Facts, not Fantasy

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

The Vaccine Times: There isn’t a single study on the cumulative effects of……

A very interesting post recently at The Vaccine Times reporting on an early result from a study.  I highly suggest you check out the linked Steve Novella link as well.  This is from a neurologist, and the study results are about neurology after all!  Just be glad the science takes a rigorous approach and actually comes to defensible conclusions about the world around us as opposed to finger pointing and wild speculation.
Recently a new study came out which suggested that changes to the brains of autistic children might be detectable as early as 6 months of age. Steve Novella has covered this particular study at his Neurologica blog so there is no need to repeat what he said there. Predictably, the anti-vaccination crowd has come out restating their belief that vaccinations are still to blame. Now, to be fair nothing in this study proves that vaccines cannot cause, or have any effect on, autism. All it says is that it may be possible to notice differences in the brain as early as 6 months of age, and even at that it does not provide a diagnostic tool, due to its size (92 infants) and limitations. It certainly points to an interesting direction, but I do not believe any strong conclusions can be drawn from it.
If the results can be replicated in larger studies though, it would certainly lay to rest one of the myths about vaccines and autism, namely the one that maintains that vaccines given at or around the age of 2 cause autism, i.e. it would exonerate the MMR vaccine for example. But that is not what I wish to deal with today. What I do wish to deal with today is the common anti-vaccine conundrum that “there isn’t a single study on the cumulative effects of vaccines on (fill in the blank)“. You will always hear this from the anti-vaccine crowd, especially when the topic of autism is being discussed. Superficially it seems to make sense, after all if we’re giving vaccines to children why shouldn’t we test if in the cumulative they cause autism?
The problem is, of course, that there are thousands of afflictions that one could choose to blame vaccines for, and then turn around and ask why a cumulative study of the effects of the vaccination schedule on that particular affliction has not been done. The list could include, but not be limited to:
  • Nearsightedness
  • Farsightedness
  • Cancer (all types)
  • Diabetes
  • Bone breakage
  • Deafness
  • Blindness
  • Heart problems
  • Lung problems
  • Kidney failure
  • and on, and on, and on
I wish to be clear that I do not mean to make light of the seriousness of autism as a disorder. The point is that we could pick literally hundreds of things to blame on vaccines and demand cumulative studies to be done, and maintain the vaccines are to blame until said studies are done, effectively perpetually moving the goal post so that vaccines are never considered “good enough”. Even the most strident anti-vaccine activist has to concede that research money is limited and we cannot possibly run studies about everything, so a certain level of plausibility must be established before studies of this magnitude are to be undertaken.

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