Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

en.ssi.dk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 140 posts

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

#41

Post by SubiculumCode »

carom wrote: post #24

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 outco…

It's called uncertainty. Do you see the confidence intervals on the log hazard ratios? They did not significantly differ from 1. In part this is because Asbergers and atypical autism were underpowered compared to the main autism group. Also note many were below 1, meaning LESS chance of getting that diagnosis.

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

#42

Post by pton_xd »

lapcat wrote: post #30
rayiner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The modern anti-vax movement has been traced back to Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 Lancet paper

As far as I can tell, the modern movement is fueled by personal anecdotes of family members / friends having young children present with autism after certain developmental milestones. The family goes, what went wrong? Well, we recently got them a bunch of shots, maybe it was that. Combined with the expanding vaccination schedule those coincidences are increasingly likely to occur. Then yeah that paper comes up when the families do a bit of research which does add more conviction to the belief.

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

#43

Post by keysdev »

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #23
rayiner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

don't think that is needed. The institutions did by themselves. Especially the large ones private and public.

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

#44

Post by pdxandi »

thegrim33 wrote: post #20
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.

To preface this, I'm not saying anything about vaccines, efficacy, safety, or my positions on them. But how can you expect to convince doubters when a claim like "no link between vaccines and autism" is made, and all you have to do is click your left mouse button twice to pull up the actual research, and see that what was actually studied was "did a certain amount of increase in aluminum content in vaccines create mo…

I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think the article is misrepresenting the study. The research looked at over 1.2 million children and specifically examined whether increased exposure to aluminum containing vaccines was associated with autism or 49 other health conditions, and it found no evidence of a link. Since aluminum adjuvants are one of the most commonly cited concerns in vaccine skepticism, especially in claims about autism, the study directly addresses that idea.

So while the article’s headline simplifies the finding by saying “no link between vaccines and autism,” it’s not inaccurate. It reflects the key takeaway, that within the vaccines that include aluminum, which are widely used in childhood immunizations, there is no indication of increased risk. That’s important and relevant.

It’s fair to expect transparency, and I agree that people should be encouraged to read the actual research, but in this case it seems to me that the summary is consistent with what the study actually tested and found.

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

#46

Post by kikki »

carom wrote: post #24

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 outco…

What exactly is a vaccine skeptic - in your opinion? What are you skeptical of?

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

#47

Post by rayiner »

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #23
rayiner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Etsy or Pinterest didn’t create women who like to collect fabric samples, those satisfy an existing demand. Similarly, I don’t think alt-media created this anti-institution sentiment. It’s catering to a consumer base that already exists.

I think you need to go back further to the education system. I’m a 1990s kid, so I grew up having teachers tell us to “think for ourselves.” In high school, a bunch of our teachers joined the students in protesting the administration over a (completely innocuous) dress code. GenX and millennials were positively marinated in anti-establishment, anti-institution rhetoric growing up. The Joe Rogans of the world are a predictable result of that education.

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

#48

Post by SubiculumCode »

fooker wrote: post #11

Makes sense, hopefully it convinces enough parents not to listen to idiots. But I have to wonder if any researcher will be able to publish a study that has a hint of the opposite conclusion? Academia is not kind to anyone going against the flow. (I am a bona fide scientist, not a do-your-own-research conspiracy theorist...)

If the hypothesis showed an actual mechanism AND a reason why it wasn't detectable in all of the studies that went before it, sure. Yes. Absolutely.

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

#49

Post by travoc »

api wrote: post #28
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.

It’s the whole “forced to take them by the government” that scares them. Ridiculous, since governments have always been trustworthy.

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

#50

Post by sorcerer-mar »

keysdev wrote: post #43
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>The problem is that a massive orchestrated campaign to sow distrust of institutions can succeed well beyond what's needed to achieve their destruction don't think that is needed. The institutions did by themselves. Especially the large ones private and public.

No, they really didn't.

Institutions made mistakes, sure, as they always have. None of these mistakes, individually or in aggregate, justify anything close to the discredit they've received.

Had there been similarly ignorant, ideologically motivated, and orchestrated media to report on all these institutions' past failures, they would've "failed" long ago. But because there wasn't, the institutions carried on despite their "failures" and delivered huge amounts of value to society.

For every modern transgression I can point to analogous historical ones. You can say "see, they've always been rotten!" and my response is "yet despite that they've delivered value." Almost as if real life is full of tradeoffs, complexity, tensions, and imperfections everywhere.

Post reply on HN