Anonymous wrote:You guys really are trying to relive the glory days of Covid aren't you? The rush you got when you get to tell other people what to do...
Who’s telling anyone what to do?
No one.
+1 Feel free to get all of the previously eliminated infectious diseases you like.
Anonymous wrote:You guys really are trying to relive the glory days of Covid aren't you? The rush you got when you get to tell other people what to do...
DP and I am absolutely not. At this point it's incredibly clear that there's a portion of the populace who are determined to reject science and common sense. These people are making a choice to risk their children's lives and health. And they only way that will change is the experience of enough illness and death in children that they are wiling to once again assume a very, very small amount risk in order to protect their children from illness and death.
The amount of kids (who survive) that are going to be estranged from their wackadoo parents in 20-25 years is going to be off the charts.
Anonymous wrote:You guys really are trying to relive the glory days of Covid aren't you? The rush you got when you get to tell other people what to do...
Pour yourself another glass of unpasteurized milk!!
Anonymous wrote:Unvaxxed people by choice should not be able to get medical help. They endanger others. You can’t accept medical expertise at the end if you dont at the beginning. And I’m not sorry for this opinion.
Drink your bleach. Eat tide pods. Pray it away. Whatever. But no hospital for you. ESPECIALLY when families like this then criticize medical personnel for not doing enough to save their kid. Buddy YOU DIDNT DO ENOUGH. It is YOU that killed your child.
People say things like this and posture like they're dispensing tough love. They're not. Here's how you know: there are lots of things that are endanger public health that we tolerate and celebrate that have *zero* upside. Junk food. Recreational drug use. Sedentary lifestyles. As to people who recklessly overindulge in these, no one suggests withholding medical care--and for good reason; it's totally ghoulish.
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.
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.
I am sure you're well intentioned, but is this actually true? I cannot imagine that, in a study for the approval of, say, an MMR vaccine, they would withhold, say, the polio vaccine. Removing multiple shots to determine the safety and efficacy of just one of them would pretty obviously be a confounding variable, no?
(One note: I recognize that anti-vaxxers would probably try to jiujitsu this into saying that this distinction means there has not been a study showing the relative health of totally vaccinated children vs totally unvaccinated children. But of course the purpose of these studies isn't to anticipate and refute the arguments of people with a particular agenda.)
The first MMR was approved in the 60’s after a series of clinical trials. The patients were divided into three group - vaccine, vaccine plus immunoglobulin (this was done because the incidence of fever was not uncommon with attenuated virus vaccines), and placebo plus immunoglobulin, and natural infection. Studies were also done in Nigeria.
The CDC is not responsible for placating irrational anti vaxxers by wasting money on studies that are not indicated. Having a layperson come in and say, what about totally unvaxxed vs blah blah blah should not drive what type of studies are done. I am furious that we are allocating time and money to study autism and vaccines. We may as well put time and money to investigating the four humors or whether earth, air, water, and fire are truly the four elements.
I am not sure what you mean by saying the polio vaccine is a confounding variable. Are you saying that you want to see studies of kids who just have MMR and no other vaccine vs unvaxxed? That is unethical since the polio vaccine was developed before MMR, and it is unethical to withhold a proven lifesaving vaccine for the purpose of a study. We are truly lucky that smallpox was eradicated before anti vaxxers invented themselves.
There are many poignant stories from the current and past measles outbreak in the U.S. about three generations of family members brought together in the icu by measles - the unvaccinated child intubated with pneumonia, the parents who chose not to vaccinate their child, and the distraught grandparents who suffered through measles themselves and did not hesitate to vaccinate their children, now parents of a child afflicted with measles.
Alright, we're on the same page. I thought you were suggesting that the MMR vaccine was tested in an approval process that involved a totally unvaccinated control group. If the goal is to test the MMR vaccine specifically against the population as a whole, I'm not sure why one would do that. As you note, that means that the existing MMR test wouldn't really test the (non)relationship of vaccines as a broad category with autism. And as you note, the scientific consensus is that there is nothing to see there and that it would be unethical to conduct such a test. (Now whether thats the views of our newfound policymakers I guess is another story...What strange times we live in.)
We are not on the same page. I don’t think you understand that no one was studying a potential link between any type of vaccination and autism in the 1960’s. There was no need to look for a control group of vaccine naive patients rather than measles vaccine naive patients.
And I don’t think you are familiar with the history of vaccines, otherwise you would realize how improbable it would be to perform a study like the one you suggest. Before the first smallpox vaccine was even invented, George Washington mandated inoculation of the Continental Army against smallpox. The U.S. made smallpox vaccine compulsory in many parts of the U.S. in the 1800’s. The smallpox vaccine was discontinued in the U.S. in the early 1970’s, after it was declared eradicated in the U.S. Presumably, many if not all of the kids in the 1960 study were vaccinated for smallpox.
There is no need to perform a study like the one you are contemplating. We already have multiple studies showing no link, and while rct’s are the gold standard, the number and quality of studies showing no link far outweigh any one RCT. It’s as if you looked back and said, I think there is a link between near sightedness and babies getting erythromycin ointment at birth, let’s make a control group for babies who don’t get erythromycin. It’s not going to happen and there is no biological plausibility to hang a hat on.
I understand everything you said and agree with it with one qualification: the notion that "[t]here is no need to perform a study like the one [we] are contemplating." To be sure, I am not suggesting that there *is* a need; I am simply noting that *whether* there is a need is a subjective determination. If a lot of parents *think* a rct would shed additional light on the topic (even if it does not), and if conducting such a study reduces vaccine hesitancy, I think a reasonable mind could conclude a study is worth doing.
Your point about erythromycin is an odd one because it has gone through multiple placebo-controlled, double-blind RCTs, I believe. Is your point that regressive autism wasn't an end point? If so, isn't that fairly obviously explained by the fact that it doesn't have the same (infamous) history of people (even incorrectly!) positing a link?
Recreational drug use isn't, either, but when you jeopardize other lives doing it (e g, intoxicated driving), you face penalties and can be arrested.
C'mon, PP. You know the difference. It's not just about making bags choices -- it's about making bad choices that put others at immediate clear risks. This isn't punishment for making bad choices, but it is instead protecting people from the immediate risks from those choices.
Anonymous wrote:You guys really are trying to relive the glory days of Covid aren't you? The rush you got when you get to tell other people what to do...
What guys are you speaking to moron. If I remember correctly it was your dumpy guy telling everyone what to do.
Recreational drug use isn't, either, but when you jeopardize other lives doing it (e g, intoxicated driving), you face penalties and can be arrested.
C'mon, PP. You know the difference. It's not just about making bags choices -- it's about making bad choices that put others at immediate clear risks. This isn't punishment for making bad choices, but it is instead protecting people from the immediate risks from those choices.
Being anti-vaccine is not contagious either. I think what you mean to say is that there is not the same degree of negative externalities that result from a drug user as there are from an antivaxxer. I am not defending antivaxxers, but that is simply wrong. Having a friend that does meth makes that person's friends far likelier to get addicted to meth.
Recreational drug use isn't, either, but when you jeopardize other lives doing it (e g, intoxicated driving), you face penalties and can be arrested.
C'mon, PP. You know the difference. It's not just about making bags choices -- it's about making bad choices that put others at immediate clear risks. This isn't punishment for making bad choices, but it is instead protecting people from the immediate risks from those choices.
Being anti-vaccine is not contagious either. I think what you mean to say is that there is not the same degree of negative externalities that result from a drug user as there are from an antivaxxer. I am not defending antivaxxers, but that is simply wrong. Having a friend that does meth makes that person's friends far likelier to get addicted to meth.
You know we vaccinate against contagious diseases, right?
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