The strangest thing I saw on TV here in So Cal was a lady doctor discussing the medical exemption contained in the new law. She said that if a sibling has autism then another sibling would be exempt from the vaccination requirement.
Wow, and all this time the medical profession keeps claiming that vaccinations are not the cause of autism. Can someone explain that, or has this doctor just admitted that vaccinations are a possible cause of autism?
She admitted it. Actually, its an open secret. The only ones denying it are paid pharmaceutical shills.
I do not see how a genuine doctor armed with the facts could make such a statement. I don't know anything about her, but I have to wonder if she is one of those kooks who, despite a medical education, decided to go down the path of quackery. Or maybe her "Dr." degree is in a highly questionable pseudoscience discipline like "naturopathy."
Wow, and all this time the medical profession keeps claiming that vaccinations are not the cause of autism. Can someone explain that, or has this doctor just admitted that vaccinations are a possible cause of autism?
Millions of dollars have been wasted as a result of that dishonest quack who made the claim that vaccines cause autism. That is money that could have been used to research the genetic aberrations that really do cause autism, but instead was wasted to try to replicate that bogus claim.
Vaccines do not cause autism. Vaccine-preventable diseases, however, can cause brain damage which does cause learning disabilities and behavioral abnormalities. Autistic children and their siblings need vaccines just as much as any other children do.
I will answer you here, rather than in the FRmail.
I do not speak “dogmatically”; I am a medical researcher, and one of my areas of expertise is vaccines. I do not *ever* post information that cannot be verified within the body of legitimate medical literature.
There are some very dedicated anti-vax activists who post a plethora of misinformation about vaccines. Like any propagandists, they mix enough valid information with their lies to be able to appear knowledgeable about the subject to people who are unfamiliar with it. Some of those activists engage in posting misinformation in comments section of on-line vaccine related articles published by news organizations. They are very active in this effort, to the point that they look more numerous than they actually are.
Anti-vax activism has existed ever since the first vaccine against smallpox was invented. Their rationale was that protecting people from dying of diseases goes against the will of God, since God wouldn’t have created those diseases if He didn’t intend for us to die from them. These days, anti-vaxxers do not use the will of God as a justification—they are more likely to appeal to Gaia. Despite any propagandistic misuse of medical literature to push their anti-vax agenda, their objection is just as ideological.
One way to determine the quality of information posted on the internet is to pull up the references (which should be peer-reviewed articles linked into a reliable database such as PubMed) and read them to see if they really say what the authors of the supposed information claim it says. Anti-vax website designers, however, count on the fact that their target audience does not know how to find medical literature, and wouldn’t understand it if they did find it.