There is something I don’t understand in this whole autism debate. Has anyone done even a retrospective study of the social interactions of children who turn out to be autistic? Had they appeared entirely normal before the diagnosis? Autism is generally diagnosed at between 18 and 30 months exactly when normal children learn to speak. But social interaction begins long before that. My daughter visited last week with her 10 month old son. He is just so social. Even at six months, I had to hide when he was nursing because he would rather look at me and smile than feed. From my experience with 3 children and 6 grandchildren, this is pretty much what I expect. So my question is were children who later turned out to be autistic this social before a year?
A negative answer to this question would surely put a crimp to any association between vaccination and autism. But I have never seen it addressed.
Yes the studies have been done and your speculation is correct. There are, albeit subtle, abnormalities in infants who later get diagnosed with autism seen on reviews of videotapes.
None of these changes are dramatic enough to be diagnostic however. That said we can very often be highly confident that a particular child does not have autism - the highly socially oriented interactive babbling waving 9-12 month old (like your grandson) is highly unlikely to later get an autism diagnosis.
No, the anti-vaxxers will not be crimped. Facts don’t matter.
Here’s an article by neurologist Steven Novella of Yale University, talking about those early signs of autism (which can be detected by skilled observers before the children have had the chance to receive vaccines blamed by some for autism).