About a year ago, I remember reading dozens of online articles about the rumored relationship between the MMR Vaccine and Autism. After all, my son was due for his MMR vaccination and as a concerned parent, I wanted to make sure that I did some due diligence that I was making the right decision in going ahead with the vaccines. Now, I am onto other parental worries. However, despite mounting evidence, there remains the mystery of this vaccine correlation with autism.
I am no medical expert, but wanted to share the results of a recent & significant medical study regarding mercury levels in vaccines, especially the MMR vaccine, and their correlation (or lack thereof in this case) with Autism. Josh Kross shared this Science-Based Medicine post titled, The Final Nail in the Mercury-Autism Hypothesis discussing how the investigators of the latest study “found nothing. Nada. Zip”
However, if there’s one rule in science-based medicine, it’s that no one study is ever sufficient to confirm or rule out correlations between undesirable outcomes and various exposures. However, as the weight of several studies starts to bear down on the problem, the preponderance of evidence must at some point be acknowledged, because we do not have unlimited resources to keep doing studies to answer the same question over and over and over again and every repeated study uses resources that could be used to study other potential causes and treatments for autism. Price et al happens to be one large and convincing chunk of that evidence, but it is not the only one. It builds on multiple other studies and it fits into the confluence of evidence strongly refuting the hypothesis that mercury in vaccines is a cause of autism.
As an aside, this vaccine article was scary – it mentions a whooping cough epidemic in California – resulting from anti-vaccine families.
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