What gets lost in this debate, which to me seems settled in favor of the actual science done over the last several decades, is how insulting and dehumanizing it is to use autism spectrum disorder as the boogeyman for vaccines, to the point people are passing on treatment for completely preventable, horrible diseases on the belief there is a small chance their kid could come out gasp "autistic."
Up to 70% of people on the autism spectrum are considered high functioning, requiring minimal to moderate support. That's the other insulting thing about it - the fact that the worst autistic outcomes (nonverbal, low IQ, etc.) are used to represent the whole of the population.
The whole thing is gross. Say somehow you could eliminate autism spectrum disorder - there goes half your IT staff.
I think the real issue is simply that the definition of ASD has been expanded to the point of near-meaninglessness. If we're applying the same label to:
1. Someone who is totally nonverbal and effectively unable to function in society
2. Someone who is kind of socially awkward
...then maybe it's time to come up with a new labeling system. ("Autism" in the context of vaccines usually is implicitly referring exclusively to [1])
It's not near meaningless though. Like not even close. And I'm also not sure people at large going for this argument really care to differentiate because these terms already exist that highlight the differences within the DSM for ASD!
The distinction you're drawing here is the OP's point. People in category one are still human beings. The CDC is suggesting that people should avoid vaccines because death from measles is preferable to outcome #1.
It's not merely that people in category #2 hate being implicated in that. It's also insulting to the people in category #1 as well. They are being told that their lives are utterly worthless.
I think the issue is that autism is not necessarily a disorder.
I'm mildly autistic and I like the way I am. Really. I don't consider it a disability at all; it's got pros and cons, but for every thing that I'm worse at than a "normal" person, I feel there's something else equally valuable I'm better at, so it balances out as a slight positive for me and a big positive for humanity because, as the OP alluded to, diversity enables specialisation.
The issue is of course some people genuinely experience autism as a disability, and the more severe it is, the more likely that is to be the case. But you can make a solid argument that autism is not necessarily disability: like height, gigantism is unhealthy, but being tall can be adaptive!
To be clear, me too. I wouldn’t change how I am at all even if it sometimes causes challenges.
There is a movement in neurodivergence trying to define autism as a different human experience, rather than in the framing of a disability, but this is still controversial within autism advocate circles.
I’m high functioning and sure —it’s fine-ish, I have advantages that somewhat balance out my disadvantages, and it’s not like I could change it even if I wanted to, so why despair about it?
However, I’d much rather not have to deal with it in the first place, and if I could be changed, I’d happily change.
If we can avoid future generations having to deal with it at this same relatively high rate, great.
It’s saying that the conditions and traits that tend to select for IT people is often represented in autistic populations. Anyone that’s managed in IT can attest to this. Maybe “half” was a figurative exaggeration for effect, but you seem to be injecting an entirely different meaning and bias into the comment.
> I’m not vilifying you, it was just a poor choice of words.
You're not being honest here. Questioning someone's belief and calling it gross is vilifying, regardless of any agreement or lack thereof from a broader community. Additionally, finding the one disagreeable point and harping on that instead of any of the rest of the points they made is another means of vilification.
I don't agree with all of her book's arguments and associations but Naomi Klein has a compelling explanation for how this happened in her book Doppleganger.
Does there become a point where reporting on this kind of stuff is just feeding the trolls? Ars is both giving them the reaction they want and platforming their nonsense.
The government put up a poster that says vaccines bad very autism and maybe the right response is to just ignore it. This admin seems to be fueled by outrage and very loud showy public displays of basically nothing when you get down to it. Cool story RFK, anyway moving on.
You’ll have to let me know when that has ever really happened. I can’t recall a single government in my lifetime that didn’t push some remarkably stupid and irresponsible nonsense.
People my age probably remember the classic 90s “food pyramid” in school and on the back of sugared cereal boxes — it pushed empty carbs as the the foundation of a healthy diet.
There's a difference between doing something well meant, failing, and improving -vs- going back to theories already proven wrong and harmful. There's a reason we don't have the food pyramid - we're learning.
You don't think that the current crop of vaccine-skeptics are mostly well-intentioned and that the movement will ultimately fade-away decades down the line?
It seems identical to me: soft corruption and bad science shaping government policy. Annoying and bad, but also hopefully temporary (but may do damage in the meantime). I agree that it happens with all governments. Has everyone forgotten the sea of bad science that was COVID policy? Thank god they arrested that paddle-boarder!
Covid policy was bad mostly because it was driven by economic interests, not because of "bad science."
The only major scientific lapses I can think of in the US were the initial insistence that masks don't work and that the virus isn't airborne. The mask issue was influenced by the fact that they wanted to conserve masks for healthcare workers. I strongly suspect the airborne issue was heavily influenced by no one wanting to deal with the consequences: that stronger measures would be needed to reduce the spread of the virus.
Don't use scare quotes to twist what is being said.
Bad science is pretending or thinking that we know more than we do, just as much as thinking the wrong thing is true. For example, claims about the under or over-effectiveness of masks (and subsequently vaccines) is definitely bad science that erodes public confidence in scientific leaders and organizations.
And the insane vaccine mandate for *children* (not federal, but some states in order to attend school) was absolutely bad science. I'm not opposed to the vacinne, but there was most definitely no evidence to support this requirement. At best, the current science suggests an unclear risk-benefit profile, and the information at the time in no way suggested a profile that justified a full-on mandate. This violated basic medical and ethical principles.
Masks turned out to be highly effective if people actually bothered to wear them. Many studies found conflicting results in real-world use, because many people don't wear masks consistently. The correct response to that is to encourage people to wear masks correctly and consistently, not to claim that masks don't work.
The vaccines were initially highly effective against infection and transmission. That was a correct result of the initial studies. What the initial studies could not possibly capture was that the vaccine would become less effective over time at completely stopping infection (because of viral mutation and because antibody titers decrease over time), though they maintained their very high effectiveness at stopping people from getting seriously ill and dying.
> And the insane vaccine mandate for children (not federal, but some states in order to attend school) was absolutely bad science.
It's not insane at all. Schools are some of the most intense centers of viral spread in just about any community. It has long been known that reducing spread at schools is one of the most important measures in controlling a pandemic. The mRNA vaccines have a very good safety profile - the risk of side-effects is tiny. The most serious side-effect of the mRNA vaccines, myocarditis, is actually caused at a higher rate (and with greater severity) by Covid itself.
The scientific community did some amazing work during the pandemic. They almost instantly developed a vaccine that is extremely effective at preventing you from dying of Covid and which has a vanishingly small rate of serious side-effects. That would have been seen as a miracle a few decades ago.
What ruined the response to the pandemic was the politics of it, not the science. One aspect of that was the insane politicization of unalloyed goods like vaccination and masking. The paradox and tragedy of the United States is that despite having the finest scientific community in the world, most of the population is scientifically illiterate and open to manipulation and fear-mongering.
> Masks turned out to be highly effective if people actually bothered to wear them. Many studies found conflicting results in real-world use, because many people don't wear masks consistently. The correct response to that is to encourage people to wear masks correctly and consistently, not to claim that masks don't work.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. The problem wasn’t the masks. It was scientific institutions flip- flopping instead of saying “we don’t know”.
- The CDC first said masks were unnecessary unless you were sick.
- The CDC then said masks were strongly recommended, specifically cloth masks. These recommendations led directly to mandates.
- The CDC then said cloth masks were mostly ineffective compared to N95.
Masks are common sense, and I think relatively few people were opposed to wearing them. The problem that I have is the translation of low-evidence science directly into policy. This is what I’m calling bad science.
> The vaccines were initially highly effective against infection and transmission. That was a correct result of the initial studies. What the initial studies could not possibly capture was that the vaccine would become less effective over time at completely stopping infection (because of viral mutation and because antibody titers decrease over time), though they maintained their very high effectiveness at stopping people from getting seriously ill and dying.
Initial studies did not test for transmission. People felt like they had been lied to regarding this aspect of the vaccines, as it was cited as the reason for many of the mandates related to vaccines. (After all, if they only affected the individual, what would be the purpose of the mandate?) I think this was more bad communication and bad politics, but it is hard to separate these things.
> It's not insane at all. Schools are some of the most intense centers of viral spread in just about any community. It has long been known that reducing spread at schools is one of the most important measures in controlling a pandemic.
You are over-generalizing and washing away details to argue something you feel should be correct. Yes, schools are often centers of viral spread — but this was never the case for Covid. Good science requires evidence before jumping to conclusions, not merely relying on what has “long been known”. If the vaccine was actually useful and important, they wouldn’t have quietly rolled back mandates a year later: it was quietly rolled back because it was a mistake. I think you are wrong regarding the risk profile, the largest study I’ve seen for children is still unclear: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47745-z#Sec2 (I do think it’s likely safe, but we never had the science to justify a mandate for school children)
You can argue that the mandate was politics — that’s fine, but in that case they are inextricable. I would agree that a lot of what I’m calling bad science is actually scientific institutions taking positions under enormous political pressures. I still think that science was wielded as the weapon during this time. Which saddens me deeply, as I strongly agree that the vaccines themselves were incredible examples of the miracle of modern science.
I think you’re blaming the wrong people when you say the population is scientifically illiterate. While that’s true, I think that Americans just hate being told what to do, and when there isn’t really justification for it (I.e. the bad science), they’re gonna do the opposite. The lesson shouldn’t be that people are dumb, it should be that trying to force half-baked policies down everyone’s throats will backfire.
> The problem wasn’t the masks. It was scientific institutions flip- flopping instead of saying “we don’t know”.
Actually, this is an area where I would criticize the CDC, though I understand why they did what they did. The first thing is that the US was desperately short on N95 masks, and not even medical staff who were treating Covid patients had reliable access to masks. Public health authorities were afraid of a run on masks (which happened anyways), which would make that situation even worse. The government should have explained the situation to people, appealed to their civic duty (which probably wouldn't work in the US), and taken emergency measures like commandeering stocks of N95 masks from retailers.
The other aspect of this, which one could see as "bad science," was that various studies had found that laypeople don't know how to wear masks properly, so their real-world effectiveness was in doubt. I think the correct response to that is to teach people how to wear them, not to say they don't work. But before the pandemic, there was genuinely dispute in the literature about what the best mask recommendation in a flu pandemic (which was what everyone was planning for) would be.
> Initial studies did not test for transmission.
Initial studies tested for signs of infection. If your chance of getting infected is dramatically reduced (which it was in the first few months after vaccination), then of course you are less likely to transmit the virus. If you don't get infected, you don't transmit.
> Yes, schools are often centers of viral spread — but this was never the case for Covid. Good science requires evidence before jumping to conclusions, not merely relying on what has “long been known”.
It absolutely was the case for Covid, as it is for pretty much every respiratory disease on Earth. In the middle of a pandemic, you don't have time to run a months-long study with thousands of children to determine if schools are centers of transmission. The virus spreads by people breathing near one another. A room full of children running around slobbering on each other is obviously going to be a perfect environment for the virus to spread. One parent gets sick. Their child gets sick. Then all the children get sick. Then all the parents get sick. It's like clockwork, as anyone who has children knows. Waiting for all the studies to come in to confirm the obvious in the middle of a pandemic would be completely irresponsible.
> I think that Americans just hate being told what to do, and when there isn’t really justification for it (I.e. the bad science), they’re gonna do the opposite. The lesson shouldn’t be that people are dumb, it should be that trying to force half-baked policies down everyone’s throats will backfire.
As opposed to what? Telling people not to vaccinate and not to mask? The issue of masks and vaccines were incredibly politicized in the US, and there were all sorts of people cynically using these issues to appear anti-establishment. The US has a long history of paranoid-style politics, and in a pandemic, that's basically poison.
> Initial studies tested for signs of infection. If your chance of getting infected is dramatically reduced (which it was in the first few months after vaccination), then of course you are less likely to transmit the virus. If you don't get infected, you don't transmit.
You don’t know this a priori, and it turned out that there was significant transmission even when people were asymptomatic. The bad science here was jumping past the evidence and claiming that the vaccines stopped transmission, when there was no data to support that. (It would be fine to say that they “probably reduce transmission” but this does not justify mandates, which is presumably why this well-intentioned-but-not-data-supported jump happened.)
> It absolutely was the case for Covid, as it is for pretty much every respiratory disease on Earth. In the middle of a pandemic, you don't have time to run a months-long study with thousands of children to determine if schools are centers of transmission. The virus spreads by people breathing near one another. A room full of children running around slobbering on each other is obviously going to be a perfect environment for the virus to spread. One parent gets sick. Their child gets sick. Then all the children get sick. Then all the parents get sick. It's like clockwork, as anyone who has children knows. Waiting for all the studies to come in to confirm the obvious in the middle of a pandemic would be completely irresponsible.
Strong disagree! Waiting until there’s evidence is a basic tenant of medical ethics, and has been for centuries. “Do no harm” means that we err on the side of natural outcomes when uncertainty is high, which it certainly was for children. You could argue that the risk profile was high enough for older or less healthy adults to justify the vaccine risk and release strong guidelines (and I would agree with this), but we had a much more limited risk profile for children, who were far less susceptible. We also had no data on how much the vaccine reduced spread, so everything you’re arguing would have been purely assumptions (which is bad science!).
And re: months, the vaccine mandate for children was for schools starting in fall 2021, over a year after the start of the pandemic and 9 months since the vaccine was deployed. There was plenty of time and data already, and I don’t think the evidence justified the mandates for children. I believe that such mandates were actually very unusual globally (so the science was certainly not clear-cut enough to have most of Europe do the same thing).
> As opposed to what? Telling people not to vaccinate and not to mask? The issue of masks and vaccines were incredibly politicized in the US, and there were all sorts of people cynically using these issues to appear anti-establishment. The US has a long history of paranoid-style politics, and in a pandemic, that's basically poison.
I’m not sure why you are disagreeing here, I agree with your general strategy that you laid out above. Tell people how to wear masks, what’s proven to be effective and what isn’t, what we know and don’t know about the vaccines, and appeal to their personal and civic responsibility (take the vaccine to protect yourself and others).
When you lie and manipulate (or base recommendations and policy on assumptions that later turn out to be false), you create more anti-establishmentism and paranoid-politics (which is pretty rational, given the manipulation).
> You don’t know this a priori, and it turned out that there was significant transmission even when people were asymptomatic.
Again, you can't transmit if you're not infected.
> Strong disagree! Waiting until there’s evidence is a basic tenant of medical ethics, and has been for centuries. “Do no harm” means that we err on the side of natural outcomes when uncertainty is high
The "natural outcome" in this case is mass death. We know how respiratory diseases spread. You're arguing that we should have assumed Covid is a magical disease that refuses to spread in the perfect breeding ground - schools - until we did months of studies. That's an incredibly irresponsible attitude to take in the middle of a pandemic that is killing millions of people in the US alone.
> We also had no data on how much the vaccine reduced spread, so everything you’re arguing would have been purely assumptions (which is bad science!).
Science also works with plausibility and theory. In the middle of a pandemic, you have to base many of your decisions on what you know about other, similar diseases, what is scientifically plausible, etc. If we followed your recommendation, we would throw our hands up, do nothing, and let millions of people die, even though we would have a very good idea of what measures would likely prevent that.
> When you lie and manipulate (or base recommendations and policy on assumptions that later turn out to be false), you create more anti-establishmentism and paranoid-politics (which is pretty rational, given the manipulation).
You're letting all the people who deliberately pushed paranoia for their own political gain off the hook, and blaming the people who did the most to fight the pandemic - the scientific and medical community.
> You don't think that the current crop of vaccine-skeptics are mostly well-intentioned
Well intentioned but wrong is only when you have incomplete information. Once your theory has been disproven multiple times and you still ignore it, that's not well intentioned anymore. That's just lying to yourself and others at that point.
Humanity is messy. There are very many things that I think have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but are still, somehow, up for debate.
The answer can’t be absolutism in any direction. No one, no group, and no ideology has a monopoly on truth.
No system or ideology is perfectly correct — or even reliably correct in the long run, if you make the error of building an ideology around it that assumes it will be correct. You create the conditions of its own fallibility.
The next government will make stupid decisions, be wrong, and promote falsehoods. We probably won’t even know all of them at the time.
They’ll be both corrupt and good intentioned, depending on the subject, who is involved, and why.
This current government at least admits the possibility of debate. That’s a fair sight better than most of what I’ve seen over the last 10 years from those who think they have a monopoly on truth and science.
"Your Honor, I really meant well when I aimed the gun and pulled the trigger! Sure, everyone told me it would go off and kill someone, but can't you see that my intentions were pure?"
I'm not sure what you are trying to prove here, but obviously intent matters a lot for the purposes of crime, e.g. if you believed your life was in imminent danger and shot someone, you may not be guilty of murder.
You seem to be saying that people are indeed malicious and just lying about believing vaccines cause harm (for what purpose?), but I do believe they are just misinformed and have strongly-held-but-incorrect beliefs.
Pretty sure it was whole grains. Not what the base of the pyramid ought to be (it should really be vegetables) but hardly "empty" calories.
Japanese eat lots of rice, white rice even, and stay thin. The food pyramid wasn't the problem. Putting sugar in everything, eating cereal and other processed foods, and dropping home economics cooking classes from school was the culprit.
"All governments make mistakes. Therefore, pushing propaganda and lies about vaccines is okay, like telling kids three servings of vegetables is okay when actually it should be four."
But why? Do you feel the need to respond to those weirdos in the street yelling about how god hates fags and the end of days or whatever? Is anything gained by acknowledging them at all?
There's plenty of real stuff this admin is doing to respond to; focusing on the performative nonsense that exists seemingly to keep them 'winning' in the news cycle to their base might just be wasting your breath.
This is the real stuff this admin is doing. Using the public health apparatus to discredit and dismantle one of the most successful medical projects in human history is real stuff.
> Do you feel the need to respond to those weirdos in the street yelling about how god hates fags and the end of days or whatever?
There's a huge difference between the seriousness of "the official disease control of the US government" saying some nonsense and "random citizens yelling in the street" doing so.
> Is anything gained by acknowledging them at all?
Is there anything gained by ignoring them?
I'm sure it won't seem very performative to the kids who aren't vaccinated and get sick, or autistic folks who don't appreciate the correlation.
> plenty of real stuff this admin is doing to respond to
Because it normalises dangerous bullshit and that should be a line in the sand for any responsible human. You can’t dismiss it because it’s part of a much wider pattern that is fuelling the justification of other dangerous bullshit we used to suppress in the pursuit of harmony.
Well, many or even most non-Americans generally look up to America to learn. The USA are regarded as the pinnacle of world culture, industry, and commerce by the world. Even in non-western countries, and even if daemonized by certain leaders, the common people generally know that there are the greatest achievements in the USA. A few people may not do so, and may know how bad some corners are cut and how rotten some things are, but that's a minority. Also, if a powerful US politician farts, it is on all the front pages of all media outlets around the world. There's no escape, US news are pushed into all corners. And politicians in the world see that the thug model has worked quite effectively, and so strategies are taken over to do the same everywhere else, like ignoring science and instead citing 'common sense'.
All this BS that's currently going on spreads into the last corners of the world as ultimately good ideas, as truths, and the thugs are role models for the world.
It is not good. How to explain future to my kids? Yeah, sorry, I am also using the 'kid' argument now.
> “Nah no need to investigate any more, enough people have said they’re satisfied.” Such a person would rightly be scoffed at.
The thing is, you need a new angle for an investigation to be justified.
There have been thousands on studies on vaccines and their long term side-effects. You can't be saying "what if they cause autism" at this point and expect people to drop everything and take you serious. You need to be showing some evidence first because all the low hanging and even high hanging fruit has been picked.
It's like if you were going "wheels don't roll". Sure, maybe they don't and reality spins around them. But there's a gazillion studies about tire composition and their effectiveness so if you want somebody to take you seriously you need to show some work first.
It has been conclusively ruled out. At some point we don't need to keep checking if the Earth is round because no amount of research and evidence will convince some folks. This isn't a science problem, it's a propaganda problem.
Yes, absolutely, but not just a simple propaganda problem. The US is fully engaged in the Propaganda tactics Orwell summarizes from the Franco era. The purpose of the outlandish claims is not to trick a moron, it is to get people to agree to things they know are untrue to show their allegiance to power is more important to them than truth or their own reason.
Because they aren't doing science. Science involves keeping an open mind to try to figure out what the evidence is telling you. The telltale signs that they aren't doing science are especially evident when you listen to the kinds of things they present as evidence.
A propagandist says: autism surged so we must fix our society. A scientist says "did autism increase, or just how often autism is diagnosed?" I don't have to study a lot of data to see that they're purposefully not asking themselves that question. Instead they seem to hope their listener is not aware that medical criteria in diagnosing autism loosened vastly over the period of time. By ignoring the big change in the word, they can instead sell you the idea of a big change in the world.
Again it happens with Tylenol. There's a question of cause and effect. They see this number that says that there's correlation between Tylenol use and autism. But Tylenol use also correlates very highly to being in awful pain, so it turns out that being in awful pain "causes" Autism to the exact same degree that Tylenol does. But RFK isn't interested in this distinction, immediately pointed out by anyone whose goal is actually to determine what the evidence we see might be telling us about reality.
[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrc