One of the topics that comes up over and over online is “The Amish don’t vaccinate” and “the Amish don’t have autism”. Both statements are incorrect. The Amish have no religious prohibition against vaccination and they do have autism.
The question of autism amongst the Amish has been studied and is being presented [...]
The Vaccine War has aired. Judging by the responses, one might consider it a success. Pro vaccine groups like Every Child By Two were telling people to watch it. The Autism Science Foundation “highly recommends” watching it. On the other side, the organizations represented by the Age of Autism [...]
I’ve posted a few pieces on the work of Prof. Peter Bearman recently. I mentioned his work on vaccines and autism in one post but the lecture was not one that could be embedded and the part on vaccines is only a relatively short bit towards the end of the lecture.
So I took that [...]
Prof. Peter Bearman is a sociologist at Columbia University who has undertaken a monumental task: figure out what is behind the increase in autism prevalence. He has chosen (at least so far) to work with California Department of Developmental Services data. This dataset is no where near the “gold standard of autism epidemiological [...]
