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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

#81
post #49
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neither the government nor the pharma industry has done much to maintain their credibility with the people. Drugs have side effects, literally every ad on any news channel will tell you so. Studies are fuzzed. Which is why its important to talk to multiple experts, and look at multiple studies. But for vaccines there have been plenty debunking the link between vaccines and autism.

Forced by the government should be pushed back but not by denying evidence.

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

#82
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…

I’d argue it has more to do with the fall of mainline religion and the rise of the zealot. In that vacuum, some people found independent churches and legacies, and others ended up following woo-woo new age bs, which the Internet organized at scale. We know about the Wakefield study because zealots pushed it hard. Fluoridation is another example - my city recently started it and the council was brigaded by lunatics fr…

It’s also declining child mortality. Child mortality in the U.S. in the 1960s was about three times higher than in the 1990s. The U.S. in the 1960s was comparable to Bangladesh today. Back then, most people knew a kid who died of a disease in childhood. That’s far rarer today. Meanwhile, virtually every parent of young children knows someone whose kid has some sort of autism spectrum diagnosis. Thanks to vaccines being so effective, the apparent risk profile has changed.

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

#83
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.

Rewind back to the '21 and Id say we were at-least 10% of HN.

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

#84
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…

I'm also not an expert here, but looking through the figures [1], that one HR result for Asperger's in a figure 4 is...surprising to see, given the headlines.

This is far from strong evidence of an effect, but you're absolutely right that this at least deserves discussion in the paper and coverage.

1. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/suppl/10.7326/ANNALS-25-0099...

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

#85
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

The anti-institutional left educated what became the anti-institutional right. If you teach kids to “distrust authority” and “think for yourself,” you’ve taught a meta-principle. You can’t predict which direction they’re going to go with it.

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

#86

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…

Or maybe science is a red herring and they're just susceptible to demagoguery and whoever shouts the loudest and simplest.

I'd advocate for skepticism. Sure check every claim, verify what you must. But when theres a mountain of evidence the whole "vaccines bad" thing doesnt hold up. At which point society has to ask - if there's nothing more we can do, why even bother ? the ideology is kinda parasitic too as it actively hurts people who believe in it. Why do this to yourself and others ? Its just inexplicable.

Anyways enough number of people believe in vaccines to have cured a pandemic. I dont think we need bother with a handful whose whole schtick rebelling against useful stuff.

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

#87
post #74
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And now, they didn’t trust the bottom-line conclusions being reported by the Lancet and the media. That's the funny thing, though. Logically, distrusting The Lancet means distrusting Wakefield's paper too. It makes no sense to claim that The Lancet is untrustworthy while you still base your beliefs on a paper because it was published in The Lancet. If the journal goes down, the journal articles have to go down with…

Why do you think it would work symmetrically like that? Say you trust your spouse. Then they admit they cheated on you. Years later they say, actually, that earlier statement was a lie. What do you believe now?

> What do you believe now?

Obviously you should be skeptical of anything they said. There was indisputably one big lie, whether then or now. If you really want to know which is the lie, you'd need to get independent confirmation.

The explanation of the lie matters. If it's, "I lied about cheating on you, and now I want you back", then lolno. If it was more like, "I was just sick of you, but you wouldn't have left me unless I drove you away", that's more plausible.

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

#88
post #73
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

One of the largest reasons is probably we're just looking more. It's a relatively new diagnosis, just 50 years ago it'd just be "oh yeah Uncle Joe is a little weird he only eats hotdogs and knows everything ever about trains".

There are severe cases of non verbal children etc

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

#89
post #46
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?

- Adjuvants. As a materials researcher I think it's nuts we inject nanoscale alumina in our blood.

- Regulatory structure. Why can't I sue a vaccine manufacturer? Limit awards, if you necessary, but if I cant sue I cant get discovery.

- Effectiveness. The flu vaccine's effectiveness is statistical artifact. See healthy vaccine bias

- Historical effectiveness. I had a civil engineer smugly point out that his profession had ended more diseases than biology. So I looked it up. Civil engineering did more to end communicable diseases than vaccines.

- General dishonesty of the medical profession. I don't expect my Advil to be 100% safe; I don't expect my vaccine to be either. I dont expect my medical health officers to lie about it though (see mRNA and the long dismissed myocarditis risk)

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

#90
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.

Precisely this. Nothing wrong with changing your mind. In fact swing the other way and own the idea. Its just an opinion, get a different one, nobody cares.
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