Was there any belief in a vaccine-autism link before Wakefield’s “study?” Or did the entire premise spring from what we now know to be a complete fabrication-for-money?
Who needs facts? Same thing in the dog world. See Dr. Dodds and http://www.thedogplace.org/VACCINES/Rabies-Update-Lawsuit-0705.asp I haven’t seen anything on autism in dogs, just charges of high rates of serious reactions. Yes, there are reactions, even deaths. However, any reaction is rare, and most of them are mild. With a new puppy every year, a vet that goes beyond the AVMA guidelines, I have my dogs vaccinated much more than many people. I have never seen any reaction at all, Now I am thinking about starting a thread ranting about generalizing from limited personal experience, but my experience is compatible with the published data Dr. Dodds questions.
Fear of possible health problems due to vaccination go back centuries. But the specific link between vaccination and autism appears to have originated with Wakefield.
Wakefield was accepting money from a group of lawyers to fabricate his research. What claim(s) were these lawyers making on behalf of their clients? What was wrong with their clients’ children? Where did they get the idea that vaccines were the culprit?
I think it started with the observation by parents that their children began exhibiting symptoms of autism shortly after having been vaccinated. Of course this was due to the fact that
- Before the vax scare pretty much every child was vaccinated
- In order to provide early protection vaccines are done early
- the first symptoms of autism also occur early
Now parents desperately seeking answers to what happen to their perfect child start naturally looking for causes. “What happened in the last few months that could have changed my child?” The obvious culprit was the vaccines.
Also there has been an increase in autism diagnoses which to my knowledge has not been entirely explained (but likely is at least partially due to more screenings). Since the use of vaccines has also been steadily increasing some people see this as evidence of a connection.
Wakefield was also looking to patent his own vaccine to replace the MMR that was in use then. He did not reveal this to his co-authors.
There are several explanations for the “increase” in diagnoses. First is that yes, there are more screenings at younger ages. The second is that rates of mental retardation have dropped as the rates of autism have risen, indicating that some of these children would have received a diagnosis of mental retardation in earlier generations but are being diagnosed with autism now. The third is that the rates of autism include the spectrum of autistic disorders, including Asperger’s, and the widening of the diagnostic criteria means that some disorders that weren’t included in the rates are now being included.
The current rate of autism is something like 1 in 150, or 1 in 125, depending on which numbers you use. Everybody’s talking about what a public health emergency this is, but the rates of schizophrenia are about 1 in 100, and nobody gives a damn about that.
Because the amount of diagnosed autism and number of vaccines have both been increasing over the last decades.
Because children are receiving certain vaccines around the same time that they first start to display signs of autism.
You could understand that there would definitely be questions about vaccines after seeing these two facts. I am not saying that vaccines cause autism, but it isn’t as if they just pulled a random idea out of the air.
A cursory Google turned up Brian Deer’s follow-up to his 2005 Sunday Times report (bolding mine):
Following a Sunday Times investigation last year, the authors of the Lancet paper, except Wakefield, retracted the claim of a possible link with autism. The journal said it regretted publishing the paper.
The GMC’s inquiry, expected to conclude at a public hearing next June, is understood to be investigating Wakefield’s work with lawyers who were trying to sue MMR manufacturers while he was apparently acting as an independent researcher.
In the original Lancet paper, the only evidence against MMR were statements by the parents of eight children who linked the vaccine with autism. The GMC is now trying to establish how many of them were lawyers’ clients.
And from Deer’s original 2004 report (the one which blew the lid off the scandal to begin with):
The scandal arises from the journal’s publication in February 1998 of a scientific report on the “findings” in the cases of 12 autistic children, apparently admitted routinely to the Royal Free hospital in north London in 1996-97.
Wakefield was the lead author of the report. He wrote that the parents of eight of the 12 children blamed MMR: they said symptoms of autism had set in within days of vaccination.
…
In the months that followed the examination of the first children, many more were channelled through the hospital. The parents of many were clients of one solicitor, Richard Barr, of King’s Lynn, Norfolk, who was leading the legal attack and had organised Wakefield’s funding from the Legal Aid Board (now the Legal Services Commission).
This seems to indicate that a group of parents basically pulled the MMR-autism link out of their collective asses on the basis of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning.
Autism sets in usually around the age of 3
kids get their MMR around 3
people with a kid that gets autism around 3 put 2 and 2 together and get 5 because they dont know that the other 100,000 kids with autism also started showing signs around 3 in regardless of the MMR
as usual Horizon has an episode on the topic, and there is absolutely zero evidence for the claims of an autism link.
http://www.videolinks4u.net/video/videos/223829/
you can even watch it here
Cellphone use has been increasing in recent decades.
A lot of different drugs, household chemicals, plastics, flooring materials* and pesticides have seen increasing use in recent decades.
Ultraviolet light exposure has increased in recent decades.
The list goes on and on. But vaccines have been a favorite target for some - again because some parents notice autistic symptoms developing in their kids not long after some vaccines are given (a counter to this is that experts have demonstrated the capability to detect subtle indicators of future autism long before it becomes apparent to parents).
It wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad if people latched on to, say, use of a pesticide as a causative factor for autism. We could likely do just fine without that pesticide. Vaccines are another story.
*yes, there’s actually been a paper tentatively linking autism to vinyl flooring.
As Orac of the blog Respectful Insolence says, it’s always about the vaccines. It will never NOT be about the vaccines to the hardcore anti-vaxxers. You can disprove links between vaccines and autism (and other disorders) until we run out of research money (and patience), and in the end, it will always and forever be about the vaccines.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - it’s time to just eliminate anti-vaxxers from the discussions about autism. We’ve wasted millions of research dollars and thousands of hours of research time trying to convince them that vaccines aren’t the problem, and they don’t care.
The anti-vaxxers are the health equivalent to the moon landing hoaxers. They do not base their opinions or beliefs on facts and facts will not change them. They have faith that vaccines cause autism.
In a lot of cases, maybe most, kids don’t “start” showing signs of autism as toddlers, it’s just that when they’re two or three parents reach the point when they can no longer deny that the child isn’t acting like their agemates. There have been studies to show that many children with autism exhibit symptoms from birth and that diagnosis can be made as young as six months.
Check out “Bad Science” by Ben Goldacre. Goldacre goes into detail about the MMR Vaccine but he also explains how scientific studies are done and can be fudged to bring about certain results.
I was going to post what Elfkin wrote.
According to the Seattle Children’s Hospital Austism Center doctors, only in about 10-15% of the cases can a “cause” of autism be identified. I say “cause” because there is a checklist of *behaviors *that are observed and if the child gets checked yes on enough of the behaviors, then it is an official diagnosis of being somewhere on the autism spectrum. My duaghter, for example, probably is one of those identifiable cases as she had hypoxic damage a birth and her twin does not exhibit much in the way of autistic behaviors.
So, the % of autism has been rising steadily. One factor is that a lot more cases of what previously would not have been diagnosed as Austism now is.
One pointer to autism being genetic is that the children of two parents that are borderline have a higher incidence than the regular population. Eg, 2 engineering geek types have a greater chance that their kids will be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Look at Silicon Valley and the high tech industry. It’s not that correlated as while Microsoft employees have a greater than normal rate of austic children, it may also be because Microsoft has the best insurance in the US for covering autism and therefore parents of autism spectrum kids actively try to get hired just for the insurance benefits.
The ironic thing is that anti-vaccination people will probably use Andrew Wakefield as evidence to support their beliefs. When legitimate scientific studies show that there’s no link between vaccination and autism, they’ll just say “So what? The Wakefield article shows you can’t believe scientific studies. I’ve got a mother’s intuition that tells me the truth.”
Yeah, and I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you. No checks please—cash only, and in small bills.
True. Mental retardation diagnoses have gone down at almost the same rates that autism diagnoses have gone up. I suspect that part of this is because it used to be believed that the autistic were always mentally retarded too, but these days doctors realize that about half have an at least average IQ.
In general I think society is in retreat from accepting science. Science has shot itself in the foot because too much of it has been been influenced by somebody’s personal agenda.
While we can disagree about climate change, I think we must accept that somebody is lying. Who?