Oh look, ANOTHER study shows no link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
Yep. It’s an actual real tragedy that good money and resources are being wasted on proving that which has been irrefutably proven time and time again. That’s the other negative fallout from the antivax lunatics.
One justification for this new study is that it not only looked at a huge group of children, it examined multiple subgroups with potentially higher risk factors.
A complaint from antivaxers has been that epidemiologic studies are fatally flawed because they can’t detect autism in such subgroups (given how commonly they claim vaccines cause autism, this is a nonsensical claim, but whatever).
This new study took that into account:
“The main goal of our modeling strategy was to evaluate whether the MMR vaccine increases the risk for autism in children, subgroups of children, and time periods after vaccination. We defined subgroups according to 1) sibling history of autism (“genetic susceptibility”), sex, birth cohort, and prior vaccinations in the first year of life and 2) a summary index estimated from a disease risk model combining multiple environmental risk factors. The motivation for a summary index was that the combination of several factors each associated with only a moderate risk increase in autism had the potential of identifying children at higher risk through multiple risk factors, in contrast to many stratified analyses of single moderate risk factors.”
Result: no association between MMR and autism either overall or in the subgroups. In fact, there was even a tiny negative association -meaning that autism occurred slightly less often in vaccinated children (not statistically significant).
Antivaxers of course have already started trying to belittle the study, but really they should just go back to anecdotes - good science wreaks havoc on their beliefs.
I’ve got a sister in law who is antivax. She’s got an autistic kid and, you know. But in any breath not devoted to slamming real medicine she sings the praises and superiority of her precious boy. I shut her down at dinner once when she started popping off about evilvax by asking her to clarify that she’d rather her son be dead or maimed from disease rather than be healthy and autistic. The Missus is lobbying for a dinner with sis in the near future. In a rare passive aggressive move, I’ve been spamming my Facebook feed with antivax mockery, trying to start some shit. I’d feel bad, except it’s just the right thing to do.
Wait, her kid is autistic but she still refuses to vaccinate them ? What, is she afraid he’ll get double autism ?
Here is a rant about Measles outbreak by one of the best ranters Lewis Black.
//i\
Alas, doesn’t work. I’ve tried it. “But the peer-reviewed research is not independent!” the anti-vaxxers cry. “All those researchers are in the pockets of Big, Bad Pharma!”
It’s the circular reasoning typical of conspiracy theorists.
we’ve already getting measles outbreaks
too bad we can’t declare a medical emergency
Yes, antivaxers will generally find a way to label even independent (non-pharma-funded) studies as corrupt.
Case in point: the latest major study to find that the MMR vaccine is not linked to autism. Immediately one of the loudest anti-vax groups (Age of Autism) derided the study by dredging up the case of Poul Thorsen.
Thorsen was a secondary author on another Danish population study of the MMR published back in 2002 (which also found no MMR-autism link). Thorsen was later accused of embezzling CDC research funds for personal use. The study was never refuted and Thorsen had no involvement in the 2019 study, but antivaxers think that by shouting his name they can smear the current authors and ignore the results.
But if people believe that anti vaccines are evil and immoral because they’re full of dead baby tissue and so on, then the scientific evidence doesn’t matter anyway.
My aforementioned niece , mother-of-three, posted the following bullshit on her FB page:
Given how religious she is, and her husband along with her, there is no way to change their minds about this.
I just hope nothing bad happens to their kids.
Don’t hope. Pray. And tell her that you are praying for god to protect her children both from the diseases that they are not protected from, and from the parents who would expose their unprotected children to diseases.
Even better if you do not believe in a god.
A six-year-old boy almost dies of tetanus in Oregon.
Get this – his family sutured the wound AT HOME. Jesus wept.
And they’re still refusing to give him any vaccines whatsoever.
Time to call CPS?
And they have a million dollar hospital bill. Money well spent, I guess, to prevent those life-threatening vaccines from entering his blood stream.
My God, these people are such idiots! The hospital gave him the first dose of the vaccine when he was life-flighted in. And then despite a prolonged, excruciating, life-threatening course of tetanus, they refuse the second dose? Obviously way too much fun was had to preclude the possibility of going through all that again by getting that second dose.
Question for those of you who are lucky enough to have a UHC. Should that have happened in Canada, would they still be on the hook, or would even expenses created by negligence be covered?
Double secret autism.
I was unclear. The “kid” is 30 and severe (nonverbal, boxing gloves, helmet, etc.). He’s taken quite a toll on her and having an atypical son myself I am not without a great deal of sympathy for her. But she needed to make sense of this crazy world, and hung all the problems on his MMR. Never mind she’s on the spectrum, as is her dad, her daughter (ya, both of her kids), a sister, her two brothers… Seems more like a genetic thing in her case.
Yes. At least tetanus is not contagious, so this isn’t going to a phenomenon like measles outbreaks. But that doesn’t help this poor kid who was unlucky enough to be born to idiot parents.