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Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions
121–130 of 140 posts
Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions
#122Earlier 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?
The most recent episode of the podcast Science Vs explored this in detail: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autism-the-real-reason... The rise in autism rates (5x over the last 25 years) is almost entirely explained by changes in how autism is defined, diagnosed, and detected. Not by an actual surge in underlying cases or any specific environmental trigger like vaccines, air pollution, heavy metals, plastics, or…
I just don't believe that based purely on my personal experience. I've been around many many people and in the last 15-20 years the amount of people with autism has exploded. It was very rare 30 years ago in my area, the occasional led exposure here, farm chemicals there... But now it's seemingly every 10th house that has someone that is nonverbal.
I'm all for papers and science but only if it matches the real world.
Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions
#123> 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…
Just to clarify for others reading: Statens Serum Institut (SSI) is a government agency, founded and primarily funded by the Danish Ministry of Health. It’s not a private company profiting from vaccines. In fact, SSI sold its vaccine production business in 2016 to AJ Vaccines and now focuses on public health, disease surveillance, and research. The claim that their “salaries come from vaccine profits” is simply false…
I was writing what wikipedia says. What about what wikipedia says are you disputing?
Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 professio…
> Civil engineering did more to end communicable diseases than vaccines.
You need to show some work on that.
Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yea immediately after I posted this I thought "ah shit someone is going to say ingesting vs injecting is different". It's still interesting as a comparison I think and the source is a solid one so I left it up.
Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions
#126Just 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.
Not terribly long ago, but I don't see "do vaccines cause autism" as being a moral position.
Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions
#127Sadly, this is a pointless study. 0% of people will have their minds changed by this since it is a political/propaganda issue that has nothing to do with science.
Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pe…
> I dont think we need bother with a handful
I wish I could agree, I'd like nothing more than to let nature take its course with anti-vax people. But the concept of herd immunity [1] tells us that, if enough people refuse to get vaccinated, even if the relative percentage is small, it affects the rest of us as well.
1. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22599-herd-im...
Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions
#129Earlier 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.
Whereas snake oil salesman have traditionally been a beacon of credibility?
Re: Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions
#130(Disclaimer: I’m not trying to make an argument that there is a link between vaccines and autism, I’m trying to understand a research paper and its methodology and conclusions) I just glanced through the study itself and not the article https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997 and have questions for anyone that is familiar with this sort of thing: They did not do a non-vaccinated vs vaccinated people c…
I'm not familiar with the medical side of this study, but I am very familiar with the statistics.
### They did not do a non-vaccinated vs vaccinated people comparison
These studies are observational, and in that sense no manipulation (such as random treatment assignment) was made. So they need to rely on observational studies techniques.
From what I could gather, one of this observational techniques in inverse treatment probability weighting when they say
> "we adjusted for all baseline covariates using stabilized inverse probability of treatment weights"
The IPW technique basically tries to solve the problem that some groups of children might have a higher prevalence of the treatment by weighting them in a manner as to mimic random assignment. This is as close as we can get to comparing treated and untreated in observational settings.
Also, the division of the doses of vaccine is also a better characterization of "was vaccinated". If you think getting vaccinated causes something, then getting more vaccinated should increase the incidence of that something.
### Wouldn’t you need a sizable cohort of non vaccinated children?
Yes, but as you pointed out, that might not exist. So by creating comparable groups (via IPW) + treatment intensity/dose we can still arrive at some conclusions.
### The researchers discarded from their cohort 34,547 children for receiving too many vaccinations/too much aluminum (...) Wouldn’t that data be relevant to look at?
They probably did. A few things are important here. The data comes from administrative data sources, so mistakes can happen. While you need to trust the sources, there could be imputation typos, or just weird cases. So the researchers probably went after a notion of "clinically relevant vaccine dosage for this study" to know up to which point to consider data points, because from that point onward, it either is not interesting because its a rare treatment incidence, or just seems like a mistake.
### “adjusted hazard ratio (95% CI) per 1mg increase in aluminum received……” and in the chart Asperger’s is listed at 1.13 (.89 - 1.44) so they do potentially see an increase for Asperger’s
Important to say that with hazard ratios, a HR of 1 means that there is no change because we are in the multiplicative scale (as opposed to 0 meaning "treatment does nothing" in the additive scale).
So in this setting, after adjusting for the treatment probabilities, a HR CI of (.89 - 1.44) just translates to 'no effect'. Nothing out of the ordinary in terms of the interpretation.