Vaccines and autism
Jun. 20th, 2005 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinThis is very sad: with a splashy Salon/Rolling Stone report, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has jumped headfirst into the longstanding claims that a preservative in childhood vaccines causes autism, with additional material about the government suppressing the truth. Some of the attention has been on a media meta-story about somebody trying to quash an interview with Kennedy on ABC. Both Mark Leon Goldberg of The American Prospect and Tom Tomorrow are convinced he's blown the thimerosal conspiracy wide-open. Apparently Ariana Huffington's group blog has been hyping the story for a while.
I'd heard of this stuff before and had the impression that there was nothing there, but when I saw new allegations popping out all over in the past few days, I thought that there was some new smoking gun and I might have actually been misled all along by an honest-to-God gigantic US government/industry/CDC conspiracy to suppress the true cause of autism (with the usual disaster-movie "we don't want a panic" justification). But, especially knowing what I know about how scientific communities work, the claims were sufficiently extraordinary that I had reservations, as did the always fiercely rationalist PZ Myers, who fired off a note to medical researcher "Orac" who apparently knows quite a bit about this.
I'm not an expert, but Orac's debunking (which links to earlier writings), together with some of the comments, is pretty convincing to me: most significantly, autism rates aren't any different in countries where thimerosal was never used (strange if thimerosal is responsible for almost all autism in the US, as the claims seem to imply), and there was a similar vaccine hysteria in Britain over autism supposedly being caused by MMR vaccine that didn't even use thimerosal. There is no new scientific smoking gun, just the same irreproducible results. Aside from opponents of child vaccination and expert witnesses for plaintiffs, the claims are pushed heavily by people promoting chelation therapy for autism, which is, to put it mildly, scientifically questionable. Note also that thimerosal has been phased out in the US recently, so vaccines your kids would get today don't use it anyway. Props to Lindsey Beyerstein for also showing sense (while refusing to let Bill Frist off the hook entirely, which is probably wise; he is cozy with the pharmaceutical industry).
Orac got a lot of outraged comments from parents of autistic children, some of whom claim good results from chelation therapy. I can only imagine what they must be going through, and I can sympathize with the notion that direct experience bringing up a child trumps any quantity of epidemiological statistics. It doesn't make it true.
I have great fun bashing conservative opinionmakers and politicians for endorsing pseudoscience that seems ideologically congenial to them, on subjects such as evolution and the environment. As far as I can tell, this time some liberals got it wrong. Teresa Nielsen Hayden famously said "I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist." I can sympathize, and the administration and its friends in Congress have also irritatingly frequently tried to portray reasonable opponents as nutbar conspiracy theorists. But an important proviso is that this is no excuse to actually think like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.
See also: Skeptico on the complete transcript of the conference where the coverup was supposedly hatched.
I'd heard of this stuff before and had the impression that there was nothing there, but when I saw new allegations popping out all over in the past few days, I thought that there was some new smoking gun and I might have actually been misled all along by an honest-to-God gigantic US government/industry/CDC conspiracy to suppress the true cause of autism (with the usual disaster-movie "we don't want a panic" justification). But, especially knowing what I know about how scientific communities work, the claims were sufficiently extraordinary that I had reservations, as did the always fiercely rationalist PZ Myers, who fired off a note to medical researcher "Orac" who apparently knows quite a bit about this.
I'm not an expert, but Orac's debunking (which links to earlier writings), together with some of the comments, is pretty convincing to me: most significantly, autism rates aren't any different in countries where thimerosal was never used (strange if thimerosal is responsible for almost all autism in the US, as the claims seem to imply), and there was a similar vaccine hysteria in Britain over autism supposedly being caused by MMR vaccine that didn't even use thimerosal. There is no new scientific smoking gun, just the same irreproducible results. Aside from opponents of child vaccination and expert witnesses for plaintiffs, the claims are pushed heavily by people promoting chelation therapy for autism, which is, to put it mildly, scientifically questionable. Note also that thimerosal has been phased out in the US recently, so vaccines your kids would get today don't use it anyway. Props to Lindsey Beyerstein for also showing sense (while refusing to let Bill Frist off the hook entirely, which is probably wise; he is cozy with the pharmaceutical industry).
Orac got a lot of outraged comments from parents of autistic children, some of whom claim good results from chelation therapy. I can only imagine what they must be going through, and I can sympathize with the notion that direct experience bringing up a child trumps any quantity of epidemiological statistics. It doesn't make it true.
I have great fun bashing conservative opinionmakers and politicians for endorsing pseudoscience that seems ideologically congenial to them, on subjects such as evolution and the environment. As far as I can tell, this time some liberals got it wrong. Teresa Nielsen Hayden famously said "I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist." I can sympathize, and the administration and its friends in Congress have also irritatingly frequently tried to portray reasonable opponents as nutbar conspiracy theorists. But an important proviso is that this is no excuse to actually think like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.
See also: Skeptico on the complete transcript of the conference where the coverup was supposedly hatched.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-20 10:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-20 10:40 pm (UTC)Heck, adults to this day insist to me that the flu vaccine gave them the flu. I think
It also squares with the popular notion that illnesses are all caused by manmade poisons in your body. Of course some are, but again there's the desire to have one completely reductive explanation, and there's always some quack willing to sell you a procedure to get the poisons out of you.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-20 10:45 pm (UTC)You misspelled "thetans". HTH!
no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 07:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 07:58 pm (UTC)According to the CDC, some flu vaccines can cause the flu (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/nasalspray.htm). While that danger only applies to vaccines based on weakened pathogens, vaccines made from dead pathogens aren't necessarily safe either -- immune reactions vary, and can kill you (e.g. severe allergies). Even a relatively safe vaccine can provoke some of the same immune responses that are symptoms of the real disease, which is probably what most people mean (unless they're just misjudging a coincidence) when they say "the vaccine gave me the flu". Some vaccines have been among medicine's greatest successes -- very safe drugs that saved millions of lives -- but you make it sound like injecting or ingesting pathogen analogs to provoke the immune system is fundamentally safe, and it isn't.
Vaccination does face two obstacles that may be inconsistent with best public health practice. Vaccinations are applied on a grand scale to cure diseases people haven't even contracted yet, which makes them perfect lawyer fodder. Not only can vaccine manufacturers face bogus litigation (not that I would know, since I'm not a biologist or a doctor, but I too am inclined to doubt the vaccination/autism link), but also legitimate litigation that may ruin the profitability of a vaccine that does more good than harm and which has no better alternative.
It does seem that a lot of opposition to vaccination is linked to quackery.
[I had been given the impression that the pulled Lyme disease vaccine LYMErix was another example of a vaccine that sometimes caused its disease, but it appears that if LYMErix really was dangerous -- and the whole scare might just be a hallucination (albeit of some prominent independent experts) that enriches lawyers; the government never officially decided LYMErix was unsafe, and the statistics are inconclusive -- then the mechanism was not so simple; the alleged dangers were autoimmune arthritis or flareups in previously asymptomatic infections.]
(Poke around on the Internet for a few minutes, and anybody can pretend to be an expert. But at least I doubt my sources, and additional searching usually confirms that they deserve it. I can feel myself peeling off into my old hobby-horse, that the maligned mainstream newsmedia are still some of the only ones that take fairness seriously enough to sometimes admit their screwups, and to -- in the hard news section, anyway -- generally avoid presenting elaborate optical illusions supported by the reporter's concealment of key facts. Wikipedia isn't too bad with hot topics either, compared to the rest of the Internet; sometimes authors' countervailing biases average out to something almost fair. Actually, when it comes to science, the mainstream media deserve to be maligned. OK, I stop now.)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-22 10:45 am (UTC)I wasn't referring to Matt when I commented about doubtful sources and sounding like an expert in minutes. Also, I should have avoided the phrase "you make it sound like".
Ian's example of a vaccine public-health policy dilemma was (naturally) much better than mine.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 08:31 pm (UTC)Vaccination generally presents a paradox: It's best for me if you are vaccinated, but I am not. If everyone in society, except me, is vaccinated, then I gain many of hte benefits of vaccination (since I'm now much less likely to be exposed to the disease(, without the risks associated with vaccination.
On the other hand, if too many "me"s are not vaccinated, then the risk to me of not getting the disease from my unvaccinated neighbour,outweighs the risk of the vaccine itself.
But in the US, and many other developed nations, vaccine rates are high enough that oftentimes individuals are better off not being vaccinated. They're parasites, sure, and they're putting me and you and our children at greater risk, but they themselves are safer.
Eventually, of course, vaccine rates drop enough that the disease can get a toothhold again, and we see the charming old-fashioned epidemics and dead children once again. There are some lovely charts, showing precisely this in Great Britain. In response to some of the anti-vaccine loons in Europe, vaccine rates in the UK dropped. You can see the line dipping, and abruptly you see spikes in vaccine-preventable deaths and disease; in response to that (there's nothing like a dead baby to get your attention) vaccine rates shot up again, and the disease rates once again dropped.
(Autism, by the way, didn't respond to the fluctuations in vaccine rates.)
The general result of the paradox is that vaccinations are often mandated by society, either by governments or by subsystems (schools, for example); because it's society that benefits from vaccination.
There's no formal way out of the paradox, but it can be reduced by making vaccines safer---by altering the risk-benefit ratio by reducing the risk, by making vaccines safer. This can be done generally (there's lots of work on making vaccines more effective and safer) and in a more targeted way, in response to disease rates.
The simplest example of the latter is polio. When polio is a common disease, the risk-benefit ratio is tilted in favour of the vaccine; even if there are moderate risks associated with the vaccine, the benefit of avoiding disease outweighs those risks. But as polio is almost eliminated, the individual risk of vaccine reaction (small though that risk is) outweighs the benefit of protection against a now nearly nonexistent disease. This is when the vaccine is switched to one that may be less effective, but is safer still.
Incidentally, I think Matt misremembered the quote he ascribed to me; it sounds like something I'd say about the swine flu vaccine (where people were sniggering about developing curly tails and snouts from the vaccine) but not about the risk of developing flu-like symptoms, or flu itself, from the vaccine.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 03:14 am (UTC)As an aside that made me giggle, for the number of PH people that are liberals, it would be a very funny (read ironic) to think we would be a pawn for the government.
But I agree with you about the parents. My heart goes out for people searching for reasons to thing especially dealing with their children. It must be horrible to go through.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 06:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 09:10 am (UTC)My experience with conspiracy theories (which is limited mostly to theories that can be researched online) is that there is a notion that the United States is somehow different from other countries, and rules that apply to the world in general don't necessarily apply to the U.S. I'm remembering specifically a website about vaccines being a government plot, which stated that OTHER countries had problems with chicken pox while the U.S. did not, because the U.S. is "cleaner". That was a point they claimed in their favor, that the children of the U.S. didn't need vaccinations, so obviously the vaccinations were a government plot.
(A brief keyword search is not coming up with the site, but now I'm curious and want to find it again.)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 09:22 am (UTC)Diseases like smallpox were unknown in the Roman Empire because they know that disease was spread by flies, polluted water, lack of sanitation, dirty clothes, overcrowding, etc., etc. They never practiced inoculation because they had no need for it." (http://www.reformation.org/vaccine.html)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 12:26 pm (UTC)We do know a few things, though. Mercury is a neurotoxin, right? But it's used in thimerosal. Granted, it's also used in tooth fillings. But is it really necessary? Is it ok?
Also, thimerosal is now not used in vaccines for children in the US. Why not? If it's not dangerous, why not just leave it in?
I'm skeptical of the 'whistleblowers', but I'm also skeptical of the skeptics.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 01:10 pm (UTC)Because conspiracy theorists made a big stink about it, and it was decided it was just as easy to take it out.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
As for the "toxin" bit, yes, mercury is a toxin. Every fucking thing is a toxin if there's enough of it. Nothing is a toxin if there's not enough of it. There's nothing good for you, that is not also bad for you if there's too much of it. It's fucking stupid to say something "is a toxin" as if dose has nothing to do with it. And it's not harmless stupidity, it's stupidity that kills children.
It's this kind of gullibility, glibness, and mindless acceptance of catchphrases that has killed thousands of children who--because of fearmongering and stupidity--didn't get their vaccines, and died of easily-preventable diseases. Children SUFFOCATE TO DEATH on their own phlegm because of this bullshit.
YES, it makes me ANGRY that people kill children because they are stupid. I don't apologize for that.