Discussing vaccines with a reasonably evidence oriented person the other day, I was surprised to hear them say “Yes, studies show no link between vaccines and autism, but you know who funded those? It was pharmaceutical companies!” Is there any work that reviews source of funding for vaccine studies and/or studies that are positively NOT funded by pharmaceuticals?
Your own premise is in error. The person you mention is not reasonably evidence oriented. You just discovered that fact.
I don’t know the answer to your question but the correct response is:
*"Do you know who funded the studies that found a link between vaccines and autism?
Sorry, trick question! Ha ha! There are no such studies! I crack me up.
So the only rational thing for me to do is take the evidence of the studies that show no link (suspect as you may believe those studies to be), because there is no evidence whatever of the contrary position."*
Of course this tactic won’t work, because any true anti vaxxer will probably rely on Wakefield’s study and suggest it was only ever discredited by dark forces manipulated by Big Pharma.
There’s no way to win.
There are numerous studies supporting vaccine safety that are not funded by Big Pharma.
For example (just pulled up a couple at random from these sources):
http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=190443
Vaccine makers are required to conduct efficacy and safety studies before vaccines are approved. But it’s false that no independent investigators evaluate these parameters.
The person (and I use the term loosely) who alleged a link between vaccines and autism, Andrew Wakefield, was paid off by a group of lawyers to fake his results. His research has been officially retracted by The Lancet due to this fraud, which is practically unheard-of, and Wakefield himself was stricken from the medical register, meaning he is effectively no longer a physician.
Wakefield subjected children to unnecessary lumbar punctures and colonoscopies to further his fraud. He sold out for £400,000 from some lawyers who wanted to sue vaccine companies and he tortured those children to make his lies more believable. His work is directly responsible for a large and unprecedented increase in the amount of vaccine-preventable diseases, some of them resulting in deaths, and he still has the temerity to continue to campaign against vaccines, even knowing it’s all a lie.
So the next time your “evidence-oriented person” makes some hand-wavy reference to “Big Pharma”, hit them with some actual evidence. If they have any basic humanity, they’ll shut up, listen, and change their mind.
Nitpick: Wakefield was a paid expert witness for lawyers pursuing a class action suit against MMR manufacturers. We don’t know if they knew his results were bogus or not. At the time he initially signed on to the project, he was researching links between the measles virus itself and autism (as well as Crohn’s disease), not vaccine links.
There’s actual evidence now that heavy metal ingestion by infants never causes harm? If you’ll recall, the mechanic for “vax’s cause autism” isn’t the active compounds, rather the preservative thiomersal (which contains mercury).
A lot of things are suspected of causing autism, and I believe vaccines could be safer. Is there more than a strictly imaginary connection? Do we have any statistics? Adverse effects are known to be severe sometimes, what are the odds specifically?
Leave autism out of the discussion for now, there’s far too much we don’t know about it to make any broad statements about thiomersal’s roll, if any.
bzzt. asking to prove a negative.
it’s this kind of baseless fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) which is convincing people to not vaccinate their children. you are demanding incontrovertible proof that everything is absolutely 100% safe for everybody in every possible condition, and that’s just plain unreasonable.
I wish the mods could auto-forward OPs like this to the secret Kolga/LavenderBlue subforum (formerly: “The Barn”) so we could have them in one neat, tidy place.
Or I wish we had a vaccine batsignal on the Dope to call them.
Either would work.
Private message.
I’ve done that a few times when a thread called for a specific Doper’s expertise.
And this is complicated by the fact that the CDC deliberately misrepresented data from a Danish study on Thimerosal:
One thing to maybe mention is that big pharma doesn’t actually make so much from vaccines. They would prefer you got sick and required expensive drugs. But their real payoff are in drugs that you take for the rest of your (hopefully long) life. I take two statins and two blood pressure drugs, for example and that is where they live.
To be sure, occasionally a vaccination will have bad results. Rare, but they happen. I tried to find out the frequency, but all I could find was that they are rare. Hell, some people will react badly to distilled water.
I was shocked to read yesterday that there were a couple dozen deaths among US children last year from diphtheria. Diphtheria! I think I may have been vaccinated against that 77 years ago. I also read that there were no cases at all of diphtheria between 2004 and 2008, before the current anti-vax craze really hit high gear. I feel a great sympathy for the kids, but none at all for their parents who are guilty of child abuse.
Of course there’s a conspiracy between Big Pharma and the Guv’ment. They’re vaccinating children so they don’t die of preventable childhood diseases and grow up to become adults who can pay income taxes. 
Not really, the infamous Wakefield study dealt with the MMR vaccine, which has never contained thiomersal.
We know that thiomersal was removed (first in Denmark in the early 90s then in the US in the early 2000s) from childhood vaccines, and autism rates haven’t gone down. We can make the broad statement that autism doesn’t seem to be related to thiomersal.
I’m not sure that a press release from a group called The Coalition for Mercury-free Drugs is a reliable source of info. From what I’ve seen from groups like that, they lie regularly. Got something else?
Thimerosal did cause a few rare allergic reactions, etc. It’s gone (except in a few things that sit on the shelf a long time, such as anti-venom. But when you have rattlesnake venom coursing thru your body, you last worry is a mercury reaction. )
It has saved many lives however, it could have prevented the serious adverse effects “such as the Staphylococcus infection that, in one 1928 incident, killed 12 of 21 children vaccinated with a diphtheria vaccine that lacked a preservative.” But it’s no longer really needed in modern Western medicine where we dont have to store the stuff for decades or improperly. So- it’s gone.
Since there’s *no connection at all *between vaccines and autism, it’s unlikely there could be a connection between thimerosal and autism. But if there was, then we’d see a sharp drop when it was stopped. Nothing of the sort has been seen.
Hard to believe any sentient human is still arguing that thimerosal preservative caused autism. Just look at the United States. Thimerosal was removed from virtually all vaccines in 2001 (with the exception of inactivated flu vaccine in multidose vials), yet reported autism rates kept increasing. If thimerosal was the culprit, we’d have seen a huge decline in autism rates by now. Where is the big drop? Huh?
This antivax argument doesn’t work for Denmark either.
It’s a dead parrot. Please stop beating it.
Just one correction to this otherwise fine post: The lawyers group paid Wakefield a ton of money in hopes he’d come up with data permitting lucrative lawsuits against vaccine makers (which Wakefield failed to report to the Lancet as an obvious conflict of interest). I’ve seen no evidence that the lawyers encouraged him to commit fraud.
How do these not go together?
And don’t forget he patented a competing vaccine.
Okay, now I have the Batman theme as an earworm.
You know that PRnewswire is a service that publishes things when you pay them to do so, right?
Nuh nuh, nuh nuh, nuh nuh, nuh nuh, nuh nuh, nuh nuh, nuh nuh, nuh nuh, VAC-CINE!
You’re welcome. 