Vaccines and Autism

[Aractus]

So I know this is beating a dead horse, but has anyone ever stopped to ask why anti-vaxers are treating autism (or disability in general) like some sort of life dooming thing? Doesn't anyone else think it's really weird that they'd rather their kid(s) have mumps, smallpox, polio, measles, etc than live with a disability?

I've pointed this out before, but people seem to be disinterested. The hypothesis that vaccines (or rather the MMR vaccination) could trigger autism is perfectly valid since there is evidence that autism is an autoimmune disease. So researching the hypothesis should not be stigmatised in any way. With that said, it has been quite thoroughly researched now and no link between vaccination and autism has been found. It's still possible, but it's looking increasingly unlikely, and that the autoimmune trigger for autism has nothing to do with vaccines.

The 1998 Lancet paper (Wakefield et al) has been retracted. It should be noted the Lancet is a highly respected peer review journal, so to say the paper had no credibility for publication at all is not entirely accurate - at best we'd say the paper should have been rejected at the time so the authors could fix the problems and re-submit it. That's what happens for every peer review paper, so claiming now that it was "false" is not so much an attack of the authors or their research methods, but rather is an example of the failure of the Journal editors. Dr Wakefield maintains to this day that his research is valid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d40suCKnjbI

And it probably is, but his 1998 paper wasn't.


The problem isn't Wakefield or so-called "rogue researchers", it goes far deeper. We know that some autism cases are likely to be trigged by an autoimmune disease. We don't really understand what the trigger is at this time, meaning there's a huge unknown in this area of health. Wakefield and his colleagues were conducting research into one line of enquiry, and other researchers to this day are looking into other possible causes. The problem is that most people don't understand the difference between the levels of evidence in health. Even if the 1998 paper was not retracted, and was considered a good example of a peer-review study (which it isn't of course), but even if that was the case the evidence for a link between the MMR vaccination and autism is so weak as to be non-existent anyway.

But with this said, I still think the MMR vaccine is a problem for other reasons. If you look at the rate of vaccinations in children, for every other vaccination they are higher than the MMR vaccine. People don't like it, and healthcare consumers can't just told to accept healthcare products they feel are wrong. I'd like to see MMR continue to be offered as it is, but also offered as two separate vaccinations for parents who would feel safer with that option. I think if we did that, vaccinations for MMR would rise to the same level of other vaccinations.