https://www.npr.org/2025/03/05/nx-s1-5285571/the-history-behind-an-enduring-public-health-falsehood-that-vaccines-cause-autism

The story is courtesy of NPR, and a full transcript is on the webpage. It's a reminder of a quote I've heard many times from Thom Hartmann (and he got it from somewhere else) that says that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth even starts out the door. And while the subject is anti-vaccine rhetoric, I think the same can also be said for lies promulgated by religious leaders.

The thing about vaccines is that the data is already there. Managing a conspiracy to make it support vaccine-caused autism would be impossible.

The heavy-handed rollout of the Covid shots may have been well-intentioned, but it means measles is coming back. The 90-95% measles vaccination rate needed to stop pandemics won't be there in many places.

Humans are fickle that way. Those who feel burned by Covid have to be right, even if it means becoming vectors for everything else. It is a significant enough fraction of the population to roll back 60 years of progress.

I think wealth inequality is driving some of this. Avoiding a vaccine schedule proven safe over decades is a form of passive aggression. Belief in conspiracy theories is a way to rebel against a broken social contract.

bradley Wrote:
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> The heavy-handed rollout of the Covid shots may
> have been well-intentioned, but it means measles
> is coming back.

By heavy-handed during COVID, do you mean mandates?

What is the connection between that and the current measles situation?

That people are (still) so angry about CV-related mandates that they are refusing to obtain childhood vaccinations for their kids?

Does that make any sense? Or were they against vaccines in the first place?

Neither position makes sense to me but I at least hope to try and understand where they are coming from. Otherwise, it's just too frustrating.

There are a lot of problems resulting from that period even today. I can't go into detail about most of them, but we are STILL seeing the economic effects right now for example. The whole thing could have been managed much better. There were inconsistencies all over the place. The manner in which it was handled undermined many people's trust and that's the important part here.

https://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-summary.htm

https://www.immunize.org/clinical/vaccine-confidence/topic/mmr-vaccine/bmj-deer-mmr-wakefield/

And the film at 11:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icJtTHgR_Ds

First, I know for a fact that vaccines do not cause autism. The scientist who promulgated this theory has since recanted. But he did a lot of damage that appears to be beyond repair at this point.

Having said that, as a public school teacher of nearly thirty years, I feel that I am seeing more cases of autism among my students. I'm not entirely sure of what's going on. It could be that teachers have simply gotten better at recognizing it when we see it. I remember my first student with autism took me the better part of a year to figure out. Now I can recognize it quickly. It might also be that students used to be shunted off to self-contained classrooms early on, but now we are more likely to mainstream them into regular classrooms.

I grew up before autism was a "thing", and yet looking back, I can think of plenty of people both young and old who had it. The ones at school were very badly treated by the teachers. They were only just beginning to get their heads around dyslexia back then. Autism wasn't even a suggestion for such kids.

If the scientist you are alluding to is Andrew Wakefield, he didn't really recant. He was exposed as a complete fraud and had his medical license struck (UK). But he still pushes the thoroughly discredited nonsense about a causal link between vaccines and autism. He makes a living peddling junk science to the crackpot conspiracy crew, which seems a fitting end to his career.

As to there being more autism now; greatly improved diagnostic methods explains this quite well.

I wish people would stop going on about "conspiracies" — they sound like censorship shills. Some people here need to rein in their latent tendencies.

The reasoning for this idea was the steep rise in autism cases in recent decades.

However, it was a complete misattribution. What had happened is that screening methods for autism had improved, but that they were mainly focused on children. Even roday, this is a problem — autism diagnoses tend to be far lower in the over-40 age bracket, not because of prevalence but just because screening only really began in any significant way in the nineties and on children.

I think autism was always with us, just few people bothered to notice it. I certainly remember a lot of people from the 1980s who had it and most of them probably slipped through the net.

When we have an open discussion about these matters, then we can properly debunk them. Not by suppressing rival ideas, even when false.

Yes, the 90s into the early 2000s sounds about right. My first student that I recognized with autism was probably around 2005. As a first grader, he didn't talk to me at all for the first six weeks of school, despite my constant efforts to engage him. He did not play with others. He seemed to be off in his own little world. It was his hand-flapping that finally clued me in. When I told his parents my suspicion, they got him immediate help from a specialized program. When I met him again about five years later, the program had done wonders for him.

Now I have three students who have been diagnosed with autism. In the old days we probably just thought that kids with mild-to-moderate autism were a bit off. Now we can pick it out rather easily.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/07/2025 04:54PM by summer.

I'm an Aspie (a name I wish they had kept - 'on the spectrum' sounds so cold and sterile. Aspie is at least a little warm and fuzzy), and that wasn't even a concept when I was in school. I didn't figure it out until I was 40-something, and teaching at university. I was working on a project with a member of the psychology faculty, and we got into a discussion about Aspies when he opined that he though ten to fifteen percent of people who went into software (this was mid 1980s - the early days of the PC/Macintosh). I seemed to tick all the boxes. He agreed.

Some years later, I related that story to a former faculty member in CS, and she laughed and said she'd lean more toward twenty-five percent being on the spectrum.

Software is the perfect place for Aspies. It requires highly focused concentration, great attention to detail, and doesn't require high social skills - not that they hurt, but they're not required.

For that matter, university positions in general are good fits for aspies - tight focus and attention to detail. That's not a half-bad description of what is needed to be a PhD. I think the proverbial absent minded professor is almost certainly on the spectrum.


When my mom passed away we were cleaning out the house, and came across all my grade school and HS report cards. That was a revelation. I have no memory of struggling in school, in fact some memory of doing pretty well, yet my first three years of report cards were liberally peppered with U's (S/U grading). I suspect I was in considerable danger of being held back in second grade.

I scored U in reading, which surprised me, because I remember being able to read passably well when I started grade school. I bet the problem was that I could not communicate, so they couldn't tell I could read. I also got consistent U's on "Organizes time well." LOL. I probably was off in my own little world.

One thing I remember clearly from grade school was that we got a list of "spelling words" each Monday, and had a quiz on them on Tuesday. If you got them all correct on Tuesday, you didn't have to do the homework assignment, which was to use each word in a sentence, due Thursday. I was in the middle of fourth grade before I missed my first spelling word. I was well aware at the time that I had a multi-year streak going! :) Hence my surprise at age 60-something to see they thought I couldn't read well in grade school. I had no idea in those early grades that I was getting poor marks, or in any way struggling.

I did have very ordinary grades up until 10th grade, when I finally started getting into the college prep courses of the era. Every 2 year period from then on was a step up in grades from the previous 2 year period (late HS, early BS (pre-mission), late BS, (post-military)MS, (middle 30s)PhD coursework - I'm an 'all but dissertation', (a job offer I couldn't refuse came along)).

Anyway, I am convinced there were a lot of people like me back in the day who were never diagnosed. Autism wasn't even a thing in the 1950s.

I think autism keeps getting blamed on vaccines because people want something or someone to blame. "We don't know what causes autism" is not a very satisfying answer.

I takes some months after birth before an infant is developed enough to be able to recognize that they have autism, and that puts them in the middle of the vaccination regimen. It's real easy for people to convince themselves that a vaccination caused the autism. They don't understand studies designed to confirm/disprove causation, and they don't really want to understand them. They want to assign blame, and the medical establishment/Big Pharma is the perfect target.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/07/2025 07:34PM by Brother Of Jerry.

I've mentioned the famous Michelson-Morley experiment many times.

Michelson couldn't believe that light waves could propagate through space without a medium -- the mysterious "aether" -- but no evidence for it was found. He did the experiment many times and with better equipment, only to discover the speed of light through a vacuum was constant.

You can't "will" something into existence...unless you are a god, of course.

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https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/07/health/hhs-cdc-vaccines-autism/index.html

The US Department of Health and Human Services asked the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study vaccines and autism, a person familiar with the situation told CNN, despite strong evidence that vaccines do not cause autism.

The agency will conduct the study using the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which monitors safety of vaccines and investigates rare and serious adverse events, The Washington Post reported, citing two people familiar with the plan. Reuters earlier reported the planned study.

The CDC has previously published several studies looking at a possible link between vaccines and vaccine ingredients and autism. None has found any evidence to suggest that vaccines increase the risk of autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders.

Using the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the CDC collaborates with 13 sites, including 11 that provide electronic health record data and two that provide expertise.

A request for comment from HHS on Friday wasn’t immediately returned. A source within the CDC spoke with CNN on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to share the information.

Researchers in other settings, including other countries, have studied this question, too.

“Decades of research have shown no link between vaccines and autism, including CDC studies using very large data systems, like the Vaccine Safety Datalink,” said Dr. Buddy Creech, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University.