The truly sad part is that regardless of the validity of the study, its methodology, or the results, the impact it will have in the political sphere or with the public will be negligible. It's maddening.
Just a friendly reminder for any who need to hear it again: it's really okay to have been wrong and okay to admit that you've been being lied to. Changing your views when confronted with new evidence that shows your beliefs/assumptions were incorrect is a sign of intelligence. It can also let you focus more of your attention on new topics/areas that are still important for protecting yourself and your loved ones.
I'm curious: did it ever become typical for these studies to publish the data and code? I haven't kept current, but I remember having read studies in times past and they definitely didn't. Not necessarily referring to this or vaccines, just like "hey we did this analysis" but they don't publish the code and data, when we have an ongoing replication crisis in science.
The people who dont believe in vaccines or that they cause autism dont really get science. Wasting hard work trying to convince them is useless. These people truly are idiots, at best a burden on society and at worse a threat to public health. Its one thing to have a skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry, its not ill founded but if their entire personality is based on denying science I dont think we should waste time or resources in convincing these idiots.
Ok, hold up. This study came up on Reddit a few weeks ago and my wife linked it to me. A lot of the comments were similar about how vaccine skeptics will never be convinced by it. So, being a vaccine skeptic, I went and read it.
>In this primary analysis, except for Asperger syndrome (hazard ratio, 1.13 [CI, 0.89 to 1.44]) and atypical autism (hazard ratio, 0.94 [CI, 0.79 to 1.12]), estimates for the individual outcomes were incompatible with any increased risk, with the upper bounds of the 95% CIs below 1.00. [1]
My understanding of this, and I am a software engineer so take it with a grain of salt, is that this study failed to disprove a link between aluminum in vaccines and aspergers! There is another section where it appears they played with the hyperparameters of their study and ended up with a lower hazard ratio for aspergers (I believe by extending the analysis window to 8 years of age, but it wasn't clear to me).
>Except for Asperger syndrome (hazard ratio, 1.02 [CI, 0.93 to 1.12]) and atypical autism (hazard ratio, 0.95 [CI, 0.88 to 1.03]), estimates for the individual neurodevelopmental outcomes assessed were incompatible with any increases in risk, with the upper bounds of the 95% CIs equal to or below 1.00.
That is to say, after reading the study, I am not convinced at all. I would like to see a longer analysis period (e.g. to 50 years of age) as many things go undiagnosed until later in life. From my reading though, this study failed to disprove a link despite what all the popsci headlines are saying.
I am an autism researcher. While we cannot say 'vaccines never cause autism' we can say with confidence 'Other potential causes of autism have much better theoretical foundations, empirical evidence, prevalence, and effect sizes. With limited research budgets, we have better research targets to pursue first before further investigating vaccines."
>To assess the association between cumulative aluminum exposure from early childhood vaccination and risk for autoimmune, atopic or allergic, and neurodevelopmental disorders.
from what I understand about the skepticism toward adjuvants, "cumulative aluminum exposure" was not the hypothesis. It might be a proxy for the hypothesis, which has to do with repeated exposures rolling the dice, but what is the attitude of the researchers (for example, how much these researchers in this industry receive funding from this industry) would play a big role in how they designed their study. Are they really looking?
We can take a quick look: "Apart from research into epidemiology and disease prevention, [the State Serum Institute] also develops and produces vaccines
... 20% of sales are used on Research and Development"
so their funding/salaries literally comes from profit in producing these vaccines. Their statement about funding? "Primary Funding Source: None."
(I spent 5 whole minutes tracking down this info. I wrote the funding sentence before I went and looked up their funding, so it's Popper-proofed)
the low effort or low sincerity part of this study is that they are saying "aluminum in greater and greater doses is not a problem." Ok then, why are you putting aluminum in in the first place? Oh, because in small quantities it has an outsized effect, aggravating the immune system, that you think is efficacious. Have you studied that? and from people who've looked into it, no, they haven't. In some studies, they use aluminum without other components of vaccine cocktail as the placebo thereby making sure not to test it.
It's interesting how they discovered adjuvants. They were making and dispensing vaccines (I think polio) and they discovered that some of the vaccines were contaminated in the processing. So they cleaned up the contamination and discovered the vaccines didn't work as well any more. The contamination was aggravating the immune system which made the immune response greater. Now, during this process, the whole whole time at each stage they were saying "vaccines are safe and effective". It would be more honest to say what actually was the case, "turns out we didn't know how they worked, but due to the contaminated vaccines we gave you we now understand better."
the point is not "vaccines aren't effective", I think they do a lot of good; the point is they were willing to lie before and now thanks to wall street, they are even more willing to lie now.
Just to clarify for others reading: Statens Serum Institut (SSI) is a government agency, founded and primarily funded by the Danish Ministry of Health. It’s not a private company profiting from vaccines. In fact, SSI sold its vaccine production business in 2016 to AJ Vaccines and now focuses on public health, disease surveillance, and research.
The claim that their “salaries come from vaccine profits” is simply false. While they conduct vaccine-related research and some of their funding comes from competitive grants, their core operations are state-funded. Saying "Primary funding source: None" in a paper means no external funding for that specific study, not that the authors are secretly paid by pharma.
It’s important to hold science accountable — but misrepresenting basic facts about an institution’s funding just spreads confusion, not clarity.
I don't like vaccines and its hard to say why. I was vaccinated as a child and I am fine. My wife and I fully vaccinate our kids per doctor's recommendation. I guess you could say I trust the doctors advice more than my silly gut feeling.
However I can articulate that:
I don't like that vaccine makers get special immunity from lawsuits.
I don't like that pediatricians get payouts from big pharma based in what percentage of their practice received their vaccine products.
I don't like that the definition of a vaccine was changed to accommodate the mRNA COVID shots while other valid treatments that already existed were pushed aside to enable the emergency use authorization.
It's just enough to give me the ick, but their benefit is generally obvious so I hold my nose.
I mean the pandemic was not too long ago, a lot of us actually remember the accessible treatments back then.
First they discovered steroids like prednisolone which were useful only for heavily sick patients, then they started to distribute antibody plasma from other patients, then monoclonal antibodies and some cytokine inhibitors and when everybody who wanted already got vaccinated, we got antivirals such as Paxlovid, and it was scarce.
There were a lot of misunderstanding around hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, similarly how we have a lot of misunderstanding around vaccines and autism. And they were tested and tested and tested, similarly how we still check if vaccines cause autism. And all the proper research showed that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were absolutely ineffective, times and times again, but people just couldn't let them go, similarly to how people can't let go the fake autism-vaccine connection.
In the first part of the pandemic, vaccines were the best we had.
(Disclaimer: I’m not trying to make an argument that there is a link between vaccines and autism, I’m trying to understand a research paper and its methodology and conclusions)
They did not do a non-vaccinated vs vaccinated people comparison. They looked at how many vaccinations each subject had and tabulated the total amount of aluminum they received (they have good records) in their vaccinations prior to age 2, and then looked for a correlation between higher amounts of aluminum adjutants and higher instances of all the conditions they reported on (the study does not focus on autism but many things, see figure 3 of the study)
There wasn’t a sizable aluminum free cohort because most children in Denmark got vaccinated for the data set they have to work with (figure 2). Wouldn’t you need a sizable cohort of non vaccinated children? (I don’t know where in the world you would find that cohort except in countries that don’t have good healthcare systems which implies they don’t have solid tracking of health outcomes in general, or maybe the USA in the last 5-10 years.)
The researchers discarded from their cohort 34,547 children for receiving too many vaccinations/too much aluminum (figure 1, right column) before age 2. Wouldn’t that data be relevant to look at?
So to my laymen’s mind it doesn’t seem like they in any way ruled out a link between vaccines and autism. At the very best, they saw no relationship with the amount of aluminum a child received before 2 and the rate of chronic disease (figure 1). The numbers correspond to “adjusted hazard ratio (95% CI) per 1mg increase in aluminum received……” and in the chart Asperger’s is listed at 1.13 (.89 - 1.44) so they do potentially see an increase for Asperger’s, but with the data they have the confidence interval is not small enough to be sure one way or the other.
But it does not seem to me that they proved what the article and submission title states. I would appreciate someone that is familiar with biomedical research that can elaborate on whether my conclusion is sound or faulty.
Also, as I understand it aluminum is one of about 5 or so adjuvants used in vaccines at the present time, so what about the other adjuvants?
I'm not familiar with the medical side of this study, but I am very familiar with the statistics.
### They did not do a non-vaccinated vs vaccinated people comparison
These studies are observational, and in that sense no manipulation (such as random treatment assignment) was made. So they need to rely on observational studies techniques.
From what I could gather, one of this observational techniques in inverse treatment probability weighting when they say
> "we adjusted for all baseline covariates using stabilized inverse probability of treatment weights"
The IPW technique basically tries to solve the problem that some groups of children might have a higher prevalence of the treatment by weighting them in a manner as to mimic random assignment. This is as close as we can get to comparing treated and untreated in observational settings.
Also, the division of the doses of vaccine is also a better characterization of "was vaccinated". If you think getting vaccinated causes something, then getting more vaccinated should increase the incidence of that something.
### Wouldn’t you need a sizable cohort of non vaccinated children?
Yes, but as you pointed out, that might not exist. So by creating comparable groups (via IPW) + treatment intensity/dose we can still arrive at some conclusions.
### The researchers discarded from their cohort 34,547 children for receiving too many vaccinations/too much aluminum (...) Wouldn’t that data be relevant to look at?
They probably did. A few things are important here. The data comes from administrative data sources, so mistakes can happen. While you need to trust the sources, there could be imputation typos, or just weird cases. So the researchers probably went after a notion of "clinically relevant vaccine dosage for this study" to know up to which point to consider data points, because from that point onward, it either is not interesting because its a rare treatment incidence, or just seems like a mistake.
### “adjusted hazard ratio (95% CI) per 1mg increase in aluminum received……” and in the chart Asperger’s is listed at 1.13 (.89 - 1.44) so they do potentially see an increase for Asperger’s
Important to say that with hazard ratios, a HR of 1 means that there is no change because we are in the multiplicative scale (as opposed to 0 meaning "treatment does nothing" in the additive scale).
So in this setting, after adjusting for the treatment probabilities, a HR CI of (.89 - 1.44) just translates to 'no effect'. Nothing out of the ordinary in terms of the interpretation.
I suffered from whooping cough/pertussis as a child because vaccines weren't available at that time. Not vaccinating against it nowadays borders on bodily harm in my opinion.
Shouldn't we actually study the link between not(!) being vaccinated and any bad health conditions in later life much more?
Sadly, this is a pointless study. 0% of people will have their minds changed by this since it is a political/propaganda issue that has nothing to do with science.
Is this the study that showed that unvaccinated kids who had an autistic older sibling were more likely to be autistic - because parents had an autistic child, decided vaccines were the cause, had more kids and never vaccinated - but autism is mostly genetic with in-utero activation so obvs genetics...
23 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 46.7 ms ] threadBut I have to wonder if any researcher will be able to publish a study that has a hint of the opposite conclusion?
Academia is not kind to anyone going against the flow. (I am a bona fide scientist, not a do-your-own-research conspiracy theorist...)
>In this primary analysis, except for Asperger syndrome (hazard ratio, 1.13 [CI, 0.89 to 1.44]) and atypical autism (hazard ratio, 0.94 [CI, 0.79 to 1.12]), estimates for the individual outcomes were incompatible with any increased risk, with the upper bounds of the 95% CIs below 1.00. [1]
My understanding of this, and I am a software engineer so take it with a grain of salt, is that this study failed to disprove a link between aluminum in vaccines and aspergers! There is another section where it appears they played with the hyperparameters of their study and ended up with a lower hazard ratio for aspergers (I believe by extending the analysis window to 8 years of age, but it wasn't clear to me).
>Except for Asperger syndrome (hazard ratio, 1.02 [CI, 0.93 to 1.12]) and atypical autism (hazard ratio, 0.95 [CI, 0.88 to 1.03]), estimates for the individual neurodevelopmental outcomes assessed were incompatible with any increases in risk, with the upper bounds of the 95% CIs equal to or below 1.00.
That is to say, after reading the study, I am not convinced at all. I would like to see a longer analysis period (e.g. to 50 years of age) as many things go undiagnosed until later in life. From my reading though, this study failed to disprove a link despite what all the popsci headlines are saying.
1. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997
Edit: I know I am going to catch downvotes for this, but please go read the study and let me know where I am incorrect!
from what I understand about the skepticism toward adjuvants, "cumulative aluminum exposure" was not the hypothesis. It might be a proxy for the hypothesis, which has to do with repeated exposures rolling the dice, but what is the attitude of the researchers (for example, how much these researchers in this industry receive funding from this industry) would play a big role in how they designed their study. Are they really looking?
We can take a quick look: "Apart from research into epidemiology and disease prevention, [the State Serum Institute] also develops and produces vaccines ... 20% of sales are used on Research and Development"
so their funding/salaries literally comes from profit in producing these vaccines. Their statement about funding? "Primary Funding Source: None."
(I spent 5 whole minutes tracking down this info. I wrote the funding sentence before I went and looked up their funding, so it's Popper-proofed)
the low effort or low sincerity part of this study is that they are saying "aluminum in greater and greater doses is not a problem." Ok then, why are you putting aluminum in in the first place? Oh, because in small quantities it has an outsized effect, aggravating the immune system, that you think is efficacious. Have you studied that? and from people who've looked into it, no, they haven't. In some studies, they use aluminum without other components of vaccine cocktail as the placebo thereby making sure not to test it.
It's interesting how they discovered adjuvants. They were making and dispensing vaccines (I think polio) and they discovered that some of the vaccines were contaminated in the processing. So they cleaned up the contamination and discovered the vaccines didn't work as well any more. The contamination was aggravating the immune system which made the immune response greater. Now, during this process, the whole whole time at each stage they were saying "vaccines are safe and effective". It would be more honest to say what actually was the case, "turns out we didn't know how they worked, but due to the contaminated vaccines we gave you we now understand better."
the point is not "vaccines aren't effective", I think they do a lot of good; the point is they were willing to lie before and now thanks to wall street, they are even more willing to lie now.
The claim that their “salaries come from vaccine profits” is simply false. While they conduct vaccine-related research and some of their funding comes from competitive grants, their core operations are state-funded. Saying "Primary funding source: None" in a paper means no external funding for that specific study, not that the authors are secretly paid by pharma.
It’s important to hold science accountable — but misrepresenting basic facts about an institution’s funding just spreads confusion, not clarity.
However I can articulate that:
I don't like that vaccine makers get special immunity from lawsuits.
I don't like that pediatricians get payouts from big pharma based in what percentage of their practice received their vaccine products.
I don't like that the definition of a vaccine was changed to accommodate the mRNA COVID shots while other valid treatments that already existed were pushed aside to enable the emergency use authorization.
It's just enough to give me the ick, but their benefit is generally obvious so I hold my nose.
First they discovered steroids like prednisolone which were useful only for heavily sick patients, then they started to distribute antibody plasma from other patients, then monoclonal antibodies and some cytokine inhibitors and when everybody who wanted already got vaccinated, we got antivirals such as Paxlovid, and it was scarce.
There were a lot of misunderstanding around hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, similarly how we have a lot of misunderstanding around vaccines and autism. And they were tested and tested and tested, similarly how we still check if vaccines cause autism. And all the proper research showed that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were absolutely ineffective, times and times again, but people just couldn't let them go, similarly to how people can't let go the fake autism-vaccine connection.
In the first part of the pandemic, vaccines were the best we had.
I just glanced through the study itself and not the article https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997 and have questions for anyone that is familiar with this sort of thing:
They did not do a non-vaccinated vs vaccinated people comparison. They looked at how many vaccinations each subject had and tabulated the total amount of aluminum they received (they have good records) in their vaccinations prior to age 2, and then looked for a correlation between higher amounts of aluminum adjutants and higher instances of all the conditions they reported on (the study does not focus on autism but many things, see figure 3 of the study)
There wasn’t a sizable aluminum free cohort because most children in Denmark got vaccinated for the data set they have to work with (figure 2). Wouldn’t you need a sizable cohort of non vaccinated children? (I don’t know where in the world you would find that cohort except in countries that don’t have good healthcare systems which implies they don’t have solid tracking of health outcomes in general, or maybe the USA in the last 5-10 years.)
The researchers discarded from their cohort 34,547 children for receiving too many vaccinations/too much aluminum (figure 1, right column) before age 2. Wouldn’t that data be relevant to look at?
So to my laymen’s mind it doesn’t seem like they in any way ruled out a link between vaccines and autism. At the very best, they saw no relationship with the amount of aluminum a child received before 2 and the rate of chronic disease (figure 1). The numbers correspond to “adjusted hazard ratio (95% CI) per 1mg increase in aluminum received……” and in the chart Asperger’s is listed at 1.13 (.89 - 1.44) so they do potentially see an increase for Asperger’s, but with the data they have the confidence interval is not small enough to be sure one way or the other.
But it does not seem to me that they proved what the article and submission title states. I would appreciate someone that is familiar with biomedical research that can elaborate on whether my conclusion is sound or faulty.
Also, as I understand it aluminum is one of about 5 or so adjuvants used in vaccines at the present time, so what about the other adjuvants?
### They did not do a non-vaccinated vs vaccinated people comparison
These studies are observational, and in that sense no manipulation (such as random treatment assignment) was made. So they need to rely on observational studies techniques.
From what I could gather, one of this observational techniques in inverse treatment probability weighting when they say
> "we adjusted for all baseline covariates using stabilized inverse probability of treatment weights"
The IPW technique basically tries to solve the problem that some groups of children might have a higher prevalence of the treatment by weighting them in a manner as to mimic random assignment. This is as close as we can get to comparing treated and untreated in observational settings.
Also, the division of the doses of vaccine is also a better characterization of "was vaccinated". If you think getting vaccinated causes something, then getting more vaccinated should increase the incidence of that something.
### Wouldn’t you need a sizable cohort of non vaccinated children?
Yes, but as you pointed out, that might not exist. So by creating comparable groups (via IPW) + treatment intensity/dose we can still arrive at some conclusions.
### The researchers discarded from their cohort 34,547 children for receiving too many vaccinations/too much aluminum (...) Wouldn’t that data be relevant to look at?
They probably did. A few things are important here. The data comes from administrative data sources, so mistakes can happen. While you need to trust the sources, there could be imputation typos, or just weird cases. So the researchers probably went after a notion of "clinically relevant vaccine dosage for this study" to know up to which point to consider data points, because from that point onward, it either is not interesting because its a rare treatment incidence, or just seems like a mistake.
### “adjusted hazard ratio (95% CI) per 1mg increase in aluminum received……” and in the chart Asperger’s is listed at 1.13 (.89 - 1.44) so they do potentially see an increase for Asperger’s
Important to say that with hazard ratios, a HR of 1 means that there is no change because we are in the multiplicative scale (as opposed to 0 meaning "treatment does nothing" in the additive scale).
So in this setting, after adjusting for the treatment probabilities, a HR CI of (.89 - 1.44) just translates to 'no effect'. Nothing out of the ordinary in terms of the interpretation.
Shouldn't we actually study the link between not(!) being vaccinated and any bad health conditions in later life much more?