4d ago

Anatomy of a Failure: Why This Latest Vaccine-Autism Paper is Dead Wrong

theunbiasedscipod.substack.com Anatomy of a Failure: Why This Latest Vaccine-Autism Paper is Dead Wrong

A methodological autopsy of flawed research that contradicts decades of rigorous evidence

A good dissection of bullshit "science" about vaccines - this dissection also highlights good general points to think about when applying critical thinking to any such out of left field "scientific" claims on the internet or those blathering dolts on TV news segments.

https://theunbiasedscipod.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-failure-why-this-latest

Dig into things before promoting them on social media.

12 comments

I am so fucking tired of people treating autism like it's some horrible disease worse than death.
It's just a different way of viewing and reacting to the world.
Are some autistic people severely intellectually disabled? Sure. Plenty of non-autistic people are too.
These antivaxxers act like if you kid is going to be autistic, you might as well have never had a kid.
And then on top of that, you have big antivaxxer proponent Jenny McCarthy saying she cured her son's autism, so why did she make such a big fucking deal about it?
Incidentally, it's been scrubbed from the web, but there used to be a website where Jenny McCarthy wrote an essay about how her son was an "indigo child," which meant he was going to grow up to be superhuman with all sorts of amazing powers. It contained the unforgettable line, "after my son was born, I quit smoking."
Edit: Ha! I found it on the Wayback Machine! And I was wrong about what she said. What she said was worse.
As all of you know, being a mother changes you in ways that you never thought you could imagine. I went from chain smoking and eating cheeseburgers to Hepa air filters and eating vegetarian after my son was born
https://web.archive.org/web/20110708144318/http://childrenofthenewearth.com/free.php?page=articles_free%2Fmccarthy_jenny%2Farticle1
- Ouch, really said after, not during pregnancy.
  
  Yeah, but the vaccines obviously caused her son's problems! It's hard to know if he even is autistic or if that was just part of her whole bullshit grift. She made a lot of money from this.
- Are some autistic people severely intellectually disabled? Sure. Plenty of non-autistic people are too.
  The incidence of intellectual disability among autistic people is notably higher than among non-autistic people, and similarly for the incidence of many other comorbidities.
  That said, I'm not sure what you're trying to argue for, here. If you're trying to say that we should be more accepting of neuroatypical people, like those with autism, I agree; it has improved quite a lot in the last decade but it's still not great. If you're trying to say autism shouldn't be considered a disease and there shouldn't be efforts to find a cure for it, I don't agree.
  I'm not sure why antivaxxers focus so much on specifically autism as a supposed vaccine sideffect. I think it might be historical reasons (it dates all the way back to Fudenberg and maybe even older), plus the fact that it's a mental problem rather than physical and hence trivial to motivatedly "self-diagnose" (it's much easier to claim that after you vaccinated your child you immediately noticed "clear autism symptoms", than to claim their leg abruptly fell off).
  
  Where is your evidence that autism is a disease? Because that's the sort of shit Autism Speaks says.
  Why do you even thing autistic people want to be "cured?"

12 comments