pagerman @ work said:

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No it isn't. You are missing the biggest reason which is there is a lot of money in diagnosing and treating autism. Parents also have an incentive to get their kid diagnosed because if your kid gets diagnosed, they get accommodations like more time to take tests including the ACT and SAT which give them a leg up.

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I don't know what to tell you if you really believe this. No person in their right mind would want their child diagnosed with ASD.

And the accommodations you speak of are available for a simple ADHD diagnosis. "Opting" for ASD in order to get some perceived advantage is insane.

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Autism and "neuro-divergent" familiarity is very high in the US now. Parents look for it. Test for it. Some test their children repeatedly until it shows up because they know the symptoms.

In the 90's these kids just seemed different. Highly focused on some things and super uninterested in other things. They were labeled weirdos in school because they didn't know what they were saying or doing was entirely odd to others in the classrooms. I dont agree that it is because of the small advantages it might mean to a family with such a child...but I do see parents all talking about it and whether their young children have the signs or not.

Truth of what? Which accusation or concern?

SunrayAg said:

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You read it on the internet so it must be true, right?

Let me let you in on a little secret.

There are people with degrees and titles who are still incompetent lunatics who shill for funding.

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Exactly!!!

So why did you trust them and take a rushed experimental vaccine for a head cold with a 99% survival rate?!

Rapier108 said:

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El Gallo Blanco said:

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Rapier108 said:

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shack009 said:

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SunrayAg said:

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You read it on the internet so it must be true, right?

Let me let you in on a little secret.

There are people with degrees and titles who are still incompetent lunatics who shill for funding.

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What funding is made available by vaccine skepticism? Most funding is through pharmaceutical companies, which push the vaccines.

It's very possible this lady is incorrect, but the "funding" argument makes no sense for the vaccine skepticism crowd.

Also she said it on the biggest podcast in the world, it wasn't just reading a tweet.

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And all she and Rogan have done is ensure there will be more cases of polio in the long run.

These whackadoodles would ban the rabies vaccine if they could.

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Are they saying the polio vaccine must be banned, or are they skeptical that it single handidly "eradicated polio".

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They would ban it. These anti-vaxxers would ban them all; although they usually don't say that part out loud.

I don't get why anyone wants to return to a time of plagues and pandemics that could wipe out millions, or in some cases, 1/3 of the world's population.

People need to quit thinking the WuFlu shots are the same as actual vaccines which have been around before many people here were even born.

It is truly sad that the WuFlu broke the brains of so many people, especially on the political right. The left was already screwed up, but now we have so many on the right who would question the color of the sky of Joe Rogan had a guest on who told them it was actually fuchsia. Critical thinking has gone out the window and replaced with pseudoscience and the belief that everything is a lie and/or conspiracy.

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Case in point.

titan said:

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A giant part of the autism data is the change in diagnoses protocols. I have three people in my family that were diagnosed on the ASD after they turned 40. You don't develop autism after you turn 40. The number of people diagnosed with Autism after 40 has absolutely skyrocketed.

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Which strongly suggests the current diagnosis protocols are wrong; changed for the worst. So is an example of the argument of changed definitions used to just remove or increase the stats for a disease.

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If there is a diagnosis then there is likely a pharmaceutical product that can be prescribed to treat it.

agdx88 said:

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Interesting discussion. Over the weekend I was having a discussion with my 88 neighbor, retired doctor about diseases and immunizations. He loves to read the medical journals etc. all the time. We had lots of fun during COVID, but he basically felt everything done in CVOID was BS. He took Ivermectin when he got COVID, prescribe by his doctor.

He's a vaccine supporter (Not COVID), but states their effectiveness is overstated. He was discussing data that showed substantial decline in infections just before the vaccines came out and theories that the decline would have continued with or without the vaccines. Said the same thing with COVID. As viruses mutate they become weaker the spread easier, but it reaches critical mass at some point and the now weaker virus is easy to fight and becomes more benign.

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Some folks here would call your neighbor a loon…..

They wouldn't have much basis. Madagascar's linked detailed standard report almost routinely confirmed that get weaker aspect.

titan said:

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A giant part of the autism data is the change in diagnoses protocols. I have three people in my family that were diagnosed on the ASD after they turned 40. You don't develop autism after you turn 40. The number of people diagnosed with Autism after 40 has absolutely skyrocketed.

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Which strongly suggests the current diagnosis protocols are wrong; changed for the worst. So is an example of the argument of changed definitions used to just remove or increase the stats for a disease.

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It could be that the past diagnosis protocols were wrong, and the new protocols are best for society. You can make an argument either way. What you can't do is blame the diagnosis rise on other thingd like vaccines unless you control for the change. Any statement that leaves this detail out is a lie of omission.

El Gallo Blanco said:

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Rapier108 said:

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El Gallo Blanco said:

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Rapier108 said:

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shack009 said:

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SunrayAg said:

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You read it on the internet so it must be true, right?

Let me let you in on a little secret.

There are people with degrees and titles who are still incompetent lunatics who shill for funding.

---

What funding is made available by vaccine skepticism? Most funding is through pharmaceutical companies, which push the vaccines.

It's very possible this lady is incorrect, but the "funding" argument makes no sense for the vaccine skepticism crowd.

Also she said it on the biggest podcast in the world, it wasn't just reading a tweet.

---

And all she and Rogan have done is ensure there will be more cases of polio in the long run.

These whackadoodles would ban the rabies vaccine if they could.

---

Are they saying the polio vaccine must be banned, or are they skeptical that it single handidly "eradicated polio".

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They would ban it. These anti-vaxxers would ban them all; although they usually don't say that part out loud.

I don't get why anyone wants to return to a time of plagues and pandemics that could wipe out millions, or in some cases, 1/3 of the world's population.

People need to quit thinking the WuFlu shots are the same as actual vaccines which have been around before many people here were even born.

It is truly sad that the WuFlu broke the brains of so many people, especially on the political right. The left was already screwed up, but now we have so many on the right who would question the color of the sky of Joe Rogan had a guest on who told them it was actually fuchsia. Critical thinking has gone out the window and replaced with pseudoscience and the belief that everything is a lie and/or conspiracy.

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You're a different poster than you used to be. I can't tell if TDS or if you are just fuly vaxxed and boosted...but something is very different from the Rapier of 3-4 yrs ago.

You probably still think the WuFlu came from a "wet market" that just so happened to be within a few miles of the viral lab that weaponized these types of viruses, which we funded btw. Meanwhile, it is looking more and more like an intentional lab leak.

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He's another fully vaxxed / boosted sucker.

agracer said:

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When the conversation turned to polio, Dr. Humphries blew just about everyone’s mind on the internet. She challenged one of the most sacred beliefs in modern medicine: that vaccines eradicated polio.

The truth is that polio wasn’t actually eradicated. “Polio is still here. Polio… pic.twitter.com/wZ91AERL6d

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) March 27, 2025

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When the conversation turned to polio, Dr. Humphries blew just about everyone's mind on the internet. She challenged one of the most sacred beliefs in modern medicine: that vaccines eradicated polio.

The truth is that polio wasn't actually eradicated. "Polio is still here. Polio is still alive and well," Dr. Humphries declared. It's just that a few sleights of hand made the world believe otherwise.

The real change that happened, according to Humphries, wasn't the vaccine's impactit was the definition.

"Polio is called different things today," Humphries explained. "Whereas back in the 1940s, 1950s, the criteria for diagnosing polio were completely different to the year that the vaccine was introduced. The playing field, the goalpostseverything was changed… they were able to show a complete cascading drop of paralytic polio simply because of the way they changed the definitions of what polio is and what could cause it."

After the vaccine rollout, cases that would've been diagnosed as polio were now labeled as Guillain-Barr syndrome, coxsackievirus, echovirus, or chalked up to lead or mercury poisoning.

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Haven't watched the whole podcast, have no clue who Dr. Humphries is or her credentials at this point.

Just to be clear, I was never a conspiracy theorist until all of the ones I thought were nonsense started to come true.

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Add another coin to the Alex Jones tip jar.

Burdizzo said:

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Investments in iron lungs

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Iron lungs are now obsolete due to modern breathing therapies and the eradication of polio in most of the world, only one person in the US, Martha Lillard, is known to still rely on one, and she only uses it at night.

twk said:

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Deadly allergies to peanuts and other silly sh** seem to have skyrocketed since his day...what was the cause there? Will they eventually come out with a vaccine to keep kids from dying from exposure to peanut particles?

I think I could make a pretty strong argument that people actually used to be healthier and more resilient. And "Do not dare bring a single peanut into this preschool or elementary because children could literally die" wasn't a thing. Where the F did that come from? I am just glad my child doesn't have any of these crazy allergies.

He makes it sound like autism wasn't really a thing.

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WSJ article (paywall)

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How Pediatricians Created the Peanut Allergy Epidemic

By recommending that children avoid exposure to peanuts until age 3, doctors inadvertently turned a rare issue into a major health problem.

The peanut allergy panic began in the 1990s, when the media started to cover stories of children who died of a peanut allergy, and doctors began writing more about the issue. In fact, peanut allergies at the time were rare and mostly mild: In 1999, researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital estimated the incidence of peanut allergies in children to be 0.6%. But starting in the year 2000, the prevalence began to surge. Doctors began to notice that more children affected had severe allergies.

What had changed wasn't peanuts but the advice doctors gave to parents about them. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) wanted to respond to public concern by telling parents what they should do to protect their kids from peanut allergies. There was just one problem: Doctors didn't actually know what precautions, if any, parents should take. Rather than admit that, in the year 2000 the AAP issued a recommendation for children 0 to 3 years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts.

The AAP committee was following in the footsteps of the U.K.'s health department, which two years earlier had recommended total peanut abstinence. That recommendation was technically only for children at high risk of developing an allergy, but the AAP authors acknowledged that "the ability to determine which infants are high-risk is imperfect." Using the strictest interpretation, a child could qualify as high-risk if any family member had any allergy or asthma.

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The article goes on to describe how a UK physician giving a lecture in Israel discovered the link between early age peanut avoidance and peanut allergies, when he asked an audience of Israeli physicians if they were treating anyone with peanut allergies, and only a couple raised their hands. Almost all Israeli children are fed a peanut-based food in infancy, and the rate of infant sensitivity to peanuts among Jewish children in Israel is 1/10th of that among Jewish children in the UK.

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I love data.

Chat gtp says respected survey shows that children eating peanuts between 0 and 3 reduces risk of peanut allergy by 81%, and peanut avoidance in infantry leads to an allergy about 15% of the time. That is how you science.

eric76 said:

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Many adults seem to be seeking a diagnosis of autism to "explain" why they are odd. I wonder if they are trying to evade responsibility for their behavior -- "It's not my fault that I am like I am -- it's autism."

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While there is likely some truth to what you are saying, your nomenclature is off, and undercuts your theory just a bit. If you are diagnosed low on the spectrum, you are provided with different tools to help manage the quirkieness of how most ASD brains think. While some people might use it as an excuse, clinicians will absolutely tell you that you are responsible for managing your own development of social behaviors, and that all but the most severe forms of ASD are manageable to some degree.

You contrast this with the 80s, where smart, awkward kids were put into 'gifted and talented' programs, that challenged them more intellectually than routine work, but also often provided social skill coaching. Note that GT programs were a form of Special Ed back then.

I like the argument that incentives are misaligned here. People respond to incentives is the foundational truth to economics. But, I think that educating people about how their brain biology affects their behaviors, and giving them strategies to manage those behaviors, is likely a good thing, not a bad thing. The important part is to get a clinician involved that has seen thousands of quirky kids so that they can provide advise on whether or not such tool have helped similarly situated people in the past.

General Jack D. Ripper said:

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Unless you are a vaccine specialist or immunologist, it's probably best to say "I don't know." That goes for both "sides" of this debate.

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This type of thinking is silly. Moat people are absolutely smart enough to become educated enough to form an opinion. Relying on experts for everything is how we as a society stood six feet apart in grocery stores, all wore masks that were not at all effective, and allowed the cdc to instruct us to give gene therapy treatment with zero studies on potential dangers to toddlers with zero risk of death from Covid.

In 1952, the number of paralytic polio cases in the US was around 20,000. In 2024, it was 6.

I have seen no quantification of how you get from 6 to 20,000 cases that doesn't rely on the successful vaccine rollout. Until then, 20,000 to 6 is plenty of data for me. Occlam's razor is often the best wisdom.

I appreciate Titans review of the arguments here, and the explanations were very helpful. But anyone making the claim that the polio vaccine wasn't that helpful has a severe upward hill to climb.

agdx88 said:

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Interesting discussion. Over the weekend I was having a discussion with my 88 neighbor, retired doctor about diseases and immunizations. He loves to read the medical journals etc. all the time. We had lots of fun during COVID, but he basically felt everything done in CVOID was BS. He took Ivermectin when he got COVID, prescribe by his doctor.

He's a vaccine supporter (Not COVID), but states their effectiveness is overstated. He was discussing data that showed substantial decline in infections just before the vaccines came out and theories that the decline would have continued with or without the vaccines. Said the same thing with COVID. As viruses mutate they become weaker the spread easier, but it reaches critical mass at some point and the now weaker virus is easy to fight and becomes more benign.

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What is also interesting is that this mutation pathway was anticipated by virologists at the earliest outset. They took a look at the virus, and realized that it had not undergone a mutation of a specific gene that most corona viruses had already gone through. Virologists that had worked through SARs were tracking the virus, waiting for that specific mutation, which had made SARs way less dangerous and much more contagious.

It had happened to SARs, which morphed into a common cold. It also eventually happened to Covid. I'm sure that somewhere, there was a virologist betting pool for the first date where this specific gene mutation was discovered in Covid.

GeorgiAg said:

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Forget the vaccine, real men just inject all the live viruses. If you live, you're good and that's what Allah intended.

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This was the method used by a prize winning research doctor from Australia that could not convince the medical community that a significant number of ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection. The prevailing wisdom was that bacteria couldn't live in the stomache. Using this deduction, scientists concluded that bacterial infections could not cause ulcers.

The good doctor drank a large load of the cultured bacteria, and developed significant ulcers. His work was documented well enough that he eventually changed the science in ulcer treatment.

That's the only more manly way to do science than thorough data analysis.

I recall seeing a graph for diseases that displayed the number of cases and when the vaccine for the disease was introduced. In every case, the vaccine was introduced as the number of cases were approaching the bottom of the curve. In other words, natural immunity/herd immunity had taken effect by the time the vaccines were released. I'm not anti-vaccine (anti-vaxx, yes) and I do think that traditional vaccines have accelerated immunity and kept the recurrence of outbreaks to a minimum, however these graphs illustrate the power of natural and herd immunity which was poo pood by the Covidians.

torrid said:

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I'm waiting for RFK Jr. to tell me whether to believe the study or not. He already told me to take Vitamin A for measles, and lots of it.

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Why on earth would you do that?

Quote:

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Chatgtp says respected survey shows that children eating peanuts between 0 and 3 reduces risk of peanut allergy by 81%, and peanut avoidance in infantry leads to an allergy about 15% of the time. That is how you science.

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Peanuts are to the infantry what apricots are to tankers and trackers.

Admiral Nelson said:

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Burdizzo said:

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Investments in iron lungs

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Iron lungs are now obsolete due to modern breathing therapies and the eradication of polio in most of the world, only one person in the US, Martha Lillard, is known to still rely on one, and she only uses it at night.

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Don't push your voodoo science witchcraft on me.

Funny swypo