Study finds no association between autism and vaccination

I wonder how critics of the vaccine-autism hypothesis respond to the fact that the exponential growth of vaccines appears to parallel the exponential growth of not only autism, but also allergies, autoimmune diseases, and cancer, thus resulting in astronomic improbabilities, which raise vexing questions about the potential pathogenicity and iatrogenicity of Big Pharma’s sacred cash cow - vaccines.

In response to Sam Lewis: The Danish study which is widely quoted to dismiss MMR vaccine as a cause of autism (Madsen et al. NEJM 347:1477, 2002) found an excess of 2 ASD cases per 10,000 MMR-vaccinated children compared with children who never received MMR. These were children born between 1991 and 1998 when the overall prevalence of ASD in Denmark was 14 per 10,000 children. In follow-up letters the article was severely criticized (NEJM 348:951, 2003). One was written by the distinguished epidemiologist, Walter Spitzer, who suggested that a relative risk of 4-fold in a vulnerable subgroup could have been masked by the study's methods.
A cross-sectional study by Gallagher suggests that neonatal hepatitis B vaccination triples the risk of autism in boys (J Toxicol Env Health A 73:1665, 2010).
These are the kinds of numbers that led to my view that vaccines have not been properly excluded as a cause of autism and my casual guess that any autism risk reliably attributed to a vaccine or vaccines is likely to be less than 5%. Perhaps I should have said less than 1% or 2%.
The Pandemrix-narcolepsy parallel puts this in perspective. In Finland receipt of the vaccine increased the risk of narcolepsy 13-fold in children and young people aged 4 to 19 years, and caused one case for every 16,000 doses in this age group. (Nohynek et al. PLoS One 2012; 2012:e33536). The association might never have come to light without astute clinical observations and attention to vulnerable subgroups.

It is very easy to indulge in such rhetoric but the voices of those damaged by vaccines and their families should also have a right to be heard.

Moreover, this kind of rhetoric - of which we have had far too much - papers over important issues, such as whether vaccines are as safe as they should be, and how far it is reasonable to expand the programme.

After the last week of bullying, empty rhetoric of this kind in media I am very fed up.

My guess is that if any responsibility for autism is ever assigned to vaccines by a high-quality epidemiologic study the attributable risk will be less than 5%. Of course, even if only 1% of autism is reliably attributed to vaccines this would terrify the vaccine establishment and the general public. Consequently, the CDC and academic pediatricians, mostly funded by the manufacturers, churn out low quality studies that show "...no association between vaccines and autism." These studies produce sound bites that are publicized in newspapers, television and the internet as antidotes to the questions and assertions of vaccine skeptics. In the latest article by DeStefano et. al.there is not much raw data, but they get their conclusions from odds ratios derived by conditional logistic regression models. For autism or ASD with regression their tables show odds ratios with confidence intervals between 0.31 and 5.72. This means that vaccine antigens might decrease risk by 69% or increase risk by 472% or somewhere in between.

Meanwhile, evidence for the Pandemrix-narcolepsy link continues to accumulate. For young children the risk is 10 to 15-fold, and we have just learned that some risk extends to adults age 40. We have also seen the devastating effects of vaccine-induced narcolepsy reported in the Swedish and British press. The vaccine adjuvant AS03 appears to be the big causal factor in these cases, which are clear examples of vaccine-induced autoimmune disease.

We don't hear much about Pandemrix-narcolepsy in the U.S., but the CDC and other members of our vaccine industry must find it worrying from a public relations point of view since it is a tangible example of the negative and non-specific effects vaccines sometimes have on our immune systems. Autism also has an autoimmune component, and the DeStefano article may be part of industry's response to this concern.

I am not against vaccines in general, but I don't think industry and public health officials have been honest about risks and benefits.