Arguments For Use Against Anti-Vaxxers

Lately I’ve found myself getting into arguments with anti-vaxxers on social media. A tiring and unpleasant experience, it’s brought home to me just how cult-like the whole anti-vax movement is, and how closed-minded they are. You cannot reach them, and I certainly don’t argue with them with that in mind. Rather, I post in hope of reaching those who are undecided.

This can be a tricky call. Statistics are good, but too dry to really cut it. Not to mention the anti-vaxxers simply come back with their own stats and links that supposedly ‘prove’ their contentions. Never mind that these are either from contaminated sources (ie those of like mind, in a sort of circular argument), or, on closer inspection, really don’t prove anything of the kind they claim. [‘Vaccine injuries’ are a typical example.] We need something more.

So if any of you find yourself arguing with these people, and realise it’s not the anti-vaxxers you need to reach but those who might be wavering, I’ve realised there are two main points that are likely to appeal to them. I plan to use them myself, and if you’d like to use them too, feel free to link to this post, or to copy and paste, with suitable acknowledgement of the source, or a link back to here. Anyway, these are the points I’ve come up with -

1) EXPERIENCE. 

If you’re someone who’s not sure about whether to vaccinate or not, think back over your life, and ask yourself the following questions. 

a) Were you raised in a developed country? If yes, it’s likely you received whatever vaccines were common at that time. And if for some reason you weren’t, it’s likely that most of those roughly your age (what researchers call your ‘age cohort’) were. If however you grew up in an under-developed country, the immunisation record for your age cohort is likely to be far more patchy or non-existent.

b) Do you remember kids of your generation getting sick and/or dying of any of the diseases that can now be vaccinated against? I’m thinking here of diseases like TB, whooping cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox. If you’re older, did you suffer through these diseases yourself, or remember them ‘going around’ as epidemics? And during these epidemics, did you hear your parents talking anxiously of who might be infected, and how (eg from attending a party with infected children)? Do you remember whole families being quarantined, or friends you weren’t allowed to visit for ages or never saw again after they got sick, or relatives who died young?

c) Did you grow up before or after the vaccines for these diseases were introduced in your country? Younger generations are far more likely to have been vaccinated for pretty much all of these diseases, if they grew up in a developed country.

If the answers for these questions are yes, yes and no, or yes, no, yes, or even no, yes, no, then that’s one powerful pro-vaccine argument right there. Some of these diseases are now coming back in Western countries of course – and, not-so-coincidentally, right in the very places where vaccination rates are dangerously low.

Just to give one example, my own generation grew up AFTER vaccines for whooping cough, diphtheria, TB, tetanus and scarlet fever were introduced, but BEFORE the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine came in. So we didn’t get the first group of diseases, but we did get the second. I know, however, that those as little as ten years older than me did commonly get whooping cough, while those only a generation younger didn’t get any of these diseases.

If that’s not enough to convince you, consider the following –

2) Rational Common Sense.

Anti-vaxxers frequently argue that these diseases are ‘still happening’, but are being mislabelled by doctors, researchers, scientists, hospitals and the government. This can only mean that either –

a) Doctors, nurses, etc, are so incompetent that they can’t recognise these diseases, even though the symptoms are widely known, and pretty unmistakable. It’s difficult to mistake whooping cough for ‘just a regular cough’, or measles for ‘just a rash’, for example. Yet the anti-vaxxers would have you believe that all medical staff etc are this incompetent. All of them. All of the time. Everywhere. In every clinic and hospital, everywhere in the Western world, and possibly beyond. How likely is this, you must ask yourself?

And yet, according to the anti-vaxxers, it’s either this, or –

b) That these same doctors, nurses, hospitals, researchers, government departments, etc, etc, are all in cahoots, conspiring to obscure and deny the truths, and keep the rest of the world’s population in the dark.

For what reason, you might ask? Good question. The anti-vaxxers never really answer that. Conspiracy theories abound, but tend, as do all such theories, to lack all rationality. They become an end in themselves, defying logic and plain old-fashioned common sense. We all know how difficult it is to get one or two people to keep a secret for long. How logical is it that hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, from all around the world, are engaged in such an enterprise? For decades on end? Someone, somewhere, somehow, would start to spill the beans. And probably lots of them.

The anti-vaxxers of course claim that people already have, but weren’t believed. Firstly, these supposed ‘whistle-blowers’ invariably prove to be very few, and also part of the anti-vaxxer crowd, with the same confused and misleading ‘data’. Secondly, it still doesn’t explain WHY this was done. 

Explanations about ‘Big Pharma’ wanting to make a profit etc, etc, don’t really meet the logic test. Doctors, pharmaceutical companies, etc, don’t actually make that much on vaccines, on the whole. Not to mention that pharmaceutical executives, doctors, scientists, etc, live in the same world we do, after all, and by and large want the same things as we do – a safe world for their descendants to grow up in. 

Yes, there are ‘rotten apples in every barrel’, and a few might be corrupt, selfish, greedy creatures only in it for the money, but it defies logic and a basic understanding of human nature to think they are ALL like that. I’ve met some of these supposedly terrible people, and they’re human beings, just as we are. (It’s also worth noting that one of those truly ‘rotten apples’, who was struck off after having found to have faked his research for financial gain, is none other than Andrew Wakefield, yep, that’s right, the ‘guru’ of the anti-vax movement himself. Hmmmmm….)

Put simply, conspiracy theories about vaccines belong in the same category as ones about alien anal probes and Elvis still being alive.

So, if you’re reading all the screeds of supposed ‘facts’ the anti-vaxxers post everywhere at every opportunity, turn to these two things to test their claims – experience and logic. The anti-vaxxers fail spectacularly, on both counts.

I'm Impatient.

I’m impatient. I’m getting more and more fed up with the whole mess of autism attitudes ‘out there’, the entire public image of autism; the misconceptions, the distortions, the downright fallacies, the blind, unquestioned assumptions. There’s a part of me that wishes I could just sweep it all away, clear the decks, like someone swiping a table clear with a backhand - I’m that frustrated, because I am seeing more and more of the damage it’s doing. So many things are connected to this bad image of autism. Let me give just a sampling of that.

- The autism parents who see autism as a ‘tragedy’, and spend mega-bucks on all sorts of useless or downright dangerous treatments to their kids, many of which, if done to any other kid, would be deemed ‘abuse’. But hey, it’s okay to do this to autistic kids, because they’re not ‘properly human’, and it’s ‘for their own good’, to make them ‘normal’, which is a good thing, right?

- These same autism parents claiming that by giving those ‘treatments,’ they are ‘rescuing’ their children – the assumption being that just to be autistic means you are suffering – because autism is so terrible, a disease, a tragedy, a ‘thief’ of the ‘real’ child supposedly buried underneath, a home-wrecker, a burden, blah blah blah.

- Again, some of these same autism parents, who go on camera saying that they’d ‘get rid’ of the autism if they could, that they wish they had a ‘normal’ kid. Right in front of those kids. And all their ilk who don’t go on TV, but spend years telling their autistic kids anyway, in one way or another, that to be autistic is a Bad Thing.

- The ‘autism industry’, who cons those parents into spending those mega-bucks on those treatments, and by golly if that one doesn’t work, or that one or that one, oh look, here’s something even more weird and even more expensive, and if you don’t do it, you’re a bad parent, maybe even guilty of ‘abuse’. (Yes, really.)

- The young adult autistics (and some not-so-young ones) who think having autism means being ‘doomed’. Of course they hate their autism – who wouldn’t hate something that seems to have ‘ruined’ their lives? Some of these are of course (surprise, surprise) the now-adult children of the above parents.

- Yet other autism parents, who think that their autistic child should be allowed to do whatever they want, whenever they want, regardless of whether it impinges on other people or not, because “they don’t understand”, so there’s no point in setting limits on their behaviour, or disciplining them in any way.

- The special autism ‘schools’ or camps that spend more time repressing the kid’s autistic traits, punishing their stims, etc, often forcibly and harshly, than they do actually educating the kids or even getting to know them properly.

- The struggles autistics have in regular schools, and the teachers who seem afraid of them, the other kids who bully them or reject them, the lack of support, and then how they get tossed out because they’re ‘aggressive’ or ‘don’t follow the rules’.

- The adult autistics who also think that being autistic automatically means being miserable, like the one who, when tossed out of a Facebook group, told the moderator that if she wasn’t suffering and unhappy, then she “couldn’t really be” autistic!

- The high unemployment rate of those with autism, not just because we flub interviews, but because we get fired or leave because of the hostility and/or manipulations of co-workers and bosses.

- The hesitation and caginess many autistics who are employed have about ‘coming out’ as such, for fear of losing their jobs, or incurring hostility, misunderstandings, rejection or arms-length ‘sympathy’ from their co-workers/bosses.

- The hostility directed at many autistics from their own family members, who think we’re either ‘faking it’, or ‘could pull ourselves together if we tried’, or misconstrue our actions and words, or just use us as scapegoats for family tensions.

- The professionals who think they ‘know what autism is like’, so of course we “can’t be” autistic if we can talk well, have a partner and/or kids, hold down a job, etc.

- The family members and general public who also assume they ‘know what autism is like’, and so if someone says they’re autistic but they don’t seem to fit that mold, that person, they decide, must be ‘faking it’, ‘jumping on the latest bandwagon’, etc, etc.

 - The way the media beat up any story that involves any autistic or any person who even might be autistic committing a crime, as though to have autism/Aspergers means being intrinsically violent or criminal.

- The same media, who regularly trumpet yet another and even more bizarre ‘cause’ of autism, everything from motorways to older mothers to the Internet, as I recounted in a previous post.

- The researchers who, when they find a ‘difference’ between us and NTs, always assume that this represents a ‘lack’ or ‘deficiency’ or ‘pathology’ on our part. In their minds, NT= always good, and autistic = always bad.

I could go on, but you get the picture. It’s all connected. All, all, stemming from the concept of Big Bad Autism. Intrinsic to this is a whole bunch of totally incorrect and distorted ideas of what it means to have autism, what motivates our behaviour, etc, etc. To give just one example of this – our lack of eye contact. Experts decided that this is because we’re “not interested in other people”. BZZZZ. WRONG. We don’t make eye contact because we find it a) painful, b) invasive, c) irrelevant (because we don’t get the ‘messages’ we’re ‘supposed’ to get from it), and/or d) many of us find it difficult to look at and listen to people at the same time. So how, you might ask, did the ‘experts’ get it so wrong? Because. They. Never. ASKED. Us. They made an assumption, and the assumption became ‘Truth’, and that ‘Truth’ is still being faithfully repeated and perpetuated. This is but one example of why we demand nothing about us, without us.

It’s like the gay thing, in some ways. Once upon a time, gays and lesbians were also assumed to be ‘unhappy’, ‘twisted’, ‘scourge on society’, blah, blah, blah, too. We ‘had’ to be, because being gay was an ‘aberration’, right? A twisting of the ‘normal’ pattern, right? So ‘of course’ we were unhappy, etc, because we weren’t heterosexual, right? A similar story could be written for old attitudes to many other minority groups. Well the world has largely changed its ideas on them, due to various social movements, and by goddamn it’s going to have to change its ideas on autism too.

Because I’m sick of the whole thing. I want to throw it off, the way you throw off stifling covers on a hot night. The way we throw out clothes that don’t fit us. The way we rip up an old script that isn’t of any use to us anymore. Like that. Yeah, like that.

I know I can’t. But I want to. I’m so sick of what is. I want each and every autistic person to be seen as an individual, as a human being first and foremost, with the same needs – for respect, education, etc, as any other human being, albeit we have to do these things or get these things in our own way. Yes, there are broad similarities, many traits we have in common, but we are first and foremost human beings, not a ‘label’ or a ‘category’ or a ‘specimen’, though an autistic identity (as an aspie, HFA, whatever) must be taken into account as an essential part of that human being. I want people to see beyond the diagnosis and the labels to see what our real capabilities are – like the case of the autistic kid whose parents were told not to worry about teaching him to read and write, to focus instead on things like tying his shoes – and now he’s proved to be a young genius. I am certainly not claiming we’re all geniuses, and nor should we have to be, to be accepted, my point is that trying to pigeonhole us is actually doing both us and the world a disservice.

Because enough is enough is enough. It’s got to stop. Things have to change. The public image of autism is beyond overdue for a complete overhaul. So I’m impatient, I’m very, very impatient. And I like to think that I’m not the only one.

About That Autism Research

A while back, I was talking with an aspie friend, and I was saying how I've become conscious I need to do more research on autism. I know my own experience with autism well, and something of those I've spoken to, whether online or ‘in real life’, but I really don’t feel I know that much about the broader picture of autism. So, I thought, it’s time to do some serious research. But immediately I start looking, a problem arises – where is the unbiased research about autism? So much of what’s being done by scientists, doctors and other professionals seems to take as its starting point that we are inherently flawed or substandard, and thus that any way in which we differ from NTs is an inferior or ‘pathological’ way of being, ‘proof’ of our ‘faultiness’.

To take just one example – some time ago, some researchers[*] found that when autistics and NTs were given the chance to contribute to charity, with and without observers present in the room, NTs gave far more when someone was present than when they thought they were alone, but autistics gave much the same amount regardless of whether they had company or not.

This could have been framed as an example of inherent honesty or high principles in autistics – but nooooo. Instead, a new term was coined - ‘reputation management’, which, it was decided, we were deficient in!! This, they said, was due to our lack of ‘theory of mind’. The possibility that we might very well know that others will think better of us if we contribute larger amounts to charity, but regard this as irrelevant, judging said charity on its own merits, never seems to have occurred to the researchers. That we might think ‘managing our reputation’ (ie presenting a false image of ourselves) an inherently dishonest, even unethical, thing to do also never seems to have occurred to them. Sigh. Once again, results that could have been structured as ‘autistic-positive’, or at least neutral, instead become ‘autistic-negative’.

A deeper and more worrying example is the research into the ‘causes’ of autism. It too usually seems to take as its starting point the assumption that the world is better off without us, that there is little or nothing positive that we bring to the world. Much of this research has almost ludicrous results – the list of ‘causes’ of autism that appear regularly as ‘Scientists-Have-Found-Possible-Cause-of-Autism’-type articles trumpeted in newspapers or online, includes (ta-dah) …motorway traffic, corn syrup, older mothers, older fathers, diesel fumes, Lyme disease, too much androgen, copper pipes, prematurity, low birth weight, high birth weight (contradict much?), environmental chemicals, organic foods (those last two also seem contradictory), anti-depressants, smoking during pregnancy, diabetes during pregnancy, too little oxytocin (the ‘bonding hormone’), Clomid (it’s your mother’s fault for wanting you), specific facial or finger or other physical features, faulty immune system in the mother, having a big head, being a big baby (really? So how come smallest-birthweight-me has autism, but none of my bigger-brawnier-birthweight-sibs do?), being second or later-born (I’m first-born), being born close together, being a twin, being born via IVF, even being born in summer, circumcision, and the Internet… I kid you not. And this list doesn't include the Hoary Old Standards of refrigerator mothers, vaccines, missing gut enzymes or mercury. (Do you get the feeling the scientists are kind of grasping at straws?)

Some autism research, into the genetics of autism for instance, could be a good thing (eg in convincing many that we are not just ‘badly behaved’, ‘spoiled brats’, etc), but could also be used against us – most especially to develop prenatal tests that could see us become as decimated as those with Downs Syndrome are becoming – and as gays, lesbians, transsexuals, etc, might once have been, if such tests had been devised before the coming of the gay liberation movement.

But where is the research that would actually help us manage our daily lives better, cope with the world better, have fewer meltdowns and sensory overloads, etc, etc; or the research into why, for instance, some autistics can communicate verbally, and some can’t? Where are the surveys to find out just how many autistics there really are amongst the adult population? (I know of only one such, undertaken in the UK, and it has been criticised.) Where is the research that is either autistic-neutral, or autistic-positive?

Nothing less than a total re-framing of the grounds on which research is done, the assumptions behind all of it, is necessary and urgent, when it comes to autism. Anything else is likely to lead to our eventual eradication, and the destruction of our unique contributions to the world.

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[*] http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/10/11/autism-linked-with-lack-concern-for-personal-reputation-study-finds/