This is the modus operandi of conspiracy theorists sigh.
Wear down your critics by just keeping saying the same thing over and over again until they really can't be arsed refuting your lies and assertions anymore. (at last count 36 out of 150 posts on this thread were yours, that?s 1 in 4?.). Saying it more often and for longer still doesn?t make your assertions correct. I guess attrition has to be your friend because logic, statistics and scientific credibility are not your strong point.
In one breath you say "stop patronising me", and then you show all of the intellect of a 6 year old by being unable to understand that a sample size of 1 child diagnosed by its mother does not constitute ?reliable evidence?. This is not the same as saying the mother isn?t a reliable witness and doesn?t know her child, it?s a simple numbers game. Coincidences do happen. Some regression happens without an environmental trigger. No parent can see what is happening inside her child?s cells.
You also labour under the misapprehension that because measles vaccine uptake and ASDs have both risen over the course of two decades that they are related.
Its a basic, simple tenet of being able to analyse scientific evidence that you understand that
CORRELATION DOES NOT MEAN CAUSATION
Growing population of people with ASD - well of course there is. Why would you expect anything else?
Why?
"ASD" it is a spectral disorder and that spectrum has been increasing in size and scope for every bit as long as it has existed. This is because of changes in the diagnostic criteria and increased public awareness and referrals to support services, not because incidence is actually increasing in the population. Loads of kids who would never have been "diagnosed" with anything other than perhaps (in the olden days) being considered "a bit slow" are now fully diagnosed paid up members of the ASD community. Great - hopefully they get the help and support they need.
Before anyone had even coined the term autism there were still people with ASD, they just called it something else. Before the raising of public awareness, people weren?t looking for symptoms in their child, so lots of people with mild symptoms would not have been diagnosed. Even now it is considered that ASD is still under-reported, so expect the numbers to keep rising for a while yet.
Observing regression.
Regression can be caused by lots of things. In girls with ASD RETT syndrome it is usually a mutation on a gene which encodes for a protein in neurones. They have this mutation from birth but they still develop entirely normally for anything from 8 months of age to 2 years of age before regressing. Even girls who have identical mutations will regress differently and from different ages.
What causes the mutation? It could be spontaneous. It could have been exposure to some mutagen during pregnancy such as cigarette smoke. Who knows? My point being that regression happens along a sliding scale of time and can be due to loads of things that never entered your mind (chemicals from a new carpet? Something that leaked under the sink? second hand smoke from a beer garden as you walked past?) Or indeed spontaneous mutations which can and do occur all the time. We know how RETT happens but the causes of some forms of ASD are still not known at the molecular level, so we can't look for them.
The point of the analogy being that there are loads of things that cause mutations, and mutations can cause ASD, so you simply can't say - it happened after the vaccine, it must have been the vaccine that caused it.
Silverfrog ? the poor science in Wakefield?s paper comes from two sources
a) the fact that he got positive results from patients that his PhD student had previously tested as negative which was almost certainly because
b) the PCR primers he used were crap and give false positive results, as written up
here
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1954854/?tool=pubmed