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MMR Still Doesn’t Cause Autism (and never did)

4 Feb

Yet another study will shortly be published that yet again shows no link between autism and MMR:

There is no evidence for a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) jab and autism, finds research published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

The authors took almost 250 kids born between ’90 and ’91. 98 were ASD. 52 had special needs with no ASD. 90 had no special needs and were developing within ‘normal’ parameters. All the children had been vaccinated against MMR, but not all of them had been given both doses.

The team took blood samples and found no persistent measles infection, no abnormal immune response.

Results of the blood sample analysis showed that there was no difference in circulating measles virus or antibody levels between the two groups of children.

Tellingly, it didn’t matter which of three groups the team looked at – none of them exhibited any ‘bad blood’ whether they’d had both MMR shots or not. Or if the autistic kids had experienced regression or not.

The team further found no evidence of any kind of so-called ‘autistic enterocolitis’ – in fact no evidence of any bowel disorders of any kind were found among the autistic kids.

The alst line of the news report is very pointed:

The authors point out that theirs is now the third, and largest, study that has failed to show a link between the MMR jab and autism.

Quite.

Repeat after me – MMR doesn’t cause autism. It never did.

Awhile ago I wrote a piece on the history of the MMR hypothesis. You can read it here.

Mark Blaxill Thinks Bloggers Are Mean

4 Feb

Mark Blaxill, the token man of the mercury moms at SafeMinds, has written a lip-trembling post over on Age of Autism about how mean bloggers can be. Lets have a bit of fun with it shall we?

The rapid evolution of the Internet has created a host of fascinating, exhilarating and occasionally despicable new things. The Age of Autism is a blog and we’re proud to be a part of a new phenomenon called the blogosphere……But as one might expect with any new form of cultural expression, there’s a bizarre variant of the blogosphere out there. It’s a strange hybrid: it looks like a regular low end blog, based almost entirely on opinion, a dressed up version of the typical online discussion groups and chat rooms….In a disturbing way, this new hybrid has found its way into the debates and controversies around autism science…..Often connected with the so-called “neurodiversity” movement, many of these game players seem to define themselves by their own “autism”

So if I’m understanding Marky Mark, the blogosphere is a ‘new phenomenon’ upon which the light of the countenance of the Age of Autism has charitably fallen.

This ‘new phenomenon’ actually was first realised nine years ago Marky Mark. I await with bated breath Marky’s breathless announcement come 2017 that Age of Autism has discovered a ‘new phenomenon’ called Facebook. Truly the interweb is a wondrous thing. A piece of advice though Mark – never, ever type ‘Google’ into Google.

And these ‘low ends blogs’….my, my whomever could he be referring to? Surely not Autism Diva’s blog with a Google PR of 5 on the home page and over 1,150 Google backlinks to it? Or maybe Orac’s with a PR of 7 for the home page and which has over 6,100 Google backlinks to it? or maybe my own which has a PR 6 on the home page of the blog and over 2,700 Google backlinks to it.

Or maybe ‘low end’ might refer to a blog which has a PR of 3 on its home page and Google link operator can find no back link data for. I wonder, can anyone suggest a blog with user stats that low end?

Anyway, Marky Mark has a point to make and by god he’s eventually going to get around to making it dammit! Even if he has to rhetoricise our asses into verbal comas!!

But unlike people that engage in the blogosphere using their real names and identities, these avatars all have one thing in common.

They’re cowards.

Hmmmm, really? Is that why some people choose to blog anonymously?

I really hate to break this piece of news to Marky Mark but passing opinions online predates the web. Why go back to the old BBS’s and you’d find a whole bunch of people chatting away with (gasp!) fake names. In fact, I hear tell that some CB radio enthusiasts use fake names too!! The dirty cowards!

There’s a damn good reason why some people blog anonymously Marky Mark as I have good reason to know about – people who espouse similar views to you Marky Mark, target their children. People like John Best for example are very good reasons for preserving anonymity. Here’s what happens when one of his friends annoys him. What do you suppose he has in store for my child?

But who Marky Mark is really pouting about is Do’C and Interverbal, two bloggers who took the time out to look at a recent paper that Marky Mark was counting on to support his kook hypotheses. So annoyed by these two ‘low end’ bloggers (PR 5 on each of their blogs) that he elected to censor out the name of the blog they wrote at!

“Unfortunately, the main bloggers of [censored wackosphere site name] have taken the time to respond to almost all of the other blogs about this article

‘wackosphere’ (tee-hee!!) is the name Marky Mark has bestowed upon autism related blogs more popular than his it seems. That’s a lot of blogs.

So shocked was I at this blatant censorship that I nearly contacted the Ever So Important Editor on Age of Autism to ask if they would write a piece about this – after all they penned 10 blog entries last week decrying censorship – they must really hate it!

In fact so grasping does Marky Mark become that he actually says:

In fact, at a deeper level, there’s a widespread pattern of scientific intimidation and censorship underway in autism science that relies on a wide range of attack dogs…

Hey yeah – I know what you mean Marky Mark like what happened to Dr Paul Offit at the hands of the mercury militia:

….as Paul Offit, a vaccine expert who served on the committee, tried to make his way through the crowd, one of the protestors screamed at him through a megaphone: “The devil—it’s the devil!” One protester held a sign that read “TERRORIST” with a photo of Offit’s face. Just before Offit reached the door, a man dressed in a prison uniform grabbed Offit’s jacket. “It was harrowing,” Offit recalls.

….
He has since received hundreds of malicious and threatening emails, letters and phone calls accusing him of poisoning children and “selling out” to pharmaceutical companies. One phone caller listed the names of Offit’s two young children and the name of their school. One email contained a death threat—”I will hang you by your neck until you’re dead”—that Offit reported to federal investigators.

Or Paul Shattuck, also from the mercury militia:

One person said, “Don’t be surprised if you get a knock on your door in the middle of the night and I’ll be there.” Another message said it was easy in the age of the Internet to find out where people live.

Shattuck also had various utterly untrue allegations made about him by the NAA.

Or how about Arthur Allen and Professor Roy Grinker who have also been on the receiving end of threats of violence:

these people need to be horse whipped…

Or how about Ray Gallup, Director and co-founder of the Vaccine Autoimmune Project? here’s what he had to say recently:

Dear ****:

Since you seem to follow what is going on with the Leitch list let me know if Leitch, Deer and the others get hit with a fast moving truck or bus that leaves their carcasses mangled and bloodly on the street.

I will be devotely praying night and day that something like this happens to them and their followers. Especially since these creeps say such hurtful things to parents. They deserve all the best in something terrible happening to every last one of them and I will pray daily.

I usually pray for good things for families that suffer but in their case I will make a big exception.

Ray Gallup

Or what about this Marky Mark?

A-YEAR-and-a-half ago, a vaccines expert in the eastern US received a phone call at home. The man on the line did not identify himself; he simply stated the names and ages of the researcher’s two children and the schools they attended, then hung up. The threat was shocking, but not a surprise. “I get hate mail every day,” says the researcher, who asked not to be named.

Many vaccine scientists in the US have received similar threats in recent years. They are thought to come from a hard core of parents who, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, are convinced that small amounts of mercury in vaccines have made their children autistic. What’s more, they believe that researchers are complicit in the scandal.

How about what EoH member and mercury militia jackass Brian Hooker did to Dr Sarah Parker? He harasses her to the point her campus security services had to get involved and she sent this email to Hooker – which he proudly displayed online:

Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 14:03:17 -0600
From: Sarah Parker
Subject: Re: Sarah Parker on the show “To The Point”
To:
Cc:

I have received your phone messages (yesterday evening and today) and emails. I would like to inform you that due to your previous threat to me in November and the tone and content of these current calls and emails I consider these as threats/harassment as well and am documenting them with the campus police department. I respect your right to disagree and wish you would respect that same right with me. Please do not contact me again in the future.

Sarah Parker

How about Brad Handley of Generation rescue saying to me:

If we were on a rugby pitch, Kev, I’d put my boot in your eye and twist…

Marky Mark is quite right that there are wacko’s in the online autism community. All he has to do to find them is look to his left and right. He closes his diatribe with:

We need to defend some minimum standards for how people are permitted to participate in a public debate. At the top of the list of these standards should be this: if anyone wants to participate in a debate about autism, put your real self on the line: your real name, your actual body of work (if you have any) and your professional accomplishments and reputation. Put the things that really matter — your family’s future and your personal career prospects — out in public for everyone to see if you want to exercise the privilege of participation in civil society. If you’re willing to do that, then you have a right to be heard. If you’re not, then you should go back to your game and keep playing with yourself. Let serious people do serious work.

And he’s serious. He means it. How he:

a) Expects to set himself up as the arbiter of whats acceptable online and;
b) Expects people to be comfortable using their real names when he stands alongside the people listed above

I really can’t imagine. Believe me, if I’d known that pond scum like John Best shared a planet with me I would never have used my real identity. Its also quote clear that Mark Blaxills friends and colleagues hold no compunctions about besmirching reputations with groundless attacks and or threats of violence upon them or their children.

Look around you Marky Mark. That rarefied air you’re sucking down? Its the polluted air of the real wackosphere. A land where threats against children is fair game and where killers and paedophiles are welcomed in with no checks and open arms and the leaders of the many antivaccine kook organisations encourage and salivate after violence against anyone who disagrees with them.

The evolution of Eli Stone

1 Feb

This is a Guest Blogged piece written by new bloggers from Hollywood Spectrum.

For those who don’t know (I wish I were one of you), there is a TV show about to premiere called "Eli Stone". It was likely going to be a pretty run-of-the-mill premiere. Possibly, it was going to be a total non event.But, the plot includes autism. Not only does it include autism, but it involves a lawyer doing what has never happened in real life-he win’s a case about how mercury in vaccines caused autism in a child. This led to a number of news stories, internet discussions and blog posts.

Well, after the initial press on this, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) sent a letter to ABC/Disney asking them to pull the show since it could erode confidence in vaccines.  Somehow this was characterized as big-bad AAP trying to bully ABC/Disney.  Now, Disney is a company that has revenues of nearly $9B per quarter.  Yeah, AAP was twisting their arm by giving them free publicity.

Did anyone really believe that ABC/Disney would pull the show?  I mean, really, they just got a lot of free publicity for what was likely to be a pretty forgettable show.   How can I say this was going to be forgettable?  Because the original script was something worth forgetting.  Consider when Eli Stone visits a Chinese acupuncturist (who somehow brings about visions in Stone).  The good Dr. Chen was given such amazing lines in pigeon English as:

"You go regular doctor? Dr. Chen not MRI."

and

"I have patient, you come back half hour."

and

"No good hate dead people. Relah. Think good memory father. Dr. Chen help ungrateful son" 

OK, so, the dialogue was lame.  And, believe me, this isn’t the only example.  A whole blog post could be devoted to it, but this is an autism blog not a TV critic blog.  Maybe Dr. Chen is  supposed to be "comedy".  But, is it OK to stereotype for comedy?  If so, how about stereotyping (incorrectly) autism for drama.  Let’s look at how about the "autism" part of the script is portrayed. Here is their stage direction for the William character from the script:

William doesn’t smile. His autism doesn’t permit it.

What?!?  Autism "doesn’t permit" smiling?  So, people who smile aren’t autistic?  That should bring down the autism "epidemic"!  Just reject the diagnosis for all the people with autism who smile.  My guess is that it would be a pretty rare condition then. 

In the original script, the fight is with an insurance company who won’t pay for the treatments of the young "William", who is autistic.  The first mention of the word "autism" comes when the mother is describing this situation:

My son has autism. He needs Risperidone every day..

Whoa.  Was that about mercury?  Nope.  It’s about Risperidone.  Yep, instead of mercury causing autism, the story was about how the fictional kid needed an off-label prescription for an antipsychotic drug and the insurance company wouldn’t pay.

How does that jive with the writer’s idea of autism?  Well, the mother describes the value of Risperidone as:

After a month on the drug, he actually smiled.

For the record, Risperidone is pretty serious medication.  It has been shown to benefit some people with autism.  But, "smiling"?  I guess that scripts don’t need science advisor approval before being approved.

Somewhere between first and, let’s face it, lame final draft and premiere, the story shifted to vaccine/mercury caused autism.  A story line guaranteed to generate controversy.  A story line guaranteed to get publicity.

It’s too bad.  Yes, the reliance of the original script on Risperidone might have caused some consternation amongst the autism community.  Yes, the stereotype of the kid "whose autism prevents him from smiling" was lame at best, damaging at worst.  But, insurance coverage for autism is a big deal right now.  A good presentation of how insurance companies deny claims for autism could have actually helped people and families with autism.

Autisms Poor Excretors

31 Jan

Pediatrics released a study refuting the autism/thiomersal hypothesis early yesterday. They said that they did it to counter the upcoming Eli Stone pilot (of which there will be more to speak of soon). If that’s true then we need to thank the creators of Eli Stone for prompting the early release of more science debunking the anti-vaccine stance.

I don’t have this new study yet so I want you to bear in mind that I can only go on what’s in the news reports. This isn’t ideal but there are numerous quotes from the study authors over the news.

Basically, this study refutes the idea that autistic kids are poor excretors of mercury. Obviously, a lot of Hub bloggers have already taken this silliness apart but this is (IIRC) the first science paper to do so.

A proviso of this study would seem to be that it was done on NT kids rather than ASD kids but there’s no real scientifically valid reason to use ASD kids particularly anyway.

“….Now it’s obvious that ethyl mercury’s short half-life prevents toxic build-up from occurring. It’s just gone too fast,” Pichichero said.

To illustrate, researchers cite that infants in the 6-month-old group — who, in their lifetimes, had encountered more total ethyl mercury that any other group studied — still had the same pre-vaccination blood-mercury levels before their checkups as most 2-month-olds had before theirs. This suggests that, before each round of shots, the mercury has plenty of time to be cleared.

Source

Now, a group of people we all know are going to claim that the Burbacher et al showed that this was becuase the ethyl-mercury was going into the brain. This isn’t strictly accurate. Though total levels in the brain were lower for the thimerosal group, a higher ratio of inorganic mercury was noted. The anti-vaxxers tried to link this to Vargas because inorganic mercury is alleged to cause microglial activation.

But Burbacher detected no neuroinflammation. He should now know if there is neuroglial activation in his primates however. This paper was due some time ago but seems to be having trouble finding a publisher. Its pure speculation on my part that this would either be because his sponsors (SafeMinds) didn’t like the results and pulled the plug, or the science is bad and can’t find a journal to be published in.

Anyway, here’s this new paper that demonstrates that thiomersal is very quickly eliminated from the body. What is the typical mercury militia response to this?

And if it’s not thimerosal, then it must be some other vaccine-related interaction, said Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center.

……

“Mercury doesn’t belong in any product,” Fisher added. “Mercury doesn’t belong in vaccines whether it’s proven or not proven that mercury is a problem in vaccines.”

You see? Its not even really about mercury to these geniuses. Its about vaccines. Always. Even when it isn’t. And when it is mercury it doesn’t matter if its actually dangerous or not. What a shame there’s no vaccine for stupidity.

Note: Bart Cubbins has done an excellent video on some of the shortcomings of the Burbacher study.

Jenny McCarthy Again

2 Oct

McCarthy was at the latest TACA bunfight recently and took to the stage to give the crowd some of her patented Sale Increasing Controversial Big Fat Mouth. Her victim was a long time favourite of American news, Barbara Walters (whos now deceased sister was born ‘developmentally disabled).

About 3:15 today at the picnic on main stage jenny mccarthy in the most lisa ackerman style of feisty adorable commented that barabara walters said our kids CANT EVER GET BETTER and called her a bitch and said something about naysayers can stick her microphone up their BUTTS!
PRICELESS. This is perfect way to get sensationalistic 6:00 news attention to get this aired NOW!!!!!!!

Isn’t that lovely? I hope all those who were puzzled by the series of posts on here decrying Mccarthy’s self-appointed role as autism advocate can begin to appreciate why I – and plenty of others – feel as we do. That McCarthy is doing no favours to the autism community with this sort of behaviour. of course, some people, even within TACA realize this probably isn’t the best course of action:

What Jenny said at the picnic was for the benefit for TACA families, not for the 6 o’clock news or Entertainment Tonight. Jenny is doing a beautiful job of being our spokesperson, so let’s let her publicist and TACA’s publicist handle the media for right now. I know it was exciting stuff but let’s let this issue rest for now.

Well, no, actually. I don’t want to let the issue rest. This person has appointed herself spokesperson not just for TACA but apparently for autism itself. She needs to back off, grow up and start thinking about her actions for those of us without a celebrity income. Calling someone ‘a bitch’ at en event that you _know_ will be covered by the media is a stupid thing to do and gives the general public the idea that we’re all as childish as Jenny McCarthy. I would like once again to distance myself from this person publicly.

In the meantime, please enjoy this blog entry I found today. I don’t know who it is but I liked it.

A bad day for antivaccinationists: Yet another study fails to support an association between vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders

30 Sep

This blog entry first appeared at Respectful Insolence. It is reproduced here with permission.

A bad day for antivaccinationists: Yet another study fails to support an association between vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders
By Orac.

I’m almost beginning to feel sorry for the mercury militia.

Think about it. They’ve been claiming for the past several years that the mercury in the thimerosal used as a preservative in childhood vaccines is a cause of autism. If you believe Generation Rescue, A-CHAMP, SAFEMINDS, and various other activist groups, vaccines are the root of all neurodevelopmental evil, culminating in what to them seems to be the most evil of evil condition, autism. Yet, in study after study in the new millennium, no correlation has been found to implicated their favorite bte noire thimerosal, which serves as a surrogate for their general dislike of vaccines in general.

It comes as no surprise, then, that A-CHAMP would want to launch a pre-emptive strike against a large study of thimerosal-containing vaccines that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine today. Blazing out of their website is the headline New CDC Study Falsely Claims Thimerosal is Safe

On September 27, 2007 the New England Journal of Medicine will publish a study entitled, “Early Thimerosal Exposure and Neuropsychological Outcomes at 7 to 10 Years.” For more than two years we at A-CHAMP have been hearing rumors of a new study that “exonerates” thimerosal, despite the fact that the study results were supposed to be kept strictly confidential.

Now the rumors have been turned into hype – another government funded study that tries to spin data and clear thimerosal of any suspicion of causing neurodevelopmental disorders. The study authors claim in their “Conclusions” that “[o]ur study does not support a causal association between early exposure to mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines and immune globulins and neuropsychological functioning at the age of 7 to 10 years.”

The statement is plainly false. The study’s conclusions do not reflect the study’s data or the limitations of the study,

You’d think that at least A-CHAMP would correct that hanging comma at the end of the sentence there.

Sarcasm aside, the study’s conclusions do reflect the study’s data, quite well, as we will see, and A=CHAMP’s complaints boil down to the usual crank technique of cherry picking the evidence, combined perhaps with sour grapes. Let’s lay the abstract out for all to see before we look at A-CHAMP’s individual points:

Early Thimerosal Exposure and Neuropsychological Outcomes at 7 to 10 Years
William W. Thompson, Ph.D., Cristofer Price, Sc.M., Barbara Goodson, Ph.D., David K. Shay, M.D., M.P.H., Patti Benson, M.P.H., Virginia L. Hinrichsen, M.S., M.P.H., Edwin Lewis, M.P.H., Eileen Eriksen, M.P.H., Paula Ray, M.P.H., S. Michael Marcy, M.D., John Dunn, M.D., M.P.H., Lisa A. Jackson, M.D., M.P.H., Tracy A. Lieu, M.D., M.P.H., Steve Black, M.D., Gerrie Stewart, M.A., Eric S. Weintraub, M.P.H., Robert L. Davis, M.D., M.P.H., Frank DeStefano, M.D., M.P.H., for the Vaccine Safety Datalink Team

Background It has been hypothesized that early exposure to thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative used in vaccines and immune globulin preparations, is associated with neuropsychological deficits in children.

Methods We enrolled 1047 children between the ages of 7 and 10 years and administered standardized tests assessing 42 neuropsychological outcomes. (We did not assess autism-spectrum disorders.) Exposure to mercury from thimerosal was determined from computerized immunization records, medical records, personal immunization records, and parent interviews. Information on potential confounding factors was obtained from the interviews and medical charts. We assessed the association between current neuropsychological performance and exposure to mercury during the prenatal period, the neonatal period (birth to 28 days), and the first 7 months of life.

Results Among the 42 neuropsychological outcomes, we detected only a few significant associations with exposure to mercury from thimerosal. The detected associations were small and almost equally divided between positive and negative effects. Higher prenatal mercury exposure was associated with better performance on one measure of language and poorer performance on one measure of attention and executive functioning. Increasing levels of mercury exposure from birth to 7 months were associated with better performance on one measure of fine motor coordination and on one measure of attention and executive functioning. Increasing mercury exposure from birth to 28 days was associated with poorer performance on one measure of speech articulation and better performance on one measure of fine motor coordination.

Conclusions Our study does not support a causal association between early exposure to mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines and immune globulins and deficits in neuropsychological functioning at the age of 7 to 10 years.

It’s noted that a similar study looking at autism will be published next year. Of course, the fact that this study didn’t look at autism leaves the antivaxers a huge opening to say, “Well, yes, but you didn’t look at autism.” Never mind that there are now several studies that did look at autism and found no association between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism. So what are the main complaints that A-CHAMP has about this study? Let’s take a look, starting with the first one:

The Study’s Claim of No Causality is Contrary to the Study’s Data. The study authors claim that the data disproves causality when in fact, several findings show a negative effect on neuropsychological functioning warranting more study. At least one such adverse association was also found to be associated with low dose thimerosal exposure in other studies. As with earlier studies hyped by vaccine promoters, the study is unable to prove or disprove causality. The blanket dismissal of the troubling neuropsychological outcomes in this study is disingenuous and misleading.

First off, the study didn’t claim that there was “no causality.” What it stated is exactly what you see in the Conclusions section: That the study does not support a causal relationship. There’s a difference there too subtle for the ideologues who wrote this press release to understand. It’s impossible ever to prove “no causality.” It is, however, possible to conclude from the data that the data does not support a causal relationship. Second, A-CHAMP is cherry picking associations here. It is true that there were some negative correlations found that achieved statistical significance. When running 42 tests, it would be shocking if there were not a few anomalous findings. What makes the study authors fairly confident that the findings are anomalous is that they were divided roughly equally in both directions, good and bad. Consequently, if A-CHAMP is going to insist that the correlation, for example, with increasing mercury exposure and poorer performance on the GFTA-2 measure of speech articulation test, then it must also accept the findings of a beneficial association between mercury and identification of letters and numbers on the WJ-III test, as there is no reason to reject it. Naturally, the mercury militia picks on the associations as being true that they want to be true and ignore the other associations, which, if true, would be arguments for including thimerosal in vaccines. It’s far more likely that all of them are just noise. Again, the reason that investigators can reasonably conclude that the associations found are most likely due to random chance is because of their random distribution between positive and negative.

Another complaint:

Children with autism were excluded from this study. The early media contacts we have received suggest that this study shows no association between thimerosal and autism. In fact, the study specifically did not look at children with autism as the sample size was too small and the testing is impossible to complete for the typical child with autism. The exclusion of children with autism from the study may have undermined the power of the study to draw any conclusions about thimerosal.

This is a really, really dumb statement. I’m sorry, but there’s no other way to put it. It just is. It’s like criticizing an apple for not being an orange. The explanation for this is right in the paper, “Since the CDC is conducting a separate case-control study of autism in relation to mercury exposure, a measure of autism was not included in the test battery.” Get it, idiots? A separate study is being done and the results will be reported in a separate paper! That renders this complaint utterly irrelevant. It’s nothing more than a red herring designed to fire up the faithful.

This complaint is not really stupid, but definitely overblown:

The Study’s Methodology has Serious Limitations Negating Any Conclusions Drawn. Major flaws that that causes a large underestimation of neurological adverse effects burden the study: 70% of the families recruited for the study failed to participate. This kind of bias in epidemiological studies is well known to distort even large studies of health effects…It is well established that people who choose to participate in this kind of study are probably very different than those who refuse to participate (the “healthy person” or “complier” effect); especially when the ones who refused to participate said they were too busy.

Simply put: if you have a kid with ADHD or mild ASD or other neurodevelopmental disorders, you are likely to be busier, more stressed, and less available than the mother of a healthy normal child. This phenomenon serves to amplify the effect of the “complier”, the ;healthy families,” – those who do cooperate with the study – confounding or confusing the study’s results. The cooperative parents included in the study were more likely to be those with relatively trouble-free kids

There’s no evidence that this sort of bias existed, and A-CHAMP conveniently omits other biases that might be result from such a selection bias. For example, it is also quite possible to argue that parents who think vaccines may have caused their child’s condition would be even more likely to want to participate in the study (self-selection bias), than parents whose children are normal or who don’t believe vaccines had anything to do with their child’s problems; they might have thought that it wasn’t worth their bother. It’s good of the antivaxers who have been championing the execrable telephone survey done by Generation Rescue to recognize that this sort of bias exists; too bad they only mention it when it suits their purposes (i.e., to trash a study whose results they don’t like) and ignore it when it doesn’t, for example when it calls into doubt the results of the Generation Rescue telephone poll.

In reality, the fact that only 30% of the families who were approached for the study agreed to participate is probably the most significant weakness of the study. The authors don’t try to hide it. Rather, they are right up front with it in the Discussion section, while at the same time pointing out that this is this possible bias was ameliorated by enrolling children on the basis of having received vaccinations without regard to the seeking of health care or having been given a neurodevelopmental diagnosis, as well as noting that many children weren’t enrolled because they couldn’t be located. Moreover, exposure information was obtained from many different sources. It also looked at prenatal exposure to thimerosal-containing vaccinations from vaccines that the mother might have had while pregnant.

Next complaint:

Vulnerable Children Were Excluded from the Study; Early Intervention Was Ignored. Children with a birth weight under 5 lbs. 8 oz. were excluded from the study further skewing the results, as these children are likely more vulnerable to thimerosal than larger babies. In addition, the fact that early intervention may have reduced deficits such as speech delay detected by neuropsychological testing of children aged 7-10 was not accounted for in the study results. There also was no analysis of combined prenatal and postnatal mercury exposures. Only 103 mothers who were exposed to mercury from prenatal immune globulins participated in the study, far too small a group for researchers to draw conclusions regarding the safety of thimerosal in these products.

This is a grab-bag of the specious and semireasonable. The reason for excluding low birthweight children was obvious: Such children are more likely to have neurodevelopmental problems completely independent from any external cause, such as thimerosal. Including preemies and lower birth weight children would only contribute to the background noise and make finding true associations more difficult. A-CHAMP should be glad that the investigators did that, given that it was almost certainly done to make the study more likely to find an association between vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders. In addition, there is no evidence that low birth weight children are “more vulnerable to thimerosal.” Of course, once again, A-CHAMP fails to point out that the authors themselves pointed out the shortcoming in regard to not being able to account for interventions such as speech therapy. As for the whining about not analyzing combined prenatal and postnatal mercury exposures, that’s just a red herring; the study did test an a priori assumption of interaction between pre- and postnatal mercury exposure.

The rest of the complaints are the standard ones: Conflict of interest, for example, because several of the study’s authors had received funding from pharmaceutical companies. These potential conflicts of interest are clearly stated in the study. A-CHAMP also brings up a totally specious complaint of the study supposedly not accounting for “efflux” disorder (i.e., children who are allegedly “poor excretors” of mercury). Fortunately, Prometheus has provided a good explanation of what a crock that whole myth is, so that I don’t have to.

Of course, there is another reason, besides this study failing to show what the mercury militia wants it to, that there is such hostility here:

The politicization of the thimerosal issue has led researchers to take unprecedented measures. Unlike previous studies, the current study included more than a dozen outside consultants, including at least one advocate for families of children with autism. “We have really tried to make the entire process–from experiment design to manuscript review–as transparent as possible,” says Thompson. But that effort may not have made a difference in the long run. Sallie Bernard, executive director of Safe Minds, a nonprofit parents’ organization that focuses on the role of mercury in neurodevelopment disorders, consulted on the study but still takes issue with its findings. “All the studies, including this one have certain limitations in their design and their methodology,” she says.

Sour grapes, anyone? Ms. Bernard was a consultant on this study and helped contribute to its design! She apparently didn’t like the results that it was producing and decided to drop out and start criticizing it–even jumping the gun on the 5 PM embargo yesterday to do so! Indeed, she is listed on the study in a way that I’ve never seen before: as a “dissenting member.”

How many studies by mercury militia enablers Mark and David Geier include even a note of dissent?

Although this study is not without flaws, it nonetheless does not support a correlation between thimerosal-containing vaccines and the neurodevelopmental problems studied. Even better, the New England Journal of Medicine included two editorials along with the story. One editorial discussed the explosion of vaccine litigation that the now discredited thimerosal “hypothesis” has unleashed, immune to the findings of science. The second editorial is by Paul Offit (the Antichrist to antivaxers) and makes an excellent point about the unintended consequences of taking precautionary measures on the basis of little or no evidence:

On July 9, 1999, after much wrangling, the CDC and AAP decided to exercise the precautionary principle. They asked pharmaceutical companies to remove thimerosal from vaccines as quickly as possible; in the interim, they asked doctors to delay the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine in children who weren’t at risk for hepatitis. A press release issued by the AAP revealed the ambivalence among its members: “Parents should not worry about the safety of vaccines,” it read. “The current levels of thimerosal will not hurt children, but reducing those levels will make safe vaccines even safer. While our current immunization strategies are safe, we have an opportunity to increase the margin of safety.” Critics wondered how removing something that hadn’t been found to be unsafe could make vaccines safer. But many parents, frightened by a sudden change in policy, reasoned that thimerosal was targeted because it was harmful — and their faith in the vaccine infrastructure was shaken. Doctors were also confused by the recommendation.

I could see how that would confuse parents and doctors. Offit concludes:

Despite several years of reassuring studies, the thimerosal controversy continues to be emotionally charged. Physicians, scientists, government policy advisors, and child advocates who have publicly stated that vaccines don’t cause neurologic problems or autism have been harassed, threatened, and vilified, receiving hate mail and occasionally death threats. The CDC, in response to planned protests at its gates, recently beefed up security and instructed personnel about how to respond if physically attacked.

During the next few years, thimerosal will probably be removed from influenza vaccines, and the court cases will probably settle down. But the thimerosal controversy should stand as a cautionary tale of how not to communicate theoretical risks to the public; otherwise, the lesson inherent in the collateral damage caused by its precipitous removal will remain unlearned.

Exactly. With the best of intentions, trying to be as “safe” as possible, the AAP and CDC unleashed a tsunami of fear of vaccines and laid the groundwork for pseudoscientists like Mark and David Geier to stoke the fears of mercury further with badly designed studies. This was an example of framing science at its worst.

In the end, it is always frustrating to watch how such studies are spun by antivaccinationists. Epidemiology is like that, though. It’s virtually impossible to conduct a cohort study like this without permitting significant shortcomings in it. The reason is that, unlike a bench experiment, the investigators can never control all the variables. Trade-offs are inevitably made, and rarely are there adequate resources to assure sample sizes large enough to be bullet-proof or to be able to account for all potentially confounding variables. No one study is ever sufficient to rule out correlations between undesirable outcomes and various compounds. However, as the weight of several studies starts to bear down on the problem, the preponderance of evidence must at some point be accepted, because we do not have unlimited resources to keep doing studies to answer the same question over and over and over again and every repeated study uses resources that could be used to study other potential causes and treatments for autism. This study happens to be one large and convincing chunk of that evidence, but it is not the only one. Coming next year, when the CDC releases a similar trial about autism, will be another. As Dr. Offit said:

In a new study, Thompson and his colleagues are taking another look at thimerosal exposure and autism. But for many, the question has been resolved. “This study is the third one of its kind. When the autism one comes out, it will be the sixth of its kind. They’ve all shown the same thing–that there is no significant correlation,” says Offit. “Meanwhile, the thimerosal question has diverted attention and resources away from the search for more promising leads on what causes autism. How many more studies will it take?”

That’s the difference between science and crankery. If this study had shown a clear and convincing correlation between thimerosal in vaccines and neurdevelopmental disorders, I would have accepted the results and perhaps started to change my mind. On the other hand, for cranks, no number of studies is ever enough to dissuade them from their beliefs. If God Himself were to come down from on high and design the absolutely perfect study, which when carried out showed no correlation between thimerosal in vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders, the antivaccinationists would insist that it was flawed, that the investigators had conflicts of interest, and that it needs to be repeated until (although they would never admit this) it shows the results they want it to show.

In fact, expect just that. The CDC has pledged to make the raw data available to other researchers. I predict that, within a few months, a study by Mark and David Geier will use their trademark bad statistics and bad math to cook the numbers to make it look as though there are associations between thimerosal in vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders that the CDC “covered up.”

Just wait.

ADDENDUM: Some more commentary on this study:

From Left Brain/Right Brain:

No, everything was fine and dandy as long as she [Bernard] was enjoying being fawned over as a “representative of the autism community” and a fellow-scientist instead of the commercial marketer she actually is. Here’s a clue, Sallie: If you’re going to play scientist, you have to follow the rules of science, and that means you stand by your results. You don’t get to say “heads I win, tails you lose” by waiting to see the outcome before deciding whether the study was any good.

And you really don’t get to have CDC at your beck and call, spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to do a study to your specifications, then turn around and call them liars when you don’t like how it comes out.

And you, CDC? You’re not just a victim here. Every time you say “let’s do more research” or “we are examining this issue” in order to appease the mercury moms, you increase the chances that kids will go unvaccinated because you failed to give their parents confidence in the safety of vaccines. When you say a study is reassuring and then highlight what is virtually certain to have been a chance finding (a statistical association between higher thimerosal exposure and transient tics in boys) without making it abundantly clear that some false associations were inevitable given the study design, you defeat the purpose of doing the study.

From AutismVox:

Safe Minds, whose Executive Director, Sallie Bernard, was an external consultant and dissenting member of the study, put out a press release stating that the new study’s “draws a misleading conclusion.” But this statement is as “misleading” as the headlines cited above are about the study’s actual contents This only furthers the belief that–no matter how clearly it is stated and shown that there is no causal association between early exposure to thimerasol and later neuropsychological outcomes—a link between these has been firmly established in the public mind. And disputing that link will take more studies, more evidence, more efforts, and more self-scrutiny of why we believe what we believe.

From Autism Natural Variation:

The CDC study looked at 42 different outcomes, and determined multiple confidence intervals in each case, since different levels of exposure were tested. In total, I understand there were over 300 confidence intervals. Consequently, assuming the null hypothesis is correct, you should expect that an RR of 1.0 will be outside the 95% confidence interval in over 15 measures. What the study found was that in 12 measures there was an apparent protective factor, and in 8 measures there was an apparent risk factor. This is completely consistent with the null hypothesis. Therefore, the conclusion of the study, namely that the results of the same do not support a causal association between thimerosal-containing vaccines and neurological outcomes, is absolutely the correct conclusion.

From Arthur Allen on The Huffington Post:

Despite the wealth of data showing that vaccines do not cause autism, many parents continue to believe the theory. Jenny McCarthy, an ex-Playboy Bunny and TV personage, has been making the rounds of the media this week (Oprah, ABC, People magazine) to promote her book, in which she claims that her child was made autistic by vaccines but was “recovered” through alternative therapies.

A large CDC study comparing thimerosal exposure rates in autistic and non-autistic kids is due out around this time next year, as is an Italian study of the question. The data will probably duplicate the many previous studies that have shown no effect. The dogs may bark but the caravan moves on. Or is it the other way around

(The comments from die-hard antivaxers after Allen’s post are scary indeed.)

From Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline:

The director of SafeMinds, a group of true thimerosal believers if ever there was, actually was on the consulting board of this latest study. But she withdrew her name from the final document. The CDC is conducting a large thimerosal-and-autism study whose results should come out next year. Here’s a prediction for you: if that one fails to show a connection, and I have every expectation that it’ll fail to show one, SafeMinds will not accept the results. Anyone care to bet against that?

As a scientist, I’ve had to take a lot of good, compelling ideas of mine and toss them into the trash when the data failed to support them. Not everything works, and not everything that looks as if it makes sense really does. It’s getting to the point with the autism/thimerosal hypothesis- has, in fact, gotten to the point quite some time ago – that the data have failed to support it. If you disagree, and I know from my e-mail that some readers will, then ask yourself what data would suffice to make you abandon your belief? If you can’t think of any, you have moved beyond medicine and beyond science, and I’ll not follow you.

Commenting on David Kirby’s truly idiotic take on this study in The Huffington Post, Steve Novella at Neurologica:

What Kirby does is not just really dumb, it’s despicable. He cherry picks all the negative (meaning bad) neurological outcomes and pretends that the study shows a correlation (it doesn’t, when you look at ALL the data). He then tries to dismiss the positive (good) outcomes as absurd. He mockingly writes:

If they (the CDC) really mean that thimerosal increases IQ levels in males, then sign me up for a double-dose flu shot this year.

No, David, they don’t mean that. Not by any stretch of the imagination. It takes incompetent statistical analysis or the blindness of ideology to write something so ridiculous. What the CDC means is that the study does NOT show that thimerosal increases IQ, nor that it causes motor tics, or improve motor skills, or decrease language skills, or anything else. The study showed no correlations because it all averaged out as noise.

Steve, normally polite to a fault even with cranks, seems to be laying down a bit of the old Respectful Insolence(tm). I like it.

More Evidence for the Safety of Vaccines

29 Sep

This article was originally published at the NeuroLogica Blog and is re-published here with permission.

By Steven Novella, MD
NeuroLogica Blog

A new study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Early Thimerosal Exposure and Neuropsychological Outcomes at 7 to 10 Years, does not support a correlation between mercury in vaccines and neurological damage. It adds to the growing evidence that vaccines are safe and they do not cause neurological disorders. This study did not look at autism (a study that will be published next year looks, again, at vaccines and autism), but the mercury-causes-autism crowd are still unhappy with the results.

I have been following this issue closely for several years. Although my awareness of the issue goes back much farther, I started to seriously research the claim that the MMR vaccine, or that thimerosal in other vaccines, causes autism while researching an article on the topic for the New Haven Advocate. As a physician (a neurologist) and a skeptical activist I knew I had to get this issue right. I certainly did not want to falsely stoke the flames of public fear, nor did I want to cast myself in the role of denier.

Early on in my research I really did not know which way I was going to go with the issue. Should my bottom line be that there is real reason for concern here, that there is nothing to the claims, or that we really don’t know and will have to just wait for further research? But after reading through all the claims on both sides, and all the research, it was an easy call – vaccines, and specifically the MMR vaccine and thimerosal, do not cause autism, and the alleged autism “epidemic” is likely just an artifact. Those claiming there is a connection were drowning in conspiracy thinking, logical fallacies, and blatant pseudoscience. Meanwhile every piece of reliable clinical data was pointing in the same direction – no connection.

But still, while I was confident in my final conclusion, a small connection between mercury and autism that eluded the existing data could not be ruled out. Or perhaps there was an angle to the whole story that we were missing but would later come to light. I have had enough experience with scientific medicine to be humble in the face of the complexity of medicine and biology. The only rational position is to remain open to new data and new ideas. On this issue there was sure to be more studies in the future – and the ultimate test of the thimerosal-autism connection, the removal of thimerosal from the vaccine schedule, was yet to be seen. So I confidently plunked my nickel down and waited for the future to unfold.

Everyone likes being right, and sometimes this desire clouds our judgment. I have learned, therefore, how to cheat, which is to say how to always be right. All you have to do is say that your position is based upon the existing data, but is contingent upon the results of future studies. In other words, the “right” position is to change your final answer to accommodate new evidence as it comes in. Therefore the only “wrong” answer is to stick to your original position despite new evidence that contradicts it.

OK – so this is just restating how science is supposed to work, but it is amazing how many people forget to cover their behinds with this simple rule. Usually this is because they are not doing science – they are taking an ideological position, and ideology is inflexible. This is a huge advantage for science over ideology, and why, when science and ideology clash, science is almost always right.

In the case of vaccines and autism, since writing my first major article on the topic, the data has come in all consistent with my original position (so I get to be doubly right). Removing thimerosal from vaccines did not decrease the incidence of autism (or decrease the rate of increase in new diagnoses). And several new major studies came out all showing no association – not counting the utter crap being produced by the Geiers.

Enough had happened to warrant an update, so I jumped at the chance when Ken Frazier of the Skeptical Inquirer asked me to write an article on the topic. My article will be out in the next issue, along with a couple of smaller ones on the same topic, so take a look.

Alas, as is often the way in the world of science, my paper is outdated before it even goes to print. This new study, of course, will not be covered in the article. But that’s what blogs are for – instantaneous news and analysis.

Actually, several of my fellow science bloggers have already beat me to the punch. They cover the article, and the response to the article by the mercury crowd, in great detail, so I will not duplicate it here.

Orac at Respectful Insolence goes over the press release of A-CHAMP (one of the mercury militia) that attempts to dismiss the study. He shows that, while the study (like all studies) has its weaknesses, it does add significantly to the body of evidence showing that vaccines are safe. The complaints of A-CHAMP are either wrong, overblown, or inconsistent with their prior positions and shows that they are just trying to tear down the study at all costs.

For the record, I agree with Orac that the study is good enough that it’s conclusions add to the cumulative data on this topic, and that the weakest element of the study was the 30% compliance rate. In other words, only 30% of the subjects that they looked at for the study made it into the final analysis. This opens up the door for selection bias. Orac is probably correct that this bias would likely overestimate a correlation, not underestimate it, but you can never be sure with such things.

I will add that the 30% figure is not as bad as it first seems. The study reports:

Of 3648 children selected for recruitment, 1107 (30.3%) were tested. Among children who were not tested, 512 did not meet one or more of the eligibility criteria, 1026 could not be located, and 44 had scheduling difficulties; in addition, the mothers of 959 children declined to participate. Most of the mothers (68%) who declined to participate in the study and provided reasons for nonparticipation cited a lack of time; 13% reported distrust of or ambivalence toward research. Of the 1107 children who were tested, 60 were excluded from the final analysis for the following reasons: missing vaccination records, 1 child; missing prenatal records, 5; missing data regarding weight, 7; and discovery of an exclusionary medical condition during record abstraction, 47. Thus, 1047 children were included in the final analyses. The exposure distribution of the final sample was similar to the exposure distribution of the initial 3648 children selected for recruitment in the study.

So about 40% of those that did not make it into the final analysis simply could not be located – this is unlikely to represent a bias. But this is a small point.

Isles from Left Brain/Right Brain points out that Sallie Bernard (a believer in the mercury hypothesis) was consulted on the study design and execution and did not criticize its methods until after the results came back negative. That kind of behavior instantly sacrifices all your credibility in the science club.

Kristina Chew at AutismVox reiterates what I did above – that the mercury-causes-autism ideologues are always asking for more studies, but refuse to change their position when the studies they ask for come out. They are waiting for studies that show what they want them to show – we call that “cherry picking.”

The other side is busy too. David Kirby (a bad journalist who desperately wants to be a bad scientist), who wrote the book Evidence of Harm, published an article online in that absolute rag, The Huffington Post (to be fair, they also published this piece by Arthur Allen defending the paper’s conclusions). Kirby repeats all the same points in the A-CHAMP press release, but he emphasizes the fact that the study found some neurological symptoms that were higher in the subjects who received more thimerosal. Kirby proceeds to completely misinterpret the significance of this.

The study looked at 42 different outcomes, and set the p-value for significance at 0.05. A vague concept of basic math should be sufficient to see that some outcomes will reach significance by chance alone. The researchers arguably should have adjusted their statistics to account for the fact that they were looking at 42 variables – but instead they just looked at all the outcomes that were significant to see if there were any patterns or trends. What they found was that there were a few scores that were worse among those exposed to more thimerosal, but there were also a few scores that were better. There was a random distribution of positive and negative effects that essentially average out to no net effect. It’s all just noise. (Is there a small signal hiding in the noise? There could be – scientists have to be honest about that. But that doesn’t mean there is.)

What Kirby does is not just really dumb, it’s despicable. He cherry picks all the negative (meaning bad) neurological outcomes and pretends that the study shows a correlation (it doesn’t, when you look at ALL the data). He then tries to dismiss the positive (good) outcomes as absurd. He mockingly writes:

If they (the CDC) really mean that thimerosal increases IQ levels in males, then sign me up for a double-dose flu shot this year.

No, David, they don’t mean that. Not by any stretch of the imagination. It takes incompetent statistical analysis or the blindness of ideology to write something so ridiculous. What the CDC means is that the study does NOT show that thimerosal increases IQ, nor that it causes motor tics, or improve motor skills, or decrease language skills, or anything else. The study showed no correlations because it all averaged out as noise.

This is, by the way, the same mistake that astrologers make (remember that crusty pseudoscience?). They look at many variables then cherry pick the outliers. At best what this study might show is a possible correlation, but any such possible correlation would have to be corroborated by a later study (with fresh data) that looked specifically at that one variable.

So the pattern that I found when I first started looking at this issue – that all the reliable data was on the side of no correlation between vaccines or mercury and autism or neurological disorders – continues to hold up to new data. The other pattern I noticed – that those promoting a correlation were relying on bad science, logical fallacies, and ad hoc conspiracy claims – also continues to hold.

In the last few years every new study showed no correlation, and the mercury militia responded with abject nonsense and dismissal. This cycle seems to be repeating itself over and over, and this latest study is no exception.

Rumours that the Observer’s Editor will get the push because of the paper’s MMR idiocy

28 Sep

I’m sure readers of this blog will remember the jaw-dropping idiocy of the Observer and Denis Campbell’s recent front page MMR/autism coverage. I’ve been preparing a post looking at how the Observer’s inaccurate 1/58 figure for UK autism prevalence has spread through the Internet (encouragingly, it looks like a good proportion of bloggers and mainstream journalists have been bright enough not to swallow this nonsense) when a little birdy forwarded me this intriguing – but unverified – piece of gossip:

Keep an eye on the Observer over the next weeks. The rumour in the week that editor Roger Alton had got the push/resigned not entirely without foundation as there is now a huge wedge between the Guardian and The Observer…This is the result of news ed Kamal Ahmed getting to keep his job – the result of an investigation into the embarrassment over the MMR splash that wasn’t a story of two months ago…The Scott Trust got involved, editor Roger Alton had to go to before them and receive six of the best like a naughty schoolboy.

It’s interesting that it has had to come to this: when I discussed some of the problems with the Observer’s autism coverage with their Readers’ Editor, he was clear that the decision on whether to retract the Observer’s embarrassing autism coverage (or issue a proper apology) was for the Editor to make, and Alton had chosen not to issue a retraction. If this rumour is correct, it looks like Alton may be paying the price for failing to retract an embarrassingly poor-quality piece of ‘journalism’.

Hopefully the rumour is accurate, and Alton will face the consequences of his actions. I think it is entirely appropriate that – if a newspaper Editor publishes something both stupid and damaging on their front page, then refuses to retract the story – their career should suffer as a consequence of this. It is also encouraging if the Scott Trust has got involved in dealing with this mess, and has taken decisive (albeit slightly slow) action. The Quackometer’s Observer Apology Counter makes it 11 weeks without a proper apology for or retraction of the Observer’s MMR idiocacy – maybe a new Editor will be able to deal with this mess before the counter goes past unlucky 13?

UPDATE: now also blogged by Shinga, here.

CDC: “Thank you, Sallie, May We Have Another?”

27 Sep

A CDC study released yesterday found no evidence to support “a causal association between early exposure to mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines and immune globulins and deficits in neuropsychological functioning at the age of 7 to 10 years.” In other words, vaccines don’t scramble your brain.

The study didn’t examine autism as an outcome, although that is almost certainly what it was intended to get at. Instead, it looked for whether children’s exposure to thimerosal before birth or in infancy had any relationship to their later performance on 42 standardized tests which one would expect to be affected by autism. For each of the 1,047 children in the study, the researchers assessed speech and language; verbal memory; achievement (letter and word identification); fine motor coordination; visuospatial ability; attention and executive function; behavior regulation; tics; and general intellectual functioning.

CDC tried so hard. They invited one of the queen mercury moms, Sallie Bernard of “SAFEMINDs,” to participate in the planning of the study. They brought on a panel of outside advisors. The team spent at least two years administering forty-seven separate tests to each of the children and analyzing and writing up the results. They printed every piece of data generated in a companion volume to the published study.

They got kicked in the teeth, but don’t feel bad for them. They should have known better.

The autism-vaccine contingent has responded by spluttering about the study not having been large or random enough, and by accusing the researchers of being biased and of ignoring important associations in the data. It’s no news that these people don’t believe anything that comes from CDC – they’ve said as much, very clearly. But one would think that if you let the antivaxers in on the process from day one, if you were totally transparent, they couldn’t object, could they? They’d have to see the light when the results came back and say, “Well! I guess it’s not the vaccines after all!”

CDC, if you really thought that would happen, you were so, so wrong.

The appearance is that Sallie Bernard was going along with all this up until the day the results came in and – shockingly! – showed thimerosal didn’t do one bit of harm. If she’d thought from the outset, as a SAFEMINDs press release now claims, that there weren’t enough kids in the study or the sampling were biased, does anybody think this gadfly would have nodded and smiled and gone right along with it?

No, everything was fine and dandy as long as she was enjoying being fawned over as a “representative of the autism community” and a fellow-scientist instead of the commercial marketer she actually is. Here’s a clue, Sallie: If you’re going to play scientist, you have to follow the rules of science, and that means you stand by your results. You don’t get to say “heads I win, tails you lose” by waiting to see the outcome before deciding whether the study was any good.

And you really don’t get to have CDC at your beck and call, spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to do a study to your specifications, then turn around and call them liars when you don’t like how it comes out.

And you, CDC? You’re not just a victim here. Every time you say “let’s do more research” or “we are examining this issue” in order to appease the mercury moms, you increase the chances that kids will go unvaccinated because you failed to give their parents confidence in the safety of vaccines. When you say a study is reassuring and then highlight what is virtually certain to have been a chance finding (a statistical association between higher thimerosal exposure and transient tics in boys) without making it abundantly clear that some false associations were inevitable given the study design, you defeat the purpose of doing the study. People who understand statistics weren’t the ones who needed to be convinced thimerosal is safe; the antivax crowd will never be convinced no matter what. You needed to speak to the well-meaning parents who worry about the rumors they hear at playgroup, and not only did you give them something new to worry about and whiff the opportunity to show them that the likes of Sallie Bernard are all about the rhetoric – you managed to tee up for yet another round of Righteous Long-Suffering Parents vs. Heartless Government Scientists.

Haven’t you learned yet who wins that one? Or are you going to invite Sallie back for another round of research?

Postscript: More commentary on this study by Arthur Allen, Orac, Joseph, Interverbal, and Kristina Chew.

After Jenny and Oprah

23 Sep

And so, this was the week that the anti-vaccine/autism hypothesis got its first real airing in a public arena. Jenny McCarthy went on US TV and told her audience that her son was her science (quite possibly _the_ silliest thing on the show since Tom Cruise’s couch/brain malfunction).

I’m going to level with you here. I don’t really care too much about Jenny McCarthy spouting on about the evils of vaccines. She’s not the first and she won’t be the last. Despite the raptures the anti-vaccination people are having over her appearance she wasn’t on Oprah because of her vaccine ideas.

This is what bothers me: she was on Oprah because she was famous. It scares the _shit_ out of me that we can only apparently have a conversation about something after a celeb has let the light of their countenance shine down upon it.

The UK is just as ridiculous about this whole thing as the US. Its got to a stage whereby the subject under discussion doesn’t even seem to really matter to Joe Public – what seems to matter is that there’s a famous face pontificating on a subject that, in all honesty, they’ve probably only recently begun to get a firm grasp on themselves.

To put it another way, the Oprah show wasn’t about autism. It was about Jenny McCarthy. It was to sell copies of her book. Her appearance on People magazine is to increase book sales. Her upcoming appearance on Larry King is to increase book sales. None of it is about _autism_ . None of this will help the autism community. Even that subsection of the autism community who are anti-vaccine are kidding themselves if they think that after the dust settles on Jenny McCarthy’s book she will be around to lead them in their fight. Until its time for the sequel of course.

Is the autism community really so shallow that we are going into raptures because a celeb is speaking about a subject that vast majority of us could speak much more accurately and eloquently about? It seems some of us are.

In the meantime, whilst Jenny McCarthy is being lucratively controversial on Oprah, the vast majority of autistic kids are still not getting the right kind of educational placement. Whilst Jenny McCarthy’s Media Clean Up Crew are attempting hoover away every mention of her Indigo Children beliefs from the web lest they affect book sales, autistic adults are still struggling to get into appropriate work and living accommodations.

I would urge autism parents to spend the ten quid they were going to spend on Jenny McCarthy’s book on something that might actually help autistic people instead of helping line the pockets of Jenny McCarthy.

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