As others have also expressed, foremost I'm also sorry about your son's diagnosis. As a parent of very young children, I live in fear of getting the news you received, as does my wife whom I might describe as a "Vaccine Skeptic".
Everyone says that so-called "anti-vaxxers" can't be pursuaded by reason. You're on HN so you must have some attraction to reason, and here two people responded with exactly the study you asked for.
I'm curious whether "everyone" is correct that you are not at all pursuaded by this evidence, as well as the evidence presented elsewhere against Wakefield?
My wife had a doctor once assure her when my eldest was getting her MMR something to the effect of "our shots are safe because we don't use the preservative that can cause autism," and now she's scared stiff of vaccines and requires my assurances that all data points to that doctor saying a lot of nonsense, probably with good intentions. My wife doesn't know how to read scientific studies or to distinguish between a sample size of 12 or 90,000, so it falls on me to provide the not-so-reassuring fact that our children will or will not be diagnosed with autism based on factors that are, at this point, not within our control, and that avoiding vaccines is only comtributing a net-negative to our children's health (and the health of our community). But again, my wife also doesn't frequent sites like HN as you do.
I like to think that we shouldn't give up on the idea of trying to find the proven truth about worries like vaccine-autism links, and spread that beyond our usual insular sphere of people who already agree with us. I appreciate that you're willing to share your (obviously unpopular-here, given the downblvoted) beliefs on HN. But I also hope that everyone's efforts to provide factual, scientifically valid data points about the very real lack of any vaccine-autism connection is not for naught. Is my hope at all justified, or is "everyone" else right?
Everyone says that so-called "anti-vaxxers" can't be pursuaded by reason. You're on HN so you must have some attraction to reason, and here two people responded with exactly the study you asked for.
I'm curious whether "everyone" is correct that you are not at all pursuaded by this evidence, as well as the evidence presented elsewhere against Wakefield?
My wife had a doctor once assure her when my eldest was getting her MMR something to the effect of "our shots are safe because we don't use the preservative that can cause autism," and now she's scared stiff of vaccines and requires my assurances that all data points to that doctor saying a lot of nonsense, probably with good intentions. My wife doesn't know how to read scientific studies or to distinguish between a sample size of 12 or 90,000, so it falls on me to provide the not-so-reassuring fact that our children will or will not be diagnosed with autism based on factors that are, at this point, not within our control, and that avoiding vaccines is only comtributing a net-negative to our children's health (and the health of our community). But again, my wife also doesn't frequent sites like HN as you do.
I like to think that we shouldn't give up on the idea of trying to find the proven truth about worries like vaccine-autism links, and spread that beyond our usual insular sphere of people who already agree with us. I appreciate that you're willing to share your (obviously unpopular-here, given the downblvoted) beliefs on HN. But I also hope that everyone's efforts to provide factual, scientifically valid data points about the very real lack of any vaccine-autism connection is not for naught. Is my hope at all justified, or is "everyone" else right?