
One More Time, with Big Data: Measles Vaccine Doesn’t Cause Autism - mykowebhn
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/health/measles-vaccine-autism.html
======
berbec
Of course Big Media is backing up Big Pharma!

/s

I really want to understand the logic that goes on the head of an anti-vax
parent. I can't wrap my head around "This injection will make sure, with a
very high degree of certainty, that my child does not die from a disease
thought eradicated."

~~~
electriclove
I don't consider myself anti-vax (my children and I are fully vaccinated) but
I do question things and I prefer to make my own decisions regarding what is
best for my family.

What are the risks of a particular vaccine? What are the risks to my child if
they get the disease?

The answers to those vary per vaccine and could result in some parents
deciding to not vaccinate their children for one or more vaccines.

~~~
driverdan
> I do question things and I prefer to make my own decisions regarding what is
> best for my family.

Medical researchers know more than you about which vaccines are safe and
should be administered.

> What are the risks of a particular vaccine? What are the risks to my child
> if they get the disease?

For all of the regularly scheduled vaccines the answer is the risks of not
vaccinating greatly outweigh those of receiving it, unless you have an allergy
to something in that particular vaccine.

~~~
existentialhalt
"For all of the regularly scheduled vaccines the answer is the risks of not
vaccinating greatly outweigh those of receiving it, unless you have an allergy
to something in that particular vaccine."

This is only true for healthy people who have had no reactions to vaccines,
nor have their family members.

There are people who have life-long debilitating reactions. What is being
proposed is to make it impossible to opt-out if you have a personal or family
history with negative reactions to vaccines. Medical exemptions are impossible
to get except for the very wealthy who can afford the appropriate testing to
prove it's an issue.

~~~
driverdan
> This is only true for healthy people who have had no reactions to vaccines,
> nor have their family members.

That's what I said. Allergy, reaction, same thing.

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xutopia
I find the pro-plague movement very similar to the flat earth movement.
Nothing will change their minds because they want to believe their story so
badly that nothing will make them budge.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Nothing will change their minds because they want to believe their story so
> badly that nothing will make them budge.

While there are fanatics, there seems to be a lot of the the movement which is
people who are ignorant and misled and can be effectively engaged from a
position of respect.

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nikanj
I wonder how much more budget and time we are going to waste re-proving this.

It’s a matter of faith, further studies will never make people change their
minds.

~~~
existentialhalt
Double-blind placebo controlled studies evaluating the safety of mercury based
preservatives and aluminum adjuvants in vaccines still have not been done.
This study evaluates the contemporary MMR vaccine that does not have mercury
or aluminum in it, so it's know surprise to people who understand the science
behind vaccine-hesitancy that the results of this study showed no problems.

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deanalevitt
I'm not sure any anti-vaccers are saying, "if only there were more data."

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jayalpha
You can't feel superior or pretend to have secret knowledge if you believe the
facts and scientific method. So feel free to ignore the article.

~~~
berbec
Facts are just what THEY want you to believe!

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AwareSituation
Even if it did, I'd rather be autistic than dead

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gdubs
People are irrational. We downplay statistics when it’s convenient (like
buying a lotto ticket) and overplay them when fearful (like with vaccines). Or
we ignore statistics completely, like how dangerous it is simply to drive to
the doctor’s office in an automobile. Unfortunately, more data is unlikely to
sway folks who are already held by this dangerous meme that vaccines are bad.
The answer is scientific literacy, and for such an advanced society we have a
shocking lack of it.

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purplezooey
We're going to hell in a handbasket quickly now, folks, hang on

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pc123
I don't want to discuss on the level of "pro" or "anti" but I would like to
analyze some numbers from this paper.

Take a look at this picture:
[https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...](https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/journals/content/nejm/2002/nejm_2002.347.issue-19/nejmoa021134/production/images/img_medium/nejmoa021134_t1.jpeg)

There were 440,655 vaccinated children and 96,648 unvaccinated. Among the
vaccinated 621 were autistic (of any kind), 117 among unvaccinated. Which
gives us 0.14% and 0.12% respectively.

Why doesn't this prove that vaccination has some impact on autism?

Please refrain from attacking me, I just want to know the science explanation.

~~~
gerbilly
I haven't read the paper, but it could be that the 0.02% difference is not
statistically significant.[1][2]

Say you pick two groups of people from a population, two groups of 10 000
people at random.

Imagine then that you count the proportion of autistic people in each group.
You might get say, 0.15% in group A and 0.14% in group B.

If by chance the people in groups A and B had been partitioned differently
between the two groups, i.e.: if enough autistic people in group A had instead
ended up in group B, you can easily imagine that the numbers would change. Or
even that they could flip.

Some differences between the two were simply due to random chance. Statistical
significance is a concept used to try to tease apart how much of an effect is
due to a suspected cause (vaccination in this case) vs chance.

Now in the case of this study, you might say, well there was no other way to
partition the data, since all the vaccinated kids had to go in group A. While
this is true, if autism has a different cause or causes than the partitions
you chose effectively, your partitioning into groups would still be random
with respect to the true cause of autism.

So to 'prove'[3] whether a vaccines cause autism, we would prefer to see large
effect sizes, which would strongly suggest that the effect is due to the cause
we suspected.

If instead, we had seen numbers like this: group A 15% and group B 7% then you
could argue that the effect size is large enough to go beyond the effect
caused by the sampling.

Mathematical techniques in statistics and probability theory exist which allow
you to choose a threshold (p value) in order to consider an effect to be
statistically significant.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance)

[2] [https://towardsdatascience.com/statistical-significance-
hypo...](https://towardsdatascience.com/statistical-significance-hypothesis-
testing-the-normal-curve-and-p-values-93274fa32687)

[3] 'Prove' in quotes, because you can't really prove cause and effect using a
study like this. To get closer to proof, you'd need an experiment where the
conditions are specifically assigned to each group.

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throwaway3449
Finally a Danish study without Poul Thorsen! As he is no longer among the
authors of the study it is probably the first Danish vaccine study that can be
taken seriously, thanks to Mr Thorsen's non-participation (who bought a house
in Atlanta,a Harley-Davidson and few other things with grant money from CDC
and there is a suspicion that he has manipulated the results of studies).

However, like the Jain study
([https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2275444](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2275444)),
this new study focuses primarily on MMR vaccination, which is a shame.
Focusing on once vaccine in a heavily vaccinated population kinda proves
nothing. They also captured data on vaccination with pentavalent vaccine,
which is great, but unfortunately it seems that it is completely useless ...

As usual a control group of completely unvaccinated probably is not included
because the study states that "We evaluated the association between MMR and
autism in children with no DTaP -IPV / Hib vaccinations in the first year of
life; we found no support for an association in this vaccine-naive
subpopulation "\- so the "no DTaP-IPV / HiB" field in the tables probably
means "no DTaP-IPV / HiB in first year of life"(haha, sneaky!). I view
positively that they included other covariants (eg parents' age, etc.), but
again, unfortunately, the covariant combination is missing and there are no
groups with more variables (shame).

As with the Jain study, there is a "healthy user bias": the authors did not
take into account the possibility that parents of children showing signs of
ASD do not start / stop vaccinating the MMR and fall automatically into the
"unvaxx" group. At least the authors mention this in the discussion.

And as usual: epidemiological studies are NOT a good tool for verifying the
safety of a product (or to disprove possible causality), this is the job of
clinical trials (unfortunately, vaccines' safety clinical trials are very very
bad pseudoscince with no placebos).

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throwawayvaxdad
My wife and I are expecting our first child. We are both pro-vaccine [trust
the professionals!] but she recently met a woman whose kid "instantly changed"
after one particular combo-dosage of several different vaccines. She has since
gotten spooked by the NUMBER of vaccinations administered at once. "I'll take
our son to the doctor every day to get them one at a time if I have to." I
doubt doctors would even entertain this strategy... Does anyone have resources
I can read to understand this angle of anti-vaxxers and the pro-science
rebuttal?

~~~
benjohnson
In my opinion - If your doctor won't indulge the a harmless idea of spreading
out your child's immune response to individual vaccines, then it's time to
find a new doctor.

~~~
throwawayvaxdad
Fair enough. We haven't spoken to docs about it yet so I was speculating. Any
idea if spreading it out is a common request?

~~~
ageitgey
This is a pretty common question/request in the US. I'm sure that almost every
doctor been asked before and is familiar with the idea and would rather work
around a special request than not have the child vaccinated at all. They
understand that parents are scared of the unknown.

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ojhughes
There are still groups out there who believe the earth is flat, more extreme
than anti-vax but a similar, irrational belief.

------
existentialhalt
This study does not evaluate the leading hypothesis of how vaccines could
cause autism / other issues.

That hypothesis is the mercury and aluminum exposure. The current MMR vaccine
does not contain mercury or aluminum.

~~~
dragonwriter
> This study does not evaluate the leading hypothesis of how vaccines could
> cause autism

A hypothesis of _how_ vaccines could cause autism would only be worth
evaluating if there were evidence presented of an effect that that hypothesis
was necessary to explain.

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z92x38y12
the new review of "Aluminium adjuvants" is on the way.

protocol: "Aluminium adjuvants used in vaccines versus placebo or no
intervention"

[https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...](https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD012805/full)

Cochrane Systematic Review - Intervention - Protocol Version published: 24
September 2017

 _" More than 10 years has passed since the systematic review by Jefferson and
colleagues, new adjuvants are being introduced continuously, and FDA and WHO
do not require genotoxicity or cardiotoxicity studies of new aluminium
adjuvants (WHO 2014b; FDA 2015). Lately, symptoms following HPV vaccination
have been suspected of being caused by the addition of aluminium adjuvant
(Tomljenovic 2011; Lee 2012; Poddighe 2014; Brinth 2015b; Gruber 2015;
Martinez‐Lavin 2015). A recent animal study by Inbar and colleagues managed to
spark further controversy by demonstrating behavioral abnormalities in mice
administered the aluminium‐containing HPV vaccine Gardasil (Inbar 2016a).
Compared to previous animal studies on HPV vaccines, the authors included two
control groups: one where mice were administered aluminium adjuvant alone and
another with placebo without adjuvant (Inbar 2016a). Inbar and colleagues
concluded that Gardasil via both its aluminium adjuvant and HPV antigens can
trigger neuro‐inflammation and autoimmune reactions, leading to behavioural
changes in mice (Inbar 2016a). Upon submission to a peer‐reviewed journal, the
paper was accepted with revisions, and published. However, it was soon
withdrawn by the editor (Inbar 2016), only to be published in a competing
journal shortly thereafter (Inbar 2016a). The initial withdrawal was allegedly
due to "unsound scientific results"; an assertion which was not supported by
the final publisher._

 _The theory that aluminium adjuvant is responsible for symptoms following HPV
vaccination is impossible to refute or prove based on the current data.
Aluminium adjuvant has been administered to both experimental and control
group in the vast majority of randomised clinical trials on HPV vaccines, thus
masking its potentially harmful effects (Exley 2011). Clinical trials designed
to administer vaccine adjuvants to the experimental group as well as the
placebo group do, de facto, not compare an intervention against a true
placebo, and therefore, do not adequately assess safety (Exley 2011). Indeed,
aluminium adjuvants, new or old, should be evaluated for benefits and harms on
their own merits._

 _Aluminium is the most frequently used adjuvant, introduced in vaccination
programmes worldwide (Tritto 2009). While the consequences of adding aluminium
to vaccines have been discussed broadly, no systematic review has been
conducted to assess the effects of aluminium adjuvants across vaccines. The
effects of aluminium adjuvants remain to be properly assessed using Cochrane
methodology to determine whether they are beneficial, or causally linked to
the numerous adverse events reported following immunisation. "_

~~~
throwaway3449
Finally someone is looking into this, it has been long overdue!

