Vaccines have nothing to do with autism.
It’s not the MMR vaccine. It’s not thimerosal. It’s not anything else about vaccines.
It has been proven time and again.
“The parental focus on vaccines as a possible cause of autism has been encouraged by the recent growth in popularity of ‘unorthodox biomedical’ theories and therapies in autism…”
Fitzpatrick on MMR: risk, choice, chance
Not surprisingly, that hasn’t stopped some parents from continuing to blame vaccines, mostly because they didn’t notice any symptoms of autism until after their child got their routine vaccines as a toddler.
Recognizing the Early Signs of Autism
In 2007, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued guidelines for universal screening of all children for autism at 18 and 24 months. Since then, many kids are getting diagnosed at an earlier age.
That’s good news, as an earlier diagnosis should mean that more kids will be able to benefit from earlier supports and accommodations.
“…the average age of diagnosis for those born before 2005 was just under four years old; for those born during during or after 2005, it was roughly two-and-a-half years old.”
AAP on Children are Diagnosed with Autism at Younger Ages Since Push for Universal Screening
Looking at the early signs and symptoms of autism, it is easy to see why autism isn’t always recognized that early, even with a screening tool, like the M-CHAT-R:
- What if you don’t recognize that your child isn’t really speaking single words because he or she is simply parroting or echoing what you are saying without knowing what the words mean?
- What if you don’t recognize that your child isn’t responding to his name being called because he responds to other noises, so sometimes coincidentally turns when you call his name?
- What if you don’t recognize that your child isn’t bringing objects to share with you (as an interest), because he or she sometimes will bring them to you to have you help open or use them?
And if your child is eventually diagnosed with autism, will you recognize that those were early signs that were just difficult to detect, or just think that your child didn’t have any developmental differences and then lost those skills?
Explaining the Correlation of Autism After Vaccines
Many people understand the idea that “correlation doesn’t imply causation.”
So just because your child was vaccinated and you soon noticed signs and symptoms of autism, that doesn’t mean that it is really linked to vaccines.
“Temporal binding is a phenomenon that reinforces that assumption of cause and effect once we have linked two events causally in our minds. The effect biases our memory so that we remember the apparent cause and effect occurring closer together in time. In experiments we tend to remember the cause as happening later and the effect happening earlier.”
Steven Novella
Of course, a phrase about correlation and causation isn’t going to be enough of an explanation for most parents, especially if they have already heard a bunch of vaccine scare stories.
Fortunately, there is plenty of evidence to back up that idea, including that:
- many studies have shown that there is no link between vaccines and autism
- unvaccinated kids develop signs and symptoms of autism at the same time as children who were vaccinated
- some studies have shown that even when parents think that their child’s first signs and symptoms of autism didn’t occur until right after a specific vaccine, like the 12 month MMR shot, when experts looked at the child’s home movies, they could detect subtle signs at a much earlier age, well before the child got those vaccines
- while regressive autism is real and some kids with autism regress significantly in their development, losing many of the early skills they had picked up, even then, these children often had some subtle, early developmental delays. They don’t usually have a sudden regressive type of autism.
What about package inserts? Don’t they say vaccines cause autism? No, they do not.
And all of the studies that anti-vax folks say support a link between vaccines and autism? They aren’t what you think they are.
Mostly remember that the scientific evidence overwhelming supports the fact that vaccines have absolutely nothing to do with autism!
What to Know About the Correlation of Autism After Vaccines
Vaccines having nothing to do with autism, even though it might sometimes seem to you that your child’s signs and symptoms of autism are correlated with recently getting vaccinated.
More About Explaining the Correlation of Autism After Vaccines
- Vaccines and Autism Redux
- Expert Statements on Vaccines and Autism
- If It’s Genetic, Where Are the Older Adults with Autism?
- What is Mitochondrial Autism?
- Vaccines and the Latest Autism Prevalence Report
- Has the Vaccine Court Compensated over 70 Families for Autism
- Autistic Adults
- Autism Acceptance vs Autism Awareness
- Getting Diagnosed With Autism As an Older Teen Or Young Adult
- How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Hurts Autistic Families
- Did the CDC Concede That There Are No Studies to Support Claim That Vaccines Given in First 6 Months of Life Do Not Cause Autism?
- Vaccines and autism: A thorough review of the evidence
- AAP – Early Screening of Autism Spectrum Disorder: Recommendations for Practice and Research
- AAP – What are the Early Signs of Autism?
- CDC – Autism Case Training (ACT)
- AAP – Children are Diagnosed with Autism at Younger Ages Since Push for Universal Screening
- Why are there so many reports of autism following vaccination? A mathematical assessment
- Does Regressive Autism Exist?
- 131 Research Papers Supporting the Vaccine/Autism Link…or Not. No, They Don’t.
- When Does Autism Begin?
- Autism Onset and the Vaccine Schedule – Revisited
- Study – Onset patterns in autism: correspondence between home video and parent report.
- Study – A prospective study of the emergence of early behavioral signs of autism.
- Study – Autism during infancy: a retrospective video analysis of sensory-motor and social behaviors at 9-12 months of age.
- Study – Assessing the early characteristics of autistic disorder using video analysis.
- Study – Early detection of autism spectrum disorders: From retrospective home video studies to prospective ‘high risk’ sibling studies.
- Study – What do home videos tell us about early motor and socio-communicative behaviours in children with autistic features during the second year of life—an exploratory study
- Study – Movement analysis in infancy may be useful for early diagnosis of autism.
- Early Detection of Autism
- The Early Course of Autism
- Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism, But That’s Not The Point. Stop Being Ableist.
- Before I Stopped Believing Vaccines Caused My Son’s Autism
- How My Daughter Taught Me that Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism
- There is NO Science that shows Vaccines Cause Autism, EXCEPT ….. explained
- Workshop report: Regression in autism
- Early Signs of Autism
- More Evidence that Autism is Genetic
- Beyond the Autism/Vaccine Hypothesis: What Parents Need to Know about Autism Research
- Vaccines and Autism
- Vaccines and autism: Same as it ever was
- The latest claims of “proof” that vaccines cause autism: Will the media take the bait?
- What causes autism – real science says it is not vaccines
- What REALLY Causes Autism?
- Before I Stopped Believing Vaccines Caused My Son’s Autism
- Study – Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses
- Study – MMR: risk, choice, chance
I appreciate, lead to I found just what I was taking a look for. You have ended my 4 day lengthy hunt! God Bless you man. Have a nice day. Bye
I didn’t get past the first few paragraphs and completely lost confidence when I read the claim that we have proved that vaccines don’t cause autism because correlation does not imply causation. I would worry about anyone claiming this to be suffering from some neurodegenerative disorder. Let’s watch autism explode while the fools simply continue to deny reality. The whole idea of using claims of causation as a metric is simply bankrupt, and there is no condition that we could ever claim causation with anyway, including smoking allegedly causing lung cancer, although when you get a high enough correlation the risks that are expressed can be way beyond what is required for us to act upon.
What is so vile with this particular debate is the sheer lack of a cost benefit analysis beyond just saying vaccines are good and they are safe, like God speaking. When we add in the abuse of power that is used to mandate this, the fierce intimidation that practitioners use, and their losing their license if they don’t comply, where we place people at significant risk for no good purpose, and with over half of our children now suffering from a chronic disease, we need to take the lighter away from the bulb of this thermometer fast or we’ll really see what happens when it blows.