I don’t know how I missed this one, but it jut goes to show that antivaccination ignorance with respect to autism is truly a bipartisan affair. You have folks like Representative Dan Burton on the right, and on the left you have this particular Daily Kos diarist, who falls like a ton of bricks for the recent Generation Rescue “study” of autism rates in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children:
The first ever study comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated children was completed with startling results.
- Vaccines Caused Autism
- Vaccines Caused Asthma
- Vaccines Caused ADHD
The study was privated funded and conducted through an independent research firm. 11,817 households with 17,674 children were interviewed.
This is important to note as this is the first ever study of its kind. All other studies on autism and vaccines only studied a changed variable, such as removing the MMR shot, or reducing the mercury in vaccines.
Talk about a lack of critical thinking skills and a surfeit of credulity! As Kev so ably described, in actuality this study demonstrates unequivocally that there is at the very minimum a significant rate of autism in unvaccinated children. There were quite a few cases found in unvaccinated children. Indeed, its results are disastrous for Generation Rescue’s longstanding “it’s the mercury in vaccines, stupid” claims.
Of course, as I documented when it was first released, the Generation Rescue poll that this diarist is referencing is a steaming, stinking, pile of crap that shows nothing of the sort. It’s so full of methodological flaws that it’s a fantastic example of how not to do such as study. I guess that “financial” needs to be shown just how bad this “study” is. To that end, I happily list my post on the subject, along with some other excellent deconstructions of this Generation Rescue pseudoscience:
- Fun with phone surveys and vaccines
- Survey says….. Nothing!!
- Generation Rescue Survey Results
- A Simple Selection Bias Model Explains Generation Rescue’s Survey Results
I doubt that “financial” can be turned from the dark side, given that he or she appears to have drunk deeply of the Kool Aid, even parroting the “Amish anomaly” and the utter crap that Dan Olmsted wrote about the Home First group in Chicago. Sadly for my sanity, I can’t help tilting at windmills from time to time, and this is no exception. On the other hand, I do note that “financial” caught a lot of much-deserved flak in the comments for this post. His or her defenses are so utterly, risibly pathetic that J. B. Handley himself appeared in the comments to defend the study.
