A good dissection of bullshit “science” about vaccines - this dissection also highlights good general points to think about when applying critical thinking to any such out of left field “scientific” claims on the internet or those blathering dolts on TV news segments.
https://theunbiasedscipod.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-failure-why-this-latest
Dig into things before promoting them on social media.
I am so fucking tired of people treating autism like it’s some horrible disease worse than death.
It’s just a different way of viewing and reacting to the world.
Are some autistic people severely intellectually disabled? Sure. Plenty of non-autistic people are too.
These antivaxxers act like if you kid is going to be autistic, you might as well have never had a kid.
And then on top of that, you have big antivaxxer proponent Jenny McCarthy saying she cured her son’s autism, so why did she make such a big fucking deal about it?
Incidentally, it’s been scrubbed from the web, but there used to be a website where Jenny McCarthy wrote an essay about how her son was an “indigo child,” which meant he was going to grow up to be superhuman with all sorts of amazing powers. It contained the unforgettable line, “after my son was born, I quit smoking.”
Edit: Ha! I found it on the Wayback Machine! And I was wrong about what she said. What she said was worse.
As all of you know, being a mother changes you in ways that you never thought you could imagine. I went from chain smoking and eating cheeseburgers to Hepa air filters and eating vegetarian after my son was born
Are some autistic people severely intellectually disabled? Sure. Plenty of non-autistic people are too.
The incidence of intellectual disability among autistic people is notably higher than among non-autistic people, and similarly for the incidence of many other comorbidities.
That said, I’m not sure what you’re trying to argue for, here. If you’re trying to say that we should be more accepting of neuroatypical people, like those with autism, I agree; it has improved quite a lot in the last decade but it’s still not great. If you’re trying to say autism shouldn’t be considered a disease and there shouldn’t be efforts to find a cure for it, I don’t agree.
I’m not sure why antivaxxers focus so much on specifically autism as a supposed vaccine sideffect. I think it might be historical reasons (it dates all the way back to Fudenberg and maybe even older), plus the fact that it’s a mental problem rather than physical and hence trivial to motivatedly “self-diagnose” (it’s much easier to claim that after you vaccinated your child you immediately noticed “clear autism symptoms”, than to claim their leg abruptly fell off).
Where is your evidence that autism is a disease? Because that’s the sort of shit Autism Speaks says.
Why do you even thing autistic people want to be “cured?”
A “disease” is a condition that affects one adversely. Some people with the autism diagnosis are not obviously affected adversely and do not consider themselves to be (and I am not suggesting that they are wrong), but most are. The worse-off autism cases look more like “constantly keeps trying to self-harm to deal with distress caused by crippling sensory issues; needs to be institutionalized”. I think not very controversial to say that those people are affected adversely and would want to not have those problems.
I think when you see me talking about autism, you think only of the first group of people - and I agree that if that’s what all autism was like, it’d be strange to consider it a disease (and I also agree with what you said earlier, that in the context of anti-vaxxing, a lot of weird parents seem to unjustifiedly think the mild autism of their children is as bad as death). But it’s not, and hence it causes quite a lot of suffering and it’d be morally right to find a way to prevent children from getting it.
A “disease” is a condition that affects one adversely.
Your definition of disease is patently false.
an) illness of people, animals, plants, etc., caused by infection or a failure of health rather than by an accident.
If vaccines were the cause, which they are not, then it still couldn’t be called a disease. It is not infectious, nor communicable, nor spreadable by any means other than genetic mutations presenting during fetal formulation.
**Autism is not a disease. **
- The definition I mentioned is from wikipedia, I didn’t just make it up.
- Your argument doesn’t actually follow - your definition mentions “failure of health”, which is so vague as to cover anything, yet for some reason you argue that it matters that it’s not infectious. Hereditary diseases are called that despite not being infectious, so clearly it’s not as clear-cut as this.
- But actually, fair enough - I don’t think it matters whether something “is a disease”, so I shouldn’t have mentioned it - my argument doesn’t rely on it in any way.
but most are
Evidence please.
You’re also arguing that it both is and is not a disease. It can’t be both.
And you still haven’t explained why people want to be “cured.” Homosexuality used to be considered a disease that can be cured too, by the way. And there are still parents who force their kids into those “cures.” That is what you are advocating here, except for autism. As if people with autism have no agency.
Evidence please.
For adults, check out the studies referenced in this analysis, for example. A few figures from there are “never employed: 74%”, “Living independently: 15%”, “No friends with shared interests: 47%”, and institutionalization rates varying from 30% to 50% depending on how you define it. The analysis notes that the two studies which had notably better results were on samples with relatively high intelligence. As for outcomes in children, there’s this one about physical aggression, and this meta-analysis giving a figure of 42% self-injurious behavior without a significant age dependence.
You’re also arguing that it both is and is not a disease. It can’t be both.
It’s a matter of definitions - if you have a condition which has small chance of making you slightly better at some kinds of intellectual work, high chance of making you have too much sensory and other issues to be unable to work or live independently, and a medium chance for those issues to be so bad as to require you to be institutionalized, is it a “disease”? I’d say yes, since the overwhelming majority of outcomes are negative, but one could techically argue that the rare positive-ish outcomes disqualify it.
But more importantly, I don’t think it matters whether something “is a disease” or not (I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that word at all). It causes suffering on net, so no matter what you call it, it’s moral to research a way to prevent people from getting the condition.
And you still haven’t explained why people want to be “cured.” Homosexuality used to be considered a disease that can be cured too, by the way. And there are still parents who force their kids into those “cures.” That is what you are advocating here, except for autism. As if people with autism have no agency.
I think you’re still treating this as a more complicated moral issue than it actually is. Forget for a second all the people with high-functioning autism, and consider a clearer case. Let’s say there’s an autistic child with severe sensory issues that make them distressed by random sounds to the point of screaming, which distresses them more until they start self-harming by hitting their head against a wall and trying to bite their fingers off. They are mentally disabled and non-verbal, and hence can’t tell you their opinion on medicine. And let’s say you have, in this hypothetical, a cure that can fix all of that. Is it moral to give it to them, even though you can’t possibly get informed consent? For me, it’s pretty clear that it is. Do you agree with me on this?
If yes, it seems to me that’s sufficient to argue that a cure for autism is very important to make. It’s not about the mild cases which go on to live fairly normal lives, and write newspaper articles with titles like “I don’t want to cure my autism, I want to own it”. It’s for all the severe cases for whom a normal life has never been an option.
Ouch, really said after, not during pregnancy.
Yeah, but the vaccines obviously caused her son’s problems! It’s hard to know if he even is autistic or if that was just part of her whole bullshit grift. She made a lot of money from this.
