Court Ruling: Innoculations NOT a cause of Autism

Not to pile up Interested, but I’d like to make sure I understand what your points are and contribute some additional information.

Your cites are intended I think to make the following points:

  1. There may be a biologically plausible model in which some children are at risk to various stresses such as, you believe the vaccines and vaccine components.

  2. Some claim that autistic children have a higher load of mercury than the normal population. The hypothesis is that some children’s mercury elimination is impaired which places them at greater risk of problems from mercury exposure.

  3. You claim children are still routinely exposed to high level of mercury in flu vaccines.

  4. Vaccines haven’t done much good anyway; it is a coincidence that targeted diseases decreased substantially or disappeared as they were introduced.

If those are indeed your points then let me address them.

Certainly there was a biologically plausible model for mercury toxicity and individual children being at greater risk. That is why, even without any evidence that any problems were indeed caused by thimerosal in vaccines, thimerosal was removed from the routine childhood vaccination schedule with the exception of flu shots in the multi-dose vial.

Your claim children are still routinely exposed to high mercury levels “delivered at even more vulnerable ages” is an untruth that you really must be aware of. Before thimerosal was removed from the vaccine schedule there was the potential for infants to receive 187.4 µg of mercury beginning with the HepB vaccine in the newborn nursery. Now most children under 3 yo who get flu vaccines (far from a universally accepted vaccine) get the thimerosal-free single vial version and the vaccine cannot be given before 6 months of age. Assuming that everyone actually complied with the recommendation and that no one used the thimerosal-free version that most use the maximum possible exposure would be 28 µg (as Jackmannii says, “way less than miniscule”) starting half a year later than exposure began a decade ago.

As has been pointed out, such a tremendous reduction and delay in thimerosal exposure should have been followed by a tremendous reduction in autism rates if thimerosal was at all a contributing actor in autism. Such has not occurred. The hypothesis is now not just not supported (as it was always), it is now absolutely falsified.

Your misrepresentation of the history of the polio vaccine has already been pointed out. To recap: the live oral polio vaccine (OPV) works better but at a cost - rare vaccine associated polio (VAP). Across the United State half a dozen or so individuals would get VAP each year. While there was real risk of a resurgence of polio that price was worth it as its efficacy prevented thousands of deaths and cases of paralysis each year, but after years of vaccine success and no wild cases in the United States, that cost was no longer worth it. The switch was made to the somewhat less effective but completely safe inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). It was a wise choice and made at the right point in time. Polio free, achieved with the OPV, was maintained with the IPV.

Your claim that vaccines were not responsible is simply hogwash. In my own professional career of just over 20 years I have seen meningitis nearly disappear, first decreasing as the Hib vaccine caused Hib disease to become unheard of and then more recently as the pneumoccal vaccine has made pneumoccocal disease a rare event. The new Rotavirus vaccine has already made hospitalizations with dehydration from gastroenteritis a much rarer event even with only partial uptake and a lack of significant herd immunity.

In case anyone had any doubt about how the anti-vaxxers would react …