Do Vaccines Cause Autism?

RFK Jr. needs to do some more research...

Lately I’ve been writing about what’s going on currently. But there’s something else that has a tie to current stuff, but it’s kind of a side issue. One of the criticisms of Robert Kennedy Jr. when he was named for the cabinet was on his views about autism. He still holds to the view that vaccines cause autism. He’s not the only one who holds that. But they are all barking up the wrong tree.

One reason that idea hangs on is that many children start to show signs of autism right about, or just after, they start getting vaccine shots. But there’s an old saying in science that correlation is not causation—just because two things happen around the same time does not prove that one causes the other.

I grew up when there weren’t so many vaccines available. I was given the smallpox vaccine as a child. And when it came out, I got the polio vaccine while in elementary school. I never got the vaccines for measles or mumps—they had not been developed yet. I did get measles, and I did get mumps—I lived through both of them.

So if vaccines don’t cause autism, what does? It’s hereditary—you get it from your parents. Hans Asperger, one of the first clinicians to deal with autism and write about it, got the cause right—he noticed that the traits he saw in the children he was working with were also present in their parents. But his writings were not translated into English until 1980. Now, current estimates are that autism is 80-90% genetic. And it isn’t just one or two genes involved. The latest stuff I saw online today is that there may be as many as 800 genes involved. And you don’t have to have all of them, either. Yes, it’s complicated.

Two terms that are in use by the psychologists and autistics are “neurotypical” and “neurodiverse.” And one reason the autistics have adopted the term “neurodiverse” is that we are not just diverse from the neurotypicals, we are often diverse from each other. There’s an old saying, “When you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” But Tony Attwood, and English psychologist who has worked extensively with autism, has said “When you’ve seen one person with autism, you’ve seen one person with autism.” The second one you see may be quite different.

The research is still going on. In 2013 Temple Grandin and Richard Panek published a book, “The Autistic Brain.” Ms. Grandin had been involved in a research project where brain scans were done on a group of autistic people, and compared to scans done on neurotypicals. They found that the brains of autistic people are structured differently; some areas of the brain are larger, some are smaller. And the connections between the two hemispheres of the brain are also different in autistics. There’s a subset of autistics that are nonverbal—they can’t talk. For years they were regarded as morons. It has now been shown that they may be just as intelligent as anyone else, but they lack the nerve connection between the brain and the vocal chords. One non-verbal autistic, a young man named Ido Kedar, got his hands on a keyboard and learned to write. He had a blog for years, and has also written two books—one non-fiction, and one novel.

One other aspect of the genetics of autism: it seems those 800 genes are widely spread among people. So some families go along for years, and then they get a child diagnosed as autistic. Enough of the genes came together in one person.

But there are some families like mine; all ten of my grandchildren have been diagnosed. Why do we have so many? What I and my two sons and daughter have been able to figure out is, we have been marrying other people on the spectrum for at least 3 generations. It may go back farther than that, but we don’t know enough about the behaviors of the previous generations to be sure. My own parents and my in-laws are deceased; but we knew them well enough to recognize things in their behavior. We don’t know enough about previous generations. But there are twenty of us alive, and all of us are somewhere on the spectrum (there are a couple of spouses who have not accepted it yet, but they show signs of it, too.) Eleven of us have been diagnosed. And we do have quite a bit of variety among us. We have one who is a professional computer programmer. Another is a repair technician—he seems to work most at the intersection of mechanics and electronics. We have one schoolteacher. My son-in-law was the oddball in his own family—he was an artist in a family of science geeks! We have one who is an expert on plants, another who loves to work with animals, one who wants to be a paleontologist—he’s been obsessed with dinosaurs for years.

So if vaccines don’t cause it, what is causing this apparent “epidemic” of autism? A few authorities are admitting the real cause—they are finally looking for us. When I was growing up, I went to a rural elementary school, and a suburban junior high and high school; nobody tried to evaluate me for autism. Nobody had even heard much of it. In 2005, when I was 55 years old, my older son found out about Asperger’s Syndrome, printed out some material from the Oasis website, and brought it to me. It was like the lights coming for a lot of things in my life—both in my childhood and as an adult. A few years later, my daughter found the book “Aspergirls” by Rudy Simone, and the lights came on for her. A few years after that, my grandchildren started getting diagnosed, and we began to do more boning up on what to do to help the kids.

How many are there of us? Currently, the CDC estimates we’re 2-3% of the US population. The wild-and-woolly estimate is that we might be 15%. My own hunch is that it’s somewhere between, maybe a bit on the higher side. Even the current efforts to find autistic children in schools are not foolproof. I saw an article a couple of years ago about a study in England where they went through the elementary schools in one region, where they had already evaluated the students. They found that for every three students they had diagnosed, there were two more they had missed!

Another factor is that for years, nearly all of the research was on autism in children. Nobody even thought about evaluating adults. In the last 15 years or so, that has been changing. A psychologist named Theresa Regan, in Peoria, IL, had raised an autistic son herself. She began to spot autistic traits in senior citizens she was working with at a hospital. She has written a couple of books, built a website and a forum, and has started developing resources for other professionals to learn how to work with autistic adults. https://www.adultandgeriatricautism.com/

I can see some possibility that for an autistic child, vaccination may trigger some reactions that make autism worse. But that doesn’t make it the primary cause. And even bad reactions may be partly due to a tendency in recent years to give kids a lot of vaccines in a very short time span—including some pushing to vaccinate children for hepatitis b—which is mostly spread through sexual contact or shared needles in drug use. Do small children really need that? My daughter and her kids were fortunate enough to find a pediatrician who was more conservative in her thinking, and was willing to space shots out instead of giving them all at once, and focus on the most important.

My advice for Robert Kennedy is to link up with some actual experts on autism, like Theresa Regan or Tony Attwood, and listen to what they have to say about it. Then he would have to be willing to look at his past opinion and see if it’s still worth promoting.

At least the genetic research may be easing one concern a lot of autistics have had about doing that research. Back in the 1940s, when Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner (the first doctor in the US to notice autism) started writing about it, eugenics was a very popular idea. It was somewhat discredited by Adolf Hitler and his mass murders and concentration camps. But it never has completely gone away. Down Syndrome is less common these days—because some doctors test for it during pregnancy and recommend aborting the child. Many autistics were concerned that such a practice might be applied to autistics. Now, since it is known that so many genes are involved, it would be a lot harder to come up with a definite and accurate diagnosis.