Furthermore, this particular domain has a significant tendency for selection bias. The overwhelming majority of parents whose children did not happen to develop problems coincidental to their vaccination, are quietly getting on with their lives (or maybe just being loud about something else).
That’s not to downplay the trouble that parents of an autistic child suffer, of course - just to point out that in naturally emphasising the apparent pattern matches, and naturally glossing over all the non-matches, there is a tendency for the case to look obvious to those who are significantly focused on the selected matches.
Yeah, the one time I had a bad reaction it was to a yellow fever vaccine and I felt like had a bad case of “the flu”, the kind which justifies why one of its names in Spanish means “the beating”. The mother of all joint pains, the times I’ve actually had the flu didn’t hurt that badly. But joint pain isn’t a symptom of yellow fever: it was my immune system going on overdrive.
That particular vaccine was unnecessary according to everybody except my employers (and perhaps their insurance companies), but I’d still rather have a miserable weekend than get actual yellow fever.
And I’m sure those antivaxxer parents spend much more time & energy preaching their cause than actually trying to help their children.
So again you’re basing your evaluations on anecdotal evidence of low quality and totally ignoring the possibility of coincidence. That’s the source of crap knowledge throughout history, from banging drums during an eclipse to get the sun to reappear to burning the woman next door as a witch because you remember her looking at your cow sideways yesterday before it got sick and died.
Coincidences happen, so do alterations of memories to fit the narrative one has chosen for them. This story has the makings of powerful emotional effect, but based on extremely well founded knowledge about vaccines, vaccine reactions and autism it is extremely unlikely to be a true tale of causation and possibly even correlation.
Are there unknowns about vaccine reactions and about the causes of autism? Certainly, especially about what causes autism, but that there isn’t a correlation between vaccines and autism is unusually thoroughly documented.
I don’t think the OP is looking to learn anything and will not be converted regardless of evidence provided. And he’s as much as said he’s not looking to convert anyone.
He’s doing promotion for this movie!
And y’all are helping him, the more you talk about it.
The truly insane part was that even if vaccines did have a small percent chance of causing autism as an adverse effect, they would certainly be worth taking the risk for. Any yet, there is absolutely no actual scientific evidence that they have this chance - yet anti-vaxers refuse vaccines. It’s nuts.
Why? You don’t even need to do that. It’s so appalling when people in First World countries sit there on their butts and say, in their blissful ignorance, that measles and mumps and whooping cough and all of those diseases are just fine, when you can go to lots of places in the world and RIGHT FUCKING NOW see kids dying of it.
I was born in India, and I have visited many times. I don’t need to go look at graves, I’ve seen it. India still has whooping cough. Measles is still one of the leading causes of death in children.
It’s so nice that people can sit here in their nice clean countries and debate whether vaccines, fucking vaccines, the greatest health advancement since washing hands, is a necessity! It’s so nice to live in that kind of blissful world with the realities of the world shut out.
First World fucking problems! You don’t want to vaccinate? Keep your children out of the public sphere. No public school for you. No field trips. Find some school that will take the little rugrats.
While I definitely see where you’re coming from, most people in the First World have it easier to visit a cemetery that another country. And if you tell a moron to look at, say, data on measles (rates, death rates, other long-term adverse effects) in India vs. whichever country said moron lives in, they’re going to attribute the differences to anything but vaccines: children in India die from measles, not because they got measles, but because the doctor didn’t wash his hands (“those people” don’t know how to wash their hands properly, as you well know) or because the moon was having a meeting with Saturn in the house of Cancer with the sun coming sideways in Scorpio.
Then again, Urbanredneck is making a very good showing of disregarding all those dead people… we could take him to a cemetery in Mumbay and he’d claim all those kids died because cows have horns. Oh wait, better: the graves are fakes put in place by Big Pharma. Anything but accept what’s in front of his nose, because what’s in front of his nose indicates, among other things, that neither he nor anybody has 100% control over our own lives and those of our children.
Nobody wonders: we all know you have nothing.
My oldest child is on the spectrum. In retrospect, I see now the social expectations he should have hit at certain stages, based on my interactions with my younger children and nieces and nephews. In 1991, as a new, inexperienced mother, I wasn’t concerned. I didn’t know what infants were supposed to do, except eat, shit, and cry.
Before his first MMR, eldest wigged out because his hands were sticky due to birthday cake. (His 6-weeks-younger cousin was face-diving into the cake.) My son could manage about 5 minutes of social interaction before he lost his shit. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s about 12 years later. In 1991, I had never heard of the syndrome. But I recognized the symptoms. It made perfect sense.
I have 2 very good friends and one idiot acquaintance whose children are profoundly effected by autism. Of the friends? R’s 9-year old son and T’s 24-year old son are progressing, within limits. The 24-year-old is increasingly verbal. In the past 2 years or so, he has begun to connect to a limited number of people, and to express independent opinions. Every question and observation is a victory. His father and aunt are both currently in custody - no formal diagnoses, but something that mimics late-onset schizophrenia. His late grandfather suffered a similar illness. In the case of the older generations, the illness was never called “autism,” but that’s the diagnosis based on today’s criteria. We might change the name of it again tomorrow, but there is an obvious genetic or heritable factor. The younger boy was more fortunate. His parents had an older child, and we’re able to recognize when their son wasn’t making connections. They had good health insurance. They were able to get an early diagnosis, and the best treatment. And still, their beloved son operates at a deficit.
In both of these cases, as in the case of my own child, the parents were able to recognize the problems, and address the issues. Even when we didn’t see the problem sooner, because we parents were too ignorant.
The acquaintance mentioned above blames vaccines and Big Pharma. She spends her days blogging for a relatively prominent autism parent site. She has been quite public about the cruel “treatment” her son has endured: chelation and bleach enemas and such. She rails about the conspiracy. And she tortures a child, in the name of Wakefield and “this is not the child I expected, based on my upper middle class first world expectations.” She is a monster.
I grew up about a quarter mile from the ca. 1850 family cemetery. The small lambs and doves marking graves haunted me. I heard the stories from the grannies and grand-aunts - the babies lost to whooping cough and yellow fever and measles. I saw my great grandmother cry, long after a stroke changed her perception of time, as she relived the horror of cradling her baby sister as the child died of streptococcus.
As an older child, I helped care for the maiden aunts. One was "simple, " after a measles-induced but of meningitis. The other lacked both legs - Rheumatic Fever compromised her circulation. She lost both legs above the knee around age 13.
If you honestly believe that autism is a result of vaccines, and that autism is worse than the complications of “routine” childhood illness? Please don’t reproduce. Please.
Lacunae, kudos to you and your friends, and fie on your acquaintance. It’s a shame when parents focus on fixing a child they perceive as “broken” instead of moving forward to make things better as best they can. As I mentioned above, a good friend of mine has a daughter who is autistic, and she is also deaf. My friend would , I think, rather cheerfully shred any person who implies her child needs torturous treatments to fix her. In fact, a woman in the grocery store got an earful once. The stranger made a nasty remark, upon seeing the child sign at her mother and not knowing what she had seen, about how children should learn to ASK and say please if they want something, instead of “just pointing at whatever they want.” People can be breathtakingly stupid. It’s heartbreaking when the ignorant can have such a tremendous impact on the innocent.
For more insight into how the “Vaxxed” team feels about protecting children, check out this article, which contains a video posted by “Vaxxed” producer Del Bigtree to his Facebook page.
In the video, Bigtree and Polly Tommey (a veteran antivaxer who’s been part of the “Vaxxed” entourage, helping to take audience questions along with film makers) interview David and Collet Stephan, an Alberta couple recently convicted in the death of their 19-month-old son Ezekiel (they’re due to be sentenced on Thursday). The child suffered through an extended bout of bacterial meningitis while his parents dosed him with homeopathic remedies, garlic, onions and other “natural” treatments (testimony showed he was so stiff that he couldn’t sit in the car taking him to a naturopath and had to be placed on a mattress). In the video, the parents don’t acknowledge their gross negligence in Ezekiel’s death, but instead blame the ambulance crew that finally took him to the hospital - and frame the case as defending parental rights.
Bigtree and Tommey, the interviewers, are heavily sympathetic to the Stephans, who Bigtree describes in the video as a “wonderful couple that are facing this incredible lying machine” and says “we’re all rooting for you”.
I would caution anyone watching the approximate 5-minute video to make sure they’re taking blood pressure medication if needed and that there are no handy objects nearby that one might be tempted to throw. I wasn’t sure who I most wanted to clock, the self-satisfied parents or the “Vaxxed” people who were praising and egging them on.
So, “parental rights” mean being allowed to let your child suffer and risk death by your avoidance of evidence-based medical care in favor of quackery. This mindset is common to many antivaxers as well, as Bigtree and Tommey have helped demonstrate.
Egads, so was that disgusting tripe also in the movie (I assume it was)? OP was this part of what you found so convincing? He had the sniffles, he wasn’t severely ill, and it’s the fault of this lying machine (and the ambulance) that he died?
As said on page 1, autism can be tracked back to the womb. I’m sure that other unfortunate things have happened to that kid, accidentally, in the time since the video was taken. Those are also unrelated to and did not cause the autism.
Vaccines do not have the power of time travel. They cannot fly backwards in time 2 and a half years to autismitize babies so that their brain expands by too much too early.
I call bullshit on this one. We spend a ton of time energy and money on our kids. Where the HELL do you come off with a wisecrack like that? Come to an ASA meeting maybe and see what we do.
I’m “sure” you dont know squat and it makes me wonder just what kind of people the pro-vaxxers are when they say crap like this.
Hey, you came back! How about responding to any of the cited responses to your questions(with something other than even more questions, that is)?
You’re making a pretty clear show, right here, of what you ‘do’ for the community.
And it amounts to spreading dangerous medical misinformation. Your ‘not so righteous’ indignation notwithstanding. Having an autistic child doesn’t give ignorance a pass. It’s not a ‘get out of scientific evidence’ free card, yknow!
When people show you, who they really are, it’s your job to see. And I think we all see pretty clearly!
But you don’t give a shit about the kids of others who are damaged by your pernicious misinformation. It’s all about your kids.
I haven’t heard of a tribute to the Stephans’ parenting being included in the movie “Vaxxed”, rather that it’s a side project of a couple of the “Vaxxed” people including producer Del Bigtree.
This defense of gross child neglect should appall supporters of the movie, but they’ll find a way to ignore or justify it.
Cute kid! I imagine her daddy wasn’t surprised when he got as many hits as he did.
Also from the Washington Post, talking about Wakefield’s work.