https://www.thefp.com/p/the-autism-surge-lies-conspiracies
It really is important to understand that increased incidence of autism is not, repeat NOT, substantively attributable to an increase in diagnosis. Not at the rates we are talking about.
And there is a bias within polite society against talking about how disabling severe autism is.
Teasing out the specifics of how much each of these contribute and separating that out from possible confounders like greater screening and others does seem like a tough study to design.
[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/environmental-auti...
[2] https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/conditions/autism
Peer-reviewed, published research does not support any kind of link between vaccines and autism: not a link by correlation, not a link by cause.
There was a paper a long time ago where the guy who wrote it committed fraud to get published. This paper, which was founded on lies, did claim a link, and did so in a highly influential medical journal - so a lot of people paid attention to what the article said, even though its claims were never true. Retraction is a very definitive way to signal to scientists not to pay attention to a particular paper.
Problem is, the retraction took more than 10 years, and in those years the internet was becoming social and available to everyone. So there was kind of a perfect storm of misinformation propagation about this particular topic.
Fact remains: many many studies have re-examined the possibility of link between vaccines and autism and there just isn't one.
- Despite numerous failures in the integrity of the peer review and editorial process (Deer, 2020), the predicted high impact of this article influenced the Lancet decision to publish [0]
- There is no shortage of authors willing to publish weird stuff in scientific journals. Search for example articles about religious content in scientific papers such as these ones: [1-3]
[0] https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcpp.14058
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38756930/
My wife got diagnosed as an adult where she never would have been as a child - quiet, academically bright, had a group of friends. Had increasing stress at work and depression, saw a psychologist who asked her lots of questions and then said this mat come as a shock but have you ever wondered if you have this? Did all the tests and voila. Seeing her parents it becomes very obvious how strongly it is genetic because in retrospect where I used to think her parents were a little odd, with a bit more understanding it’s clear that they both have traits.
Source? Are the Amish regularly screened for autism?
Also, the Amish are (a) far from the only unvaccinated population and (b) different from other Americans in other major ways. (The one that comes to mind is air pollution [1].)
[1] https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/air-pollution-linked-with-incr...