A 2006 paper reported that autism rates have started to decline, according to a California reporting system and a nationwide one. The declines, you will see if you look, are very clear. They started soon after mercury began to be removed from childhood vaccines. Richard Herrnstein, the psychologist, coined a useful phrase: to praise with faint damn. I thought of it when I read comments (here and here) criticizing this study because of the journal it is in.
According to the Sacramento Bee,
Experts said, however, that they don’t know what’s causing the numbers to fall off.
“Perhaps whatever caused (the number of cases) to go up … is no longer present,” said Dr. Robert Hendren, executive director of the University of California, Davis MIND Institute, which researches neurodevelopmental disorders.
No kidding.
They do more than criticize it for the journal it’s in (which seems low-rent even by inspection). They criticize it because of the lack of peer review, cite shoddy methods, and provided more recent data. How can you read this and still be indignant at the vaccine makers?
The reality is, this is a 2006 paper, from even earlier data. If there was anything to it, the trend would have continued and it would be all of the news, and vaccine makers would be hauled off to court in droves.
So tell us, what is Big Pharma doing to hide the True drop in autism cases that has occurred because of the removal of that nefarious chemical thimerasol?
NE1,
To answer your question: I don’t know. Perhaps you have read “The Emperor’s New Clothes”?
Do you have an alternative explanation of the declines?
I really can’t imagine why anyone would question the integrity or reliability of the pharmaceutical industry. Their record of honesty and transparency is unassailable. I am certain that if they had any information regarding the safety or danger of any of their products, they would move heaven and earth to reveal that information immediately. And skepticism about their motives is clearly unwarranted and unfair.
“Do you have an alternative explanation of the declines?”
Why do you trust these authors?
You are stepping into the middle of a very politicized situation without knowing the history or the players.
I think an alternative explanation of the adverse events data (figs 1 and 2) is pretty easy. they’re using an exceptionally poor sample that is subject to a bias that, i would predict, would mimic their results. the data set is one maintained be the cdc and contains adverse events reported to the cdc following vaccinations. some adverse events are legally required to be reported (as the authors note), but most are not. Autism is not required to be reported, and i didn’t see that the authors mention this (but i only skimmed the paper). medical professionals are rather busy and reluctant to report things that are actually legally mandated, let alone optional. Further, the other adverse events that are required to be reported are things like anaphalaxis (see https://vaers.hhs.gov/pdf/ReportableEventsTable.pdf) which happen almost instantly after immunization. So this raises the questions of what physician in his/her right mind submits non-mandatory adverse events information about a vaccine many years after that vaccine was given. physicians who are already convinced that vaccines cause autism. why did the number increase over the late 90′s? likely because 1 or 2 physicians became increasingly convinced of the link and began reporting it. why did it decline after use of thimerisol stopped? because they were convinced of the link and therefore stopped reported their cases after thimerisol use stopped.
i actually don’t know anything about the CDDS data, but it also seems to be self-report and is probably non-mandatory and could be subject to any manner of reporting bias. i also recall seeing data presented at a meeting a few years ago from an autism study in california that did not show this trend at all. further, if my memory is correct, japan switched off thimerosol before the US did and didn’t see any decline.
you seemed to indicate the NYT acted inappropriately in not reporting the results of this article. but a cursory glance at the first half of the data indicates an analysis so flawed that they would have been (rightly) ridiculed had they reported it.
Perhaps you have access to this article and can review it for us.
“Thimerosal Disappears but Autism Remains”
Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2008;65(1):15-16.
Rich, thanks for the alternative explanation. I don’t find it plausible that the reduction in cases occurred because 1 or 2 physicians stopped reporting their cases after thimerosol stopped. Of course the measurements are flawed; all measurements are.
SusanJ, thanks for the citation. I’m going to wait to see what people who know more about this than me say. I do have one comment, however: The author has apparently received a lot of money from pharmaceutical companies for defending them in court. He tried to downplay this by including a lot of irrelevant detail in his financial disclosure, including the statement “None of his research has ever been funded by the pharmaceutical industry.” He is far from unbiassed — yet he tried to appear so. Not a good sign.
If you are worried about the credibility of the author of the Arch Gen Psychiatry article, then you should do a bit more research about the Geiers before betting on their horse. There is a wealth of research showing no association between thimerosal and autism. It would be difficult to dismiss all that research as being big pharma funded and useless.
In a recent court case (Blackwell v. Sigma Aldrich, Inc. et al. (Circuit Court for Baltimore City, Case No. 24-C-04-004829)), the Court held that
“The 2004 IOM Committee found that ‘[e]pidemiological studies examining TCVs and autism, including three controlled observation studies (Hviid et al., 2003; Miller, 2004; Verstraeten, et al. 2003) and two uncontrolled observational studies (Madsen, et al., 2003; Stehr-Green, et al., 2003), consistently provided evidence of no association between TCVs and autism, despite the fact that these studies utilized different methods and examined different populations (in Sweden, Denmark, the United States and the United Kingdom).’ ”
The Court also had harsh words for Mark Geier:
“Dr. Geier is not qualified by his knowledge, skill, experience, training or education to render the opinions he proffers in this case… [T]his Court does not find that there exists a sufficient factual basis to support [Dr. Geier’s] proffered testimony…”
and
“Dr. Geier’s epidemiological studies purporting to show an association between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism were not conducted in accordance with generally accepted epidemiological methods.”
“…Dr. Geier’s methodology of differential diagnosis is fundamentally flawed, because he improperly “rules in” thimerosal as a potential cause of autism, and he cannot rule out the high likelihood that autism in any given individual was caused purely by genetic factors that do not require an environmental trigger.”
You should browse the archives of https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/.
If you want to see bias, the Geiers are your men.
Seth,
As SusanJ points out, you really need to do your homework as the various actors of this tragedy have various angles to this.
It is easy to say that big pharma is trying to hide something. However, I am overly skeptical of this type of conspiracy. To get a better perspective, I went to a presentation of Eric Fombonne (McGill) and he has shown (with peer-reviewed publications) in Canadian studies that the removal of mercury in vaccines has not changed the numbers of cases in autism. His point is simple, tax-payers money in every country is somehow diverted in these type of statistical exercises even though other stats in other countries have shown it was negative. He has also shown that the change in the definition of autism from DSM-II to DSM-IV has changed the number of kids diagnosed with the disease but going back to 1970′s and recategorizing some of the diagnostics, one eventually gets about the same number : 1/166 kids is affecting with the disease.
So it is easy to see a jump into some epidemics bandwagon if most of the people you used to put in different categories now fall into this new autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Now, the worst thing that I think is really happening is that this diagnosis of ASD comes generally very late and that there is no simple way to find out that there is something wrong. As somebody asked me once, “so what, you learn your kid has ASD, there is no cure, it doesn’t matter if you learn about it sooner rather than later”. It so happens that ASD is actually a very broad term and it includes, it seems, about three different subgroups (still not very well defined). One group has major problems and our current health care system will have to take care of them for a long time. For the rest two other groups, it looks as though by aiming at the capabilities that are missing that some type of re-education program does OK. Please note that there is not even a substantial work on the evolution of the disease/condition as witnessed by the inability to interpret well the graphs we studied here:
https://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/09/redoing_venn_di.html
https://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/10/venn_diagram_ch.html
https://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/10/venn_diagram_ch_1.html
Your interest in rigorous self-experimentation is exactly what families should go through in order to see the things that work and the ones that do not.
For instance, in the detection of autism, we already know that the cranial perimeter of the infant goes above the 95 percentile for the first two years of his life (with a specific jump in the first six month). How come there is no universal way of measuring the head perimeter of infants ? Also, some groups have dedicated psychologists going through hours of family movies to see if, at the age of 6 months, one could already see something amiss (generally it’s the eye tracking business). Hence how come more money is not spent on having an automated system that evaluates this condition right on the spot instead of doing it 3 years later when people are seeking a diagnosis. Not only could it be used for diagnosis but more importantly it could be used to assess the day-to-day effects of the therapy.
One more thing, I think it is unfair to say that if you are funded by big pharma your studies are suspicious. If you make your data available and do the peer-reviewed thing, I don’t see how the funding affects the findings and subsequent re-analysis of it by others.
Igor.
Igor, thanks for your comment. There is one thing I don’t understand. You write: “tax-payers money in every country is somehow diverted in these type of statistical exercises even though other stats in other countries have shown it was negative.” I think I understand the first part of the sentence about taxpayer’s money but certainly don’t understand what you mean by “even though other stats in other countries have shown it was negative.” What’s “it”?
Seth,
In all developed countries, the same rumors about the vaccine causing autism have abounded and in every country, local governments had to fund the same studies using their own data to eventually come to the same conclusion. The “it” was referring to the statement “vaccine cause autism”.
One more note in case I was not clear, the head perimeter study from Couchesnes and the less “peer-reviewed” studies on family movies are pointing to an autistic syndrome that was already there from birth. It so happens that the disease is so badly detected/diagnosed that the first time people worry about it, is when their kids don’t start speaking at about 2-3 years old. It so happens that this is also the time when some vaccines are being innoculated thereby producing this never ending wave of “mercury causes autism”. Let me also state that I am clearly not saying that vaccines are not exarcerbating a condition that was already there. If there is, the studies have shown it is not a mercury issue.
Igor.
This looks to be a good starting point explaining why the study by Dr. Amy Holmes has been discredited.
https://photoninthedarkness.com/?p=142