@supermom. Just so you’re aware, there isn’t a single legitimate study that has concluded there is a link between any of the above mentioned illnesses, and vaccines. Additionally, vaccines make up a very, very small portion of pharmaceutical sales, so there is little chance that companies would be promoting them for the sake of profit alone. I also want to say that your actions are putting other children at risk. Your stupidity is a danger to the public. The reason we don’t have widespread pandemics like we once did is because of vaccines. So when a you see the rates of things like mumps rise, and young boys go sterile, I want you to take some of the credit. Asshole.

In the 1960s I was a uni student and as a pt job I typed up medical records for a large hospital. (Evenings) I can testify (1st) hand that there were
several hand written changes that I had to incorperate in reports to down play, and cover up insidents regarding bad reactions to vaccines. Yes your right, Im sure it all better now.

There is no, and i repeat NO (null, nothing, nada, none, nichts, rien du tout, zip) link between vaccinations and autism or related conditions. Neither is autism an illness, disease or a handicap, rather a condition or a way the brain is wired together. It’s not broken, it just works differently. Especially when it comes to the so called higher functioning cases. In many of the more severe cases there’s also a lower than average IQ which causes many of the problems, or comorbidity with other conditions. It also doesn’t have to be an obstacle for living a rich, productive and valuable life (as long as there’s not some serious other impairment) and it’s dealt with in the right way (note how I said ‘dealt’ and not ‘treated’ there).

Most serious scientists agree the cause for autism almost certainly is to be found in the genes wich are carried over trough the male side of the family. That’s what’s raises question about whether it’s an illness. Because if these genes have survived trough generations, they may have been useful in evolutionary terms as many key inventors, thinkers, rulers and artists have displayed more than a few autistic traits.

This is coming from someone who has studied neuropsychology, and was himself diagnosed as having asperger’s syndrome. It’s a complex subject and many things are unclear and misunderstood about it, even by the best experts. It’s ironic that the vaccine story is causing such a shitstorm, while that’s one of the few things we are actually pretty sure about.

The vaccine story was initiated by a study that was discredited as quickly as it was released. Alas, as it goes, it was picked up by tabloid newspapers of dubious reputation that went to town with it. It also fell like hot cookies on the plates of the kind of overprotective soccermoms Sarah Palin represent so well. Instead of just loving their children, they are more concerned with them appearing ‘normal’ in school and vaccines give them a way to blame other entities for anything that;s less than perfect in their lives.

If you don’t vaccinate your children, you are not keeping them safe from autism, you are however putting them at a huge risk for a couple of highly volatile, very real diseases, this risks of which we in the west may have forgotten about because they were driven into near extinction by worldwide inoculation programs. Worse, many of these diseases have graver consequences when contracted at a later stage, and you might contract a variant that may be a resistant to antibiotics or other cures thus making it as good as untreatable.

There are cases of children reacting badly to vaccination, and some reaction is expected as the whole idea is injecting a near-harmless dose or variant of a virus, so the immune system can get ‘used’ to it and build the appropriate response. The human body is a complex system, so more extreme reactions could be down to allergies (most people are allergic to at least something, often without knowing it) or other ways the system is configured. Drugs don’t have the same effect for everybody, same with vaccines. So there is absolutely a risk there, but there’s the same and often bigger risks involved with any medical procedure and those risks may or may have not been covered up in the past in some places, but even if the cases in which it went wrong are sad, they are within normal variations. They are in any case preferable to going back to the situation where millions of children die every year of diseases we know perfectly well how to prevent and treat. Withholding research data shames the person that does the act, but going back to that would shame us as humanity.

The people that repeat this kind of paranoid nonsense usually get this kind of tabloid paper message and very little else. The panic on the basis of hearsay, basically. Any idiot can make a webpage or story about something, and many idiots do. The lone fact that they are the kind of people that have the time to do something like that is a testement to the amount of excitement they get otherwise. Read the research, it is easy to find and you will know exactly what we know and don’t know. It’s easy to single out the research that supports your view, and allows you to make the links you want to make, but the entire body of research going back to about the second war just doesn’t support it.

So, Brendan may be rude about it, but he is right. No need to attack supermom though, as her kids have obvious adverse reactions to them, so it would foolish to force it on them. First of all, do no harm… and free choice is ALWAYS the principle, even though the downside is that people may make the choices we’d rather have they didn’t. The people that wilfully expose their own children to entirely preventable diseases based on something they read or heard about somewhere..yeah, they’re total idiots.