I got into it at school today with a couple of anti-vax woohoos. I gotta stop hanging around community colleges. One of them was the instructor who is teaching the course I’m taking, and the other was a classmate who, frighteningly enough, wants to be an MD. OK, woohoo is too strong a word—neither of them are card-carrying McCarthyists. However, they both maintained that not all of the evidence condemning the autism link has been thoroughly discounted. The instructor voiced concern over the “lead” that is still present in some vaccines. This is just utter nonsense, isn’t it? I did read a few years ago that there were still a handful of reputable researchers who were pursuing research in this area, but surely by now they must have thrown in the towel and set their sights on more fruitful pastures, right? Is there even the remotest possibility that the anti-vax proponents have even the flimsiest, most tenuous, termite-infested leg to stand on?
Nope.
It’s not like vaccines are entirely without risk. When vaccines are widely implemented it’s not uncommon for a very tiny percentage of people have negative reactions of varying severity. Some reactions like Guillain-Barre syndrome can be quite serious.
The problems come when people use extremely poor methodologies to claim that exposure to a vaccine is directly related to a host of problems, some of which existed well before the age of vaccines. Because the use of vaccines is so widespread in modern western society you can claim that they cause just about anything.
Has anyone ever really proven Santa Claus doesn’t exist?
There is no evidence to support any of the anti-vaxxer claims but a serious anti-vaxxer can always claim cover-up/conspiracy or the effect is real but too small to be noted by studies that only look at several hundreds of thousands, or only true in some subpopulation otherwise at risk for the adverse effect for some reason … and so on. So from that POV they claim that the claims are not completely discounted.
I find it hard to believe that a computer could cause autism.
Global warming causes autism! Duh. And mankind is not responsible for any of it.
The exact cause of autism is unknown but the evidence is overwhelming that it’s a genetic disorder. So it’s pretty hard to see how it could be caused by a vaccination.
Stop hanging around with those people 
Hey, now, I teach at a CC, and I am careful to beat the “vaccines=autism” bullshit out of my students (at least in terms of what they express verbally)
Kill me now.
Not every anti-vaxxer is a Jenny McCarthy-ite.
They are wrong (as far as I can parse this sentence. I think you are saying that they maintain that the information that says “vaccines don’t case autism” isn’t conclusive). There are numerous studies that have investigated numerous aspects of the vaccines/autism link and have found no credible evidence of such a link.
Well, yea, there’s no “lead” in vaccines. Did the instructor perhaps mean “mercury,” which is the anti-vaxxers shorthand for “icky stuff I don’t understand and that must therefore be bad because my uneducated ass doesn’t comprehend it”?
If the instructor meant “mercury,” then that’s a HUGELY different issue, and he/she misunderstands the presence of thimerosal in some vaccines and why that particular compound is present in some vaccines.
No, unfortunately, because of raving publicity whores like Jenny McCarthy and other anti-vax morons (Barbara Loe Fisher, David and Mark Geier, etc.), precious research time and money has continued to be wasted on more research in this area long after the need for such research.
Depends on what you mean by “anti-vax.” Do people (both children and adults) have unpredictable (and very rare) adverse reactions to vaccines? Yes. Are those reactions more likely to occur than deaths from the diseases themselves? No. Are vaccines a cause of autism? No, they are not.
Sure.
Let me see if I can do this from memory. When the first polio (Polio? whichever) vaccine came out, it was ‘live virus.’ It was very, very effective, but it also gave one in every zillion people polio (or perhaps Polio). When the disease was rampant, that was an acceptable risk.
Later, when the disease got rare, we went to a less-effective ‘dead virus’ vaccine. THis is less effective but cannot give anyone the disease.
So anyway, it is fine to be a little leery of vaccines. They have a history even in my lifetime of causing disease. But the central claim of the anti-vax movement is not a bit of skepticism, but of stone-cold certainty when the facts are not there.
Here’s the “science”. There are basically three claims.
One is Andrew Wakefield’s studies. Wakefield is a medical researcher who wrote a report in 1998 linking a common vaccine to autism. It’s since been proven that Wakefield was lying. He was receiving money from law firms that were suing vaccine companies and he falsified evidence to give the law firms the results they wanted.
The second is the thiomersal recall. In 1999 it was found that some mercury compounds could have a toxic effect. As a precautionary measure the government called for the removal of all mercury compounds, including thiomersal, where they could be replaced by other compounds. Thiomersal was used in vaccines and it was removed. This was the height of the anti-vaccination panic and some people saw this as proof that thiomersal caused autism.
This wasn’t true. The problem with mercury compounds had nothing to do with autism. And while the government stopped the use of all mercury compounds, subsequent tests found that the problem didn’t even exist in thiomersal. And finally, if thiomersal was the cause of autism, the whole point was that it had been removed from vaccines so they would presumedly now be safe.
The third theory is vaccine overload. This one really has no evidence behind it. The claim is that getting a vaccine shot produces too much stress on your immune system which causes autism.
This has no basis in fact. A vaccination is actually a fairly minor event as far as your immune system is concerned. If you took every major vaccination all together you’d be exposed to about 200 compounds. Your immune system can handle exposure to thousands of compounds at the same time. And nobody has ever found evidence of any post-vaccination immunity problems. And finally, even if there were some immunity problems they wouldn’t include autism, which has nothing to do with your immune system.
Yeah, I screwed the pooch on that one. I meant to say the opposite—that they both maintained that not all of the evidence supporting (not condemning) the autism link has been thoroughly discounted.
Ah. Then they are wrong. See the above posters regarding the original fraudulent Wakefield study. Any other studies that claim to have found a link between vaccines and autism has used tainted data (the VAERS database) or confounded data (any studies by the Geiers).
To be scrupulously fair, it is theoretically possible to inherit a genetic predisposition to some condition that is triggered by exposure to some aspect of the environment.
And reject what Jenny McCarthy says? Being a former Playmate of the Year certainly makes you a modern day Salk, Pasteur or Fleming.Jenny McCarthy - Wikipedia
There is never enough evidence to “thoroughly discount” the “autism link” in the opinion of antivaxers. There’s always a new and illogical theory, some dread “contaminant” in vaccines, whatever can be dredged up to keep the meme alive.
Yes, but it’s a popular avenue of attack. What you’ll often see from antivaxers is a list of all the diabolical “toxins” they say are present in vaccines - “antifreeze”, aluminum, formaldehyde, thimerosal, aborted fetuses, monkey parts - you name it. Some of these claims are straight out of fantasy, others appear to be compiled from a list of excipients and substances used in vaccine manufacture that the FDA once released, and which can be distorted into “toxins” by the antivax crowd. Was a cell culture originally derived from fetal tissue used to grow viruses as part of the vaccine-making process? There’s your “aborted fetuses”. Was formaldehyde used to weaken or kill a virus, and a minute trace possibly exists in the finished vaccine? Deadly! (except the amount doesn’t even measure up to the formaldehyde naturally occurring in your body as part of normal metabolic processes). Maybe there’s a minute trace of lead in some vaccine, but certainly not enough to be of any significance.
No and no. Even as the etiology of autism becomes better understood (and genetic links uncovered), there will remain a hard core dedicated to the proposition that vaccines are the cause. Some of these people just cannot give up an idea they’ve invested so much in, others are determined antivaxers who see value in continuing to scare parents in order to advance their antivax agenda.
Antivax nuttery long predates concerns about autism. It’ll be with us for a long time to come, even as new and equally baseless scares are promulgated.
About the “lead” that your instructor mentioned - I suspect that he was thinking either mercury (which someone else has already addressed), or aluminum.
Aluminum is added to some vaccines because it causes your immune system to crank it up a little more, and therefore be more responsive to the virus in the vaccine. Vaccines aren’t perfect at inoculating you - maybe only 80% of the people who’ve had a vaccine will actually be immune to the disease. Aluminum is added because it increases this percentage. IANAIDD, but that’s my understanding. If you’re trying to increase the herd immunity in a population (which is really the goal of vaccines), getting that percentage up makes a big difference.
Whether he was thinking mercury or aluminum, the fact that he said “lead” tells you that he’s not familiar enough to justify any strong opinions.
Reputable researchers? Probably yes. Anti-vaxxers? Hah! These folks are married to the idea, and if God Himself came down and proved they were mistaken, they would not believe it.
A while back, the government admitted that in one case, a vaccine caused “autism-like symptoms” in a child. I don’t remember the specifics, but it doesn’t really matter, because as part of the settlement, I think the records were sealed.
This. There is no evidence that vaccines do what people are most afraid of them doing, and the one major study that showed that they might cause problems like Autism has been widely debunked by everyone including its own authors.
I think you may be referring to the Hannah Poling case, which is no secret and has been exhaustively discussed.
The issue here was a (genetic) mitochondrial disorder in a child which may have predisposed her to a bad reaction to a vaccine(s). The same sort of disorders have been known to cause severe reactions to infectious diseases in children, which is why parents are typically urged to keep them up on vaccinations. The “vaccine court” did not find that vaccination caused autism in her case, and in fact the same court subsequently rejected such a link in other cases.