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

I am an autism researcher. While we cannot say 'vaccines never cause autism' we can say with confidence 'Other potential causes of autism have much better theoretical foundations, empirical evidence, prevalence, and effect sizes. With limited research budgets, we have better research targets to pursue first before further investigating vaccines."

If it were the only study, sure. But it is not. Not by a hot mile.

>To assess the association between cumulative aluminum exposure from early childhood vaccination and risk for autoimmune, atopic or allergic, and neurodevelopmental disorders.

from what I understand about the skepticism toward adjuvants, "cumulative aluminum exposure" was not the hypothesis. It might be a proxy for the hypothesis, which has to do with repeated exposures rolling the dice, but what is the attitude of the researchers (for example, how much these researchers in this industry receive funding from this industry) would play a big role in how they designed their study. Are they really looking?

We can take a quick look: "Apart from research into epidemiology and disease prevention, [the State Serum Institute] also develops and produces vaccines ... 20% of sales are used on Research and Development"

so their funding/salaries literally comes from profit in producing these vaccines. Their statement about funding? "Primary Funding Source: None."

(I spent 5 whole minutes tracking down this info. I wrote the funding sentence before I went and looked up their funding, so it's Popper-proofed)

the low effort or low sincerity part of this study is that they are saying "aluminum in greater and greater doses is not a problem." Ok then, why are you putting aluminum in in the first place? Oh, because in small quantities it has an outsized effect, aggravating the immune system, that you think is efficacious. Have you studied that? and from people who've looked into it, no, they haven't. In some studies, they use aluminum without other components of vaccine cocktail as the placebo thereby making sure not to test it.

It's interesting how they discovered adjuvants. They were making and dispensing vaccines (I think polio) and they discovered that some of the vaccines were contaminated in the processing. So they cleaned up the contamination and discovered the vaccines didn't work as well any more. The contamination was aggravating the immune system which made the immune response greater. Now, during this process, the whole whole time at each stage they were saying "vaccines are safe and effective". It would be more honest to say what actually was the case, "turns out we didn't know how they worked, but due to the contaminated vaccines we gave you we now understand better."

the point is not "vaccines aren't effective", I think they do a lot of good; the point is they were willing to lie before and now thanks to wall street, they are even more willing to lie now.

> 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 don’t think there’s much daylight between our positions. You’re correct that mathematics was never involved. Any trust most people had in vaccines was always social, not analytical. They never understood Wakefield’s original paper, except insofar as it was reported by trusted organizations as credible. That broke people’s trust in those organizations, who had previously told everyone that vaccines were very safe.

When the retractions and follow-ups came, people weren’t able to understand them, because they were never capable of understanding the analysis in the first place! And now, they didn’t trust the bottom-line conclusions being reported by the Lancet and the media.

It doesn’t help that there’s a bunch of other confounding factors: rising parental age and possibly assortive mating increasing actual autism rates, changing norms around diagnosing autism, and changing incentives for autism diagnoses. We took our four year old to be evaluated, and the folks at the county told us they didn't really think any diagnosis was justified, but would have given us one if he was going to public school (where it would lead to additional services) instead of private school. They told us that point blank.

read up on what confidence intervals are.