Autivaccinism

In a fit of logodaedaly inspired by a particularly infuriating aginner, I have just coined this term to indicate the mythonuttical belief in a connection between autism and vaccination.

The aginner in question stubbornly and aggressively clings to a variety of idiotic beliefs that run counter to both evidence and expert opinion, and supports these beliefs with a panoply of fallacies of logic. All in all, this aginner provides a fascinating, if infuriating, nutcase study.

One of his collection of unfounded beliefs concerns the empirically invalidated claim that vaccination causes autism. Most of the authors of a 1998 study that postulated a connection based on woefully few study subjects have since retracted their erroneous interpretations, yet the damage was done and the myth continues.

At 12 months of age, infants receive MMR vaccination against viruses that formerly caused illness, debility, and some deaths (measles, mumps, rubella). This also happens to be the age at which signs of early autism are first recognized in some affected infants. Many other events impact an infant in the first year of life, but a single event, such as vaccination stands out by virtue of its singularity and so is noticed even when there is no causative association. This fallacious assumption that correlation indicates causation arises whenever an unusual event precedes an unconnected event. Epidemiologists must study large numbers of cases to tease out any genuine causative associations from serendipitious associations.

"Other larger studies have found no relationship between MMR vaccine and autism.
For example, researchers in the UK studied the records of 498 children with autism born between 1979 and 1998. They found:

• The percentage of children with autism who received MMR vaccine was the same as the percentage of unaffected children in the region who received MMR vaccine.


• There was no difference in the age of diagnosis of autism in vaccinated and unvaccinated children.


• The onset of "regressive" symptoms of autism did not occur within 2, 4, or 6 months of receiving the MMR vaccine.

"Groups of experts, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, agree that MMR vaccine is not responsible for recent increases in the number of children with autism. In 2004, a report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded that there is no association between autism and MMR vaccine, or vaccines that contain thimerosal as a preservative." (source)

As health professionals have become more informed of autistic symptomatology and are able to recognize milder cases, rates of identification of existing cases have increased. Increased rates of identification do not necessarily indicate increased prevalence.

Research into the etiology of autistic neurobiological disorders continues, but the conditions are almost certainly multifactorial in etiology. Autism subtypes include early onset and regressive (Rett Syndrome, Glutaric Aciduriais). Autism is not a single syndrome and likely results from several different etiologies or combination of pathological mechanisms: genetic, infectious, neurologic, metabolic, immunologic, and environmental.

Vaccines act by priming the immune system to develop a clone of 'memory cells' that can respond rapidly to any exposure to live virus. On first exposure to live virus, the primed memory cells proliferate (as they would otherwise have proliferated on second exposure), pumping out monoclonal antibodies that bind specifically to the virus, enabling the rapid elimination of the infectious agent. The introduction of vaccines has enabled the eradication of smallpox and the virtual elimination of many childhood killers. Happily, vaccination has prevented horrific outbreaks such as the pre-vaccination polio epidemics that paralyzed children for life and forced thousands of children and adults into 'iron lungs'. The image at top left shows iron lungs collect in a gym (courtesy of Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center). Image above right courtesy of Ontario March of Dimes.

"Mounting evidence indicates that immune dysfunction along with an environmental pathogen may be factors contributing to the development of some cases of autism. One of the immune deficiencies observed in autism is abnormal T-cell mediated immunity. Another is altered levels of certain classes of antibodies(immunoglobulins), including decreased levels of immunoglobulin A and deficient complement activity, based on the inheritance of a null allele of the C4B gene. In addition to the C4B gene, other genes on chromosome 6 also appear to be associated with autism. In the developing child, genetically determined immune deficiencies might increase the risk for autism in 2 ways: (1) A pathogen or its toxins might damage the brain, and (2) the pathogen might trigger an autoimmune mechanism that would interfere with brain functioning. In the mother, immune deficiency might allow a pathogen to persist in utero, damaging the fetal brain directly or triggering a maternal immune response that creates pathogenesis in the fetal brain." (Immune findings in autism)

These alterations are quite different than the effects observed after immunization.

Quo Vadis?
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Argumentum ad numeram

Appealing to the Gallery, Appealing to Numbers

Argumentum ad numeram and argumentum ad populam are closely related fallacies of logic. Fallacious ad numeram arguments take the position that the veracity of an argument can be determined by the number of people who support or believe the proposition. Fallacious ad populam arguments attempt to win acceptance of an argument by making an emotional appeal to as large an audience as possible.

Giorgio Dubaya Borgia and his administration used ad nauseam emotional appeals (fear of terrorism, Saddam Hussein has murdered Iraqi civilians) to attempt to justify an invasion of extremely dubious merit. Most people are not so foolish as to remain conned forever, and Borgia's approval ratings have plummeted.

However, politicians succeed because large numbers of people are conned by propagandistic appeals to emotion, realizing their errors only too late. (This is the chief problem with democracies – the populace is far too easily duped into voting for candidates who later prove, as did Bush, to have absolutely no merit.) As a result of the gullibility of USians who voted for Bush, al Queda is now operating in Iraq when it did not operate under Hussein. Thousands of soldiers and civilians have been needlessly killed or maimed, and Iraq faces years of civil war before yet another strong man dictator takes over. The only upside of all this stupidity is that the share value of Haliburton has probably increased, and that is not an upside except to greedy Americans.

Religious dogmatists argue that because most people in the US believe that God was their personal creator, then God must exist and must be their creator. This, of course, demonstrates only that most people have been told, from an early age, that there is a God who is their creator and they have believed the tale in the absence of any confirmatory evidence. Unlike the case for Bush's lamentable record, only death could confirm or deny the existence of this purported creator, and the dead cannot inform the still-living that they were duped. If the dead could speak, then I am quite confident that God's approval rating would plummet almost to zero.

Fallacious argumentam ad numeram or argumentam ad populam is particularly damaging in the hands of dishonest politicians, but it is also a general problem amongst those who refuse to believe in the valid, empirical-based knowledge of credible authorities.

Because it is easy and cheap to form and hold an opinion, no matter how ill-informed or illogical that opinion, people with virtually no knowledge of a field will dogmatically insist upon ridiculous notions that run counter to received wisdom from those who are authorities in their fact-based field.

Thus, people who know nothing of meteorology or atmospherics will decide incorrectly that global warming is a myth simply because they do not wish to believe that they must alter their behaviour. People who know nothing of medicine, biomedical sciences, or epidemiology will erroneously decide, for example, that smoking is not harmful, or that vaccination causes autism.

Such errors would merely result in the holding of unfounded opinions by peope not sufficiently informed to host any opinion, but because politicians pander to public opinion, public ignorance becomes translated into harmful political action or inaction.

Quo Vadis?
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