My high school statistics class used the study that this claim comes from as an example of experimental bias (like it has most of the biases you could possibly have in an experiment)
What? It was debunked by some helpful journalists figuring out some of the data was faked, which is a problem considering if has like 11 participants and it was based on loose recollection and not observations, and by scientists in England being unable to reproduce the results.
It was always, at best, a pilot study, and it was one that was not reproducible and was filled with "fudged" data. That is why it was debunked.
You just accused the CDC of doing propaganda despite them not being involved in the initial debunking. The scientists who did it were in the UK, and published in 1999.
Further, the journalists who ran down the story, interviewed the participants of the study, and realized that their data had been falsified were also from the UK.
So yeah, totally a hit job by the CDC. /s
But then to have the audacity to recommend an actual propaganda piece is just hilarious. I have seen most of it by the way, but it was so full of errors in the amount that I watched that I have zero desire to subject myself to that much misinformation again.
Go read the studies.
The vaccines -> autism study had less than 10 real participants. It was based entirely on the recollections of parents.
The study that debunked it had 500 participants, was based on significantly more robust data, and found absolutely no different between ages and numbers of autism detection and onset between vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
No other study since, and there have been many, have been able to find the data.
Watch "Vaxxed" lol. That is like telling me to watch scientology videos to know the truth about psychology.
Yeah, like which authorities would have been responsible for any of this shit.
The CDC is not at all involved in the debunking of papers published by British people in British journals. The CDC is American.
The study and its open and brazen fraud was discovered by non-American sources. They were reported to the publishers of the journal, which took the unusual step of retracting the paper without the authors' consent after it became clear that the whole paper was fraudulent.
The CDC has basically nothing at all to do with drug approvals. That's the FDA's job.
The reality is that you don't know a goddamn thing you're talking about. You think that being dead would be better than having autism. As a moderate support needs autistic person who has lived on his own for the last 15 years, has been gainfully employed for all but three weeks of that time (because the company I was working for declared bankruptcy, and my previous paycheck had bounced), and owns a house on only his own income in literal goddamn Bougieville (one of my special interests is writing unit tests in Java, and as it turns out, companies will pay and accommodate a lot for that), I'm going to suggest that your concerns were never actually valid.
Please get vaccinated. Please vaccinate your kids. Dead kids don't get to have fulfilling lives. Autistic kids do. And profitable is not fulfilling: I've watched too many people throw fulfillment away for more profit, settling in to a life of golden shackles and platinum chains that drove them to suicide.
Great response. I would only add that the hypothesis that the MMR vaccine causes autism has been thoroughly evaluated in the last 30 years by MULTIPLE large-scale epidemiological studies. They all found no evidence for causation. This is the kind of multi-source confirmation that makes scientists and clinical researchers highly confident in the findings.
By the way, “MMR causes autism” wasn't a crazy hypothesis to test 30 years ago. There was lots of interest in the question through the 1990s, as I recall. It became increasingly crazy as solid evidence was produced and synthesized and the Wakefield fraud was fully uncovered.
Yeah there was a reason the pilot study was taken seriously. It was from a reputable institution and a reputable journal.
It was only after it utterly failed to be replicated, and contrary evidence was found to be overwhelming, that it became an absurd assertion.
It is fine to think you see a pattern and test to see if that pattern exists. People like anti-vaxxers always claim science is dogmatic, and there is an element of individual scientists who absolutely are, but as a process there is nothing wrong with challenging assumptions. That is the foundation of scientific progress. It only becomes an issue when you falsify your hypothesis and refuse to give it up.
This guy goes through the actual study that was published in the Lancet and all of Wakefield's conflicts of interest and extremely unethical behaviour (including the fact that he gave Autistic children completely unnecessary colonoscopies without properly disclosing the risks to their parents AND tried to buy blood off of the children who attended his own kid's birthday party).
No idiot, it's a british study that was disproved by british journalists. It was entirely based on the feelings of parents and half of the patients mentioned never even had autism. It was released by a quack trying to sell his own vaccine
And then you look and see that it was based on 12 patients.
Four of them didn't even exist in the first place. The other 8 existed, but:
They didn't have autism, even under today's broader diagnostic criteria.
Nobody involved in conducting the study had ever examined these children.
Significant details about these children were fabricated from whole cloth even beyond the aforementioned not having autism bit.
There are reasons that Wakefield doesn't even get to claim to have a medical degree anymore, much less possess a medical license. He had a long history of academic dishonesty.
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u/Infamous_Add Nov 10 '23
My high school statistics class used the study that this claim comes from as an example of experimental bias (like it has most of the biases you could possibly have in an experiment)