Debunked by "The Science"?
Post #1231
In this report by Nic Hulscher and Dr. McCullough, there is a CNN interview of Dr. Peter Marks and, during Minute 2:00, the CNN “news operative” claimed that a link between autism and vaccines had been debunked by science. In other words, science was able to “prove a negative” (prove that there is no contribution to autism).
Beyond the philosophical logistics of being able to prove a negative, we can ask what “The Science” really did find, when it looked into the matter. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) claims that Madsen et al., 2002 (NEJM) is one of the better studies out there regarding this issue:
But let’s have a look at what was was found …
The crude incidence rates (per million person-years, MPY) show that the autism rate for the vaccinated kids — at 159.6 yearly cases per million — was 45% higher than that for the unvaccinated. Now, here, the researcher will start hand-waving and pointing to fancy formulas written on the whiteboard. They will say:
“But you have to adjust those raw numbers”
And a good follow-up question is:
“By what?”
And that short follow-up question can be elaborated on with this:
“Do you have biological plausibility arguments for the things that you adjusted by?”
Their answer will likely be something on the order of this:
“Well, we put a bunch of variables through a regression and we found out that a bunch of them correlated with the rate of autism, and we would like to think that the real effect produced by the vaccines is going to have to be found to be the residual effect that is left over after we have removed the other factors — on the presumption that they were causes, too.”
Really?
No matter how biologically plausible, you are going to presume that they are independent causes, contributing to the autism rates?
At this point, they will say how it is that they found statistically significant correlations and how that — even in the absence of biological plausibility — must be evidence of cause-and-effect, so that only the residual effect left over after removing them can be ascribed to vaccines, per se.
Newsflash:
This type of finding (crude autism incidence rate that is 45% higher among the vaccinated) — along with the leap in reasoning required by jamming-up the regression with age, sex, 7 levels of calendar year, 6 levels of socio-economic status, 5 levels of mother’s education, gestational age, and 5 levels of birth weight — isn’t enough.
This is not proof of no link, it is not even close to being proof of no link.
Reference
[CHOP reporting telling you “where to look” for the really good evidence on autism] — https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety/vaccines-and-other-conditions/autism
[Madsen study that found crude autism incidence was 45% higher] — https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa021134