Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions | Hacker News Reader

Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or other health conditions

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164 pointshealsdata130 comments

I am an autism researcher. While we cannot say 'vaccines never cause autism' we can say with confidence 'Other potential causes of autism have much better theoretical foundations, empirical evidence, prevalence, and effect sizes. With limited research budgets, we have better research targets to pursue first before further investigating vaccines."

would you mind answering a couple questions? I'm very curiuous:

Have autism rates increased recently (last few decades)?

If so, what are the best theories for why?

One of the largest reasons is probably we're just looking more. It's a relatively new diagnosis, just 50 years ago it'd just be "oh yeah Uncle Joe is a little weird he only eats hotdogs and knows everything ever about trains".

There are severe cases of non verbal children etc

Yes, and 50 years ago, those high-support-needs children would be the only people diagnosed as autistic, unlike today.

I'm not 100% sure what you're saying. Yes there are obvious cases like but those instances also used to just get called other things before we figured out autism as a distinct disease and it became widespread knowledge. There's no field in the data that gives us (for lack of a better term) the level of autism for people getting that diagnosis over time and we're recognizing more and more things as being on the spectrum of autism as time goes on which really just feeds back into the "there's more because we're finding/labelling more people as autistic" hypothesis.

The book “Neurotribes” goes into this in great detail. The number of diagnoses have increased, primarily due to a widening of the criteria used to diagnose autism as the DSM [1] has gone from version 3 to 5. In the early days of autism research, it used to be necessary to meet multiple criteria (i.e. profound social withdrawal, language peculiarities such as echolalia, resistance to change, repetitive behaviors, etc., all occurring in very early childhood). Today, it’s possible to receive a diagnosis in adulthood, and to do so while meeting criteria across fewer of the above domains.

This widening has multiple causes, not the least of which was an attempt to help parents of autistic children access parenting resources they otherwise couldn’t without a diagnosis in-hand.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_M...

> widening of the criteria used to diagnose

Seeing some autism influencers on social media, I'm reminded that every childhood friend I ever had was autistic.

The most recent episode of the podcast Science Vs explored this in detail: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autism-the-real-reason...

The rise in autism rates (5x over the last 25 years) is almost entirely explained by changes in how autism is defined, diagnosed, and detected. Not by an actual surge in underlying cases or any specific environmental trigger like vaccines, air pollution, heavy metals, plastics, or screen time.

I just don't believe that based purely on my personal experience. I've been around many many people and in the last 15-20 years the amount of people with autism has exploded. It was very rare 30 years ago in my area, the occasional led exposure here, farm chemicals there... But now it's seemingly every 10th house that has someone that is nonverbal.

I'm all for papers and science but only if it matches the real world.

Ah.. like Joe Rogan, you're "just asking questions".

That’s not a helpful way to communicate with the public.

Instead you should follow the standards we hold for everyday occurrences, which is if there’s no compelling evidence, it’s safe to say it doesn’t happen.

"which is if there’s no compelling evidence, it’s safe to say it doesn’t happen."

I call BS.

Until there was compelling evidence that antidepressants cause suicidal ideation it's safe to say it doesn't

Until there was compelling evidence that contaminated water causes cholera it's safe to say it doesn't

Until there was compelling evidence that dirty hands cause maternal death it's safe to say it doesn't

Until there was compelling evidence that lack of sunlight causes neo-natal jaundice it's safe to say it doesn't

These examples span centuries, including the 21st, that were vigorously rejected by experts

Also, the internet makes this sort of well-intentioned deception both impossible and counter-productive.

What is your point? You can't suspect things without evidence or you'd never be able to leave your house afraid of everything.

Yeah man, if you went around telling people not to take their meds because someone suspected jt might cause suicidal ideation, you’d end up causing far more harm to all the unmedicated people.

This is exactly why the whole "vaccine causes autism" got started. We need to improve science literacy before we could say things like that to the general public.

When a layperson hears this, they'll think that there's a small but possible chance that vaccines do cause autism; when what the scientist means to say is that "it's highly unlikely that vaccines cause autism."

I think it’s okay to mean what you say. Part of improving literacy is also respecting the intelligence of your audience and not talking down to them. Treating everyone like buffoons makes people act like them - treating them as beings capable of thought and reason tends to show the better side.

I find this argument hard to agree with. We are seeing unprecedented levels of buffoonery in many governments of the world and people enthusiastically agreeing with (objectively) idiots. Before anyone that does not know how to understand a statement as we are talking about, they will understand it the wrong way, tell everyone they know, create social media content and form organizations that oppose vaccines. I would say that this is more likely to happen many times over than them actually learning how to understand a statement like OPs properly. So as sad as it is, I think you are wrong.

I can understand that this approach seems like the easy quick solution, but the problem is much deeper than that. It's more about a weaponization of language by those who know what they're doing. Getting into a language fight isn't worthless, but doesn't actually resolve the issue, just escalates it.

What's more important IMHO, is raising the general understanding of how this science works and not falling into the trap of feeling like we have to debate this buffoonery on the same level. We're so worried about being called "elites" or whatever that we fight on their terms instead of just straight up calling it out as stupid and manipulative and giving it no more time than that.

So what you're saying is vaccines might cause autism?

;-)

I'd say being realistic about the intelligence of your audience. "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people".

I got sent some looping tik tok anti vax thing with a pretty woman saying sincerely vax bad, with no sources and links. The people influenced by that are not going to look up the papers in Nature.

It's not the reason why this conspiracy got started. It got started by a fraudulent pseudoscientific paper with financial ties to it. We shouldn't be reducing human intelligence and ability to process information to the "wet streets cause rain" level. I know it's easier said than done though. When a scientist claims that "highly unlikely that vaccines cause autism", it still leaves the same room for doubt as when they say "it is very likely that vaccines do not cause autism".

The real issue isn't scientific caution. It's that the misinformation campaigns exploit any uncertainty, no matter how small. The solution isn't dumbing down science communication, but being clear about what the evidence actually shows.

The people who dont believe in vaccines or that they cause autism dont really get science. Wasting hard work trying to convince them is useless. These people truly are idiots, at best a burden on society and at worse a threat to public health. Its one thing to have a skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry, its not ill founded but if their entire personality is based on denying science I dont think we should waste time or resources in convincing these idiots.

There seems to be something special about vaccines that really sets these people off, and it goes way way back. Vaccine paranoia is as old as vaccines and they’ve always drawn a special ire from believers in naturopathy, natural medicine, faith healing, new thought, and similar strands of thinking.

I don’t quite get it.

Fear of the unknown pairs with magical thinking, like a norm-and-culture destroying iconoclastic cheese and wine.

Honestly, I think a big part of it is fear of needles. Sticking a sharp thing into your body hurts, leaves a bruise, and sometimes makes you feel sick. Those immediate negatives can be hard to weigh against the nebulous benefits of possibly not getting sick months or years from now.

Fear of needles

There are other mechanisms of delivery such as oral vaccines. This is a valid reason, phobias need addressing. But plenty of vaccines are available via oral delivery.

Ive had a bone marrow biopsy done. Those are done fully awake with no anesthetic except for the skin incision.

You literally feel the push of the sharp needle cutting through your bone. Slowly. methodically. Half a millimeter by half millimeter every time the practitioner puts her weight on the needle.

Then, as they aspirate the marrow, you feel as if your balls are being sucked into your hips.

Then, despite the pain, I volunteered to sign up as a bone marrow donor.

Please, call me an idiot if you must, but don't explain away my distrust of vaccines with cowardice.

It’s the whole “forced to take them by the government” that scares them. Ridiculous, since governments have always been trustworthy.

Governments have always been trustworthy?

That was sarcasm

Neither the government nor the pharma industry has done much to maintain their credibility with the people. Drugs have side effects, literally every ad on any news channel will tell you so. Studies are fuzzed. Which is why its important to talk to multiple experts, and look at multiple studies. But for vaccines there have been plenty debunking the link between vaccines and autism.

Forced by the government should be pushed back but not by denying evidence.

Whereas snake oil salesman have traditionally been a beacon of credibility?

That's the biggest thing that gets me.

"I don't trust the authorities, so I'm going to base all my health choices on this random hustler from YouTube and eat horse dewormer."

It's kind of the essence of populism. "I'm too smart to fall for the lies of the authorities, so ... here let me throw my brain totally out the window and follow pure charisma instead."

Some skepticism of the authorities is rational because of course governments are sometimes corrupt and more often incompetent. (Never attribute to malice what can be explained by laziness or stupidity.) Doing some of your own research is good. But why does critical thinking go totally out the window for so many people at that point? And why do people assume that just because someone is "alternative" rather than "mainstream" they have no profit motive? Do people not realize that alt-med and self-help and certain kinds of religious zealotry are all massive industries with their own profit motives just like "big pharma"?

There is no need to treat vaccine scepticism as something special.

Most of the denialism is rooted in the logic of "truth of the world is what you can see and observe". This worked fine for centuries but once there was rapid progress lot of things could no longer be explained through "see and observe". This mostly happened in late 1800s and early 1900s when there was a huge leap in scientific understanding. Lot of scepticism comes from this era. In the conspiracy theory lore - Before 5G was causing COVID, electricity was causing influenza outbreak in late 1800s.

"Natural" or faith healing are thought to be observable facts. You can see a plant growing but not the vaccine produced in a lab.

Couple this with general distrust of governments - monarchy or democracy you have people doubting vaccines.

> In the conspiracy theory lore - Before 5G was causing COVID, electricity was causing influenza outbreak in late 1800s.

Wow. Any book/paper recommendations ? Fascinating stuff.

Or maybe science is a red herring and they're just susceptible to demagoguery and whoever shouts the loudest and simplest.

I'd advocate for skepticism. Sure check every claim, verify what you must. But when theres a mountain of evidence the whole "vaccines bad" thing doesnt hold up. At which point society has to ask - if there's nothing more we can do, why even bother ? the ideology is kinda parasitic too as it actively hurts people who believe in it. Why do this to yourself and others ? Its just inexplicable.

Anyways enough number of people believe in vaccines to have cured a pandemic. I dont think we need bother with a handful whose whole schtick rebelling against useful stuff.

> I dont think we need bother with a handful

I wish I could agree, I'd like nothing more than to let nature take its course with anti-vax people. But the concept of herd immunity [1] tells us that, if enough people refuse to get vaccinated, even if the relative percentage is small, it affects the rest of us as well.

1. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22599-herd-im...

Most people don’t “get science.” Their trust or not is social.

I don't like vaccines and its hard to say why. I was vaccinated as a child and I am fine. My wife and I fully vaccinate our kids per doctor's recommendation. I guess you could say I trust the doctors advice more than my silly gut feeling.

However I can articulate that:

I don't like that vaccine makers get special immunity from lawsuits.

I don't like that pediatricians get payouts from big pharma based in what percentage of their practice received their vaccine products.

I don't like that the definition of a vaccine was changed to accommodate the mRNA COVID shots while other valid treatments that already existed were pushed aside to enable the emergency use authorization.

It's just enough to give me the ick, but their benefit is generally obvious so I hold my nose.

I mean the pandemic was not too long ago, a lot of us actually remember the accessible treatments back then.

First they discovered steroids like prednisolone which were useful only for heavily sick patients, then they started to distribute antibody plasma from other patients, then monoclonal antibodies and some cytokine inhibitors and when everybody who wanted already got vaccinated, we got antivirals such as Paxlovid, and it was scarce.

There were a lot of misunderstanding around hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, similarly how we have a lot of misunderstanding around vaccines and autism. And they were tested and tested and tested, similarly how we still check if vaccines cause autism. And all the proper research showed that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were absolutely ineffective, times and times again, but people just couldn't let them go, similarly to how people can't let go the fake autism-vaccine connection.

In the first part of the pandemic, vaccines were the best we had.

I'm curious: did it ever become typical for these studies to publish the data and code? I haven't kept current, but I remember having read studies in times past and they definitely didn't. Not necessarily referring to this or vaccines, just like "hey we did this analysis" but they don't publish the code and data, when we have an ongoing replication crisis in science.

On page 8 of the supplemental material, they pasted some R code, at least. Hopefully that code runs once you load the packages they reference. I wish they made it easier to download and start working with the data, though. It’s from a national registry, so I suppose it’s available to those who look/make a request, but I’d like a 100 MB CSV.

But to really answer your question - not really. In fields where Jupyter Notebooks are common, those are generally available via a Github link, but in medical fields code and data are still relatively difficult to find.

(Disclaimer: I’m not trying to make an argument that there is a link between vaccines and autism, I’m trying to understand a research paper and its methodology and conclusions)

I just glanced through the study itself and not the article https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997 and have questions for anyone that is familiar with this sort of thing:

They did not do a non-vaccinated vs vaccinated people comparison. They looked at how many vaccinations each subject had and tabulated the total amount of aluminum they received (they have good records) in their vaccinations prior to age 2, and then looked for a correlation between higher amounts of aluminum adjutants and higher instances of all the conditions they reported on (the study does not focus on autism but many things, see figure 3 of the study)

There wasn’t a sizable aluminum free cohort because most children in Denmark got vaccinated for the data set they have to work with (figure 2). Wouldn’t you need a sizable cohort of non vaccinated children? (I don’t know where in the world you would find that cohort except in countries that don’t have good healthcare systems which implies they don’t have solid tracking of health outcomes in general, or maybe the USA in the last 5-10 years.)

The researchers discarded from their cohort 34,547 children for receiving too many vaccinations/too much aluminum (figure 1, right column) before age 2. Wouldn’t that data be relevant to look at?

So to my laymen’s mind it doesn’t seem like they in any way ruled out a link between vaccines and autism. At the very best, they saw no relationship with the amount of aluminum a child received before 2 and the rate of chronic disease (figure 1). The numbers correspond to “adjusted hazard ratio (95% CI) per 1mg increase in aluminum received……” and in the chart Asperger’s is listed at 1.13 (.89 - 1.44) so they do potentially see an increase for Asperger’s, but with the data they have the confidence interval is not small enough to be sure one way or the other.

But it does not seem to me that they proved what the article and submission title states. I would appreciate someone that is familiar with biomedical research that can elaborate on whether my conclusion is sound or faulty.

Also, as I understand it aluminum is one of about 5 or so adjuvants used in vaccines at the present time, so what about the other adjuvants?

I'm not familiar with the medical side of this study, but I am very familiar with the statistics.

### They did not do a non-vaccinated vs vaccinated people comparison

These studies are observational, and in that sense no manipulation (such as random treatment assignment) was made. So they need to rely on observational studies techniques.

From what I could gather, one of this observational techniques in inverse treatment probability weighting when they say

> "we adjusted for all baseline covariates using stabilized inverse probability of treatment weights"

The IPW technique basically tries to solve the problem that some groups of children might have a higher prevalence of the treatment by weighting them in a manner as to mimic random assignment. This is as close as we can get to comparing treated and untreated in observational settings.

Also, the division of the doses of vaccine is also a better characterization of "was vaccinated". If you think getting vaccinated causes something, then getting more vaccinated should increase the incidence of that something.

### Wouldn’t you need a sizable cohort of non vaccinated children?

Yes, but as you pointed out, that might not exist. So by creating comparable groups (via IPW) + treatment intensity/dose we can still arrive at some conclusions.

### The researchers discarded from their cohort 34,547 children for receiving too many vaccinations/too much aluminum (...) Wouldn’t that data be relevant to look at?

They probably did. A few things are important here. The data comes from administrative data sources, so mistakes can happen. While you need to trust the sources, there could be imputation typos, or just weird cases. So the researchers probably went after a notion of "clinically relevant vaccine dosage for this study" to know up to which point to consider data points, because from that point onward, it either is not interesting because its a rare treatment incidence, or just seems like a mistake.

### “adjusted hazard ratio (95% CI) per 1mg increase in aluminum received……” and in the chart Asperger’s is listed at 1.13 (.89 - 1.44) so they do potentially see an increase for Asperger’s

Important to say that with hazard ratios, a HR of 1 means that there is no change because we are in the multiplicative scale (as opposed to 0 meaning "treatment does nothing" in the additive scale).

So in this setting, after adjusting for the treatment probabilities, a HR CI of (.89 - 1.44) just translates to 'no effect'. Nothing out of the ordinary in terms of the interpretation.

Ok, hold up. This study came up on Reddit a few weeks ago and my wife linked it to me. A lot of the comments were similar about how vaccine skeptics will never be convinced by it. So, being a vaccine skeptic, I went and read it.

>In this primary analysis, except for Asperger syndrome (hazard ratio, 1.13 [CI, 0.89 to 1.44]) and atypical autism (hazard ratio, 0.94 [CI, 0.79 to 1.12]), estimates for the individual outcomes were incompatible with any increased risk, with the upper bounds of the 95% CIs below 1.00. [1]

My understanding of this, and I am a software engineer so take it with a grain of salt, is that this study failed to disprove a link between aluminum in vaccines and aspergers! There is another section where it appears they played with the hyperparameters of their study and ended up with a lower hazard ratio for aspergers (I believe by extending the analysis window to 8 years of age, but it wasn't clear to me).

>Except for Asperger syndrome (hazard ratio, 1.02 [CI, 0.93 to 1.12]) and atypical autism (hazard ratio, 0.95 [CI, 0.88 to 1.03]), estimates for the individual neurodevelopmental outcomes assessed were incompatible with any increases in risk, with the upper bounds of the 95% CIs equal to or below 1.00.

That is to say, after reading the study, I am not convinced at all. I would like to see a longer analysis period (e.g. to 50 years of age) as many things go undiagnosed until later in life. From my reading though, this study failed to disprove a link despite what all the popsci headlines are saying.

1. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997

Edit: I know I am going to catch downvotes for this, but please go read the study and let me know where I am incorrect!

This is more of an issue with there being a low number of cases (both < 300) for of those two Neurodevelopmental Outcomes categories than anything else.

read up on what confidence intervals are.

It's called uncertainty. Do you see the confidence intervals on the log hazard ratios? They did not significantly differ from 1. In part this is because Asbergers and atypical autism were underpowered compared to the main autism group. Also note many were below 1, meaning LESS chance of getting that diagnosis.

What exactly is a vaccine skeptic - in your opinion? What are you skeptical of?

- Adjuvants. As a materials researcher I think it's nuts we inject nanoscale alumina in our blood.

- Regulatory structure. Why can't I sue a vaccine manufacturer? Limit awards, if you necessary, but if I cant sue I cant get discovery.

- Effectiveness. The flu vaccine's effectiveness is statistical artifact. See healthy vaccine bias

- Historical effectiveness. I had a civil engineer smugly point out that his profession had ended more diseases than biology. So I looked it up. Civil engineering did more to end communicable diseases than vaccines.

- General dishonesty of the medical profession. I don't expect my Advil to be 100% safe; I don't expect my vaccine to be either. I dont expect my medical health officers to lie about it though (see mRNA and the long dismissed myocarditis risk)

>Civil engineering did more to end communicable diseases than vaccines.

This is a cute statement but really shouldn't be part of the basis for vaccine skepticism.

Hand washing is also one of the most significant medical practice advancements... That doesn't mean we stop there.

Sure, civil engineering did a lot for water borne illness and the like. And I'll even grant that building design and HVAC systems can reduce respiratory virus transmission. But it's not doing anything for measles, smallpox, polio, ebola, hepatitis, HIV, Yellow fever, etc etc. I mean come on.

And if I do have to go to a place with worse infrastructure, I'll take that typhoid vaccine please...

> Civil engineering did more to end communicable diseases than vaccines.

You need to show some work on that.

The other comment articulates the points much better than I would have, but I have a large number of (tested) food and environmental allergies. It is a very logical explanation that the adjuvants in vaccines would cause the body to also train an immune response to other things.

There is also a massive profit motive for pharma companies and many hospitals, when you couple that with the revolving door between industry and government, it seems like a situation ripe for corruption.

I don't see the harm in removing aluminum adjuvants from vaccines (we all buy aluminum free deodorant!). I don't see the harm in not vaccinating children for things they are unlikely to come into contact with (i.e. hepatitis B). In fact, I think it would be good to make the change and see what the health outcomes are over the next 30 years. That is how we will learn.

I would guess people that don't know how stuff works or what they're talking about, but still feel entitled to disregard medical science progress because they don't see the effects directly.

Seeing my father in law daily is a very good reminder to me as to why we thought eradicating polio (and creating vaccines) was a good idea: his left leg is 30% the size of his right leg, and he's had trouble walking since he was 7yo (he's now 65), with no way of fixing it.

People don't understand what life used to be like before 60y ago because they didn't live through it, and even then they're tempted to dismiss the death or permanent complication rates because "nobody died"... that they knew/recall of.

It's true that in general better sanitation, clean water, better food availability have helped in reducing the death rates in general and also complications (because better prepared immune system, better symptoms management, ...), but vaccines allowed to eradicate stuff that killed or altered lives permanently on a regular basis.

I wouldn't call myself a vaccine skeptic, and I don't have a problem with anything else you said, but "feel entitled to disregard medical science progress" puts my back up. We are in fact all entitled to that.

I think a not insignificant part of the skepticism problem stems from well meaning authoritarians who believe they have the right to shoot everything that has a pop sci press release behind it into everyone else's bodies.

It's like the opposite of the naturalist fallacy: if it's man made and has a sciency name, let's assume it has no glaring flaws until we get the class action lawsuit recruitment commercials a decade later telling us we might be entitled to 5 dollars compensation if we're on our deathbeds because of some horrible complication.

Even better if your political tribe has tied its identity to the thing.

The fact that the confidence interval range includes 1 means that the finding was not statistically significant.

The population for those two specific diagnoses were low in the study. Diagnostic patterns change over time for these type of disorders. Considering neurodevelopmental outcomes as a group may add more color.

You are correct that the study failed to disprove a link between aluminum and aspergers. But the study did prove a that if there is a link it does not result in a moderate to large increase in aspergers risk.

I'm also not an expert here, but looking through the figures [1], that one HR result for Asperger's in a figure 4 is...surprising to see, given the headlines.

This is far from strong evidence of an effect, but you're absolutely right that this at least deserves discussion in the paper and coverage.

1. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/suppl/10.7326/ANNALS-25-0099...

I suffered from whooping cough/pertussis as a child because vaccines weren't available at that time. Not vaccinating against it nowadays borders on bodily harm in my opinion.

Shouldn't we actually study the link between not(!) being vaccinated and any bad health conditions in later life much more?

Sadly, this is a pointless study. 0% of people will have their minds changed by this since it is a political/propaganda issue that has nothing to do with science.

The truly sad part is that regardless of the validity of the study, its methodology, or the results, the impact it will have in the political sphere or with the public will be negligible. It's maddening.

Nah, the truly sad part is that the study had to be done AGAIN when the original paper suggesting a link was withdrawn decades ago and other studies have disproven any link over and over and over again.

That funding could have been used for something that actually advanced our knowledge. And instead it got sucked into the bottomless pit of trying to disprove something claimed by people who aren’t interested in proof.

While I sympathize with the sentiment, I disagree with the details. I don’t think it’s wasted effort to reproduce results. There was a possibility they found a different outcome than what we expect, and then we’d have something new and interesting to learn about. As a made up example, maybe they’d find that autism turns out to be higher among the population groups more likely to have their kids vaccinated or something unexpected like that, and then we could try to figure out what caused that new observation.

It’s shocking how often basic science turns up something wholly unexpected and new and weird and interesting.

Edit: To be super clear, I don’t buy the antivax line for a second. Nor did I remotely believe there was a link between vaccines and autism. We know there isn’t. But science means sometimes you investigate what you’re pretty sure you know just to be certain.

None of your imaginary hypothetical scenarios would remotely satisfy / be okay with the anti vaxx movement.

It’s okay to say “Anti Science”.

How many times do they have to be reproduced before we Say “oh maybe we’re done testing that one?”

A dozen? A thousand?

We'll be lucky if the impact is negligible. It will probably reinforce the idea that vaccines case autism with those who believe it already.

Most people lack the ability to understand inferences drawn from mathematical analysis. It’s not just vaccines, it’s numeric or logical reasoning of all kinds. If you can’t explain why something is true in non-abstract terms, you can just forget it. And it’s true even for somewhat smarter than average people: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/msnbc-bloo....

I’ve become persuaded that for democracy to work successfully, you need to socialize people from birth so their gut feelings are directionally correct. And you need to cultivate trust in certain institutions, in particular public health, by targeting every segment of society on their own terms and jealously guarding the institution’s credibility.

My dad worked on maternal health programs in Bangladesh. They’d build hospitals, but women in the villages wouldn’t use them. Turns out they didn’t trust the doctors, they trusted the village midwives and traditional healers. So my dad proposed to network with the midwives to establish reciprocal trust. This worked because it reflected how human trust networks operate. Public health in a developed country shouldn’t work any differently (and certainly shouldn’t work the way it does now in the U.S.).

The problem is that a massive orchestrated campaign to sow distrust of institutions can succeed well beyond what's needed to achieve their destruction.

The actual truth and institutional trust are both far harder to establish than they are to destroy. I'm not sure how institutions survive in the presence of this asymmetry, alt-media's conscious effort to exploit it, and freedom of speech.

>The problem is that a massive orchestrated campaign to sow distrust of institutions can succeed well beyond what's needed to achieve their destruction

don't think that is needed. The institutions did by themselves. Especially the large ones private and public.

No, they really didn't.

Institutions made mistakes, sure, as they always have. None of these mistakes, individually or in aggregate, justify anything close to the discredit they've received.

Had there been similarly ignorant, ideologically motivated, and orchestrated media to report on all these institutions' past failures, they would've "failed" long ago. But because there wasn't, the institutions carried on despite their "failures" and delivered huge amounts of value to society.

For every modern transgression I can point to analogous historical ones. You can say "see, they've always been rotten!" and my response is "yet despite that they've delivered value." Almost as if real life is full of tradeoffs, complexity, tensions, and imperfections everywhere.

Etsy or Pinterest didn’t create women who like to collect fabric samples, those satisfy an existing demand. Similarly, I don’t think alt-media created this anti-institution sentiment. It’s catering to a consumer base that already exists.

I think you need to go back further to the education system. I’m a 1990s kid, so I grew up having teachers tell us to “think for ourselves.” In high school, a bunch of our teachers joined the students in protesting the administration over a (completely innocuous) dress code. GenX and millennials were positively marinated in anti-establishment, anti-institution rhetoric growing up. The Joe Rogans of the world are a predictable result of that education.

Interesting theory but anecdotally doesn't fit with my experience.

The most compliant, least critical, and laziest thinkers in my acquaintance are all squarely "anti-institutional" now.

> Alt-media arose in maybe the last 10 years. Most of these anti-vaxxers were fully baked (intellectually) by then

This isn't true. There was definitely a crunchy left-wing anti-institutional anti-vax cohort that's very old, but the modern energy behind the movement is not from this group. And alt-media is much older than you give it credit for. Rush Limbaugh premiered in 1988. Alex Jones' InfoWars was founded in 1999.

The anti-institutional left educated what became the anti-institutional right. If you teach kids to “distrust authority” and “think for yourself,” you’ve taught a meta-principle. You can’t predict which direction they’re going to go with it.

But again: Alex Jones' and Limbaugh's hugely popular shows pre-date that. So does the libertarian strain on the right. Modern MAGA definitely spun out of the Tea Party which didn't originate at all in leftist education.

> GenX and millennials were marinated in anti-establishment, anti-institution rhetoric growing up.

Would that were true and they were fighting against the system right now...

They were marinated in "Both sides are bad(tm)! The System(tm) is bad. You can protest by dropping out of the system!"

Except that ... doesn't work. "Dropping out of the system" instead advantages both the status quo and those who do actually muster up the energy to fight.

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." -- John Philpot Curran, 1790

> Most people lack the ability to understand inferences drawn from mathematical analysis.

It was never about that. The modern anti-vax movement has been traced back to Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 Lancet paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud But it's not like the anti-vaxxers ever fully understood the original paper, much less the follow-up papers disputing it. And in fairness to the anti-vaxxers, the paper is an example of the failure of scientific peer review. What happened was that ordinary people heard about the paper and became frightened, which is natural, but then when Wakefield's fraud and conflicts of interest were revealed, and the paper was ultimately retracted, the people who bought into the scare never came back and revised their beliefs based on new evidence. What's missing is the capacity for self-correction. Mathematics was never involved.

I suspect that people are reluctant to admit that they were duped, so they'd rather continue to believe something that's been proven false. It's emotional, not rational. And it's also social: people tend to surround themselves with others who reinforce their beliefs. This prevents backtracking and self-correction, because you have to convince your entire social group that they were wrong, not just yourself.

> the people who bought into the scare never came back and revised their beliefs based on new evidence. What's missing is the capacity for self-correction. Mathematics was never involved.

I don’t think there’s much daylight between our positions. You’re correct that mathematics was never involved. Any trust most people had in vaccines was always social, not analytical. They never understood Wakefield’s original paper, except insofar as it was reported by trusted organizations as credible. That broke people’s trust in those organizations, who had previously told everyone that vaccines were very safe.

When the retractions and follow-ups came, people weren’t able to understand them, because they were never capable of understanding the analysis in the first place! And now, they didn’t trust the bottom-line conclusions being reported by the Lancet and the media.

It doesn’t help that there’s a bunch of other confounding factors: rising parental age and possibly assortive mating increasing actual autism rates, changing norms around diagnosing autism, and changing incentives for autism diagnoses. We took our four year old to be evaluated, and the folks at the county told us they didn't really think any diagnosis was justified, but would have given us one if he was going to public school (where it would lead to additional services) instead of private school. They told us that point blank.

> And now, they didn’t trust the bottom-line conclusions being reported by the Lancet and the media.

That's the funny thing, though. Logically, distrusting The Lancet means distrusting Wakefield's paper too. It makes no sense to claim that The Lancet is untrustworthy while you still base your beliefs on a paper because it was published in The Lancet. If the journal goes down, the journal articles have to go down with it.

The difference is that these people had spent years building a personal identity around vaccine skepticism, as embattled fighters for the safety of children. Retraction of their beliefs would have been very painful, a blow to their self-image. Thus, it was easier to invent conspiracy theories about how their beliefs are still true, and now there's a cover-up.

Why do you think it would work symmetrically like that? Say you trust your spouse. Then they admit they cheated on you. Years later they say, actually, that earlier statement was a lie. What do you believe now?

> What do you believe now?

Obviously you should be skeptical of anything they said. There was indisputably one big lie, whether then or now. If you really want to know which is the lie, you'd need to get independent confirmation.

The explanation of the lie matters. If it's, "I lied about cheating on you, and now I want you back", then lolno. If it was more like, "I was just sick of you, but you wouldn't have left me unless I drove you away", that's more plausible.

I’m not asking what someone should do, but what your average person would do. They would believe the spouse had cheated, and was lying when the spouse retracted the statement. Even though that requires believing the first statement by the spouse and not the second.

To circle back to the point, people aren’t capable of understanding any independent confirmation, nor are the capable of understanding the explanation for the change in position. The operation of science is incomprehensible to most people.

> I’m not asking what someone should do, but what your average person would do.

I guess I misunderstood your question then. I thought you were responding to, "Logically, distrusting The Lancet means distrusting Wakefield's paper too."

I think we've already established what an average person would do: not revise their beliefs in light of new evidence.

> To circle back to the point, people aren’t capable of understanding any independent confirmation, nor are the capable of understanding the explanation for the change in position. The operation of science is incomprehensible to most people.

I think this overcomplicates the situation, which is just about beliefs, evidence, and changing your mind. And people do change their minds in light of new evidence... about topics to which they're not emotionally attached. It's the emotional attachment to beliefs that causes people to perform mental cartwheels and stand on their heads just to avoid admitting the obvious truth.

For the most part, professional science, its complex math and statistics, operates in a parallel universe to our daily lives. A paper is published in a scientific journal? Shrug. A paper is retracted? Shrug. It may be interesting, a curiosity, but it's largely irrelevant to the average person. They're not emotionally committed to any of it. The problems occur when professional science somehow overlaps with something that they do care deeply about. And their interaction with that scientific work is not even an attempt to analyze it; rather, they simply want to cherry pick scientific results that agree with their preconceived notions, and use (abuse) scientific authority in order to argue for their preconceived notions.

But independent confirmation is not that difficult to understand. Is Jane lying or telling the truth about a particular situation? If you're skeptical of Jane's claims, then you ask John, someone else you know who also has first-hand knowledge of the situation. Average people can't design a scientific experiment, but they can certainly dig deeper into some question. However, you've got to be motivated to dig deeper. Some people want to be lied to, because the truth would be uncomfortable.

> The modern anti-vax movement has been traced back to Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent 1998 Lancet paper

As far as I can tell, the modern movement is fueled by personal anecdotes of family members / friends having young children present with autism after certain developmental milestones. The family goes, what went wrong? Well, we recently got them a bunch of shots, maybe it was that. Combined with the expanding vaccination schedule those coincidences are increasingly likely to occur. Then yeah that paper comes up when the families do a bit of research which does add more conviction to the belief.

Only a tiny percentage of people would have personal anecdotes. The great majority of it especially after covid is driven by social media memes.

You'd think so but the rate of autism in the US just keeps going up, it's something like 1 in 31 kids now. Many people will know someone with an anecdote. Social media definitely does its part though, I agree.

If you’ve got elementary-school aged children you’re almost certainly just one degree of separation away from a parent whose kid has an autism diagnosis or something similar.

Came to say this. Most people now aren't aware of the paper. It's the 1) anecdotes from parents, 2) memes about how the Amish don't have autism, 3) distrust of institutions and pharma companies.

You've got "post hoc ergo propter hoc" plus the naturalistic fallacy. Might as well label the vaccines as a needle full of capitalism juice.

> What happened was that ordinary people heard about the paper

I've never heard of this paper, but I am aware of the judicial capture that pharma companies manage to get for themselves. A whole extra judicial organization to handle vaxx related damages.

That's why I don't trust them. Amongst other things (burgers for vaxxes is an odd choice, speaking charitably).

I’d argue it has more to do with the fall of mainline religion and the rise of the zealot.

In that vacuum, some people found independent churches and legacies, and others ended up following woo-woo new age bs, which the Internet organized at scale. We know about the Wakefield study because zealots pushed it hard. Fluoridation is another example - my city recently started it and the council was brigaded by lunatics from all over the world losing their minds over it.

It’s also declining child mortality. Child mortality in the U.S. in the 1960s was about three times higher than in the 1990s. The U.S. in the 1960s was comparable to Bangladesh today. Back then, most people knew a kid who died of a disease in childhood. That’s far rarer today. Meanwhile, virtually every parent of young children knows someone whose kid has some sort of autism spectrum diagnosis. Thanks to vaccines being so effective, the apparent risk profile has changed.

Strong vaccine supporter here, and I think studies like this are still worth doing. Healthy society has vocal skeptics that are occasionally correct. We also have authorities that are occasionally wrong. Scientists maintain trust in our most important systems by properly addressing claims through rigorous research rather than relying simply on authority. We’ve seen smoking and thalidomide (and I’m sure more relevant substances) scientifically ‘proven’ safe before causing massive harm. When anti-vaxx claims evolve (MMR, now aluminum), having solid population data helps counter misinformation with hard evidence. Active research helps us know which side the misinformation is actually on.

To preface this, I'm not saying anything about vaccines, efficacy, safety, or my positions on them.

But how can you expect to convince doubters when a claim like "no link between vaccines and autism" is made, and all you have to do is click your left mouse button twice to pull up the actual research, and see that what was actually studied was "did a certain amount of increase in aluminum content in vaccines create more negative health effects than the vaccines with the previous aluminum content?". That's what was studied here, that is the source for this article.

Yes, these things are related, but intentionally removing that context and misrepresenting the actual result does not convince people to believe you, it just drives them further away. It's so easy for a reader to see for themselves that the claim that's being made in this case is not remotely what the source research is actually claiming. How does that increase trust?

If it were the only study, sure. But it is not. Not by a hot mile.

I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think the article is misrepresenting the study. The research looked at over 1.2 million children and specifically examined whether increased exposure to aluminum containing vaccines was associated with autism or 49 other health conditions, and it found no evidence of a link. Since aluminum adjuvants are one of the most commonly cited concerns in vaccine skepticism, especially in claims about autism, the study directly addresses that idea.

So while the article’s headline simplifies the finding by saying “no link between vaccines and autism,” it’s not inaccurate. It reflects the key takeaway, that within the vaccines that include aluminum, which are widely used in childhood immunizations, there is no indication of increased risk. That’s important and relevant.

It’s fair to expect transparency, and I agree that people should be encouraged to read the actual research, but in this case it seems to me that the summary is consistent with what the study actually tested and found.

Agreed here, the description under the headline is important:

> A new Danish study finds no association between aluminum in childhood vaccines and 50 different health conditions, including autism, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. The findings reaffirm the safety of Denmark’s childhood vaccination program.

Breaking it down --

1. The study was Denmark specific 2. The study inspected aluminum specifically 3. (Based on reading, it seems to) Reaffirm the findings that the vaccines are safe, conducted / funded by those who set the policy

Here's the actual study: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997

Note the main researcher is funded by Novo Nordisk: https://researchleaderprogramme.com/recipients/anders-hviid/

And is frequently trying to debunk criticisms of drugs, often with phrasing such as this.

https://www.contagionlive.com/view/hpv-vaccination-does-not-...

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/740704

and the list goes on...

That’s an odd thing to say, “regardless of the validity”? Why would or should it have any impact at all if it is not valid?

>The truly sad part is that regardless of the validity of the study

the truly sad part to me is that you could/would have written this before this study. I don't believe that you have evaluated the validity of this study yet, but you feel justified in telling us you've already made up your mind and you don't really believe in the follow through part of the scientific method, instead you're playing the tribe game

The study only covers aluminum:

> no association between aluminum in childhood vaccines and 50 different health conditions

It's right in the title, which was omitted on submission.

The concerns the public have are not aluminum, so of course it wont. Should also point out the argument largely made is that the _quantity_ of vaccines, particularly in the US are part of the problem.

Generally speaking, I'd welcome studies on what folks are actually saying. Having friends in both the avid vaccine advocates and the anti-vaccine crowd, I think both are just arguing past each other and not studying stuff rigorously enough to convince the other.

Is this the study that showed that unvaccinated kids who had an autistic older sibling were more likely to be autistic - because parents had an autistic child, decided vaccines were the cause, had more kids and never vaccinated - but autism is mostly genetic with in-utero activation so obvs genetics...

Just a friendly reminder for any who need to hear it again: it's really okay to have been wrong and okay to admit that you've been being lied to. Changing your views when confronted with new evidence that shows your beliefs/assumptions were incorrect is a sign of intelligence. It can also let you focus more of your attention on new topics/areas that are still important for protecting yourself and your loved ones.

I wonder how many people on HN believe stuff like this though. Not that many?

I'm open to being wrong on that guess.

there is a nonzero amount in the sphere of antivaxxers. if not for the exact reason, but because engineering types are more likely to lean libertarian or believe their position in a dominant field gives them a superiority complex over other fields

Rewind back to the '21 and Id say we were at-least 10% of HN.

Textbook vocal minority.

You have personally contributed 5/84 = 6% of the comments on this article.

For what it's worth, this is still quite loaded, and I think it's far more helpful to drop the stuff about lies and protection of loved ones and simply say:

It's good to weaken or strengthen your views based on the evidence given, and intellectual humility often leads to a better grasp of issues.

And it's also worth recognising, as another commenter has noted, that this is something that extremely few people are good at. It's an error to think that assenting to mainstream views is a strong sign of intellectual humility.

Out of curiosity, when is the last time you changed your mind about something moral? If you can’t remember the time, it’s petty rich to accuse others of being exactly as close minded as you are.

I've dramatically changed my moral views over the course of my life and I'm continuously seeking to hone them. I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Not terribly long ago, but I don't see "do vaccines cause autism" as being a moral position.

Precisely this. Nothing wrong with changing your mind. In fact swing the other way and own the idea. Its just an opinion, get a different one, nobody cares.

Well, thank god for that. Can you imagine the uproar if just one showed a link, or proved inconclusive?

autism is caused by vaccines is a mind virus about a mind virus.

Makes sense, hopefully it convinces enough parents not to listen to idiots.

But I have to wonder if any researcher will be able to publish a study that has a hint of the opposite conclusion?

Academia is not kind to anyone going against the flow. (I am a bona fide scientist, not a do-your-own-research conspiracy theorist...)

In the context of vaccines, I think there's enough political tension it would immediately gain traction regardless of scientific rigor or correctness

If the hypothesis showed an actual mechanism AND a reason why it wasn't detectable in all of the studies that went before it, sure. Yes. Absolutely.

>To assess the association between cumulative aluminum exposure from early childhood vaccination and risk for autoimmune, atopic or allergic, and neurodevelopmental disorders.

from what I understand about the skepticism toward adjuvants, "cumulative aluminum exposure" was not the hypothesis. It might be a proxy for the hypothesis, which has to do with repeated exposures rolling the dice, but what is the attitude of the researchers (for example, how much these researchers in this industry receive funding from this industry) would play a big role in how they designed their study. Are they really looking?

We can take a quick look: "Apart from research into epidemiology and disease prevention, [the State Serum Institute] also develops and produces vaccines ... 20% of sales are used on Research and Development"

so their funding/salaries literally comes from profit in producing these vaccines. Their statement about funding? "Primary Funding Source: None."

(I spent 5 whole minutes tracking down this info. I wrote the funding sentence before I went and looked up their funding, so it's Popper-proofed)

the low effort or low sincerity part of this study is that they are saying "aluminum in greater and greater doses is not a problem." Ok then, why are you putting aluminum in in the first place? Oh, because in small quantities it has an outsized effect, aggravating the immune system, that you think is efficacious. Have you studied that? and from people who've looked into it, no, they haven't. In some studies, they use aluminum without other components of vaccine cocktail as the placebo thereby making sure not to test it.

It's interesting how they discovered adjuvants. They were making and dispensing vaccines (I think polio) and they discovered that some of the vaccines were contaminated in the processing. So they cleaned up the contamination and discovered the vaccines didn't work as well any more. The contamination was aggravating the immune system which made the immune response greater. Now, during this process, the whole whole time at each stage they were saying "vaccines are safe and effective". It would be more honest to say what actually was the case, "turns out we didn't know how they worked, but due to the contaminated vaccines we gave you we now understand better."

the point is not "vaccines aren't effective", I think they do a lot of good; the point is they were willing to lie before and now thanks to wall street, they are even more willing to lie now.

Just to clarify for others reading: Statens Serum Institut (SSI) is a government agency, founded and primarily funded by the Danish Ministry of Health. It’s not a private company profiting from vaccines. In fact, SSI sold its vaccine production business in 2016 to AJ Vaccines and now focuses on public health, disease surveillance, and research.

The claim that their “salaries come from vaccine profits” is simply false. While they conduct vaccine-related research and some of their funding comes from competitive grants, their core operations are state-funded. Saying "Primary funding source: None" in a paper means no external funding for that specific study, not that the authors are secretly paid by pharma.

It’s important to hold science accountable — but misrepresenting basic facts about an institution’s funding just spreads confusion, not clarity.

I was writing what wikipedia says. What about what wikipedia says are you disputing?

Where on wikipedia does it say: SSI salaries come from vaccine profits

I'd love to know so I can go correct it. Remember Wikipedia is a community encyclopedia not the ground thruth.

I wonder how the Danish vaccine schedule compares to the US, vis a vis total aluminum content.

Don’t know but I’d highly doubt it’s relevant.

> The aluminum contained in vaccines is similar to that found in a liter (about 1 quart or 32 fluid ounces) of infant formula. While infants receive about 4.4 milligrams* of aluminum in the first six months of life from vaccines, they receive more than that in their diet. Breast-fed infants ingest about 7 milligrams, formula-fed infants ingest about 38 milligrams, and infants who are fed soy formula ingest almost 117 milligrams of aluminum during the first six months of life.

https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety...

Not that I think vaccines are in any way harmful, but your own link goes on to point out that less than 1% of ingested aluminium ends up in the blood so just quoting the numbers like that doesn't add much.

Yea immediately after I posted this I thought "ah shit someone is going to say ingesting vs injecting is different". It's still interesting as a comparison I think and the source is a solid one so I left it up.

You can check the figures yourself: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997

Thanks to a long term study over a changing schedule they were able to layer the subjects by cumulative aluminum exposure from vaccination with aluminum-adsorbed vaccines.

No adverse associations were found, from low to high levels.

This was a study on humans, not mice, and to the best of my reading neither Tomljenovic nor Shaw were involved here.

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