Autism & Childhood Vaccinations
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Autism & Childhood Vaccinations
A Simple Linear Regression Across US States
Summary
Changes in the proportion of children who received all recommended vaccines in the first two years of their lives (lag: 6 years) and changes in the prevalence of autism or speech/language impairment among 8 year old children are positively correlated across U.S. states (p<0.002).
Every percentage point increase in vaccination rates of 2 year olds between 1995 and 2001 was associated with an increase of 0.035 (95% CI: 0.014-0.057) percentage points in the rates of autism or speech impairment disorders among 8 year olds between 2001 and 2007.
Introduction
Last night I received an email asking me to take a look at an article about the association between vaccination rates and the prevalence of childhood autism and speech disorders.
I postponed fulfillment of the request to the morning hours, since I was coincidentally spending time with an autistic friend at the time who happened to tell me that he considers me autistic as well.
The study came up with a weird model:
Autism = a + b1∗Vaccination + b2∗Log(Income) + b3∗Hispanic + b4∗African American + b5∗Other + b6∗2002 + b7∗2003 + b8∗2004 + b9∗2005 + b10∗2006 + b11∗2007
I just wanted to run a simple linear regression without all those other variables which probably just served to maximize their model fit.
Methods
I chose a very simple approach which should eliminate the need to correct for confounders like race and income, as was done in the original study.
4:3:1:3:3:1:4 means fully immunized with 4 doses of DTaP, 3 doses IPV, 1 dose MMR, 3 doses Hib, 3 doses HepB, 1 dose Varicella, and 4 doses PCV. This is the official childhood vaccination series before children turn 3.
For each state, I determined the linear trend for each of the following two variables over the respective time periods.
1995-2001: [rate of 2 year olds who received the recommended 4:3:1:3:3 series of vaccinations]
2001-2007: [rate of autism among 8 year olds] + [rate of speech/language impairment among 8 year olds]
I then ran a linear regression between the two resulting variables across the 50 US states + District of Columbia.
Results
Trends represent the average absolute change per annum of the respective rate.
These are the regression results:
The intercept has a very low significance, with it’s regression coefficient (B) being right around zero.
The coefficient of our independent variable was found to be 0.03527 (95% CI: 0.01380-0.05675) which I interpret as follows:
An increase from 0% to 100% vaccination rate among under 3 year olds would result in an additional 3.5% (95% CI: 1.4% - 5.7%) of children being diagnosed with speech impairment and/or autism before reaching their 9th birthday.
Cross-validation with VAERS
Compared with a pseudo-placebo reference cohort, an excess 2.0% of reports (90% CI: 1.8% - 2.2%) about MMR vaccinations mention autism spectrum disorder. Report proportions often approximate incidence proportions. For the age groups 0–4 and 5–11 proportional differences are 4.6% (90% CI: 4.0%-5.1%) and 2.6% (90% CI: 2.0%-3.3%). All confidence intervals overlap with the regression coefficient's 95% confidence interval, which confirms our results.
Autism is much more frequently reported in boys than in girls. You can look up gender-stratified proportional differences if you follow this link.
Other vaccines for which I found weaker autism spectrum disorder safety signals are:
Conclusion
If you ask me, this is enough evidence to withdraw products from the market until double-blindly randomized placebo-controlled trials have been performed. But I’m not the science, so we are unlikely to see that happen.
All we can really do is speak truth whenever we get a chance.
What’s next
I’m not saying I will be doing these things, but here are a few ideas what one could do:
Do an analysis not by antigen type, but by other constituents (adjuvants and preversatives)
Get updated government data and see how things have changed since 2007
Autism & Childhood Vaccinations
Added to the confusion, autism and autoimmune encephalitis are similar... one being a medical diagnosis and one being behavioral. I’m the parent of two children, one with auditory processing disorder/adhd, and one with ASD who was profoundly affected, nonverbal until he was 8 and we were able to use functional medicine to improve his health, which resolved many of his “autistic” behaviors. You don’t magically gain cognition when you heal an infection. We have found that he was more able to express himself and take in information when his body healed, which affects how his brain functioned. I would like to see these two diagnostic labels be more integrated or more separated. I think it’s why they can say that vaccines don’t cause autism. Which other medical product causes a behavioral diagnosis?
Some adults who have autism are resentful at the implication that there is a cure, and those of us with children severely affected resent the implication that they can’t be helped with functional medicine bc we should respect that they have autism and not try and “fix” them.
Regardless, the adverse medical impact on our children needs to be brought to light. One new prediction I read is that 1:2 people will be diagnosed with “autism” however you define that, by 2035. I’ll tell you right now, between insurance, Medicare and out of pocket expense we are over $1M of care on our boys, easily. Big pHARMa will impair the next generation of adults by a lot.
Thank you for hearing me out on this.
Nice