGbh milk to vaccines to plastic residues to antibiotics in our meats and every larger numbers of pesticides in our vegetables, stronger and harsher cleaning products and pollutants in our air and stronger and more advanced medications and a much greater use of over the counter medications… We’re drinking the entire drink every day, but it’s impossible to comprise the entire drink.
So instead, someone says “Hey, it can’t be the plastics. We see statistically similar numbers of the things we’re looking at in people who drink out of plastic containers and those who only use the far-less reactive glass containers.” And someone else says “Well, it’s definitely not rGbh, there’s no statistically significant difference between people who drink milk from cows that have been given it and cows that have not.” And pretty soon we’ve “scientifically proven” that every one of those things is harmless because taking that individual poison out of the cocktail doesn’t result in any better outcomes for the people drinking it.
Does this mean vaccines actually are a problem? No, of course not. But something is increasing rates and severities of autism and food allergies and autoimmune diseases and inflammatory syndromes and the like, and I’m really starting to think that as long as we test for one individual poison at a time, we’re always going to think that it’s blameless, removing one toxic chemical from a soup of many of them will never show any benefit.
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By the way, a friend used the term “toxic soup” and I liked it, so I borrowed it here. I’m not necessarily trying to be a “sky is falling” chicken little type here.
My point is that our bodies are inundated with a large number of things that are new to the most recent few generations, and at least one of them is likely the culprit for the rise in incidence and severity of autism, auto-immune problems, food allergies and the rest.
My point was to suggest that all of these things COULD be the result of a combination of factors.
Another way to look at it is tracking down a bug in software. If you have one bug, it’s fairly easy to track down. If you have one symptom, but it’s caused by two different bugs, it becomes an order of magnitude harder to find. If it’s caused by THREE bugs, it’s yet another order of magnitude harder.
Or think back to your favorite medical drama (for instance, House). Think about how much more difficult it must be for a doctor to figure out what is making a patient sick if they have TWO undiagnosed diseases going on? They can’t simply look at a symptom profile and narrow down the list, because now they have to consider every different combination of the symptoms and say “OK, if these were the two groupings, what could disease A be, and what could disease B be?”
So if, in the large number of new substances in our environments and our bodies in the last 100 years (a subset of which I listed in the previous comment), let’s say there are 5 which contribute to the rise in autism, any three of which will cause the problem. We can then run as many studies as we want taking one or even two of the substances out of the equation and will never find a statistically significant difference in incidence. Maybe a trivial number, if you happen to have someone in your study who had already naturally omitted two of them, and now you took one more and the problem went away, but that’s going to likely be a statistically insignificant amount.
Now, you could make the argument that “Hey, if the autism is going to happen because of four other things, so even if we could prove that vaccines were a fifth one, the other four are already prevalent, so the benefit to the vaccine is still far greater than the increased risk”, and maybe you’d have a point…
On the other hand, you could also make the argument “Hey, if we determine that vaccines are one of multiple combined causes, and we eliminate them from the picture, that’s one less thing we have to figure out before we can start solving the problem of (autism, serious food allergies, auto-immune disorders, etc).”
Either argument is valid.
For me, it comes back to this: I don’t really give a hang about “herd immunity”, I care about bodily integrity. I just don’t believe anyone, for any reason, has any business telling anyone else that the must take some substance into their body or have some medical procedure performed on their body. I don’t think anyone has any business telling a woman she can’t have (or must have) an abortion. I don’t think anyone has any right ever to force anyone else to have sex with them or anyone else. I don’t believe anyone has a right to dictate to someone else what they must do with their own internal body.
The best you can do is educate and try to convince people. And I’m cool with that. Maybe even some light shaming, if you think it works, although I think you drive some people further away with the shaming techniques.
But there are always going to be people who reject the argument, distrust the science, see a profit motive behind the studies, whatever. There will always be conspiracy theorists (and since there will also always be conspiracies, the conspiracy theorists won’t ALWAYS be wrong), and those people have the right to make their own decisions.
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