Vaccines and Autism

As a mother of a child given an education label of Autism Spectrum Disorder just a year ago, and a medical diagnosis on Tuesday of Autistic Disorder (autism) and various other developmental delays and disorders, and also this same child being my youngest of six and the only child that was not vaccinated on schedule, not to mention the myriad of studies done to prove otherwise, I am astounded and annoyed that anti-vaccine autism parents continue to be so brazen in their attempts to force the world to believe their crackpot 'theory' that the autism their children have is an injury caused by vaccines.

These people's main claim that they are right, and the science is just cover up by the government and big pharma, is based on coincidence and nothing more. Their premise is this: My child was normal, healthy and happy up until they were about 18 months old and then they got their vaccines and it was almost instantaneous, like something snatched their soul. One day they were fine, the next day after getting their shots they were drastically different. The natural conclusion is since it happened right after their vaccines, the vaccine is to blame.

Here is why this is a ridiculous claim: Statistics show that 20 to 40 percent of children with autism show regression. Regression is normal or even faster then average development, and then a loss of abilities or back sliding to a previous or younger stage or age of development. For example, most children are able to babble by 12 months of age and by 18 months of age they should have several words, such as mommy, daddy, bye bye, hi, certain names for their favorite food and other simple things. From what I've heard about children with regressive autism, and in my own son's case, they had several words by 12 months so verbally were ahead of the curve and then by 18 months lost all ability to speak and reverted to babble or odd vocalizations like humming or grunting. My son actually would just utter the 'uh' sound repeatedly while he would be doing some other physical stim (self stimulating behavior such as rocking, hand flapping, spinning self or objects, lining things up or stacking things.)

By 18 months old, most communication symptoms of autism are present, either because the child never progressed to speech, or they regressed from limited speech back to babble or even no speech at all or guttural sounds. There are other symptoms that may manifest earlier and not be as obvious. My son began walking on his toes at 14 months old. He got to the point eventually when he would only walk on his toes, but that practice started gradually with him. He began to show obsessive behavior, endless flipping of pages in a book or catalog with no interest in what was on the page, or everything needing to be in a predictable pattern or location for him. It was around this same time when tantrums began to manifest and became increasingly violent and self abusive. He was always a happy baby before unless he was tired, hungry or sick and he was always inquisitive, wanting to get into everything and exploring places I wasn't aware he could get to. He lost his inquisitive nature also and became subdued , withdrawn and seemingly uncaring. He still liked to explore and climb and had no sense of danger for things that could hurt him. This resulted in him climbing the blinds in his bedroom window, falling and breaking his arm just after the 18 months mark. He was still happy, loved to be tickled, chased around the house as well as cuddled, as long as he was in the mood for it. He wouldn't and still doesn't accept hugs and kisses if he isn't in the mood.

My son doesn't have as much of a problem with eye contact as many children with autism do. He can look me in the eye, but if he holds it for too long it obviously pains him. For him he becomes overwhelmed in situations where there are a lot of people. He will separate himself physically as much as he can and stim on whatever happened to be close at hand for him. When he was just over two years old, his symptoms became so obvious I couldn't deny them anymore. A friend of mine was having a baby shower and my son and I went. There were other children there and I thought it would be really good for him to get out and spend time with other children. The fact that up until this time he didn't wasn't something that I even considered abnormal, just something that I thought was due to lack of available options for socialization.

My son looked at the other children, but that was it. He was more interested in the confetti decorations that were on the table, little plastic baby bottles, diaper pins, binkies and rattles. About two hours into the party, after everyone had eaten and presents had been opened, I realized my son had left my side. I had been holding him on my lap during the unwrapping of presents and since she had a lot this was quite a long time for little kids to sit still, but nearly from the moment we sat down and she began opening, he had been struggling to get away from me. I held him on my lap as long as I could until I was just too tired to hold him anymore. I released him and he took off. He stayed in the room but wasn't playing or sitting with the other children. He had taken a couple handfuls of the confetti under the table and was sorting it into piles of the same object, same color, lining them up in rows and continued to do this over and over and it was a good 30 minutes that he was there doing this. I didn't know this at first, I was just making sure that he stayed in my sight and didn't try to go outside. After the presents were all open and people began to meander about and do their own thing again, it became harder to keep an eye on my son so I went to bring him out from under the table. I watched him for several minutes once I noticed what he was doing and saw the intensity of focus he had while he was sorting the confetti. I looked around and became aware of just how loud it was in the room. There were a lot of people talking, music was playing, children were talking and screaming and there was a 9 month old who was crying and his mom apologizing loudly saying he was tired and hadn't had his nap yet so she needed to go. I suddenly realized that my son was overwhelmed and was seeking shelter and distraction from it all. I mean once I realized how much sound there actually was it almost overwhelmed me, but I hadn't gone under a table and began stimming on the confetti and that wasn't normal little kid behavior either. I was scared and shivers and chills rushed through me once the realization of what I was seeing hit me. We had had suspicions prior to this but this particular incident made it undeniable, it was very likely my son has autism.

For my son, his regression was gradual, so gradual in fact that I didn't notice it until I noticed it and that is what seemed sudden. I can't help but wonder how many of these other children's regression was also gradual and was just suddenly too obvious to ignore anymore right after vaccines.Nobody wants to look at their child and see developmental delay or autism. Once the autism diagnosis hits you over the head, it can still be a while before it is real. It's very easy to deny it and say there must be another answer. I believe (and this is my own personal opinion, not research or study based) that many people who believe in this vaccine autism link are looking for a reason, something to blame and ways to cure it because they don't want to accept their child will never be normal again.

For me, once I heard the diagnosis, I began to do research. Naturally, the vaccine autism thing swam across my mind and I nearly jumped on that. Then a few months later I remembered, my son wasn't vaccinated on schedule like these other children were who's parents are claiming it was the vaccines. They are two schools of thought with regard to this, that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine caused autism, based most heavily on Andrew Wakefield's study that was later found to be fraudulent earning him a revocation of his license to practice medicine, or the thimerosal (an enthymercury preservative that was found in most routine children's vaccines up until 2002). The argument for the MMR vaccine was simply because it was given to many children around the same time symptoms of autism began to manifest or became too obvious to ignore. The thimerosal theory was so ridiculous, particularly now that people continue to believe it.

Due to parental concern of vaccines containing anything even remotely related to mercury at all (even though testing and testing and testing was not able to find that mercury poisoning could result from this preservative because it was present in such small amounts, not to mention that there wasn't any real way for them to test this as the 'mercury' part of it was so insubstantial, it was determined that all routine childhood vaccines would no longer be manufactured with ethylmercury preservative. This process began in 1997 and was 5 years before previous stores of children's vaccines with thimerosal were exhausted and the newly manufactured thimerosal free vaccines were available. It was stated most clearly by these thimerosal dooms day sayers that with the removal of thimerosal, autism cases would not only stop rising but begin to decline. In 2002 it was stated that 1 in ever 166 children were diagnosed with autism. In 2010, when my son was diagnosed it was 1 in 110. Today it's closer to 1 in 90 which is more then 1% of the current population. Even if you choose to disregard the science and studies done in any potential link, common sense should be able to tell you, since vaccines for children no longer contain thimerosal, yet autism rates continue to rise, obviously it isn't the thimerosal in vaccines that cause it. People still claim mercury poisoning from vaccines as the cause of their child's autism though, even nearly a decade after thimerosal has been removed. Also, if you look up the symptoms of mercury poisoning and autism you will see their are vastly different, so autism isn't mercury poisoning.

The next culprit is the MMR vaccine being the cause. This is based mostly on the claim by Andrew Wakefield that the measles part of the MMR vaccine would cause damage in the children's intestinal tissue and cause  some form of inflammatory bowel syndrome and the resulting illness and distress from that caused brain damage which resulted in autism. It was claimed to be a new syndrome which was dubbed autistic enterocolitis. Even though initially, him and the coauthors of this study stated unequivocally their theory wasn't proven, Wakefield had given a press release which called for removal of the use of the triple vaccine jab and replaced by single jabs one year apart. This press conference is what sparked the vaccine scare and led to decreased rates of vaccination resulting in a rise in measles cases, causing serious injury and several deaths. When Wakefield's research was found to be fraudulent and his entire theory based on profit (he was paid for his efforts by a lawyer hoping to represent the children involved in a law suit against the pharmaceutical company who made the vaccine and he had shortly after this submitted a patent for a single dose oral measles vaccine) and other conflicts of interest, not to mention it was found (and parents of the children the study was based on have confirmed this) the data he used was fabricated, adjusted to fit and support the theory. He paid the children to allow him to take their blood at a child's birthday party and submitted them to procedures against the authority of the hospital he was working at and even reports of abuse of the children were mentioned, though no details were given. He continues to defend himself and instead of this entire debate dying like it should, it's turned instead into a government cover up of the truth.

Some have asked why this debate continues and I have asked that myself. To me, the science is clear. To the anti-vaccine people (they don't like you to call them that, they want to be called pro-vaccine safety, right...) they are still clammouring for that all inclusive, US only study showing rates of autism between fully vaccinated versus fully unvaccinated. They keep claiming once that study is done they will accept the results. They don't accept the results of the Danish Study conducted over a ten year period which shows the incidence of autism is the same between the two different groups but the rate of increase is also the same over the period of time they were researching. Why won't they accept this? It wasn't done in the US. Oh, and because now a minor player in the study who didn't actually have anything to do with the study research, results or implementation of data but in charge of the grant money, was indicted for fraud against the CDC, taking over $1 million of that grant money and routing it to his own personal account.

One person's greed shouldn't debunk an entire study especially if that person never had any part in the actual research end of things. They are claiming of course, if we can do it to Andrew Wakefield, they can do it to us... Hmm, there's quite a difference between one man (in several that were involved) who never touched the study data, committing fraud in a monetary sense and one man who was the author of the study, oversaw every aspect of the research and was essentially the Mac Daddy of the entire thing to commit fraud by paying off children for their blood, falsifying medical records, performing unwarranted and painful procedures on the children and then not being able to give step by step instructions on how he was able to reach the results he got so nobody anywhere was ever able to reproduce the results he claimed he got. Can you see a difference? I can, why can't the anti-vaxers?

The entire thing is just so over done and too drawn out. I know their fire is fizzling, but there are a few dry pieces of tinder they continue to jump on and try to fan into a flame again. Their time is just about up and I'll be very glad when it is because I want to see some real research being done.