Vaccine and Autism: Science, Biases, and Myths

19 days ago

Its been about 5 years that we had the Covid-19 virus and sincerely, the year 2019 and 2020 was a whole lot with deaths being recorded, people scared, and government just holding different lock down activities. While there were a lot of negative news in the media, one news that almost everyone joy and a sign of hope was the news of a vaccine being developed. We all just wanted a solution and we heard there was one, we received it with all the enthusiasm in us.

Now Covid is gone at least for now, and we are back to the vaccination debate which I believe is just a waste of people's time because vaccines do not cause autism, rather it save the lives of millions of people. But so I am not seen as one who judge, I will discuss today's topic of vaccination and anti-vaccination based on science.

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My son is 1 year and 1 month and 3 days today, and he has been going to the pediatric hospital to get all his vaccinations and my wife mentioned to me that she met with a woman who said she doesn't believe in vaccination and so she didn't take her children for vaccination. My wife mentioned to me that the woman's child had sores on his lips and body, he also had rashes and boils all over.

I am not saying that he has those because he didn't get vaccinated but if she had gone to the hospital, a doctor would have been able to diagnose the child and commence with the right treatment. It's painful that the Child Protective Services (CPS) and social service in this country isn't active, they would have done a better job in teaching her parenting.

A lot of misleading science reports has also added to people's believe in not getting vaccinated. The relationship between vaccination and autism started as a result of an increased diagnoses of autism which looks like it is directly proportional to an increasing number of people getting vaccinated but this is not true. We are actually having an increased number of autism diagnosis and this is a a result of a change in how we diagnose the condition and how people report it but it doesn't look like we are having an increased number of incidence and if we do, it would be as a result of environmental factors.

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Autism itself is a spectrum of disorder which means it can manifest itself in a lot of different ways which is why they are referred to as Autism spectrum Disorder. It has been said to have genetic linking but it also has environmental factors in play but since we do not know what causes autism precisely, people who are in the anti-vaccination group hijacked this and began creating a lot of cognitive bias that are not founded on fact around it.

It is understandable for parents of children who just got autism to begin to find a cause for the spectrum and the first step would be to look at what event in the health of the child just took place, if it was a vaccine, then they would blame the vaccine for the autism. There have been peer-reviewed papers that have found no correlation between autism and vaccine but hen you go to the internet, you will see different groups of people who just claim that vaccines can cause autism without any proof. They go on to say the government or some large corporations are covering up the result of the research.

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A study showed that an attempt to advise parents to choose vaccination didn't help as there was a decrease in percentage of people who went on to choose being vaccinated. Also, we tend to fear the things we see than the things we do not have an idea of. People of this time aren't scared of the dark plaque because they didn't witness its pandemic. Also people of this recent age didn't witness measles killing spree so they are often not scared of it unless the few people whose children suffer from it in recent times. This is because we aren't scared of things we didn't see or know nothing about. The success in the vaccine for measles is one of the reasons people aren't taking the vaccination serious again and this is the same for a lot of other vaccines.

We are just a complicated specie and our attitudes more complicated. We do not accept that negative outcomes could come from a thing beyond control, we want to always blame something and vaccine just became the crucified lamb in this case.