Not an expert on this subject so I cannot speak to the validity of this study, but my son was diagnosed with ASD support level 2 in April, and I’ve been doing some reading. This is what I’ve learned: Nobody knows WTF causes autism but researchers are pretty sure it’s not one thing. There’s a genetic component for sure, but it’s not as simple as “I inherited autism genes from my Dad.” It probably involves the genes of both parents and something being switched on during gestation. Theories for what switches it on have ranged from inflammation to pollution, but it’s likely a confluence of several factors. Then there’s the fact that some researchers think there are different types of autism, one for example that is obvious from early toddlerhood but is less severe, and one that appears as a sudden regression in late toddlerhood but is more severe. Our kid was somewhere in the middle. We knew something was going on but weren’t fully convinced it was autism until he was almost three when he experienced a regression and the stereotyped behaviors became much more apparent. (Incidentally, the sudden regression, caused by a malfunction in the pruning process, coincides with when people usually get their kids vaccinated. That is why so many parents swear their kids were fine until they got them vaccinated.)
All of which is to say, if anyone tells you they know what causes autism, they are full of shit.
But we know definitively what doesn’t: vaccines and formula feeding.
Also to add: I don’t know how autism became such a bogeyman among new parents. It makes the diagnosis much more shocking and difficult to deal with not because of your actual child but because of ideas about what autism looks like or means or predicts about your child’s future. These are largely ableist stereotypes and as a new parent of an autistic kid we all have to confront them. It’s a crisis at first, and then it just becomes life. But I think if we didn’t have all these scare campaigns about autism it would be a lot less stressful for new families dealing with diagnosis.
When I read something like this I parse it as: Diet Coke may cause my son!
I mean, what’s wrong with my son? Nothing. My son is awesome. If we could somehow extricate the autism I don’t think I would have the same son, and that would be a tragedy.
It’s an “award” (like the Darwin awards) for dying of COVID-19 after publicly disavowing masks or vaccines–especially if they also publicly engaged in risky activities.
Herman Cain, like many prominent Republicans, spread false information about COVID-19 early on in the pandemic. He specifically avoided wearing a mask at a Trump rally, and subsequently died of COVID-19 a month later. A month after his death, a tweet went out on his Twitter (probably written by his PR staff) saying “It looks like the virus is not as deadly as the mainstream media first made it out to be.”
Vaccines prevent life-threatening diseases and Diet Coke is just a low calorie soft drink. So I think it’s factually accurate to state Diet Coke is worse than vaccines.
Also incidentally, the hard proof that the MMR vaccine don’t cause autism came when the nation of Japan changed its vaccine schedule, delaying the MMR vaccine, and the rates/ages at which Japanese kids developed autism continued along the same trajectory without a jiggle. (Googling, maybe it was just the city of Yokohama. It was an enormous study that’s statistically extremely solid.)
As I recall, after the schedule was changed to delay the MMR (because of false concerns that it caused SIDS, after two deaths), the death rate from whooping cough jumped to 40 in one year. Antivaccine activists handled this fact the same way they handled all other facts: Ignoring it or lying about it
The MMR does not protect against pertussis. The DTaP does, however.
The old DTP vaccine (“a” means acellular) was thought to cause brain damage in a small percentage of the people who took it, and this appeared to cluster in families. And indeed it “did”: Those children had a genetic disorder of sodium metabolism in the brain that usually starts to cause symptoms around age 2 to 4 months, which coincides with the first DTaP vaccine.
We met with some distant family members a few months ago when our son was first diagnosed. Both had autistic kids with very high support needs - one went suddenly blind in his early twenties, as if he hadn’t struggled enough in his life. The subject of vaccines did come up. They did believe that vaccines caused their sons’ autism because they both experienced that sudden regression around the time of vaccination.
They asked us what we thought. I said as tactfully as possible that I don’t think it’s vaccines, I think it runs in the family, at which point my cousin conceded that she knows a family who didn’t vaccinate and their son still was autistic, so it’s hard to say.
It’s easy to sneer at these people but I have developed empathy for people facing their child’s severe disability and wanting an explanation. I reserve my ire for the people giving a platform to this nonsense and grifting desperate parents. Anti-vaxxing is just the tip of the iceberg. There are people selling dangerous “cures” for autism that lead to abuse and neglect.
The antidote in my opinion is to foster a society that fully accepts and integrates people with disabilities. Then there would be nothing to be afraid of.
An antivaccine movement developed in Japan as a consequence of increasing numbers of adverse reactions to whole-cell pertussis vaccines in the mid-1970s. After two infants died within 24 h of the vaccination from 1974 to 1975, the Japanese government temporarily suspended vaccinations. Subsequently, the public and the government witnessed the re-emergence of whooping cough, with 41 deaths in 1979.
Even an “unsafe” vaccine is better than letting the disease run free
The talk about MMR vaccines reminded me of something.
There was some concern that a previous MMR vaccine may have been what led to my high fever and seizures as an toddler. There was some concern that this caused some brain damage–particularly the part where I wasn’t breathing. (This is, yes, the point where I say I was considered dead for over 45 minutes, according to my mother.) And later on in life, I was thought to possibly be on the autism spectrum (pervasive developmental disorder), though a later diagnosis said I was not.
When time for the MMR boosters (in seventh grade) came around, I was understandably concerned. So what did we do? Did we just avoid the vaccine? No. I got myself tested, to see if I was immune. I definitely was, so I didn’t need the booster. But I would have gotten it if not–just with heavy monitoring.
So I guess maybe there’s a possibility that a vaccine indirectly caused autism in this case. But notice how much else had to happen. If you didn’t have a fever and stop breathing, possibly causing brain damage, your vaccine didn’t cause your autism.
Probably not, though, because all evidence points to autism being something you’re born with. It isn’t caused by anything that happens after birth. While it usually isn’t diagnosed until around 18 months at the earliest, and age 4 on average, some research studies can predict it within months of birth. While parents and other loved ones may not see any signs until the child is older, differences in tracked eye movements, EEG patterns etc observed in a laboratory can predict autism pretty well.
One thing I’m curious about myself is the high rate of autism in children born prematurely. It seems unlikely that premature birth itself causes autism - so is there something happening along with autism getting switched on that causes early labor? (My son was not premature. Just curious.)
I got very sick from my measles vaccine. (I’m old enough that i got vaccinated separately for measles and German measles, and had a case of the mumps.) So when we were all supposed to get another dose, my mom got me a medical exemption.
A few years ago, when measles was in the news for making a comeback, i considered getting revaccinated. But instead i asked my doctor if it was possible to test for immunity. It is and i am, so i didn’t try another dose.
(Although honestly, from my mother’s description, i think the problem was that i caught measles from the vaccine, not that i had a weird vaccine reaction. The early vaccine wasn’t as reliably manufactured as it is now. The reason my cohort was supposed to be revaccinated was that many kids got a dose where the virus was too damaged to create a good immune response. I think i got a dose where the virus wasn’t damaged enough.)
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