Unvaxxed child in Texas just died of the measles

[Anonymous]

Parents should be arrested for child neglect.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The only childhood disease I had was chicken pox.

My child has had none of them thanks to vaccines.

My parents' generation? My mom lost hearing in 1 year due to measles, my Dad newsmen sterile because of the mumps (I am adopted), polio crippled my aunt so she always hobbled and paralyzed my uncle.

I can't believe the dummies on here saying childhood disease are no big deal.

I heard someone say vaccines are victims of their own success.

Human beings have short memories and, unfortunately, bad judgment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Doctor in Texas pushing back on RFK, Jr.'s of Vitamin A for measles!

"One mother...told her she was giving her two children high doses of vitamin A to ward off measles, based on an article posted by Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nearly a decade before he became President Donald Trump's top health official."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/doctors-push-back-parents-embrace-120353827.html

Vitamin A is fat soluble and builds up in the body. Too much can lead to toxicity. And it's only a factor for measles if you are malnourished -- with a normal diet, adding more Vitamin A does not protect against measles.

Fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin A can lead to toxicity because your body doesn’t excrete any excess — it stores it. Vitamin A’s presence in so many different supplements compounds the problem.
...
“Patients who take a variety of supplements are getting much more vitamin A than they should,” says Dr. Young.
...
Acute vitamin A toxicity symptoms

Acute vitamin A toxicity happens when somebody — usually a child — accidentally ingests a megadose of vitamin A. Common symptoms include:
- Headache
- Rash, which may cause the affected skin to peel later
- Drowsines
- Irritability
- Stomach pain, nausea and vomiting

In acute vitamin A toxicity cases, symptoms should resolve over time. Still, if an individual (especially a child) is experiencing these symptoms, you should call Poison Control, and, if directed, go to the nearest emergency room.

Chronic vitamin A toxicity symptoms

Chronic vitamin A toxicity happens when a person takes excessive doses of vitamin A (10,000 IU or more) per day over a prolonged period. The symptoms are more subtle and harder to distinguish from other conditions. They include:
- Severe headaches and pressure in your skull (idiopathic intracranial hypertension)
- Hair issues like sparse, coarse hair and alopecia of your eyebrows
- Skin issues, like dry, rough, itchy skin (pruritus) and cracked lips
- Weakness and susceptibility to fractures
- Enlarged liver (hepatomegaly) or spleen (splenomegaly)

Children may experience loss of appetite (anorexia), joint pain (arthralgia) and excessive bone growth (cortical hyperostosis). Vitamin A toxicity can also cause “failure to thrive,” which — while not a good thing — sounds scarier than it is. It basically means your child’s growth has either slowed or stopped.

Cleveland Clinic: Vitamin A Toxicity: How Much Vitamin A Is Too Much?
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/vitamin-a-toxicity

These people are so stupid. Sacrificing your child on the altar of your need to have special magical knowledge.

Vitamin A is the main ingredient in Retin-A, the acne medication that is so teratogenic you have to be demonstrated to be on two forms of birth control to get it prescribed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This study will be a real example of fraud waste and abuse since there are already dozens of studies showing there is no link between vaccines and autism.

The validity of these studies are in question. You cannot trust the manufacturers or those who directly financially benefit from the products to be able to do an unbiased study.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1124634/

No one serious is questioning the validity of those studies. At this point the only thing that we are sure doesn’t cause autism is the MMR vaccine.
- mother of a kid with autism

I'm not an antivaxxer, but let me play devil's advocate: the study you cited describes itself as a "retrospective cohort study" (rather than a prospective, double-blind, placebo-controlled study like the kind you often see in the drug-approval process). It also seems like it doesn't test vaccinated vs. unvaccinated but instead tests kids who got one particular vaccine (MMR) against those who did not. You could imagine an RFK acolyte say, "show me a placebo-controlled test where some of the kids were vaccinated and the rest weren't." What's the answer to that? Is it that that study has already been done? Is it that it hasn't been done but it's not worth doing? Is it that that study could be informative but would be unethical? Is it that that's a good idea and we should do it if it'll allay concerns?

It doesn’t appear that you are an expert in evidence based medicine. I don’t consider myself to be one either, but I did a residency in evidence based internal medicine at ucsf and there is way too much boring info I could spout about the merits and feasibility of different types of studies for different situations. I reviewed the “autism” link as a case study during my residency and I can tell you that many many smarter people than myself looked into it and agree that it’s a load of horses&$t and there is no need to squander more time or money on this. It deserves as much merit as the theory that has long prevented Pakistan from eradicating polio - that the polio vaccine was deployed by the CIA as a means to sterilize Muslim men. That theory resulted in 20k cases of polio a year in the 90’s.

And you can trust me, I’m an mit grad, and obviously a genius who is qualified to be an ATC. Actually only the first part is true.

I'm the poster you responded to. Thanks for the civil and interesting response. You're 100% correct that I'm not an expert in evidence-based medicine (or any kind of medicine), and, not to belabor the point, I'm also not an antivaxxer. But I think your message hits the nail on the head with what I'm grappling with: there are (I assume) as you point out a lot of ways to design a study. I certainly haven't read the autism-vaccine studies, and I'm definitely not questioning their conclusions. But is a foreign retrospective study without a vaccine-free control group really the most rigorous study we have that exists? (I'm not saying it is; I don't know!) If it is (or is at least close to it), then asking for a more rigorous study strikes me as... somewhat less crazy than I might have assumed?

I get your point that smart people have looked at this and said this has been conclusively proven. I'm not disputing that.

NP. There is no “vax vs unvax” study. None. There never has been, and there probably never will be. People claim that it would be unethical to deny people vaccines so they can’t have a proper control group. They are deliberately ignoring the fact that there are thousands of unvaccinated children in the US that they could use for study participants. I know for a fact that there are many people who would willingly allow their kids to be tracked and their health monitored as part of a study but nobody is attempting those studies. In order to do that, you’d need to release findings of complications - i.e. adverse reactions to the vaccine. These are hidden behind the sealed walls and files of vaccine court. Yes, there is a special secretive court in this country where vaccine injury claims are tried, and nobody is allowed to know what goes on there, what the complications were, how much people were awarded for those damages, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Now cases in MD and VA.

good luck to the anti-vaxxers

The case is from someone who traveled abroad. Explain to me what is different about this now than it was a year ago? there were no people who traveled abroad in every major metro area of the USA? there were no unvaxxed religious groups or did they just emerge in the last few months? I am trying to understand what is different in 2025 that was not here in 2024.. The same number of unvaxxed and vaxxed, the same travel policy, the same world. What gives other than politics?

I don’t think it’s true that there is the same number of vaccinated and unvaccinated people now as compared to last year. Vaccination rates dropped sharply after Covid and have continued to decline. We are reaching a critical mass of regions with vaccination rates being too low to provide herd immunity, hence a widespread outbreak is occurring.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This study will be a real example of fraud waste and abuse since there are already dozens of studies showing there is no link between vaccines and autism.

The validity of these studies are in question. You cannot trust the manufacturers or those who directly financially benefit from the products to be able to do an unbiased study.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1124634/

No one serious is questioning the validity of those studies. At this point the only thing that we are sure doesn’t cause autism is the MMR vaccine.
- mother of a kid with autism

I'm not an antivaxxer, but let me play devil's advocate: the study you cited describes itself as a "retrospective cohort study" (rather than a prospective, double-blind, placebo-controlled study like the kind you often see in the drug-approval process). It also seems like it doesn't test vaccinated vs. unvaccinated but instead tests kids who got one particular vaccine (MMR) against those who did not. You could imagine an RFK acolyte say, "show me a placebo-controlled test where some of the kids were vaccinated and the rest weren't." What's the answer to that? Is it that that study has already been done? Is it that it hasn't been done but it's not worth doing? Is it that that study could be informative but would be unethical? Is it that that's a good idea and we should do it if it'll allay concerns?

It doesn’t appear that you are an expert in evidence based medicine. I don’t consider myself to be one either, but I did a residency in evidence based internal medicine at ucsf and there is way too much boring info I could spout about the merits and feasibility of different types of studies for different situations. I reviewed the “autism” link as a case study during my residency and I can tell you that many many smarter people than myself looked into it and agree that it’s a load of horses&$t and there is no need to squander more time or money on this. It deserves as much merit as the theory that has long prevented Pakistan from eradicating polio - that the polio vaccine was deployed by the CIA as a means to sterilize Muslim men. That theory resulted in 20k cases of polio a year in the 90’s.

And you can trust me, I’m an mit grad, and obviously a genius who is qualified to be an ATC. Actually only the first part is true.

I'm the poster you responded to. Thanks for the civil and interesting response. You're 100% correct that I'm not an expert in evidence-based medicine (or any kind of medicine), and, not to belabor the point, I'm also not an antivaxxer. But I think your message hits the nail on the head with what I'm grappling with: there are (I assume) as you point out a lot of ways to design a study. I certainly haven't read the autism-vaccine studies, and I'm definitely not questioning their conclusions. But is a foreign retrospective study without a vaccine-free control group really the most rigorous study we have that exists? (I'm not saying it is; I don't know!) If it is (or is at least close to it), then asking for a more rigorous study strikes me as... somewhat less crazy than I might have assumed?

I get your point that smart people have looked at this and said this has been conclusively proven. I'm not disputing that.

NP. There is no “vax vs unvax” study. None. There never has been, and there probably never will be. People claim that it would be unethical to deny people vaccines so they can’t have a proper control group. They are deliberately ignoring the fact that there are thousands of unvaccinated children in the US that they could use for study participants. I know for a fact that there are many people who would willingly allow their kids to be tracked and their health monitored as part of a study but nobody is attempting those studies. In order to do that, you’d need to release findings of complications - i.e. adverse reactions to the vaccine. These are hidden behind the sealed walls and files of vaccine court. Yes, there is a special secretive court in this country where vaccine injury claims are tried, and nobody is allowed to know what goes on there, what the complications were, how much people were awarded for those damages, etc.

I’m the one who has been replying to PP. Perhaps you know this already, but every vaccine was originally tested in a “vax vs no vax” study, if by “vax vs no vax”, you mean a double blinded placebo controlled RCT. The covid vaccine was tested in that manner.

Your suggestion to find the parents who are willing to be tracked but would choose to be in the placebo group is not feasible because then the study would not be a placebo controlled double blinded RCT. The “R” means random. Having parent choose no vax is not random. You are suggesting a prospective cohort study or a case control in which two groups (one group who chose vaccination and one group who did not) are followed over time. There have been many such studies involving well over 1 million kids. See my previous post.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This study will be a real example of fraud waste and abuse since there are already dozens of studies showing there is no link between vaccines and autism.

The validity of these studies are in question. You cannot trust the manufacturers or those who directly financially benefit from the products to be able to do an unbiased study.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1124634/

No one serious is questioning the validity of those studies. At this point the only thing that we are sure doesn’t cause autism is the MMR vaccine.
- mother of a kid with autism

I'm not an antivaxxer, but let me play devil's advocate: the study you cited describes itself as a "retrospective cohort study" (rather than a prospective, double-blind, placebo-controlled study like the kind you often see in the drug-approval process). It also seems like it doesn't test vaccinated vs. unvaccinated but instead tests kids who got one particular vaccine (MMR) against those who did not. You could imagine an RFK acolyte say, "show me a placebo-controlled test where some of the kids were vaccinated and the rest weren't." What's the answer to that? Is it that that study has already been done? Is it that it hasn't been done but it's not worth doing? Is it that that study could be informative but would be unethical? Is it that that's a good idea and we should do it if it'll allay concerns?

It doesn’t appear that you are an expert in evidence based medicine. I don’t consider myself to be one either, but I did a residency in evidence based internal medicine at ucsf and there is way too much boring info I could spout about the merits and feasibility of different types of studies for different situations. I reviewed the “autism” link as a case study during my residency and I can tell you that many many smarter people than myself looked into it and agree that it’s a load of horses&$t and there is no need to squander more time or money on this. It deserves as much merit as the theory that has long prevented Pakistan from eradicating polio - that the polio vaccine was deployed by the CIA as a means to sterilize Muslim men. That theory resulted in 20k cases of polio a year in the 90’s.

And you can trust me, I’m an mit grad, and obviously a genius who is qualified to be an ATC. Actually only the first part is true.

I'm the poster you responded to. Thanks for the civil and interesting response. You're 100% correct that I'm not an expert in evidence-based medicine (or any kind of medicine), and, not to belabor the point, I'm also not an antivaxxer. But I think your message hits the nail on the head with what I'm grappling with: there are (I assume) as you point out a lot of ways to design a study. I certainly haven't read the autism-vaccine studies, and I'm definitely not questioning their conclusions. But is a foreign retrospective study without a vaccine-free control group really the most rigorous study we have that exists? (I'm not saying it is; I don't know!) If it is (or is at least close to it), then asking for a more rigorous study strikes me as... somewhat less crazy than I might have assumed?

I get your point that smart people have looked at this and said this has been conclusively proven. I'm not disputing that.

Here is a primer on evidence based medicine.

https://www.mwc.com.br/files/Williams%5BA769%5D%20-%20Understanding%20EBM.pdf

The PP who said it would be unethical to do the gold standard study, a double blind placebo controlled RCT, is correct. You cannot perform a double blind study in which half the babies are given placebo and half are given MMR for many reasons that I’m sure you understand. If you don’t, please reply and I will lay it out.

The loophole that doctors often used for this moral impasse, was to just pack their stuff and do the studies in developing countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, where people were not so fussy about medical malfeasance and informed consent. In India, a trial came under scrutiny because infants were being randomized between groups that got placebo vs a proven safe rotavirus vaccine.

The original Wakefield study looked at 8 children with GI symptoms from intestinal inflammation, who were diagnosed with autism 1 month after MMR vaccine, and concluded that there was a link between autism and vaccination. However, since autism diagnoses often occur at the same age that kids are vaccinated, it would be impossible not to see a coincidence. The Wakefield study is akin to showing that the second dose of MMR, typically given between ages 4-6, causes children’s front teeth to fall out and new ones to grow in their places.

You can read more about the flaws in the 8 person Wakefield study here

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2908388/

One of the best ways to study if there is a link between an exposure and an outcome is to do a cohort study - a study that follows a cohort of patients and follows them over time for certain outcomes. By keeping track of other variables like maternal age, paternal age, ethnicity, birth weight, gestational age, ses status, siblings with autism, environmental exposures, vaccinations, childhood illnesses etc, you can control for those variables and see if any of them show correlation with the outcome. There have been many cohort studies involving a total of well over 1 million children that show no correlation.

Also, there was a meta-analysis, which is the gold standard of looking at multiple studies and using data analysis to create more accurate conclusions and stronger evidence by pooling the number of patients and reducing the margin of error.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24814559/

Here is a list of cohort and case control studies

https://www.autismspeaks.org/do-vaccines-cause-autism

The sheer number of studies on this topic that have been done to allay irrational fears is already wasteful. We didn’t need so many studies when one involving 500k kids as opposed to 8 should have been sufficient.

Something is causing autism. It’s not vaccines.

I'm the OP you responded to. I am familiar with all of-- and do not disagree with any of-- the arguments that you made. That said, I can also imagine a parent saying, "sure, but the approval of a new drug requires typically requires a prospective, randomized, blinded study design; I want that for my kid's shots." You can argue that the parent is wrong-- and, yeah, i get the ethical concerns-- but I think you'll agree that the merits of that view really boil down to a matter of values rather than cold hard science.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Parents should be arrested for child neglect.

Yup.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This study will be a real example of fraud waste and abuse since there are already dozens of studies showing there is no link between vaccines and autism.

The validity of these studies are in question. You cannot trust the manufacturers or those who directly financially benefit from the products to be able to do an unbiased study.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1124634/

No one serious is questioning the validity of those studies. At this point the only thing that we are sure doesn’t cause autism is the MMR vaccine.
- mother of a kid with autism

I'm not an antivaxxer, but let me play devil's advocate: the study you cited describes itself as a "retrospective cohort study" (rather than a prospective, double-blind, placebo-controlled study like the kind you often see in the drug-approval process). It also seems like it doesn't test vaccinated vs. unvaccinated but instead tests kids who got one particular vaccine (MMR) against those who did not. You could imagine an RFK acolyte say, "show me a placebo-controlled test where some of the kids were vaccinated and the rest weren't." What's the answer to that? Is it that that study has already been done? Is it that it hasn't been done but it's not worth doing? Is it that that study could be informative but would be unethical? Is it that that's a good idea and we should do it if it'll allay concerns?

It doesn’t appear that you are an expert in evidence based medicine. I don’t consider myself to be one either, but I did a residency in evidence based internal medicine at ucsf and there is way too much boring info I could spout about the merits and feasibility of different types of studies for different situations. I reviewed the “autism” link as a case study during my residency and I can tell you that many many smarter people than myself looked into it and agree that it’s a load of horses&$t and there is no need to squander more time or money on this. It deserves as much merit as the theory that has long prevented Pakistan from eradicating polio - that the polio vaccine was deployed by the CIA as a means to sterilize Muslim men. That theory resulted in 20k cases of polio a year in the 90’s.

And you can trust me, I’m an mit grad, and obviously a genius who is qualified to be an ATC. Actually only the first part is true.

I'm the poster you responded to. Thanks for the civil and interesting response. You're 100% correct that I'm not an expert in evidence-based medicine (or any kind of medicine), and, not to belabor the point, I'm also not an antivaxxer. But I think your message hits the nail on the head with what I'm grappling with: there are (I assume) as you point out a lot of ways to design a study. I certainly haven't read the autism-vaccine studies, and I'm definitely not questioning their conclusions. But is a foreign retrospective study without a vaccine-free control group really the most rigorous study we have that exists? (I'm not saying it is; I don't know!) If it is (or is at least close to it), then asking for a more rigorous study strikes me as... somewhat less crazy than I might have assumed?

I get your point that smart people have looked at this and said this has been conclusively proven. I'm not disputing that.

Here is a primer on evidence based medicine.

https://www.mwc.com.br/files/Williams%5BA769%5D%20-%20Understanding%20EBM.pdf

The PP who said it would be unethical to do the gold standard study, a double blind placebo controlled RCT, is correct. You cannot perform a double blind study in which half the babies are given placebo and half are given MMR for many reasons that I’m sure you understand. If you don’t, please reply and I will lay it out.

The loophole that doctors often used for this moral impasse, was to just pack their stuff and do the studies in developing countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, where people were not so fussy about medical malfeasance and informed consent. In India, a trial came under scrutiny because infants were being randomized between groups that got placebo vs a proven safe rotavirus vaccine.

The original Wakefield study looked at 8 children with GI symptoms from intestinal inflammation, who were diagnosed with autism 1 month after MMR vaccine, and concluded that there was a link between autism and vaccination. However, since autism diagnoses often occur at the same age that kids are vaccinated, it would be impossible not to see a coincidence. The Wakefield study is akin to showing that the second dose of MMR, typically given between ages 4-6, causes children’s front teeth to fall out and new ones to grow in their places.

You can read more about the flaws in the 8 person Wakefield study here

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2908388/

One of the best ways to study if there is a link between an exposure and an outcome is to do a cohort study - a study that follows a cohort of patients and follows them over time for certain outcomes. By keeping track of other variables like maternal age, paternal age, ethnicity, birth weight, gestational age, ses status, siblings with autism, environmental exposures, vaccinations, childhood illnesses etc, you can control for those variables and see if any of them show correlation with the outcome. There have been many cohort studies involving a total of well over 1 million children that show no correlation.

Also, there was a meta-analysis, which is the gold standard of looking at multiple studies and using data analysis to create more accurate conclusions and stronger evidence by pooling the number of patients and reducing the margin of error.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24814559/

Here is a list of cohort and case control studies

https://www.autismspeaks.org/do-vaccines-cause-autism

The sheer number of studies on this topic that have been done to allay irrational fears is already wasteful. We didn’t need so many studies when one involving 500k kids as opposed to 8 should have been sufficient.

Something is causing autism. It’s not vaccines.

I'm the OP you responded to. I am familiar with all of-- and do not disagree with any of-- the arguments that you made. That said, I can also imagine a parent saying, "sure, but the approval of a new drug requires typically requires a prospective, randomized, blinded study design; I want that for my kid's shots." You can argue that the parent is wrong-- and, yeah, i get the ethical concerns-- but I think you'll agree that the merits of that view really boil down to a matter of values rather than cold hard science.

I don’t think parents who are refusing vaccinations are familiar with the merits of random double blind placebo controlled studies vs single blind studies vs prospective cohort studies vs retrospective case control studies. If they were, they would understand. It’s just math. The anti vax parents think that they are smarter than the 99.999% of physicians and epidemiologists who are advising them to vaccinate their kids based on decades of research and their tens of thousands of hours of study and clinical work. A randomized controlled trial will not convince them when even the unnecessary death of their own child won’t change their mind.

[Anonymous]

Outbreaks are growing and spreading to Alaska, California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.


Measles outbreaks in West Texas and New Mexico are now up to more than 250 cases, and two unvaccinated people have died from measles-related causes.

https://apnews.com/article/measles-outbreak-texas-new-mexico-vaccine-rfk-d5444b3397ac7c4034e63becc219aa33

[Anonymous]

For those who think vaccination should be left up to individual choice, this is where you put babies and children at risk who are too young to be fully vaccinated.

A mother gave birth at a TX hospital but it was not realized until she was in active labor that she had measles. With a disease that is as contagious as measles - airborne, lingers in the air for hours after the infected person has departed, everyone in that shared unit airspace (which depends on how the HVAC is designed) or even admitted to the same waiting room, triage room, delivery room, within a couple hours, or in a room that shares airspace even if divided by walls, is at risk. On an L&D unit, that means newborns who are too young to get the vaccine.

Multiple newborn babies are getting IV immunoglobulin to protect them because of their exposure.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna196519?fbclid=PAY2xjawJCpzhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABpgpExcgW_jlWh-ddb6OtpfX3fvep51szSS7qpRJj_SgUHvOMD38_xN3-3Q_aem_6Lx0Am_jhqP0O84vSiU0Vg

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For those who think vaccination should be left up to individual choice, this is where you put babies and children at risk who are too young to be fully vaccinated.

A mother gave birth at a TX hospital but it was not realized until she was in active labor that she had measles. With a disease that is as contagious as measles - airborne, lingers in the air for hours after the infected person has departed, everyone in that shared unit airspace (which depends on how the HVAC is designed) or even admitted to the same waiting room, triage room, delivery room, within a couple hours, or in a room that shares airspace even if divided by walls, is at risk. On an L&D unit, that means newborns who are too young to get the vaccine.

Multiple newborn babies are getting IV immunoglobulin to protect them because of their exposure.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna196519?fbclid=PAY2xjawJCpzhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABpgpExcgW_jlWh-ddb6OtpfX3fvep51szSS7qpRJj_SgUHvOMD38_xN3-3Q_aem_6Lx0Am_jhqP0O84vSiU0Vg

What a waste.
And Texans are following RFK’s advice to just take vitamin A and not seek medical attention.
Mind boggling stupid.

[Anonymous]

Sucks but we win the Darwin award now.

[Anonymous]

People don't ask older people what it was like when everyone got measles and chickenpox. They think they know better.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This study will be a real example of fraud waste and abuse since there are already dozens of studies showing there is no link between vaccines and autism.

The validity of these studies are in question. You cannot trust the manufacturers or those who directly financially benefit from the products to be able to do an unbiased study.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1124634/

No one serious is questioning the validity of those studies. At this point the only thing that we are sure doesn’t cause autism is the MMR vaccine.
- mother of a kid with autism

I'm not an antivaxxer, but let me play devil's advocate: the study you cited describes itself as a "retrospective cohort study" (rather than a prospective, double-blind, placebo-controlled study like the kind you often see in the drug-approval process). It also seems like it doesn't test vaccinated vs. unvaccinated but instead tests kids who got one particular vaccine (MMR) against those who did not. You could imagine an RFK acolyte say, "show me a placebo-controlled test where some of the kids were vaccinated and the rest weren't." What's the answer to that? Is it that that study has already been done? Is it that it hasn't been done but it's not worth doing? Is it that that study could be informative but would be unethical? Is it that that's a good idea and we should do it if it'll allay concerns?

It doesn’t appear that you are an expert in evidence based medicine. I don’t consider myself to be one either, but I did a residency in evidence based internal medicine at ucsf and there is way too much boring info I could spout about the merits and feasibility of different types of studies for different situations. I reviewed the “autism” link as a case study during my residency and I can tell you that many many smarter people than myself looked into it and agree that it’s a load of horses&$t and there is no need to squander more time or money on this. It deserves as much merit as the theory that has long prevented Pakistan from eradicating polio - that the polio vaccine was deployed by the CIA as a means to sterilize Muslim men. That theory resulted in 20k cases of polio a year in the 90’s.

And you can trust me, I’m an mit grad, and obviously a genius who is qualified to be an ATC. Actually only the first part is true.

I'm the poster you responded to. Thanks for the civil and interesting response. You're 100% correct that I'm not an expert in evidence-based medicine (or any kind of medicine), and, not to belabor the point, I'm also not an antivaxxer. But I think your message hits the nail on the head with what I'm grappling with: there are (I assume) as you point out a lot of ways to design a study. I certainly haven't read the autism-vaccine studies, and I'm definitely not questioning their conclusions. But is a foreign retrospective study without a vaccine-free control group really the most rigorous study we have that exists? (I'm not saying it is; I don't know!) If it is (or is at least close to it), then asking for a more rigorous study strikes me as... somewhat less crazy than I might have assumed?

I get your point that smart people have looked at this and said this has been conclusively proven. I'm not disputing that.

Here is a primer on evidence based medicine.

https://www.mwc.com.br/files/Williams%5BA769%5D%20-%20Understanding%20EBM.pdf

The PP who said it would be unethical to do the gold standard study, a double blind placebo controlled RCT, is correct. You cannot perform a double blind study in which half the babies are given placebo and half are given MMR for many reasons that I’m sure you understand. If you don’t, please reply and I will lay it out.

The loophole that doctors often used for this moral impasse, was to just pack their stuff and do the studies in developing countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, where people were not so fussy about medical malfeasance and informed consent. In India, a trial came under scrutiny because infants were being randomized between groups that got placebo vs a proven safe rotavirus vaccine.

The original Wakefield study looked at 8 children with GI symptoms from intestinal inflammation, who were diagnosed with autism 1 month after MMR vaccine, and concluded that there was a link between autism and vaccination. However, since autism diagnoses often occur at the same age that kids are vaccinated, it would be impossible not to see a coincidence. The Wakefield study is akin to showing that the second dose of MMR, typically given between ages 4-6, causes children’s front teeth to fall out and new ones to grow in their places.

You can read more about the flaws in the 8 person Wakefield study here

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2908388/

One of the best ways to study if there is a link between an exposure and an outcome is to do a cohort study - a study that follows a cohort of patients and follows them over time for certain outcomes. By keeping track of other variables like maternal age, paternal age, ethnicity, birth weight, gestational age, ses status, siblings with autism, environmental exposures, vaccinations, childhood illnesses etc, you can control for those variables and see if any of them show correlation with the outcome. There have been many cohort studies involving a total of well over 1 million children that show no correlation.

Also, there was a meta-analysis, which is the gold standard of looking at multiple studies and using data analysis to create more accurate conclusions and stronger evidence by pooling the number of patients and reducing the margin of error.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24814559/

Here is a list of cohort and case control studies

https://www.autismspeaks.org/do-vaccines-cause-autism

The sheer number of studies on this topic that have been done to allay irrational fears is already wasteful. We didn’t need so many studies when one involving 500k kids as opposed to 8 should have been sufficient.

Something is causing autism. It’s not vaccines.

I'm the OP you responded to. I am familiar with all of-- and do not disagree with any of-- the arguments that you made. That said, I can also imagine a parent saying, "sure, but the approval of a new drug requires typically requires a prospective, randomized, blinded study design; I want that for my kid's shots." You can argue that the parent is wrong-- and, yeah, i get the ethical concerns-- but I think you'll agree that the merits of that view really boil down to a matter of values rather than cold hard science.

I don’t think parents who are refusing vaccinations are familiar with the merits of random double blind placebo controlled studies vs single blind studies vs prospective cohort studies vs retrospective case control studies. If they were, they would understand. It’s just math. The anti vax parents think that they are smarter than the 99.999% of physicians and epidemiologists who are advising them to vaccinate their kids based on decades of research and their tens of thousands of hours of study and clinical work. A randomized controlled trial will not convince them when even the unnecessary death of their own child won’t change their mind.

+1. I hate to say it, but the only way out of this is going to be death, more resurgence of childhood disease, and maybe public health measures that people find unacceptable. I also think unvaccinated children are eventually going to be shunned and kept out of dance studios, sports leagues, play groups, etc., etc. We have a few years before that happens though.