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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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"which is if there’s no compelling evidence, it’s safe to say it doesn’t happen." I call BS. Until there was compelling evidence that antidepressants cause suicidal ideation it's safe to say it doesn't Until there was compelling evidence that contaminated water causes cholera it's safe to say it doesn't Until there was compelling evidence that dirty hands cause maternal death it's safe to say it doesn't Until there w…

Yeah man, if you went around telling people not to take their meds because someone suspected jt might cause suicidal ideation, you’d end up causing far more harm to all the unmedicated people.

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

#132
post #88
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not 100% sure what you're saying. Yes there are obvious cases like but those instances also used to just get called other things before we figured out autism as a distinct disease and it became widespread knowledge. There's no field in the data that gives us (for lack of a better term) the level of autism for people getting that diagnosis over time and we're recognizing more and more things as being on the spectrum of autism as time goes on which really just feeds back into the "there's more because we're finding/labelling more people as autistic" hypothesis.

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

#133
post #106
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s okay to mean what you say. Part of improving literacy is also respecting the intelligence of your audience and not talking down to them. Treating everyone like buffoons makes people act like them - treating them as beings capable of thought and reason tends to show the better side.

I find this argument hard to agree with. We are seeing unprecedented levels of buffoonery in many governments of the world and people enthusiastically agreeing with (objectively) idiots. Before anyone that does not know how to understand a statement as we are talking about, they will understand it the wrong way, tell everyone they know, create social media content and form organizations that oppose vaccines. I would…

I can understand that this approach seems like the easy quick solution, but the problem is much deeper than that. It's more about a weaponization of language by those who know what they're doing. Getting into a language fight isn't worthless, but doesn't actually resolve the issue, just escalates it.

What's more important IMHO, is raising the general understanding of how this science works and not falling into the trap of feeling like we have to debate this buffoonery on the same level. We're so worried about being called "elites" or whatever that we fight on their terms instead of just straight up calling it out as stupid and manipulative and giving it no more time than that.

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

#134
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's the biggest thing that gets me.

"I don't trust the authorities, so I'm going to base all my health choices on this random hustler from YouTube and eat horse dewormer."

It's kind of the essence of populism. "I'm too smart to fall for the lies of the authorities, so ... here let me throw my brain totally out the window and follow pure charisma instead."

Some skepticism of the authorities is rational because of course governments are sometimes corrupt and more often incompetent. (Never attribute to malice what can be explained by laziness or stupidity.) Doing some of your own research is good. But why does critical thinking go totally out the window for so many people at that point? And why do people assume that just because someone is "alternative" rather than "mainstream" they have no profit motive? Do people not realize that alt-med and self-help and certain kinds of religious zealotry are all massive industries with their own profit motives just like "big pharma"?

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

#135
post #61

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."

This is exactly why the whole "vaccine causes autism" got started. We need to improve science literacy before we could say things like that to the general public. When a layperson hears this, they'll think that there's a small but possible chance that vaccines do cause autism; when what the scientist means to say is that "it's highly unlikely that vaccines cause autism."

It's not the reason why this conspiracy got started. It got started by a fraudulent pseudoscientific paper with financial ties to it. We shouldn't be reducing human intelligence and ability to process information to the "wet streets cause rain" level. I know it's easier said than done though. When a scientist claims that "highly unlikely that vaccines cause autism", it still leaves the same room for doubt as when they say "it is very likely that vaccines do not cause autism".

The real issue isn't scientific caution. It's that the misinformation campaigns exploit any uncertainty, no matter how small. The solution isn't dumbing down science communication, but being clear about what the evidence actually shows.

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Where on wikipedia does it say: SSI salaries come from vaccine profits

I'd love to know so I can go correct it. Remember Wikipedia is a community encyclopedia not the ground thruth.

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

#137
Is this the study that showed that unvaccinated kids who had an autistic older sibling were more likely to be autistic - because parents had an autistic child, decided vaccines were the cause, had more kids and never vaccinated - but autism is mostly genetic with in-utero activation so obvs genetics...

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

#138
post #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 treatm…

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

#139

I don't like vaccines and its hard to say why. I was vaccinated as a child and I am fine. My wife and I fully vaccinate our kids per doctor's recommendation. I guess you could say I trust the doctors advice more than my silly gut feeling. However I can articulate that: I don't like that vaccine makers get special immunity from lawsuits. I don't like that pediatricians get payouts from big pharma based in what percent…

I mean the pandemic was not too long ago, a lot of us actually remember the accessible treatments back then.

First they discovered steroids like prednisolone which were useful only for heavily sick patients, then they started to distribute antibody plasma from other patients, then monoclonal antibodies and some cytokine inhibitors and when everybody who wanted already got vaccinated, we got antivirals such as Paxlovid, and it was scarce.

There were a lot of misunderstanding around hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, similarly how we have a lot of misunderstanding around vaccines and autism. And they were tested and tested and tested, similarly how we still check if vaccines cause autism. And all the proper research showed that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were absolutely ineffective, times and times again, but people just couldn't let them go, similarly to how people can't let go the fake autism-vaccine connection.

In the first part of the pandemic, vaccines were the best we had.

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