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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why not research autism seriously instead of just going on feelings about vaccines? Or would that get too close to researching female health? Wouldn't want to do that!!![/quote]

It's not coming from vaccines.  Inducing immune response in young children simply doesn't do it otherwise we would see autism rates increase in different countries based on when they started vaccinating their kids.  And it doesn't line up that way.  It lines up with improvements in diagnosis.

Kids that we used to think were just dumb turned out to be autistic.  Like Forrest Gump.

I am not a doctor but I have a dozen doctors in the family and they all vaccinate their kids.
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This is well intentioned, but it is borderline disinformation in my opinion.

You can say that vaccines don’t cause autism, and I’d agree with that. But you’re insinuating (1) that doctors keep up with the medical research—they mostly don’t, and lots of good research never gets done—and (2) that any hypothesized link between the immune system and autism is bunk. That proposition is wrong. As a few datapoints:

• some emerging research suggests that autism can result where maternal autoantibodies attack proteins in the mom that are needed for fetal neural development (e.g., CRMP1 and CRMP2).

• mice models of autism are sometimes approximated by taking genetically modified mice and activating the mother mouse’s immune system.

• research suggests that people with autism have higher circulating levels of interleukine 6, a protein used in immune response.

• even controlling for confounding variables like antibiotic administration, ear infections in infancy are associated with an elevated risk of autism later in life. One plausible connection is that infections obviously involve an immune response.

• machine learning models have recently found patterns of altered species of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and archaea in the gut of people with autism. Gut composition influences immune response.

Again, I agree that vaccines do not cause autism. But there is a public health danger in stigmatizing legitimate discourse around the relationship between immunology and autism. Keyboard warriors who think they’re quasi-scientists simply because they hate RFK and who paint with too broad a brushstroke risk creating a culture where researchers will conclude it’s simply too fraught to look into the relationship between autism and the immune system. [/quote]

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