Vaccines Don't Cause Autism

And so what if they did?

I’ve been itching to write some version of this post ever since I created my Substack, because recently one particular vaccine denier has skyrocketed into public consciousness. I’ve largely off writing this because I feel like I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t been said before (and also because it takes time for me to whip up something good on here!) Nevertheless, let’s give it a shot, shall we?

First, RFK Jr tends to have some interesting views on pretty much everything. But although he has a somewhat wacky personality, and it would be tempting to just blame it on the brain worm, the anti-vaccine movement has deeper roots worth examining. RFK Jr may be the standard-bearer of vaccine skepticism at the moment, but that skepticism didn’t start with him, and it certainly won’t end with him either. So I will, in the rest of my words here, avoid focusing on the alternative facts of one (albeit quite powerful) guy, and focus more generally on what vaccine skepticism means for all of us.

Second, contrary to the belief of plenty of people besides just RFK Jr (including at least one of my co-workers), vaccines. do. not. cause. autism. Full. Stop. Often times in science, there’s an emphasis on creating causal links and/or publishing papers that show correlations between variables. Think of all of those “Scientists Show That x Might Lower Your Risk of y” headlines that you’ve read over the years. On the other hand, papers that establish that there is not a link between variables don’t get published nearly as much, because the concept is kind of boring. The “relationship” between autism and vaccines is perhaps the biggest exception to this. Ever since Andrew Wakefield kicked up a hornet’s nest in the ‘90s with the spurious claim that vaccines cause autism, paper after paper, study after study, metastudy after metastudy, has come out to refute the claim. The scientific community has put an absolutely inordinate amount of time and energy into proving (and I do use the word prove, although it’s a bit of a dirty word in science) that vaccines do not cause autism. Time and energy that could otherwise look into the actual root causes of autism, were it not for the persistence of this one particular myth. And to be clear, even though autism is a difference to be celebrated rather than a disease to be cured, it would still be worthwhile to understand the causes of autism. You know, just to know! And there are some pretty intriguing hypotheses out there! So perhaps we should spend our nation’s slashed scientific grant funding collective scientific resources to investigate those things. But as we’ve already seen with vaccines and autism, “there’s no there there”.

So at this point it’s worth saying two conclusions. On an emotional level, it’s not really a cheery thought that millions of parents in America would rather risk that their child contract chicken pox, measles, mumps, rubella, HIB, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, etc than turn out like me. It is quite interesting that to these parents and policy-makers, having a kid that spends their teenage years memorizing the interstate highway system and scripting Kevin Costner movies is less preferable than having a kid that died or was permanently injured due to a preventable disease. Perhaps vaccines have become a victim of their own success.

Nearly every parent in America knows an autistic child, some of whom do indeed have very significant challenges! I’m not going to pretend that autism doesn’t cause difficulties related to social interactions, executive functioning, and restricted behavior, because life as an autistic adult is definitely not always a walk in the park! The issue is that these challenges are more familiar to people than the aforementioned illnesses. The challenges associated with autism seem like a much more present concern than illnesses that seemingly have only a handful of cases nationwide each year. I, for my part, don’t know a single person that has ever had measles. The problem is that by turning down life-saving vaccines, parents jeopardize the comfortable public health reality that nearly universal vaccination in this country has created. The rarity of many childhood illnesses today is not a reason that vaccines aren’t necessary; rather it’s a testament to their success.

Which sort of leads me to my other conclusion; humans don’t assess risk well. When they do make decisions, emotions, rather than rational evidence seem to drive the decision-making process for most people. Autistics sometimes are stereotyped as being these cold, calculating, passionless Vulcans that only do what’s logical, emotions be damned. While this is a bit of a caricature, I think there is a bit of truth buried under this stereotype. And while it’s perhaps unrealistic to expect that all 330 million of us Americans can have a calm and rational conversation about vaccine efficacy, devoid of emotional appeals, I have since college fantasized about a sort of Vulcan Moral Theory, where our decision making is determined by what is most logical, based on the evidence.

In the meantime, since we do live in a world where emotion tends to drive science denialism, despite the wealth of scientific evidence we have access to, perhaps we need to do a better job of interrogating the emotional basis and values behind science deniers. Why, for example, does RFK Jr think that a child with measles is somehow better off than an autistic child? When Jenny McCarthy claims that vaccines caused her son to become autistic, is she openly stating that she wish her son were fundamentally someone else? There is, I think, a respectful way to ask these questions of those people who don’t accept the scientific body of facts that we do. But then again, I’ve always been a bit more blunt than the average person. If you made it to the bottom, thanks for reading! Smash that subscribe button if you want to read more ramblings of a vaccine-poisoned autist (!)