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Comment by technologyvault | Hacker News Reader

I met a woman at an amusement park last year who was certain that her child became autistic immediately after receiving immunization shots. She was wearing a shirt advertising this movie: http://vaxxedthemovie.com/

It seems like this research (if it's proven to be accurate consistently) could be instrumental in either putting that idea to rest or validating it.

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It's not an idea that needs putting to rest. There is no legitimate research that supports such causation. "Validation" would invalidate the existing body of research, which is improbable.

Why research has to validate everything? These are facts that children are regressing into Autism after MMR at 15 months.

Science still doesn't know how food gets digested and becomes poop. Will you stop eating, because science doesn't know what really happens during digestion?

> Science still doesn't know how food gets digested and becomes poop.

You're going to really need to provide some kind of evidence for this, because I'm pretty certain that scientists do have a pretty good idea how this process works.

For that matter, I could give you a layman's explanation that, while it may not be 100% accurate, probably would come really close to a real explanation...

These are facts that children are regressing into Autism after X at 15 months:

Choose your X:

Stop breastfeeding

Start walking

Start playing in the park

Start eating solids

Start throwing tantrums

Are you really saying "don't trust science, but do trust this scientific study that vaccines cause autism"? You're undermining your own argument.

I think the logic goes something like this (not limited to anti-vax folks by any means):

P: If my belief is false, I have no explanation for my experience.

P: Losing the explanation that I've used to validate my experience would be deeply uncomfortable.

C: My belief is true.

P: This scientific study agrees with my belief.

C: This scientific study is true.

This movie has been absolutely panned by the scientific community.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/andrew-wakefields-vaxxed-an...

Though I appreciate your optimism, there's no amount of evidence that could convince anti-vaxxers at this point.

Maybe not existing anti-vaxxers, but we might stop making as many new ones if we are able to tell people their child is autistic before it has been administered the any of the vaccines they are skeptical of.

Autism starts showing at about the same age that kids get vaccinated.

For me this research actually validates the link. Because MMR vaccination is given at 15 months. Parents strongly suspect link between MMR and Autism, not all vaccinations as popularly believed.

Following is vaccination schedule.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...

Someone explained to you already, in a different thread - this is just accidental correlation.

We know it because children who didn't get the vaccine show Autism symptoms around the same time.

   > We know it because children who didn't get the vaccine     
   > show Autism symptoms around the same time.

That, my friend, is you making shit up. I know that you made it up, because such a study, comparing autism rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated children has never been done, despite a huge number of people asking for it.

You mean like this one? https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2275444

Finding that took 15 seconds on Google.

http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2275444

Does a study with an N of > 95k, including vaccinated and unvaccinated children with autistic siblings, count?

As others have also expressed, foremost I'm also sorry about your son's diagnosis. As a parent of very young children, I live in fear of getting the news you received, as does my wife whom I might describe as a "Vaccine Skeptic".

Everyone says that so-called "anti-vaxxers" can't be pursuaded by reason. You're on HN so you must have some attraction to reason, and here two people responded with exactly the study you asked for.

I'm curious whether "everyone" is correct that you are not at all pursuaded by this evidence, as well as the evidence presented elsewhere against Wakefield?

My wife had a doctor once assure her when my eldest was getting her MMR something to the effect of "our shots are safe because we don't use the preservative that can cause autism," and now she's scared stiff of vaccines and requires my assurances that all data points to that doctor saying a lot of nonsense, probably with good intentions. My wife doesn't know how to read scientific studies or to distinguish between a sample size of 12 or 90,000, so it falls on me to provide the not-so-reassuring fact that our children will or will not be diagnosed with autism based on factors that are, at this point, not within our control, and that avoiding vaccines is only comtributing a net-negative to our children's health (and the health of our community). But again, my wife also doesn't frequent sites like HN as you do.

I like to think that we shouldn't give up on the idea of trying to find the proven truth about worries like vaccine-autism links, and spread that beyond our usual insular sphere of people who already agree with us. I appreciate that you're willing to share your (obviously unpopular-here, given the downblvoted) beliefs on HN. But I also hope that everyone's efforts to provide factual, scientifically valid data points about the very real lack of any vaccine-autism connection is not for naught. Is my hope at all justified, or is "everyone" else right?

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