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Health & Well-Being

Vaccines and Autism

Junk research turns science on its head

For the longest time, science has been at the mainstay of America and its technological achievements. But that was then. Nowadays conspiracy theories abound and science has lost much of its prestige. It’s ironic that our current era has been deemed “The Information Age”. That phrase was thrown around a lot during the last quarter of the 20th century, but really came into its own with the rise of the internet in the 1990s, when anything you wanted to know was literally at your fingertips.

Of course, information availability only matters if you’re motivated to get your hands on that information. Unfortunately, many Americans are just not that interested. Instead, they rely on their opinions – what they believe to be true — rather than on reality. As part of the narcissistic trend in this country, personal feelings and opinions are now more important than facts or scientific findings.

Vaccines are one of the more recent victims of the anti-science crusade. They used to be regarded as our best inventions, saving millions of lives and eliminating feared diseases. Smallpox was the first to go, around 1980, and others have come close to eradication, including polio, measles, rubella and mumps. Yet these may return because vaccination rates are declining, and if the vast majority don’t vaccinate, there is no eradication.

Criticism of vaccines came to the spotlight with the covid pandemic. At that point vaccine safety became a political issue, advocated most strongly by Robert Kennedy Jr., and supported by those who spread misinformation to weaken the credibility of our medical professionals. As a scientist, Kennedy has explored this issue in depth, illustrated by the number of peer reviewed research studies he’s authored (note: there are no publications, nor has he any science training for that matter.)

RFK, Jr.

Certainly, one should question whether a vaccine has met the rigorous safety and efficacy standards established by our Federal guidelines. But we’re talking about informed awareness, and informed awareness has to include scientific data.

So let’s explore the actual data with respect to the covid vaccine. As of July 1, 2022, approximately 10% of adults aged 16 and older had not received any dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, for a total of about 34 million Americans. That means roughly 300 million adults received at least one vaccine, and total administered doses has surpassed 700 million.

Of the 300 million recipients, there have been 55 cases of death reported after taking the COVID-19 vaccination. Of these, a causal relationship has been excluded in 17 cases. But even in the remaining 38 cases, the causal link between the vaccine and death isn’t clear. But regardless, that’s 38 cases out of 300 million recipients, so we must conclude that the benefits of vaccination clearly outweigh the risks of going untreated. Consider that since 2020, there have been 112 million Americans who contracted coronavirus, resulting in 1.2 million deaths. It’s estimated that the fatality rate from covid is 5 times higher among unvaccinated versus vaccinated people.

Receiving a covid vaccine

If you’re still worried about the covid vaccine, then consider the safety profile of OTC pain relief medications that you might take regularly. Take NSAIDS (Aspirin, Ibuprofen, Naproxen, Celecoxib, Diclofenac, and Meloxicam.), for example. Roughly 3,200 deaths occur annually from taking N-SAIDS, primarily due to GI bleeding. How about Acetaminophen? An estimated 450 deaths occur each year from acetaminophen overdose, due to acute liver failure.

The real craziness focused on the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, and rubella), stemming from the claim that this vaccine is responsible for the rise in autism. One researcher (and only one, and I use the term researcher loosely), Andrew Wakefield, published two studies in the highly respected research journal Lancet in 1998 making such a claim.

But Lancet retracted Wakefield’s articles in 2010 for a variety of reasons, including poor research design (e.g., no control group of unvaccinated children), ethics issues, and outright fraud. Investigative journalist Brian Deer discovered that Wakefield falsified data and was trying to patent his own measles vaccine to compete with MMR. Wakefield’s dishonesty led to his and some of his co-authors’ removal from the medical register, meaning they can no longer legally practice medicine in the United Kingdom.

Wakefield and Kennedy
Wakefield and Kennedy

Since then, every scientific article, and there are many, showed no link between autism and the MMR vaccine, or to any other vaccine in the childhood schedule. Nevertheless, the damage was done — at its worst, Wakefield’s fraud has eroded confidence in vaccines, making it more difficult to control future outbreaks.

So, what’s the truth about autism? There’s no question autism has risen dramatically over the past few decades — the chart below shows an increase from 1 in 150 children in 2000 to 1 in 36 in 2020.

But has the incidence of autism actually increased? Not likely — and certainly not to the extent that the data above indicates — and here’s why. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, better diagnostic tools have been developed, and the criteria for inclusion was broadened to include borderline traits, adding many more people on the spectrum not previously diagnosed as autistic. Furthermore, in 2013, the American Psychological Association (APA) combined autism, Asperger’s, Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) into one classification called Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). So, overnight even more people were thrown into that group.

The truth is, with changes in diagnoses and an increased understanding of the condition, we are probably measuring the prevalence of autism closer to what it has always been, and we are only now starting to understand the actual size of that population.

The latest scientific research suggests that autism is a neurological condition that begins in the womb. A person with autism processes information differently than a person not on the spectrum. It’s not an illness or disease, but simply a natural variation of how brains function.

If that’s the case, how is it possible for a vaccine administered at least one year after birth be linked to a neurological condition that develops before birth?

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