Anti-Vaxxers Will Have To Come Up With Another Vaccine Ingredient To Claim Causes Autism

On Tuesday, GOP Senator Ron Johnson brought a slew of anti-vaccine activists to the US Senate for a hearing plaintively titled “Voices of the Vaccine Injured.”

During this hearing, the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations heard from two officials from Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy organization founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., along with parents who believed their children had developed autism and other issues as a result of having been vaccinated.

According to Johnson — who believes carbon dioxide is good for trees and that Greenland actually used to be green (and that this is proof that climate change is not caused by human beings) — the purpose of the hearing is “to give a platform to those individuals and families who have been abandoned; their injuries and suffering, dismissed and forgotten.”

Well, how very compassionate of him, and cruel of us to dismiss and forget these people, for no reason other than the fact that what they are saying is categorically untrue.

On Monday, one day before that hearing, the Annals of Internal Medicine published the results of an absolutely massive study finding that there is absolutely no link between the aluminum used in vaccines to boost the immune response and autism. Or asthma. Or 48 other possible conditions, including ADHD and other neurodevelopmental disorders, allergies, and immune disorders.

Aluminum has been enemy number one for anti-vaxxers in recent years, and has been described by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as “extremely neurotoxic,” with no evidence whatsoever. In another interview, he claimed it was the reason for the rise in allergies. “You wonder why a whole generation of children is allergic to stuff … It’s because we’re inducing allergies, pumping them full of aluminum”.

Previously, it was thimerosal, a preservative that also did not cause autism, but was removed from the vast majority of childhood vaccines (and was never in the MMR vaccine, period) in 2001 as a precautionary measure, despite there being no actual evidence of harm. Actually, it sometimes still is thimerosal, because many of these people don’t even realize that it was removed 20 years ago in the first place.

While the study is unlikely to convince anyone who is determined to believe that vaccines cause autism, it is remarkably comprehensive. It was conducted over the course of 23 years and included more than 1.2 million Danish people — which we must point out is slightly more than the 12 (yes, 12) children that Andrew Wakefield studied for his thoroughly discredited study meant to prove that vaccines cause autism.

Via NBC:

The study looked at more than 1.2 million people born in Denmark from 1997 through 2018 and followed them until the end of 2020. Because health records in Denmark are meticulously kept by government agencies, the researchers were also able to compare children who received more aluminum in their vaccines by age 2 compared those who received less. The study didn’t include unvaccinated children.

The researchers found no link between aluminum in childhood vaccines and any of the 50 conditions.

Ross Kedl, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, said Scandinavian public health studies are of uniquely good quality.

“[This excellence is] partly because they have, for a long time, had such a unified health system,” said Kedl, who wasn’t involved with the new study. “Everyone is tracked for life from birth and you can go back for many years and ask, ‘Can we find a link between something that happened in the past and in the future?’”

Another win for universal healthcare!

As far as we know, there’s not really another specific chemical that anti-vaxxers could land on and claim causes autism. Aluminum’s really all they’ve got left in their arsenal. In all likelihood, they will simply claim that they just can’t trust the Danish and continue on making the same claims they’ve made for decades.

During the hearing Tuesday, several parents shared very sad stories about the deaths of their children, stories that would tear anyone’s heart out. Stories that they already told in Andrew Wakefield’s fact-free documentary Vaxxed.

Via MSNBC:

Emily Tarsell said that speaking about her daughter Christina, who died suddenly in 2008, gave her purpose. “I’m trying to make her death matter,” Tarsell said.

A medical examiner could not determine the cause of Christina’s death, but Tarsell believes the HPV vaccine, Gardasil, is to blame. Her initial vaccine court claim was denied, but years later on appeal, a special master ruled that she had met the program’s low burden of proof. (More than 160 studies have shown Gardasil to be safe and effective at preventing cancers caused by HPV, according to the CDC.)

Krystle Cordingley, a self-described wellness practitioner whose infant son died 14 hours after a flu shot, claimed, without offering evidence, that she believes doctors hid the cause of death from her and that an independent investigator revealed vaccines were to blame.

It is understandable that people want concrete answers. It’s hard enough losing someone you love, especially a child, even when you do have answers and you know what happened. It feels good, satisfying even, to have something or someone to blame, a place to focus your hurt and anger — especially one that makes you feel like you are slaying a dragon. It’s understandable that Emily Tarsell wants her daughter’s death to “mean something,” because it’s hard to imagine so big a loss with no purpose at all.

I cannot begin to imagine the pain these parents have experienced. It’s an unimaginable loss. But it’s a loss that was caused by something other than vaccines. Cordingley’s son died over 10 years ago, and one would just have to imagine that if the flu shot were regularly killing children or had any connection to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), that there would have been more cases since then. There aren’t.

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People get stuck on things like this because they make more sense to them than reality does (as reality rarely makes much narrative sense). They see autism rates increasing, allergies increasing and the number of vaccines increasing and it makes sense to them that these things would be related. They notice that these things tend to appear after children get vaccinated, and they assume they’re related. They’ve also been mentally trained to believe that “chemicals” are bad and natural things are “good” (ignoring that many chemicals are natural and not all things found in nature are safe), and that is something that’s very hard for many people to shake in a variety of contexts, not just those involving vaccines. It’s bad now, but it’s about to get a whole lot worse with RFK Jr. on the case.

I would love to believe this study will change some minds, but it probably won’t. It may, however, keep some other people from buying into this nonsense, so at least there’s that.

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