Actual Real Causes of Autism

Tldr vaccinate your fucking kids you assholes, this can and does kill people.

When I was a baby, I was allergic to the pertussis component of the TDaP vaccine. I'm not 100% sure how serious my reaction was - my mother just says I turned bright red and screamed for 3 days straight afterwards. When she told my pediatrician, the pediatrician said it was safe to not vaccinate against pertussis, as herd immunity would protect me. So the rest of my vaccines were tetanus and diphtheria only.

Fast forward to when I'm 8 years old. My family and I are traveling up to a family vacation spot like we did pretty much every weekend when I was a kid. We stop at a McDonald's. I play with the other kids in the little play area. My mom remembers a couple of them being sick, but I don't think I was paying attention. We eat, pile back into the car, and off we go.

Maybe a week later I start feeling sick. It looks like a cold, but I keep getting worse instead of better. My mild cough turns into horrible coughing fits, where I cough until there's no air left in my body ... it feels like I'm suffocating (because I am) until some instinct kicks in and my lungs reinflate with a horrible sucking gasping sound. I start coughing up blood and throwing up from my coughing fits.

My mom is terrified and my doctor (eventually a small team of doctors) is baffled. Remember, this was 1994, when the anti-vaccination movement was still pretty new. No one on my team had ever seen whooping cough before; it was just something you read about in a textbook, not something anyone actually *gets* these days.

They treated me for pneumonia, for bronchitis, for asthma and croup and I don't know how many other things. I just remember lots of pills and syrups and inhalers and a nebulizer that tasted like ghosts.

Finally, my mom saw a segment on the local news about an outbreak of pertussis (whooping cough) in the area where we had been travelling. The epicenter of the outbreak was a charter school that had a high population of "persona exemption" unvaccinated kids. She looked up pertussis in one of her family medicine books (which she'd been reading like a fiend since I got sick) and the symptoms fit me perfectly.

The doctors didn't believe her at first. They thought she was being overdramatic and overprotective. It took her ages to convince them to test me. Lo and behold, it's whooping cough! They start giving me the proper treatment, and I s.l.o.w.l.y start to get better.

Most of my memories of that summer are pretty dim. I remember waking up in the mornings covered in blood that I'd coughed up in my sleep; I had to sleep with towels covering the bed because I kept ruining my sheets and blankets. I remember my mom sleeping next to me on the floor so she could wake up and give me medicine when I woke up coughing. That medicine tasted like death (I used to cry and scream when they'd try to give it to me), so she'd mix it with a glass of fruity sparkling water to get me to drink it. I didn't know how to swallow pills, so she would crush them up and mix them with these orange sherbet Flintstone's push-up ice cream pop things. (I still can't eat sherbet without throwing up.) I remember her holding me, rocking me as I cried because I was in so much pain from coughing. Each fit was agonizing, and I would cry because I knew another one would always come and I was helpless to stop it. I remember being rushed to the pharmacy, literally being picked up and carried into the car and then out again to the counter, for an emergency dose of some medication or another, I think it was an injection. It was loud and scary and chaotic and I didn't fully understand what was going on, just that everyone around me was terrified.

Most of all, I remember being really angry that the Lion King came out that summer, and I was too sick to go see it. Clearly I had priorities.

What I don't remember, because no one told me at the time, was just how serious this all really was. My parents and doctors were very reassuring, and I was too young to really understand the severity of the disease. My mom didn't tell me this until years later, but they had wanted to put me in the hospital in case I started to ... well, her exact words were, "They wanted me to put you in the hospital, but I said no because I wanted you to die at home."

I was incredibly sick for months, continuing to throw up and cough up blood for about a year after I first got sick. (I'd start coughing if I laughed too hard, so you can imagine my asshole siblings got a kick out of taking advantage of that.)

The long and short of it is, I lived. If I'd been even a little bit younger, or if my mom hadn't caught that news segment, or if my doctors had waited just a little longer to start proper treatment... who knows.

But I lived, and dammit, I'm angry.

This should not have happened to me. This shouldn't happen to *anyone*. Diseases like whooping cough, measles, rubella, polio... they're all absolutely *terrifying*. They can kill, they can maim, they can leave a person permanently disabled or brain-damaged.

Every time I hear someone say they're not vaccinating due to a risk of autism (or whatever the big scary syndrome is that week), I want to either start screaming or punch somebody. It takes everything in me to remain calm and rational and explain that (1) those are quite simply not things that happen as a result of vaccinating and (2) even if they were, do you really prefer a dead child over an autistic one? Vaccines are some of the most highly tested, carefully monitored substances in the medical world. They go through years or decades of trials and are constantly being reevaluated for safety and efficacy. The current recommended vaccine schedule wasn't just designed on a whim - it's been developed over the course of 50 years by three separate, independent medical organizations (ACIP, AAP, and AAFP, if you're interested) that are NOT in fact paid by Big Pharma or the government to trick you into things you don't need. Vaccines aren't some vast conspiracy to make the pharmaceutical companies millions, since they actually lose money on each vaccine they produce. (If they cared only about the bottom line, they'd let you get sick and sell you the medicine to make you better. There's more profit in disease than prevention.) Your doctor isn't giving your child shots because it's fun; they're doing it to spare your child from needless suffering.

There has not been one single case of a vaccination causing autism. NOT ONE. Every study, every exam, every peer-reviewed paper on the subject comes to the same conclusion: vaccines don't cause autism, they save lives.

The reason medical science even developed these vaccines in the first place was because the diseases can be *devastating*. Polio can cause permanent paralysis and deformities in the hips and legs. Measles can cause nerve damage which may become permanent, as well as permanent brain damage or death from encephalitis and meningitis. Rubella can cause fatal encephalitis and internal bleeding. Mumps can leave you deaf, infertile, and brain damaged.

These aren't colds. They're not even the flu. They're fatal, debilitating, AND UTTERLY PREVENTABLE.

WHY WHY WHY WOULD YOU EVEN RISK THE POSSIBILITY OF YOUR CHILD GETTING THESE DISEASES?! NOTHING IS WORTH THIS RISK. NOTHING.

This brings me to herd immunity. What the doctors told my parents was true - in a vaccinated community, I would have been totally fine. Vaccines work when everyone or nearly everyone has them. Whooping cough can't gain a foothold in a community if 99% of the people there are protected form it. One protected person gets exposed, and it goes nowhere. One unprotected person gets exposed and they get sick, but the protected people around them don't. It's like hitting a brick wall. The disease doesn't infect the community. The problem comes about when too much of the community goes unvaccinated, and "too much" varies by disease. For measles, a whopping 90-95% of people need to be vaccinated in order to protect the entire population. Yet there are schools out there where 80% of the children are NOT vaccinated. And that puts *everyone* at risk.

There will always be a segment of the population that cannot be vaccinated. It consists of people like me, who are allergic to a vaccine; young children, who may be too young to vaccinate or who haven't had all their doses and are still vulnerable; the elderly, whose immune systems are weaker and whose immunity may have worn off; and those with weakened immune systems, who are more susceptible to disease and cannot be vaccinated without risking contracting the disease.

Whenever a parent chooses not to vaccinate, they are not only putting their own child at risk - they are putting at risk everybody around them who is vulnerable. They are saying that the risk of autism (or, again, whatever the current unfounded fear is) is scarier to them than the risk of letting their child and possibly dozens of others get sick and maybe die. They are saying that they don't care if I, or someone like me, lives or dies.

I don't want to die. I don't want my child to die, or for her to watch a friend die of an illness that should have disappeared when my own parents were babies. I don't want that sweet old man down the street, who blows the pine needles out of my driveway every month because he thinks his leafblower is the most awesome invention ever, to die. I don't want someone whose immune system is shot due to cancer or illness or age or medication OR ANYTHING AT ALL to die just because some asshole ignorant fucknugget thinks 3 minutes on google is better than a medical degree.

If you are An Adult™️ and you were fully vaccinated in childhood as is the thing responsible parents do?

Yeah, parts of your childhood vaccines may have faded in efficacy or even worn off completely. Because biology is weird like that. When I got vaccine titers done before starting my current job (I couldn’t find my old vaccine paperwork), I found out that the mumps portion of my MMR vaccine was no longer effective! Because I work for a large healthcare nonprofit, it was no big deal for one of the immunization people to bring me a mumps booster at work, and the problem was solved.

I don't want that ever happening to anybody again if possible.

things that happen when you make eye contact with an autistic person:

- their lazers activate

- the killer gets you

- the enderman instinct

- they turn into a flock of ravens and disperse

you know the "bunny hands" pose everyone does to indicate t. rex? with the hands folded down, palms facing the chest? yeah. almost no dinosaurs could do that. it would break their wrists. only one unique group evolved to do that, which doesn't include any of the Jurassic Park dinosaurs. the term for this is "pronation" and actually the vast majority of land vertebrates can't do it. mammals can. mammals are weird.

not a single dinosaur has claws on their fourth or fifth fingers. not a single one. not even if they're quadrupedal.

most dinosaurs have very stiff tails and can't wiggle them around like a lizard tail. the tails were stiff for balance.

the "tongue flick" thing that lizards do is a lizard thing. dinosaurs wouldn't have done that. they don't do that today (birds, birds don't do that)

"nonavian" dinosaurs with feathered wings had them like birds. they covered the hands. and attached to the hands. stop giving Velociraptor hands. it had wings. and very big ones, too, based on Zhenyuanlong.

dinosaurs with scales don't have lizard scales. lizard scales are a derived trait found only in lizards. they had scutes similar to those of living birds, but much smaller compared to body size, and often in crazy shapes and patterns. dinosaur scales are super weird tbh

sauropods don't have elephant feet. they handled the problem of size in a much weirder way: instead of spreading out the weight, they turned their feet into columns. like pillars. some of the biggest species didn't have any fingers, their front limbs just. end. for maximum column support.

dinosaurs were chonky. you could not see the bones like a silhouette under the skin. some might have been skinnier and some of the features of the bones would be somewhat like with skinny bird legs, but most of the time? no. so stop making the holes in their skulls visible on the outside like damn. jurassic park/world is the biggest offender for this one.

the whole unique feature of dinosaurs is having their legs DIRECTLY under their bodies. they do not sprawl. I can't believe I have to say that, but I do.

hadrosaur (duck-billed dinosaur) front feet were hooves. like, seriously, hooves. not little flippers. not three fingered hands. hooves.

I reserve the right to add more to this post as I think of things.

But from that module comes one of my favourite pieces of dinosaur trivia:

There are two major branches of dinosaurs: bird hipped and lizard hipped.

Before we knew birds were dinosaurs, we grouped dinosaurs based on their hip shape

some had hips like this, like modern birds, where the pubis and ischium are both facing towards the tail (Ornithischians)

while others had hips like this, like modern lizards, where the pubis faces the head and the ischium faces the tail (Saurischians)

Problem is, the configuration where both bones are facing the tail is actually really useful for many things - such as growing large guts to digest plants (all Ornithischians were primarily herbivorous) or having more lightweight bodies... for flying and agile maneuvering

So, in the dinosaurs that lead up to birds, like Deinonychus, we actually see "Saurischians" evolve the Bird-Hip configuration!

Look at those bones both facing the tail!

Alas, we group organisms not on their traits, but on their evolutionary relationships

So, since birdie dinosaurs evolved from Saurischians, they themselves are Saurischians.

Guess which one birds are descended from (and also look at bird feet. That. That doesn’t look anything like an ornithopod foot. Why did you call it that, what birds were you looking at. You can literally use emu feet to calculate theropod range of motion because they’re so similar)

This cute platypus 

* has a rough tongue for licking flesh from bone

* can breathe in low-oxygen environments 

* appears in the fossil record around 170 million years ago

its hide is used in Aboriginal metalwork

it produces a chemical from special glands under its armpits called  distearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine to attract mates but causes paralysis in small mammals

I tried.

Again.

Misinformation is also a virus and our country is just as infected with it as it is with COVID-19.

Bunk thinks he is perfectly innocent publicly posting his bad information. That he is not harming anyone. But he has influence over his loved ones and his friends and maybe even strangers that see his nonsense.

He is a potential superspreader of misinformation.

And that is dangerous.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-vaccine/art-20484859

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2035389

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6950e2.htm

And I just wanna shake this bunk guy and tell him, BECAUSE, you ding-dong, the more of unvaccinated people, the more chance of the virus mutating into new strains that the existing vaccine is less effective against, the more likelihood we have to keep doing *emphatic gestures at all of the everything*

This chucklenut wants to wait THREE YEARS? Ffs, you swizzlestick, it’s only been ONE year and we already have, what, like…four variants? You wait three years until you take this vaccine, congrats, there’ll be a dozen variants that it doesn’t work as well against making the rounds. Oops, gotta wait three years before you take the vaccine for those I guess.

A simplified hypothetical: Imagine the vaccine is 95% effective in creating full immunity, can’t catch it, can’t spread it.

If everyone takes it you end up with 5% of the population can still get and spread it.

If just 10% of people choose not to take it, 14.5% of the population can now continue to catch and spread it.

Diseases we protect against with herd immunity have threshold levels of the population who need to be immune to prevent spread by isolating the non-immune from each other. For some, like measles which is ludicrously infectious, that number (the HIT - herd immunity threshold) has to be so high you basically need 100% vaccination to prevent outbreaks, because the HIT is over 95%. That’s why we see massive outbreaks of measles when vaccination rates dip even a little bit but it’s basically never see it otherwise.

Covid, even the Delta variant, is far less infectious than measles, but a relatively small number of people choosing not to get vaccinated can still put us below the minimum immunity threshold we need to stop community transmission. I think with the Delta variant the HIT is predicted to be around 80% or more, which will require a good 90% of people being vaccinated.

Even organically produced apples contain arsenic. Some autistic people eat apples.