Vaccine Tie to Autism Gains New Supporters

The decade-long debate over what has caused this country's frightening spike of childhood autism once again is exploding…

Reigniting the debate is the much-publicized book "Evidence of Harm" by David Kirby, as well as the report titled "Deadly Immunity" by environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In brief, Kirby and Kennedy argue that federal health officials, with the help of vaccine-makers and some in Congress, have deliberately downplayed, even covered up, evidence that thimerosal - a preservative containing mercury - in childhood vaccines is the prime trigger behind the explosion of autism in U.S. children the last 15 years.

Although thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines as long ago as the 1930s, preschoolers typically received no more than three shots throughout the subsequent five decades.

But, by the early '90s, that exposure changed, with most children getting up to 23 shots against 12 diseases by age 2 all laced with mercury, a metal known to cause brain damage.

And so was launched the "Thimerosal Generation," according to the Kennedy report - children born between 1989 and 2003, when estimated cases of autism jumped an astounding 15-fold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 today. ationwide, 500,000 children now are struggling with some form of autism - a syndrome of behavioral abnormalities marked by withdrawal from contact, loss of communication and developmental regression...

But their paranoia has absolutely no bearing on whether or not they are being followed. It's all just unassociated coincidence.

You cannot look at their paranoia and conclude from it that anything else is going on, so as a fact it has no significance. In order to determine causality you need objective, verifiable, and reproducable evidence of cause and effect as well as a logical hypothesis for confirmation. Ideally, it should be one that makes direct refernce to some other externally proven fact.

This story has none of that. It has nothing but a bunch of people that all saw a duck.

But there is evidence, or at least, there is what appears to be evidence (that's what needs to be investigated)...the mercury content in the vaccines.

To use your illustration, if it turned out that 90 of those 100 people were pooped on by the ducks they saw, would you not say there is possible causation there and that maybe it ought to be looked into? At the very least, a good scientist or debater would not overrule it without first disproving the possibility of the causal relationship. I'm sure if the vaccine-autism link is confirmed, it will include another undiscovered factor (weakened immune systems, for instance).

That's why we investigate, objectively, to determine if there is a cause-effect relationship.

My original comment was more against the casual citing of logical fallacies in an effort to undermine someone's argument. I see it more and more on FR and it's irritating to anyone who has studied formal logic. It doesn't further anyone's journey to the truth to shut them down with a line that sounds good.

The logical fallacy of equating correlation with causation is intended for an argument closer to what you presented, or something like of 100 traffic deaths on a given day, 90% were smoking and therefore smoking leads to death (it's a fine line between the false-cause and correlation-cause fallacies because they have similar roots), not in the case of a possible link between autism and vaccines, where there are strong possibilities of a causal relationship (the mercury).

I did not say there were/are not genuine cases of autism, nor did I say that the mercury in vaccines may not be related to them, if not a causative agent.

However, and making a collateral point, the broadening of criteria for these conditions works hand in glove with increasing federal funding for special needs students to increase school district and social services budgets, whether or not the children are actually aflicted with the disorder in question.

For those children who are not afflicted under more classical guidelines, they are branded as if they are, will recieve whatever attention the system will bestow on them, and if they snap out of (or outgrow) their particular developmental disability (as opposed to their optimal peer group), will be hailed as successes for the system.

The dilution of attention on children who genuinely are autistic under the older, more narrow guidelines, does them a disservice, and lowers their chances for a more normal life.

Second, that funding increases the size of school and social service systems, thus increasing their relative prestige, and increasing the ability of personnel to make salary demands they would not have been able to make in smaller entities. Smaller school and social service providers are more prone to this, as larger systems may have enough children who meet more classical criteria to qualify for the funds. Smaller systems will often find a way to fill the group to qualify.

Thus, there is a definite incentive, especially at the administrative level to fill these programs and get the funding.

Odd, too that the carseat/baby carrier became a convenient lowgrade babysitting device, rather than having the little nippers crawling at large, about the same time that standards were broadened. Parking the rugrat in fromt of the boob tube is no substitute for human interaction during early development. Has anyone investigated this?

Sometimes very bright children will not communicate well because they simply do not want to. I have observed a child whom I had seen perform tasks repeatedly not perform them for the developmental assessor because they did not like the person, and flunk the test. The child simply did not like the tester, but the system made no allowances for that.

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