The logical lapses of the anti-vaccine movement. [View All]

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

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In the logic lapse department, stop number one is Scientific Studies. The data supporting autism simply isn’t there in study after study. In fact, the British study that garnered rabid media attention was later retracted by its lead author and, as the mass media omitted, the study only used twelve children. The Immunization Action Coalition has a complete list of studies for and against (23 to 2 if you’re keeping score). And if you take the time to check this list out, take a moment, too, to notice the numbers of children involved in each of the studies. Thousands more children are examined in the “no connection” studies. For a correlation to exist, the occurrence of event “X” (in this case, autism) most happen more often in the group receiving the treatment (in this case a vaccine) compared to the same rate of occurrence of event “X” among those not receiving it. The number of study participants also must be sufficiently large enough to be representative of the entire population and decrease the possibility that the results are due to chance.


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Autism diagnosis guidelines (DSMV-IV) changed significantly in 1992, affecting how it is diagnosed and the number of kids diagnosed with it. (Brief history of diagnostic evolution here). In short, it was expanded and the criteria are more inclusive than the European counterparts; we add a number of autism-like diseases in with the autism, which falsely inflates the numbers. For a comparator here, consider attention deficit disorder or ADD. It didn’t used to be all that either, but thanks to another section of the DSMV-IV criteria, more and more children each year are diagnosed with it and placed on ADD drugs. So, changing the guidelines by which something is diagnosed, can increase (or decrease) the numbers of diagnosed patients.


Next, amid outcry, thimerosal was removed by the turn-of-the-century from all but a few vaccines (complete list here), and nearly all having a non-thimerosal alternative. With that change, one would expect the autism rate to decline significantly. Never mind that if you accept the premise thimerosal/mercury = autism, the autism rate should have been sky high to start with, not increasing during the 1990’s, since all of us born in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s all received thimerosal containing vaccines. This chart lists autism prevalence studies conducted around the world starting as early as 1966. Notice the “Criteria used” column and how the “Prevalence” column’s numbers jump from less than one percent to four, five and six percent as everything moves into the DSMV-IV diagnosis criteria.


Our exposure to mercury in medicine has, in fact, decreased over the last 20 years, not increased. Mercury thermometers, (which are long since off the market though people continue to ask your Intrepid Pharmacist for one) and play toys like the Quicksilver games of the 1970’s and 80’s all increased the possibility of mercury exposure. With mercury having been in so many vaccines before, plus removal of other mercury products, we should see a decrease rather than an increase in autism rates. The reality is that in spite of thimerosal removal from most vaccines, the autism rate has not wavered significantly since the DSMV-IV criteria was put into place nearly 20 years ago (refer to the above paragraph’s chart). Thus, vaccines as the source must be ruled out no matter how desperately people wish to cling to this notion.


And then, of course, is the aforementioned half-life between ethyl and methyl mercuries and the required constant exposure for neural damage to occur. Taken in total, there is no way any rational person can buy the thimerosal in vaccines leads to autism argument. The bigger problem perhaps is the fact that, apart from HIV, there has been no communicable disease health crisis in this country in more than half a century and we are now dealing with several generations of people who do not remember the real threats and consequences of these diseases…and they probably won’t until something hits and people are dropping like flies (as we saw with HIV before the cocktail drug treatments). Which is sad for the children, who ultimately will be the ones to suffer for their parent’s decisions.



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