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

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

#51

I'm curious: did it ever become typical for these studies to publish the data and code? I haven't kept current, but I remember having read studies in times past and they definitely didn't. Not necessarily referring to this or vaccines, just like "hey we did this analysis" but they don't publish the code and data, when we have an ongoing replication crisis in science.

On page 8 of the supplemental material, they pasted some R code, at least. Hopefully that code runs once you load the packages they reference. I wish they made it easier to download and start working with the data, though. It’s from a national registry, so I suppose it’s available to those who look/make a request, but I’d like a 100 MB CSV.

But to really answer your question - not really. In fields where Jupyter Notebooks are common, those are generally available via a Github link, but in medical fields code and data are still relatively difficult to find.

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

#52
post #42
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 vaccina…

Only a tiny percentage of people would have personal anecdotes. The great majority of it especially after covid is driven by social media memes.

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

#53
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…

The fact that the confidence interval range includes 1 means that the finding was not statistically significant.

The population for those two specific diagnoses were low in the study. Diagnostic patterns change over time for these type of disorders. Considering neurodevelopmental outcomes as a group may add more color.

You are correct that the study failed to disprove a link between aluminum and aspergers. But the study did prove a that if there is a link it does not result in a moderate to large increase in aspergers risk.

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

#54
post #47

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.

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 j…

Interesting theory but anecdotally doesn't fit with my experience.

The most compliant, least critical, and laziest thinkers in my acquaintance are all squarely "anti-institutional" now.

> Alt-media arose in maybe the last 10 years. Most of these anti-vaxxers were fully baked (intellectually) by then

This isn't true. There was definitely a crunchy left-wing anti-institutional anti-vax cohort that's very old, but the modern energy behind the movement is not from this group. And alt-media is much older than you give it credit for. Rush Limbaugh premiered in 1988. Alex Jones' InfoWars was founded in 1999.

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

#55
post #52
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 vaccina…

Only a tiny percentage of people would have personal anecdotes. The great majority of it especially after covid is driven by social media memes.

You'd think so but the rate of autism in the US just keeps going up, it's something like 1 in 31 kids now. Many people will know someone with an anecdote. Social media definitely does its part though, I agree.

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

#56
post #47

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.

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 j…

> GenX and millennials were marinated in anti-establishment, anti-institution rhetoric growing up.

Would that were true and they were fighting against the system right now...

They were marinated in "Both sides are bad(tm)! The System(tm) is bad. You can protest by dropping out of the system!"

Except that ... doesn't work. "Dropping out of the system" instead advantages both the status quo and those who do actually muster up the energy to fight.

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." -- John Philpot Curran, 1790

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

#57
post #30
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…

> What happened was that ordinary people heard about the paper

I've never heard of this paper, but I am aware of the judicial capture that pharma companies manage to get for themselves. A whole extra judicial organization to handle vaxx related damages.

That's why I don't trust them. Amongst other things (burgers for vaxxes is an odd choice, speaking charitably).

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

#58

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."

would you mind answering a couple questions? I'm very curiuous:

Have autism rates increased recently (last few decades)?

If so, what are the best theories for why?

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

#59

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."

That’s not a helpful way to communicate with the public.

Instead you should follow the standards we hold for everyday occurrences, which is if there’s no compelling evidence, it’s safe to say it doesn’t happen.

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

#60
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.

Out of curiosity, when is the last time you changed your mind about something moral? If you can’t remember the time, it’s petty rich to accuse others of being exactly as close minded as you are.
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