The Truth About Vaccines

Originally posted by kacy ↑

It should be pretty simple to find out if vaccines cause autism. Just do a survey!

The CDC tells us that 1 in every 68 children in the U.S. has autism and a recent government survey pegged the incidence of autism even higher at 1 in 45 children. Amish children are mostly unvaccinated. It has been estimated that the rate of autism in the Amish community to be 1 in 15,000.

You cant argue with statistics.

https://www.ageofautism.com/2016/04/lets-go-find-unvaccinated-children-with-autism.html

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As you say you can't argue with statistics. Firstly the statement that Amish children are mostly unvaccinated is incorrect. They have lower vaccination rates that the rest of the US population, but the majority of Amish do in fact vaccinate:

https://blogs.plos.org/thepanicviru...ccinate-claims-disproved-by-fact-based-study/

https://www.verywellhealth.com/amish-vaccinate-autism-rates-lower-3971479

In another post you state that the increase in autism is strongly correlated with the increase in vaccination. But this correlation that you attribute to vaccination clearly doesn't exist in the statistics related to The Amish community. From your own figures the rate of autism among The Amish community is only 1 in 15,000 compared to 1 in 50 or so in the population of the US in general. So, assuming an Amish vaccination rate of 50% (it is higher) and the general US population at 100% (it is a bit lower than this), one would expect the autism rate in the Amish community to be about 1 in 100 if the autism rate were highly correlated with the vaccination rate. Yet, it is 150 times lower than that.

So it is clear that there are other factors at work. In particular, the genetical makeup of the Amish community is unique within the US due to their geographically narrow immigrant origins and comparatively extreme lack of sexual interaction with those outside their community.

It would certainly be useful to have figures relating to autism rates of unvaccinated Amish compared to vaccinated Amish, but unfortunately I can't find any proper study. But drawing conclusions based on a small anecdotal survey, with erroneous suppositions (rate of vaccinations and rate of autism) and not testing the fundamental hypothesis (whether those with autism were in fact vaccinated) is of little value, particularly when the correlation that is supposed to exist between the two clearly breaks down.

Of much more use would be a properly conducted large scale analysis on the general population rather than comparing a specific unique group within the population that have genetic differences from the population at large and then ignoring any contributing factors these genetic differences and in fact other non-genetic differences like lifestyle, consumption of processed food etc.might have on the results.

But there are in fact many such properly conducted studies and they have disproved the autism - vaccination link.

https://www.autismspeaks.org/scienc...k-large-study-vaccinated-vs-unvaccinated-kids

Also, going back to your assertion that the increase in autism rates are highly correlated to the increase in vaccination rates. But that is simply untrue.

In the US, for example, autism rates have increased from about 1 in 150 in 2000 to 1 in 59 in 2014. So almost a tri-fold increase. But vaccination rates haven't increased tri-fold in the US in that period. At best they have been steady and in fact have fallen off slightly.

https://vaxopedia.org/2018/05/05/vaccines-and-the-latest-autism-prevalence-report/

So perhaps the increase in autism rates is, as the experts tell us, primarily due to a change in the criteria of what is autism, more diagnosing of children for autism and more accurate diagnostics.