CDC to study vaccines and autism despite research showing no connection
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The US is setting their entire science infrastructure on fire, leaving a massive opening for Europe, the UK, and especially China to take over. And the US does not consider any of those countries allies.
It's baffling to imagine why this is happening unless those in control are actually actively working on foreign orders to weaken the US and its future.
This is exactly what is happening. I feel like people have to be deliberating ignoring all the evidence that Elon and Trump are foreign assets at this point. It has been obvious for years and only more obvious with time.
Certainly the Russians have been doing their best to dis-inform the voters, but that doesn't need to come from the top. And they are largely doing it by parroting the standard Republican talking points for the last four decades. The Russians are, at most, exacerbating what they already wanted to believe.
If anything, that's worse. They're not assets. They're doing this because they're genuine believers.
This might in fact be the only innovation that Russia can claim since the fall of the USSR: complete mastery of the technology of propaganda for controlling populations.
Conservatives have been threatening to drown the federal government in the bathtub since the 1980s. There’s no new beliefs. It’s just a reshuffling between the parties of the same folks that existed in 1990: paleocons and social conservatives, capitalists, neocons, nationalists, economic populists, etc. The anti-vaxxers were there, they were just democrats because that was the low-institutional-trust party back then.
The people you’re calling “Russian agents” were also there in the 1990s, as were the neocons calling them that. They just took over the GOP because it turned out that the Democrats (back then) were correct and american military intervention in places Iowans can’t find in a map is actually bad for the GOP base.
I’m old enough to remember conservative republicans from 2008 ish era and while there was some dumb stuff, anything 2016 and beyond is unparalleled and its revisionist to say otherwise.
The American public got slowly acclimated to turning into a ridiculous version of idiocracy. A mix of corrupt / easily bought politicians, a voter base addicted to consumerism and social media, and a country with a problematic voting system, all contributed to todays situation.
I used to wonder, like many kids, “why didn’t anyone stop hitler, he was so obviously bad”. It was never that obvious to me that so many other indoctrinated people could have been just as awful and far gone.
I pray those smart enough to see where all of this is inevitably leading to, leave the US before it’s too late for them to. Do not become an unwilling contributor to what the US does next.
"Idiocracy" came out in 2006, and Carl Sagan was writing about American anti-intellectualism long before that. I'd also note that 2008 brought us Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket. I agree things were better, but the rot was clear to some already.
Trump was elected to raise inflation, make markets unstable, waste money on conspiracy theory research?
How does money influence votes? Money pays for private intelligence companies, PR firms, think tanks, and social media influence.
What does this mean? It means that politicians are influencing the voter base, rather than the voter base influence politicians.
What is the corollary of all this? A foreign government can influence American voters either via more direct means (such as running a private intelligence company) or indirect means (offering resources in exchange for favors).
Is there precedent? Yes. America institutes regime change in other countries in many ways. France funded and offered aid to the pre-american rebellion against British rule resulting in the formation of a new state.
At some point people stop being individual actors and become statistics. It might be even more correct to say people are in A/B testing groups and there are engineers literally experimenting on these groups to achieve an outcome for the purposes of whoever paid them.
I don't recall most of the things going on now coming up during the campaign, so I don't see how you can conclude he was elected to do them. He was elected to do the things that he spent 95% of his campaign time on.
“If they were working with foreign powers to weaken the US, what would they be doing differently”
It should raise even more alarms how thus far every single critic of them even inside their own party was silenced or actually joined them!
I don't believe in threats as explanation on that scale. Many of those people are themselves well connected and influential.
I fear there is something deeper going on, and we will only find out by watching.
I hate this narrative that concentrates on Trump, or even Musk. Neither would be where they are now with a huge amount of active support. Whatever is happening is coming from inside the US. They may also be working together with foreign actors, but they act according to their own interests.
Dubious journals created to serve political narratives are common in every country ( https://beallslist.net/ .)
Throw enough money at any issue, and one may engineer influence in public media outlets just like any regular Ad/Review spot.
It is not a new phenomena, have a wonderful day =3
However, one brand of idealism is still functionally equivalent to another. =3
[1] I would say the same thing about evangelicals on the other side of the aisle. You cannot be in Bangladesh working in public health while being an evangelical Christian. You will never gain people's trust, and without that you cannot do the job.
The norm against that must be reestablished. So the people who did things like apply different hiring standards to medical students based on race, or proposed triaging care based on race, must go. Not because of their ideology—you can be a communist in public health as long as you compartmentalize—but because they hurt their institutions’ ability to do the job. And the people who sat by while that happened—who didn’t speak up to defend institutional values over progressive ones—need to learn some harsh lessons so that doesn’t happen again. I like you personally and hope your kid is part of rebuilding our public health institutions into what they once were.
I hope the ones I know personally escape those consequences. Just as I assume they weren't intending for anyone they know personally to e.g. have their small towns flooded with illegal immigrants.
Seemingly this is something you don't actually agree with, considering as I've mentioned to you multiple times now of the Trump admin kicking out and discriminating against transgender individuals in the military despite having nothing to do with anything else.
Other than that you've been just continually justifying petty revenge for increasingly insane reasons.
Could you point to an institution or even individual you feel is an exemplar of ideological neutrality? I don't believe this exists but I'm very curious how you perceive it.
Further, that you want all current scientists and health administrators "wiped out" because you disagree with a tiny number of statements or situations pins you as an extreme anti-vaxxer, just one that isn't very honest about it. As an ideological extremist.
It's the classic "I'm super for vaccines, just not any of the existing ones..." bit that antivaxxers often use to try to launder their nonsense.
Ala Jack Posobiec's "What if instead of a vaccine we just were able to get exposed to a weak version of the virus that enabled us to build the antibodies we need to fight the real thing" bit (which is hilariously real, btw).
"Wipe out"? Absolutely abhorrent and authoritarian take. I'll note the common thread of brutal authoritarian regimes who executed purges of scientists and professionals convicted of wrongthink.
You want to destroy the future of science in this country because of some manufactured culture war. So much for free speech.
Not at all. My dad worked in public health, and I grew up around extremely liberal northeastern white people who worked in Africa and Asia while adapting themselves to the moral environment of wherever they happened to be working. You'd never know from their work they had any beliefs other than "vaccines are good" and "pregnant women should get sufficient folate."
> Who would be the arbiter of neutrality?
The public as a whole. Either they perceive you as neutral or they don't.
> "Wipe out"? Absolutely abhorrent and authoritarian take.
Public health as a field needs people who prioritize institutional values to the exclusion of everything else, because that's the only way you can build trust across the whole population. People who "bring their whole selves to work" endanger lives by destroying confidence in the public health system. If they can't do what the job requires they must leave.
The second was because if they didn't the ACLU was going to sue them into the ground on a 1A violation because protesting is the most bright line clear cut political speech. This wasn't a Black Lives Matter thing only either, the protests against the (in practice) vaccine mandate and social distancing itself were protected by this. How else could you protest them?
Replace it by necessity with a CEO-dictator. Isn't that the Yarvin, Thiel, Musk playbook?
"Americans ... have to get over their dictatorphobia"
The way to do this while retaining trust is to gather data, release the methodology and data transparently, then have other labs reproduce the studies and see if they get the same results.
RFK and others have touted they will be aggressively transparent. In my opinion, lets let them do it and see if their words match their actions.
If it ends up being a connection, we should be able to reproduce with independent labs. If not, then proceed as normal.
Given the historical mistrust with pharmaceutical industries, investing resources in a study such as this is low on the “wasteful spending” list.
Worst case, its a scandal and we need to reevaluate how we handle vaccine testing. Best case it builds trust back in institutions.
Classic scientific method has been tainted by corporate interest.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w
[1] https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/bioethics/ar...
This isn't a 'big pharma doesn't want YOU to know the truth' problem. There have been multiple and independent studies done into this topic across the globe. The people perpetuating the line of vaccines causing autism are the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet with zero credentials and zero actual evidence backing it up.
The real fight will be the communications about the results. Bend over backwards to explain everything extremely clearly. If RFK Jr oversees a milestone study that dramatically shows there is no vaccine/austism connection then maybe, just maybe, we can stop talking about it.
Then again, flat earthers seem to lose faith in their experiments as soon as the results disagree with their preferred outcome…
We know vaccines can have negative side effects, but a reasonable person weighs those against the (larger) benefits. I don't think the current regime is very reasonable though.
They gave literal orders to stop reporting for CDC, so no, their actions do not match those words.
Anyway, if you want a sacred cow to kill, a good one would be "we don't have enough evidence to draw conclusions about the risks and benefits of vaccines".
Uh-huh.
How would this work? If they're going to do a literature review or meta-study, the conclusions are foregone. If they're going to do new studies, it will take years to get anything conclusive. Longer than the current political administration.
... so far. What's the harm in pivoting research goals? A curious mind (like many have here on HN) will pursue all avenues, even those some may consider controversial and contradictory to our current beliefs. I, for one, am supportive of being curious like this, and I can only hope that it spurs curious discussion among the world, as per the HackerNews guidelines.
We have limited time and funding, so we maintain a portfolio of research investments that are based on what we currently see as reasonable.
"Curious" is not what the folks who want to research the link between vaccines and autism are. Weaponized is a better term.
Did the Guardian present any research showing there is no evidence showing a connection between vaccines and autism, or are they insisting that it is so because they say so?
Let's ignore any single article from the Guardian and instead talk about the larger public health question: "Do vaccines have side effects that are great enough to prevent their use"? It's a classic risk benefit problem with additional societal complexity (most vaccines work much better at high rates of vaccination) and a fair amount of subtlety to the outcomes (people who are vaccinated can still get sick, the vaccine itself can have short-term side-effects).
Of course, there are many different vaccines and each needs to be treated more or less independently of any other in terms of risks. The technology used to create, store, and deliver the vaccine matters tremendously. We have had terrible outcomes with vaccines before, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#Cutter_inc... was an example where an error cause a bunch of people to die after they were vaccinated for polio.
But throughout my whole life, people, regardless of their political orientation, always thought the polio vaccine was a great thing. One exception: I worked with a guy whose parents didn't get him vaccinated for polio, and he was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Anyway, back to the scientific story. As we know, you can't "prove a negative" (can't prove there is no vaccine/autism causative relationship), but scientifically speaking, nobody has been able to come up with a reliable experiment demonstrating that it does ("proving a positive"). This is not for lack of trying; the problem is inherently challenging, because running trials like this skirts ethical issues.
What we do know is the original paper by Wakefield that purported the vaccine/autism relationship was fraudulent- contained false information - and more importantly, similar studies that were not fraudulent (to the best of our knowledge) did not replicate the results. And all of that led to a number of trials where a great deal of evidence of Wakefield's actions (which include close to half a million pounds in payments from a vaccine manufacturer) was presented and Wakefield was found guilty.
Not sure where you're really going with your question other than to muddy some fairly clear waters. Nobody has shown replicable evidence that there is a causative relationship between vaccines and autism.
The Wakefield red herring as usual.
Did anyone mention that the MMR was derived from a vaccine that was banned by the Japanese Govt, and that it was one of the reasons that prompted Wakefield to research it?
There are more than enough papers showing a correlation between vaccines and autism, even a case where the CDC prompted its researchers to distort and remove evidence which indicated a correlation between a vaccine and autism in black boys.
The Wakefield paper was written with with 12 other co-authors. 3 of the authors Wakefield included were struck off by Britain's GMC. They all fought their case in court and 2 of them were reinstated except Wakefield which is why it is called the Wakefield case.
The primary case of the GMC concerned the ethics of the research not its findings but the papers don't focus on that. The authors of the paper still stand by the clinical conclusions no matter what. The Lancet withdrew the paper not because of its clinical conclusions but because of the ethics. Go figure.
I feel like of all the issues and problems in medical research, chasing after vaccine/autism association is one of the less likely to bear any useful fruit.