I’m pretty confident I’ve talked about autism and mental health enough on this blog that anyone reading the title of this post will understand it doesn’t align with my beliefs. I for one, believe in reality and things that are based in facts. If I was that quick to believe complete and utter nonsense, I’d become a podcaster.
For a little bit of context, Joe Rogan had Robert F. Kennedy Jr on his podcast the other day where the two of them shared vaccine misinformation for the duration of the podcast. Now I don’t watch or listen to Joe Rogan at all. I think I listened to maybe two episodes back in the day after a coworker at the mail recommended it to me years ago, but I found out quickly it wasn’t really for me. Instead, I get most of my Joe Rogan content through other people reacting to how incredibly hateful some of his guests are. Robert F. Kennedy (RFK to save me some typing) is probably near the upper echelon of hateful. His entire bit is that vaccines and wifi cause autism.
Now, as someone who’s had to come to terms with their own struggles with autism, this is obviously a touchy subject for me. I’ve spent many hours online trying to figure out my identity and what having autism means to me. That’s part of why I talk about it on this blog regularly. It’s a spectrum, as we know, which means there’s not a nice and tidy list of symptoms we can just checkmark. One thing I am very confident in however, is the fact that vaccines are not the primary cause of autism. I don’t need to be a scientist or even all that smart to know this. I just need to look at the data presented and it’s a pretty clear cut case.
Now to understand where the anti vax movement really caught steam we need to look at Andrew Wakefield, a man who unfortunately still exists and hasn’t been banished to the shadow realm yet. In 1998, Wakefield published a study linking autism to the MMR vaccine. His claim was that the kids started developing symptoms of autism within weeks of receiving the “dangerous” vaccination. Now obviously the alarms should start ringing already because if vaccines cause autism, everyone would be autistic and that’s clearly not the case. So what is really going on and why did he come to this conclusion?
Well, for starters, he studied the results of this vaccine on a grand total of 12 children. That’s a sample size so low that even using it for a high school project would be laughable. If that was where it ended we could still brush it off as incompetence, but there’s a lot more to this story. Allegedly, the parents and children were recruited by a firm that was already trying to undermine the MMR vaccine, which puts into question how reliable of a sample group it was. 12 children recruited on pre-existing biases is never going to give you a reliable set of data. Not only that, but there have been stories of some of the parents coming out and saying that their children were misrepresented in the final study. The study has been fully retracted since, and Wakefield no longer has a medical license. Both the UK and Japan have done separate studies in which they found no link between autism and the MMR vaccine. If you want to go into this a bit more deeper – and it is both fascinating and depressing – I highly suggest you watch this video on the subject. It does a far better and more detailed job of explaining everything surrounding Wakefield and his lies. Where I only read a few excerpts of the original paper, this video goes into detail on the entire thing.
So having talked about Wakefield, we arrive at modern day. Vaccine skepticism has grown at a very rapid rate during the recent pandemic and Joe Rogan and his guests were at the forefront of this moment. Joe doesn’t believe in vaccines for some reason but instead takes alternative medicine that – at least at the time – have not been proven to be effective. RFK claims this was done so the vaccines could be sold to a high profit. I’m not one to call into question the medical field’s desire to make a profit, I’m sure that part is true, but I doubt they would start a mass conspiracy with fake vaccines just to make a profit. I’m confident there’s enough normal, trustworthy people working in any field that something like that would come to light soon enough.
Unfortunately not everyone sees it that way and as someone who has to live with autism every single day it’s incredibly frustrating to see so much misinformation on the topic. What they’re basically saying is that my parents’ negligence caused my life to be infinitely more difficult than it should have been. That’s such a vile thing to imply that it makes me sad just writing it down. I hope people like Joe Rogan will read posts like mine (it’s not like he’ll read mine, I have like 2 readers) and really think about the rhetoric they’re platforming. I think I’m just going to end this blogpost here. I really wanted to put some of my frustration on paper to get it out of my head. Please be careful not to be swayed by misinformation. I try my best to do the same, knowing that even I probably end up believing some things that are false. But we live and learn I guess. Thanks for reading.
Opal Kaharis 