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Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions

en.ssi.dk

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Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions

#21

Post by wzdd »

roxolotl wrote: post #13
kryogen1c wrote: post #6

I wonder how the Danish vaccine schedule compares to the US, vis a vis total aluminum content.

Don’t know but I’d highly doubt it’s relevant. > The aluminum contained in vaccines is similar to that found in a liter (about 1 quart or 32 fluid ounces) of infant formula. While infants receive about 4.4 milligrams* of aluminum in the first six months of life from vaccines, they receive more than that in their diet. Breast-fed infants ingest about 7 milligrams, formula-fed infants ingest about 38 milligrams, and in…

Not that I think vaccines are in any way harmful, but your own link goes on to point out that less than 1% of ingested aluminium ends up in the blood so just quoting the numbers like that doesn't add much.

Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions

#22

Post by another_twist »

The people who dont believe in vaccines or that they cause autism dont really get science. Wasting hard work trying to convince them is useless. These people truly are idiots, at best a burden on society and at worse a threat to public health. Its one thing to have a skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry, its not ill founded but if their entire personality is based on denying science I dont think we should waste time or resources in convincing these idiots.

Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions

#23

Post by sorcerer-mar »

rayiner wrote: post #15
dc396 wrote: post #2

The truly sad part is that regardless of the validity of the study, its methodology, or the results, the impact it will have in the political sphere or with the public will be negligible. It's maddening.

Most people lack the ability to understand inferences drawn from mathematical analysis. It’s not just vaccines, it’s numeric or logical reasoning of all kinds. If you can’t explain why something is true in non-abstract terms, you can just forget it. And it’s true even for somewhat smarter than average people: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/msnbc-bloo... . I’ve become persuaded that for democracy to…

The problem is that a massive orchestrated campaign to sow distrust of institutions can succeed well beyond what's needed to achieve their destruction.

The actual truth and institutional trust are both far harder to establish than they are to destroy. I'm not sure how institutions survive in the presence of this asymmetry, alt-media's conscious effort to exploit it, and freedom of speech.

Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions

#24

Post by carom »

Ok, hold up. This study came up on Reddit a few weeks ago and my wife linked it to me. A lot of the comments were similar about how vaccine skeptics will never be convinced by it. So, being a vaccine skeptic, I went and read it.

>In this primary analysis, except for Asperger syndrome (hazard ratio, 1.13 [CI, 0.89 to 1.44]) and atypical autism (hazard ratio, 0.94 [CI, 0.79 to 1.12]), estimates for the individual outcomes were incompatible with any increased risk, with the upper bounds of the 95% CIs below 1.00. [1]

My understanding of this, and I am a software engineer so take it with a grain of salt, is that this study failed to disprove a link between aluminum in vaccines and aspergers! There is another section where it appears they played with the hyperparameters of their study and ended up with a lower hazard ratio for aspergers (I believe by extending the analysis window to 8 years of age, but it wasn't clear to me).

>Except for Asperger syndrome (hazard ratio, 1.02 [CI, 0.93 to 1.12]) and atypical autism (hazard ratio, 0.95 [CI, 0.88 to 1.03]), estimates for the individual neurodevelopmental outcomes assessed were incompatible with any increases in risk, with the upper bounds of the 95% CIs equal to or below 1.00.

That is to say, after reading the study, I am not convinced at all. I would like to see a longer analysis period (e.g. to 50 years of age) as many things go undiagnosed until later in life. From my reading though, this study failed to disprove a link despite what all the popsci headlines are saying.

1. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997

Edit: I know I am going to catch downvotes for this, but please go read the study and let me know where I am incorrect!

Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions

#25

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #15
dc396 wrote: post #2

The truly sad part is that regardless of the validity of the study, its methodology, or the results, the impact it will have in the political sphere or with the public will be negligible. It's maddening.

Most people lack the ability to understand inferences drawn from mathematical analysis. It’s not just vaccines, it’s numeric or logical reasoning of all kinds. If you can’t explain why something is true in non-abstract terms, you can just forget it. And it’s true even for somewhat smarter than average people: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/msnbc-bloo... . I’ve become persuaded that for democracy to…

[deleted]

Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions

#26

Post by ausbah »

mettamage wrote: post #17
autoexec wrote: post #8

Just a friendly reminder for any who need to hear it again: it's really okay to have been wrong and okay to admit that you've been being lied to. Changing your views when confronted with new evidence that shows your beliefs/assumptions were incorrect is a sign of intelligence. It can also let you focus more of your attention on new topics/areas that are still important for protecting yourself and your loved ones.

I wonder how many people on HN believe stuff like this though. Not that many? I'm open to being wrong on that guess.

there is a nonzero amount in the sphere of antivaxxers. if not for the exact reason, but because engineering types are more likely to lean libertarian or believe their position in a dominant field gives them a superiority complex over other fields

Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions

#27

Post by hydrox24 »

autoexec wrote: post #8

Just a friendly reminder for any who need to hear it again: it's really okay to have been wrong and okay to admit that you've been being lied to. Changing your views when confronted with new evidence that shows your beliefs/assumptions were incorrect is a sign of intelligence. It can also let you focus more of your attention on new topics/areas that are still important for protecting yourself and your loved ones.

For what it's worth, this is still quite loaded, and I think it's far more helpful to drop the stuff about lies and protection of loved ones and simply say:

It's good to weaken or strengthen your views based on the evidence given, and intellectual humility often leads to a better grasp of issues.

And it's also worth recognising, as another commenter has noted, that this is something that extremely few people are good at. It's an error to think that assenting to mainstream views is a strong sign of intellectual humility.

Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions

#28

Post by api »

another_twist wrote: post #22

The people who dont believe in vaccines or that they cause autism dont really get science. Wasting hard work trying to convince them is useless. These people truly are idiots, at best a burden on society and at worse a threat to public health. Its one thing to have a skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry, its not ill founded but if their entire personality is based on denying science I dont think we should waste…

There seems to be something special about vaccines that really sets these people off, and it goes way way back. Vaccine paranoia is as old as vaccines and they’ve always drawn a special ire from believers in naturopathy, natural medicine, faith healing, new thought, and similar strands of thinking.

I don’t quite get it.

Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions

#29

Post by hopelite »

dc396 wrote: post #2

The truly sad part is that regardless of the validity of the study, its methodology, or the results, the impact it will have in the political sphere or with the public will be negligible. It's maddening.

That’s an odd thing to say, “regardless of the validity”? Why would or should it have any impact at all if it is not valid?

Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions

#30

Post by lapcat »

rayiner wrote: post #15
dc396 wrote: post #2

The truly sad part is that regardless of the validity of the study, its methodology, or the results, the impact it will have in the political sphere or with the public will be negligible. It's maddening.

Most people lack the ability to understand inferences drawn from mathematical analysis. It’s not just vaccines, it’s numeric or logical reasoning of all kinds. If you can’t explain why something is true in non-abstract terms, you can just forget it. And it’s true even for somewhat smarter than average people: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/msnbc-bloo... . I’ve become persuaded that for democracy to…

> Most people lack the ability to understand inferences drawn from mathematical analysis.

It was never about that. The modern anti-vax movement has been traced back to Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 Lancet paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud But it's not like the anti-vaxxers ever fully understood the original paper, much less the follow-up papers disputing it. And in fairness to the anti-vaxxers, the paper is an example of the failure of scientific peer review. What happened was that ordinary people heard about the paper and became frightened, which is natural, but then when Wakefield's fraud and conflicts of interest were revealed, and the paper was ultimately retracted, the people who bought into the scare never came back and revised their beliefs based on new evidence. What's missing is the capacity for self-correction. Mathematics was never involved.

I suspect that people are reluctant to admit that they were duped, so they'd rather continue to believe something that's been proven false. It's emotional, not rational. And it's also social: people tend to surround themselves with others who reinforce their beliefs. This prevents backtracking and self-correction, because you have to convince your entire social group that they were wrong, not just yourself.

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