Nah, the truly sad part is that the study had to be done AGAIN when the original paper suggesting a link was withdrawn decades ago and other studies have disproven any link over and over and over again.

That funding could have been used for something that actually advanced our knowledge. And instead it got sucked into the bottomless pit of trying to disprove something claimed by people who aren’t interested in proof.

We'll be lucky if the impact is negligible. It will probably reinforce the idea that vaccines case autism with those who believe it already.

Most people lack the ability to understand inferences drawn from mathematical analysis. It’s not just vaccines, it’s numeric or logical reasoning of all kinds. If you can’t explain why something is true in non-abstract terms, you can just forget it. And it’s true even for somewhat smarter than average people: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/msnbc-bloo....

I’ve become persuaded that for democracy to work successfully, you need to socialize people from birth so their gut feelings are directionally correct. And you need to cultivate trust in certain institutions, in particular public health, by targeting every segment of society on their own terms and jealously guarding the institution’s credibility.

My dad worked on maternal health programs in Bangladesh. They’d build hospitals, but women in the villages wouldn’t use them. Turns out they didn’t trust the doctors, they trusted the village midwives and traditional healers. So my dad proposed to network with the midwives to establish reciprocal trust. This worked because it reflected how human trust networks operate. Public health in a developed country shouldn’t work any differently (and certainly shouldn’t work the way it does now in the U.S.).

Strong vaccine supporter here, and I think studies like this are still worth doing. Healthy society has vocal skeptics that are occasionally correct. We also have authorities that are occasionally wrong. Scientists maintain trust in our most important systems by properly addressing claims through rigorous research rather than relying simply on authority. We’ve seen smoking and thalidomide (and I’m sure more relevant substances) scientifically ‘proven’ safe before causing massive harm. When anti-vaxx claims evolve (MMR, now aluminum), having solid population data helps counter misinformation with hard evidence. Active research helps us know which side the misinformation is actually on.

To preface this, I'm not saying anything about vaccines, efficacy, safety, or my positions on them.

But how can you expect to convince doubters when a claim like "no link between vaccines and autism" is made, and all you have to do is click your left mouse button twice to pull up the actual research, and see that what was actually studied was "did a certain amount of increase in aluminum content in vaccines create more negative health effects than the vaccines with the previous aluminum content?". That's what was studied here, that is the source for this article.

Yes, these things are related, but intentionally removing that context and misrepresenting the actual result does not convince people to believe you, it just drives them further away. It's so easy for a reader to see for themselves that the claim that's being made in this case is not remotely what the source research is actually claiming. How does that increase trust?

That’s an odd thing to say, “regardless of the validity”? Why would or should it have any impact at all if it is not valid?

>The truly sad part is that regardless of the validity of the study

the truly sad part to me is that you could/would have written this before this study. I don't believe that you have evaluated the validity of this study yet, but you feel justified in telling us you've already made up your mind and you don't really believe in the follow through part of the scientific method, instead you're playing the tribe game

The study only covers aluminum:

> no association between aluminum in childhood vaccines and 50 different health conditions

It's right in the title, which was omitted on submission.

The concerns the public have are not aluminum, so of course it wont. Should also point out the argument largely made is that the _quantity_ of vaccines, particularly in the US are part of the problem.

Generally speaking, I'd welcome studies on what folks are actually saying. Having friends in both the avid vaccine advocates and the anti-vaccine crowd, I think both are just arguing past each other and not studying stuff rigorously enough to convince the other.

Don’t know but I’d highly doubt it’s relevant.

> The aluminum contained in vaccines is similar to that found in a liter (about 1 quart or 32 fluid ounces) of infant formula. While infants receive about 4.4 milligrams* of aluminum in the first six months of life from vaccines, they receive more than that in their diet. Breast-fed infants ingest about 7 milligrams, formula-fed infants ingest about 38 milligrams, and infants who are fed soy formula ingest almost 117 milligrams of aluminum during the first six months of life.

https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety...

You can check the figures yourself: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997

Thanks to a long term study over a changing schedule they were able to layer the subjects by cumulative aluminum exposure from vaccination with aluminum-adsorbed vaccines.

No adverse associations were found, from low to high levels.

This was a study on humans, not mice, and to the best of my reading neither Tomljenovic nor Shaw were involved here.

I wonder how many people on HN believe stuff like this though. Not that many?

I'm open to being wrong on that guess.

For what it's worth, this is still quite loaded, and I think it's far more helpful to drop the stuff about lies and protection of loved ones and simply say:

It's good to weaken or strengthen your views based on the evidence given, and intellectual humility often leads to a better grasp of issues.

And it's also worth recognising, as another commenter has noted, that this is something that extremely few people are good at. It's an error to think that assenting to mainstream views is a strong sign of intellectual humility.

Out of curiosity, when is the last time you changed your mind about something moral? If you can’t remember the time, it’s petty rich to accuse others of being exactly as close minded as you are.

Precisely this. Nothing wrong with changing your mind. In fact swing the other way and own the idea. Its just an opinion, get a different one, nobody cares.

In the context of vaccines, I think there's enough political tension it would immediately gain traction regardless of scientific rigor or correctness

If the hypothesis showed an actual mechanism AND a reason why it wasn't detectable in all of the studies that went before it, sure. Yes. Absolutely.

On page 8 of the supplemental material, they pasted some R code, at least. Hopefully that code runs once you load the packages they reference. I wish they made it easier to download and start working with the data, though. It’s from a national registry, so I suppose it’s available to those who look/make a request, but I’d like a 100 MB CSV.

But to really answer your question - not really. In fields where Jupyter Notebooks are common, those are generally available via a Github link, but in medical fields code and data are still relatively difficult to find.

There seems to be something special about vaccines that really sets these people off, and it goes way way back. Vaccine paranoia is as old as vaccines and they’ve always drawn a special ire from believers in naturopathy, natural medicine, faith healing, new thought, and similar strands of thinking.

I don’t quite get it.

Or maybe science is a red herring and they're just susceptible to demagoguery and whoever shouts the loudest and simplest.

Most people don’t “get science.” Their trust or not is social.

This is more of an issue with there being a low number of cases (both < 300) for of those two Neurodevelopmental Outcomes categories than anything else.

read up on what confidence intervals are.

It's called uncertainty. Do you see the confidence intervals on the log hazard ratios? They did not significantly differ from 1. In part this is because Asbergers and atypical autism were underpowered compared to the main autism group. Also note many were below 1, meaning LESS chance of getting that diagnosis.

What exactly is a vaccine skeptic - in your opinion? What are you skeptical of?

The fact that the confidence interval range includes 1 means that the finding was not statistically significant.

The population for those two specific diagnoses were low in the study. Diagnostic patterns change over time for these type of disorders. Considering neurodevelopmental outcomes as a group may add more color.

You are correct that the study failed to disprove a link between aluminum and aspergers. But the study did prove a that if there is a link it does not result in a moderate to large increase in aspergers risk.

I'm also not an expert here, but looking through the figures [1], that one HR result for Asperger's in a figure 4 is...surprising to see, given the headlines.

This is far from strong evidence of an effect, but you're absolutely right that this at least deserves discussion in the paper and coverage.

1. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/suppl/10.7326/ANNALS-25-0099...

would you mind answering a couple questions? I'm very curiuous:

Have autism rates increased recently (last few decades)?

If so, what are the best theories for why?

That’s not a helpful way to communicate with the public.

Instead you should follow the standards we hold for everyday occurrences, which is if there’s no compelling evidence, it’s safe to say it doesn’t happen.

This is exactly why the whole "vaccine causes autism" got started. We need to improve science literacy before we could say things like that to the general public.

When a layperson hears this, they'll think that there's a small but possible chance that vaccines do cause autism; when what the scientist means to say is that "it's highly unlikely that vaccines cause autism."

Just to clarify for others reading: Statens Serum Institut (SSI) is a government agency, founded and primarily funded by the Danish Ministry of Health. It’s not a private company profiting from vaccines. In fact, SSI sold its vaccine production business in 2016 to AJ Vaccines and now focuses on public health, disease surveillance, and research.

The claim that their “salaries come from vaccine profits” is simply false. While they conduct vaccine-related research and some of their funding comes from competitive grants, their core operations are state-funded. Saying "Primary funding source: None" in a paper means no external funding for that specific study, not that the authors are secretly paid by pharma.

It’s important to hold science accountable — but misrepresenting basic facts about an institution’s funding just spreads confusion, not clarity.

I mean the pandemic was not too long ago, a lot of us actually remember the accessible treatments back then.

First they discovered steroids like prednisolone which were useful only for heavily sick patients, then they started to distribute antibody plasma from other patients, then monoclonal antibodies and some cytokine inhibitors and when everybody who wanted already got vaccinated, we got antivirals such as Paxlovid, and it was scarce.

There were a lot of misunderstanding around hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, similarly how we have a lot of misunderstanding around vaccines and autism. And they were tested and tested and tested, similarly how we still check if vaccines cause autism. And all the proper research showed that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were absolutely ineffective, times and times again, but people just couldn't let them go, similarly to how people can't let go the fake autism-vaccine connection.

In the first part of the pandemic, vaccines were the best we had.

I'm not familiar with the medical side of this study, but I am very familiar with the statistics.

### They did not do a non-vaccinated vs vaccinated people comparison

These studies are observational, and in that sense no manipulation (such as random treatment assignment) was made. So they need to rely on observational studies techniques.

From what I could gather, one of this observational techniques in inverse treatment probability weighting when they say

> "we adjusted for all baseline covariates using stabilized inverse probability of treatment weights"

The IPW technique basically tries to solve the problem that some groups of children might have a higher prevalence of the treatment by weighting them in a manner as to mimic random assignment. This is as close as we can get to comparing treated and untreated in observational settings.

Also, the division of the doses of vaccine is also a better characterization of "was vaccinated". If you think getting vaccinated causes something, then getting more vaccinated should increase the incidence of that something.

### Wouldn’t you need a sizable cohort of non vaccinated children?

Yes, but as you pointed out, that might not exist. So by creating comparable groups (via IPW) + treatment intensity/dose we can still arrive at some conclusions.

### The researchers discarded from their cohort 34,547 children for receiving too many vaccinations/too much aluminum (...) Wouldn’t that data be relevant to look at?

They probably did. A few things are important here. The data comes from administrative data sources, so mistakes can happen. While you need to trust the sources, there could be imputation typos, or just weird cases. So the researchers probably went after a notion of "clinically relevant vaccine dosage for this study" to know up to which point to consider data points, because from that point onward, it either is not interesting because its a rare treatment incidence, or just seems like a mistake.

### “adjusted hazard ratio (95% CI) per 1mg increase in aluminum received……” and in the chart Asperger’s is listed at 1.13 (.89 - 1.44) so they do potentially see an increase for Asperger’s

Important to say that with hazard ratios, a HR of 1 means that there is no change because we are in the multiplicative scale (as opposed to 0 meaning "treatment does nothing" in the additive scale).

So in this setting, after adjusting for the treatment probabilities, a HR CI of (.89 - 1.44) just translates to 'no effect'. Nothing out of the ordinary in terms of the interpretation.