Vaccines don’t cause autism, but the lie won’t die. In fact, it’s getting worse.

Im almost positive that Andrew Wakefield has caused more harm to modern medicine than any other person in the last 200 years.

His human megaphone, Jenny McCarthy, isn’t much better. No one heard of him before she advocated for his findings to be mainstream.
- Don't forget Oprah who amplified the idea more than they ever could have done on their own

Lol jokes on you. I already have autism. So, vaccines just make me stronger.

I'm getting tested for autism as an adult next week. If it turns out I am, who do I contact from the Autistic community? Or does a representative contact me? I don't want to mess this up and I have a costume ready and everything.
- I tried to think of a witty response to your funny joke but I'm apparently too tired for that, so instead, I'll wish you good luck for next week, and the weeks that follow it; getting a diagnosis as an adult is often cathartic in the short term, liberatory in the long term, and in between those points is a long period of introspective untangling a web of messy feelings and possibly internalised ableism. I wish you the strength to endure and to emerge with a better understanding of who you are, regardless of the outcome of the assessment.
- Can you tell me your secret? I've been waiting 8 years for an adult diagnosis. It doesn't really matter in the sense that I know I'm some flavour of ND, though. And I work in education, and people around me have been pretty accepting.
- Anthony Hopkins will get in touch with you about filing all the paperwork.
- The fact that you have a shred of humor in your system means you aren't autistic.
did the vaccines update the autism hud?
- Yeah. After I got the covid shot it added a steps counter.
Man, your autism makes the vaccines stronger.
- The circle is complete
I make this joke every time I get a vaccine. I ask them if it'll make me extra autistic and for how long. I've never gotten a laugh.
- I would have laughed (except I don't administer vaccines).

There’s a correlation between wearing socks and athlete’s foot. Socks cause athletes foot, clearly, and so we shouldn’t wear socks when wearing shoes.

Amen, brother! I have long freed my feet from the prison that is the sock!
- That just seems like a practical cost cutting measure for a squid.
actually yes https://lunasandals.com/products/mono-winged-edition
- You wear socks…. With…. Sandals?!?!?
  
  E’eryone, git your pitchforks!! They’re coming to force you to wear SOCKS WITH SANDALS!!!

It's because there is no punishment for spreading false information. These cunt celebrities and politicians spread their fucking lies and if they are found out, they make an empty apology that reaches 1% of the people that they lied to, and it's all forgive and forget. Fuck all of that. Every anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-education cunt out there needs to be strung up from the societal rafters. They have to be made an example of. At the bare minimum they should be doing tours helping to correct the lies they have spread, spending time on social media and running commercials like fucking community service hours. There has to be a punishment for this shit.

I’m curious as to how that law would be written and what it would look like in practice.
- Ideally, you wouldn't have to write a law for it, and the people would be held accountable by others. That's a BIG wish, though, and I'm a realist--it'll never happen. Instead, if it were written into law, it would have to be done the same ways that libel and slander laws are written, and there would have to be a criminal trial for it. I understand that up front that seems like a lot of extra work for the courts, but if the punishments were severe enough, then hopefully we would see an outright reduction on it.
  
  Some precedent for it would be libel laws as previously stated, false advertising laws, and public health laws like what Germany has instituted (NetzDG) that required social media to remove false health information within 24 hours.
  
  And just to make it clear, I don't want to infringe on anyone's right to free speech, but just like libel and slander laws, when that free speech damages others, then it has to be curbed. The scientific evidence is there for things like the mask mandate and the efficacy of vaccines, we just have to prove it in court and punish those who are guilty of spreading that false information.

I'm collecting vaccines like infinity stones. I'm going to unlock complete autism.

Oh, you're autistic? Name every time someone said you don't look autistic and that everyone is a little bit autistic
And you know what happens when you unlock complete autism? That's right: you gain the power to create your own vaccines, making you capable of reaching even new heights.
- Is that what the anti-vaxxers refer to as shedding? They're shedding vaccine particles everywhere as a community service?
I'm already autistic, what's it gonna do, give me a software update?
i already have

hbomberguy did a fantastic video debunking these claims. Now if only the antivaxxers would actually watch it instead of staying in their own bubbles.

oh they loooove YouTube videos, trust me. Just not THOSE videos
I just wish it had less zany YouTube BS. I'd like to send it to my mother, but there's zero chance she would take it seriously.
Bold of you to presume they ever cared if they were wrong.
Penn and Teller did a fantastic demonstration on Bullsh!t (I wanna say 15 years ago?). The only real flaw in the demo was when Penn pulled the "autistic" pin out at the start, because that child would still be vaccinated and thus safer than the unvaxxed group.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQqBvH4Be6U
Obviously, hbomberguy is just in league with the vaccine cartels.
- And don't forget his allegiance to Sobek.
Link to the video, since no one has done so yet. Warning: this video is 1 hour and 44 minutes long, and if you're anything like me you will want to watch hbomberguy's entire catalogue afterwards.

So, the universe is like a video game but the lesson is morality. Long story short, i have met the antivaxers and i understand. They are dishonest people. I dated their daughter. They will not listen because they're arrogant. They will face horrors until they learn their lesson. The point is, this is a morality problem, not an education problem. Nothing will save them but their own misery you're honestly trying to prevent.

I'd say it is ,at least partly, an education problem.

Sure, education is less likely to correct a deeply engraned false belief, but education is one of the most effective tools to prevent the lies, misinformation, and manipulation from taking hold in the first place.

However, like most preventative measures, it will take a long time to see results.
- OK, if you can educate them early, yeah. However, these folks were homeschooled. They were elitist and arrogant.
My friends family is a bunch of trumpers, she's apolitical and vaguely socially liberal.

At her graduation party, they hung up a HUGE Trump banner. It wasn't already up, they put it up before most people started showing up. Fucking insane.
- Sounds insane. However, mother nature will correct their attitude problems. Just wait patiently.
- So the same behavior as the folks of the rainbow flag then?

Can we convince people that Andrew Wakefield, Jenny McCarthy and RFK, Jr. cause autism?

(I don't believe there's anything actually wrong with being autistic, I have multiple autistic people in my family. I just think that would be amusing.)

Steps:

be (usually born) rich

have an agenda

use your wealth to accomplish it

lie, cheat, steal, do whatever you have to in order to "win"

Did I leave anything out? :-P
- You forgot step 5: once you have won, change the rules so nobody else can play anymore
Being a Kennedy is more likely to cause lobotomies.
- If the quacks don’t do it the worms will
Can we convince people that Andrew Wakefield, Jenny McCarthy and RFK, Jr. cause autism?

Not autism. They cause death.
- For the idiots who avoid vaccinating their kids because "it causes autism," death is preferable. Consider that they would rather take that risk than be put in a situation of having to parent a neuroatypical child.
(I don’t believe there’s anything actually wrong with being autistic, I have multiple autistic people in my family. I just think that would be amusing.)

there's probably a less tenuous correlation there, though. just saying. Granted, correlation is not causation, but, eh... yeah.
- I know, but imagine all of these people in this ludicrous panic suddenly thinking Wakefield is the culprit for autism...

I don't care if these anti vax idiots kill themselves, I care that they are killing people with weakened immune systems or children that are either too young to get them or they didn't vaccinate them. This is all 100% the fault tRump and Russian propaganda, it's sad soo many fall for it.

survival of the fittest is doing its thing, even if innocent people go down as victims of stupid people, such is life and death.
- That is a complete misunderstanding of how evolution works. This does not weed out the people who are not genetically immune from a disease. If civilization died and measles came back in force in two generations, it would be just as deadly as it was before vaccines were developed. Because this does nothing to genetically change humanity's ability to fit into an ecological niche.
I'm ok with them harming some innocent people in the process of killing themselves. Greater good.

All the information available to us now and yet all people care about is if someone the Internet likes them.

While I hate what the internet is becoming because of AI, and I dread what's going to come from the better systems down the road, and all the people who will be utterly lost as they fall in love with their phones, I am wondering if just maaaybe these LLM's will be able to satisfy some people's desperate craving for attention and acceptance with simulated social circles and virtual supportive communities and give people at least some kind of outlet or if nothing else keep them out of the way while the rest of us make progress.

We run into a few interesting possibilities here. Start with the assumption that more children are being diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. That gives us a few possibilities.

Because there's more and better screening autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is being caught more often. Okay, maybe. But.

1.a) If more children are being appropriately diagnosed with ASD, then perhaps the criteria needs to be tightened up; at a certain point, behavior/feelings/thoughts are just normal.

Because there's more screening--but not necessarily better screening--children are being pathologized as having ASD when they do not, because too many clinicians don't have the necessary expertise. This is a distinct possibility, in much the same way that kids are being labelled as having ADD/ADHD--and then getting drugs--when they're more frequently just being kids.
More children are actually on the autism spectrum now than there were 30 years ago. E.g., it's not that more kids slipped through the cracks 30 years ago, but there is actually a higher rate of ASD than there was 30 years ago. This is the one that should cause the most concern; if this is actually the case, and can be demonstrated to be the case, then what factor is causing this maladaption?

1)a) you missed the part where you clearly said "spectrum" before.

maybe instead, you/we need to change how we react to parts of the spectrum. That is a) it isn't "normal" and b) that's okay.
- Even though it's a spectrum--in that it's comprised of a number of different characteristics that are present to varying degrees--I think that perhaps some of those characteristics have been overly pathologized. I'm not sure exactly how to explain it. If I made up a disease--I'm going to call it Short-Man Syndrome (SMS)--and said that any male under 5'2" had SMS, then someone that was 5'2.1" wouldn't fit the criteria. But wait!, he says, I feel short. So maybe that definition gets widened a little bit. So now a person that's 5'2.5" says, well, I feel short too, and maybe a doctor disagrees, since 5'2.5" is pretty short, and that definition gets even wider. Eventually maybe someone that's 5'11" is saying, well I feel short compared to Yao Ming...
  
  And maybe that's what's happening here. I don't know. Even though all of these characteristics may exist on a continuum, you need to have a definite cut off point where you say, this point and beyond is pathological, and anything up to that, no matter how close, isn't. Otherwise your definition becomes pointless.
- I like "Normal is boring" as a slogan.
Agree on the better testing for ASD. According to the CDC, autism rates have doubled from the year 2000(1 in 68, vs 1 in 150).

The consensus is that ASD is mostly genetic, however, there is some research going into other causes of autism, such environmental/biological causes. Personally, I think growing up with modern technology(kids being raised by YouTube/TikTok) impacts brain development/connections, so there are people with symptoms of ASD that otherwise would be "normal"

The issue with diagnoses like this is that you arrive to the conclusion by looking at the symptoms. And there's a lot of fucked up things going on right now that could cause more and more people to show symptoms.

i've worked on building better habits such as exercise, maintaining social connections, and working through my emotions instead of repressing them, and I've noticed that many symptoms that I used to associate with ASD were really depression. Like some sort of coping, catatonic state. I'd imagine that with mental health being what it is, there's probably a lot of people similar to me. Surprise, did you know ASD is far more common in males? 1 in 42, vs 1 in 189, for females.
- There's some thought that autism rates are identical in men and women, and that the difference in diagnosis has more to do with the presentation. It's plausible.
- Yeah, I've suspected for a while that some of the autism spectrum is just the brain allocating resources differently to different things. It has a finite number of neurons (which is true even if it can grow new ones over time), so a higher emphasis on learning one thing could come at the cost of something else.
  
  Or it could even be a matter of some people not building as strong of a foundation in some areas because their brain didn't figure out something that others did, and it snowballs from there as peers develop on that stronger foundation of things they think they just inherently know and can't imagine someone not knowing it and those without that strong foundation try to develop along with their peers but can't because of what they are missing.
  
  Like imagine that while learning math, you somehow miss learning the number 3. This would be pretty obvious because math is a rigid system, but imagine it wasn't as strictly logical like language or social interactions. Maybe a better example would be developing drawing skills without knowing anything about perspective or lighting. Sure, there's plenty of styles that don't need that foundation, but if you want to draw photorealistic pictures, they are going to look off or even bad, even though they might still be recognizable. Kinda like socializing with someone with autism who isn't good at masking.
  
  Though the ability to mask itself might indicate it's deeper than that. It indicates that some are capable of adjusting for their foundation, does being able to mask while still having those gaps mean the gaps are genetic? Or can we only develop by building on what we have, so the best we can do is put patches over the shortcomings we recognize in ourselves and want to correct instead of being able to truly fill those gaps in the foundation?
  
  And all of this doesn't even go into sensory issues related to autism. If there's different mechanisms that result in the different aspects of autism, should they even be considered the same thing? How would one even figure out if they share mechanisms?
If there ARE more cases of autism(which we dont know if there are, or if it's a result of better screening. Smarter people than me would have to determine that) my first instinct would be to look at microplastics and other environmental pollutants. Again, more qualified people than me would have to look into that, but it seems to be a better hypothesis than the conspiracy theory about vaccines.
This is pure speculation, but since we found Lead caused so many development issues when it was so prominent in everyday life, and plastic has been likened to this generations lead- poisoning, I wonder if there is a link between the prevalence of micro plastics and the increase in ADHD and ASD.
- The plastics are blocking my dopamine receptors
kids are being labelled as having ADD/ADHD–and then getting drugs–when they’re more frequently just being kids.

I might go a level deeper and argue that the formal education process requires a degree of attention and focus that lots of kids don't have. The "autism" diagnosis and subsequent treatment is more about fitting round kids into square holes than it is treating an actual mental disorder.

I can say from personal experience that Adderall helped me study even without ADD. Its a performance enhancing drug, of sorts. And if landing a diagnosis means giving your kids a chemical edge on the next state exam, then more parents are going to discover their children have a problem.

I might take this one step deeper and assert that the real problem we're attempting to medicate isn't autism, its poverty. The underlying fear of an autistic diagnosis is that the child won't grow up to be self-sufficient. The drugs (whether they're necessary or simply a competitive edge) are intended to turn children into the successful mindless drones who are capable of churning mechanically through rote exercises that the school system / workforce demands of them.

This is the one that should cause the most concern; if this is actually the case, and can be demonstrated to be the case, then what factor is causing this maladaption?

Its possible that this is entirely due to a survivorship bias. Kids with autism are considered "salvageable" in an age where drowning the weakest of six children in the bath tube because they're dead weight on the family income is no longer consider practical (fewer kids) or acceptable (surveillance state).

Also possible that autism - like a number of other disorders - is linked to aging mothers or sunlight deficiency or toxic food/water/air in a heavily industrial society.

Autism could arguably even be a kind-of beneficial mutation - the result of increasingly smart people having increasingly more mentally adapt babies with mental talents the rest of us dumb-dumbs only see as a handicap, because we're trying to fit them into those aforementioned square holes.
- I might go a level deeper and argue that the formal education process requires a degree of attention and focus that lots of kids don’t have. The “autism” diagnosis and subsequent treatment is more about fitting round kids into square holes than it is treating an actual mental disorder.
  
  Okay, but that seems to be more prevalent now than it used to be. Is it really more prevalent? Or maybe the way we teach things has changed, leading to worse outcomes? Full disclosure: I was formally diagnosed with ASD in my later 30s; Asperger's didn't even exist as a diagnosis until after I had graduated from public schools. I had a very hard time focusing in all of my classes.
  
  Also possible that autism - like a number of other disorders - is linked to aging mothers
  
  I know that there's a strong link between trisomy-23 (Downs Syndrome) and older mothers, but I hadn't heard of other genetic issues. I'm not disputing it, just saying I wasn't aware of them.
  
  more mentally adapt babies with mental talents the rest of us dumb-dumbs only see as a handicap,
  
  It is absolutely a handicap. This is undeniable. It's a handicap because it hinders your ability to interact appropriately with the world. I have greatly reduced empathy and communication ability; I can usually guess how people are feeling, but I don't really feel it in the way that most people say they do, and I don't really feel much of my own emotions. I can't just power through shit like some people can either; I'll sometimes go into complete shutdown when there's too much going on, things that most people have no issues with. There's a lot more, really. But trust me, it's a handicap in dealing with life.

Can I have the smart autism please

Only if you're smart anyway since autistic people have the whole distribution of capability represented. Then being smart isn't enough. You also have to be resilient, lucky, and privileged (not enough systemic factors outside of systemic ableism to wash you out in a psychological and logistical pincer attack), and also lucky again to get past the many societal filters that block most autistic success and create the illusion of some unicorn like uniqueness in all visible versions of autistic success.
Sure, make sure to go back in time so that you aren't overestimulated in your environment, don't get bullied until you suffer an anxiety disorder, and have someone inspire interest in you for something capitalist society pays well for.
yes come to my house
Aspergers is still a stony route.

And the tech school I got a degree from now hosts courses on "Reiki healing" and "Crystal healing". America is fucking doomed.

I met a nice lady at the dog park, we vibed, she was into reiki and tarot, I dipped.

duh...they cause magnetism not autism. /s

So thats why everyone with Autism is magnetic
- That explains why I repel people.

One of my high school acquaintances posted on Facebook that Peppa the Pig causes autism.
I like that conspiracy theory much better, despite how illogical it is that watching a cartoon pig can cause a neurological disorder.

That is hilarious. I wonder what caused autism before 2004?
- Silly, autism didn't exist before 2004. It's just like the dinosaur bones, Satan put that evidence there to confuse us.

... but you know what will eventually die? People who do not believe in vaccines

Too bad they will take many with them because of their wilful ignorance... but eventually the problem will correct itself

Someday I hope to live in a society where confidently saying something idiotic is shameful as crapping your pants in public or realizing you have a bugger hanging off your nostril

It'll take a really deadly disease for that to happen. Smallpox and the plague could kill over 50% of the population in an area they hit. No one had vaccines (though some portion would have had incidental previous exposure to cow pox, which became the first vaccine, but I wouldn't guess that all survivors had been previously exposed to cow pox). Note that that's 50% of the total population, it's not just looking at those who were confirmed to be infected. Nothing that currently exists (considering treatment options, since the plague does still exist) comes even close to that, so don't hold your breath that they'll go extinct from catching easily preventable diseases that they chose not to prevent.

And personally, I think shame isn't a great teaching tool and is a mechanism that leads to people doubling down on incorrect beliefs rather than correcting them as well as attacking new ideas that conflict with currently accepted ideas. I'd like to see a society where being willing to admit you were wrong is respected and where everyone can appreciate that whatever they currently believe, reality is likely more nuanced and complex than their model of it suggests, if it's even on the right track at all.
- And personally, I think shame isn’t a great teaching tool and is a mechanism that leads to people doubling down on incorrect beliefs rather than correcting them as well as attacking new ideas that conflict with currently accepted ideas.
  
  I don't really get this about people. Someone told me I should eat less meat and I went, "Yeah, you're right" instead of doubling down into shame insanity.
  
  I probably do it sometimes without realizing it.
Having a bugger hanging off your nostril isn't shameful, it's weirdly impressive

Just give the option to be injected with a vaccine or with chlorine. Watch the numbers drop spectacularly.

Something of a selection bias on this experiment, as you're not going to make the wrong choice twice.
- Nah, the "chlorine" is actually a microdose of ecstacy.

I sure hope I can get some autism for the bird flu.

I'm not surprised. The quality of education has been going downhill and there's been a recent vaccine scare.

Vaccine scare? What?
- I'm not endorsing it ffs, I mean a bunch of people have gotten spooked by vaccines over covid.

Specifically, the survey asked them to assess the accuracy of the statement that the CDC has said there is no evidence linking vaccines to autism.

That is an such a poorly conceived question for a researcher to pose. I don't even know what else to say tbh.

I shake my head.

The autism fear stems from the historical use of Thiomersal as a preservative.

the autism fear stems from one quack asshole intentionally skewing data for profit, then granola hippy moms holding him up as some bastion of truth, Which then evolved into right wing idiocy of medicine bad (until they are sick and think it could help them (which by then its probably too late) )
- And yet he tried really hard to make people believe it was just the one vaccine causing autism, so he could sell his other, worse, replacement vaccine.
- Hey hey hey!
  
  Don't be dragging granola into this fuckwit-ocracy. It's a perfectly reasonable low effort breakfast for those of us that are unable to cook for ourselves because we can't find our arses with both hands for the first hour of semi-consciousness in the morning.
- While I agree in general with your post, there must be a valid reason why thiomersal is no longer allowed in vaccines inside North America and Europe. It's not only because of a quack doctor.
The autism fear stems from a grifter doctor.
- Not only. Of these studies, the vast majority (74%) suggest that mercury is a risk factor for ASD.
That was one of the original proposed mechanisms to explain how the (obviously false) autism was caused.

But since then, since thiomersal was removed, other 'causes' and moral issues have been invented, including cells from abortions.

The one that makes me laugh the most is that it's terrible that the poor poor baby is exposed to so many illnesses (measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus, notovirus, rotovirus and more) in such a short space of time, it's no wonder the poor dear's immune system is compromised. And then the same mother drops the kid off at daycare and exposes the poor dear to all those viruses and more - and live viruses at that.

There is no bleeding logic, just feels. And they get so angry at the fake harm that medicine is causing, and simultaneously actually causing real harms to real people.

The fact they think they can definitively state this just proves they don't actually care about science.

What do you mean?
- You can't have a blanket statement where you declare vaccines do not cause autism. You could say X vaccine and Y vaccine do not cause autism as evidenced by these clinical trails and 20 years of research data that is public here have a look. Still doesn't address Z vaccine though which was made by BLAH Company and they are a bunch of douche bags and used shady clinical trial practices that should be investigated by the Federal government, but oh wait the politicians paid off the government so that investigation won't take place.
  
  Also measles cases are soaring because our current administration has literally let in some where between 10 million and 20 million illegal aliens into the country.

The new vaccines generate lots of profits for the pharma. Therefore, what incentives will ALWAYS there be for the owners and creators of the vaccines? Not vacciness in general, but SOME vacciness, against SOME diseases-19.

Would or could they, the pharma, ever reveal that some vaccines, especially their own, especially the newest ones, may be harmful to people in any way? That they could cause delayed negatives consequences and side-effects?

Therefore, who, or ironically WHO, has all the incesitves to always try to prove that all the negative data about the newest vaccines is a lie? And "in fact, it's getting worse". Yeah, worse for the those manufacture the vacciness and try to jab people like pigs :)

This may not prove that they, the vaccines, are or may be indeed harmful. Or not that all of them, for all people, not against all the viruses. Nonetheless, the incentive of hidding the truth about this exists and for one side only.

I think you should watch this video. The orgional paper linking vaccines to autism was specifically made to further the authors ambition. He lied and withheld or manipulated data in order to support his work.

Drug companies go through extensive trials before bringing vaccines to the market. So who do you believe? Extensive peer reviewed studies or one guy clearly furthering his own agenda?

https://youtu.be/8BIcAZxFfrc?si=3gN3mTnJA3aVaHBP
- It's been 4 hours... Do you think he watched it?
The new vaccines

Retvrn To Tradition! Only get the flu shot from 10 years ago. Don't get the one that's been selected against the current flu strain.

Therefore, who, or ironically WHO, has all the incesitves to always try to prove that all the negative data about the newest vaccines is a lie?

Or maybe they have an incentive to use proven health care technologies that deliver effective treatment, because epidemics are bad for everyone?
I admire your brave attempt at writing in a second language.