Quote:
Originally Posted by BigBrodieFan
I understand your concern, but my point to people who have kids with autism is that almost all children are immunized. How do they know it was the immunizations? Immunizations start at 2 weeks to 1 month old. How could someone possibly know that their child was 'changed' at that point?
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I was going to make this point as an additional comment to photon's earlier post. In addition to looking at the coincidence in ages between onset of autism symptoms and vaccinations, you also have to analyze the sample set of those autistic parents who relate vaccination to autism. If 90% of kids get vaccinated, then one would expect that 9/10 parents of autiistic children will be able to relate autism symptoms to vaccination.
As an example, earlier this week my son won the spelling bee in his class of about 20 kids and today he is going on to the second stage of the spelling bee where he will be competing with the winners in the other classes at his grade level. I told him he should put a little bit of extra time in studying if he wanted to do well. His response to me was, "Dad, I have a better chance of winning because there are only going to be 8 kids so my chances of winning are better than when there were 20." (Yes my 9 year old is that geeky, takes after his old man). I then reminded him, that those 8 kids each already beat out a whole classroom of other kids and you can't ignore that fact in analyzing the probabilities.
One of the earlier points raised by FlamesAddiction (I believe) is that fear shouldn't be used to push vaccination. I disagree for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the unique phenomenon of jerd immunity means that you actually have to hit the right proportion of vaccination in the population. If you don't, it fails. If you actually tell people that it may be okay for their child not to be immunized because most others will, you essentially give those parents an out to justify their irrational choice by thinking it won't hurt anyone. Secondly, fear for one's health aand safety is a great motivator and can be used positively. Stop smoking, lose weight, and eat healthy are all messages that are pushed by fear of consequences, and justifiably so IMO.