Vaccinations and Autism - My evolving views.

I recently saw a post on a Facebook Autism group from a mother who asked the following question:

To vaccinate or not to, that is the question...

I have 4 children who are all fully vaxed between the ages of 13 years and 22 years old. I never had any major problems after they were done.

With my last child (who is special needs) I often wonder if I hadn't had him done would he be different? He was an awesome baby, my little koala. But at around 18 months to 2 years my angel disappeared and was replaced with a baby that just cried and screamed, something which he never really did before. I thought he was sick, so I took him to the Doctor, but he wasn't. It wasn't just me that noticed the change as my family did too. I put it down to teething, the terrible 2s, or just being naughty. I thought it was my fault, that I'd done something to hurt him.

I thought for a long time it was the vaccinations that he had around this time which had "stolen" my baby. Thinking back I realise I just had to have something to blame. But when having a really bad day the smallest part of my brain will start thinking this again.

Is this normal, do other parents ever wonder the same thing?

My lengthy response to her post was as follows:

Vaccines get a lot of the blame because they happen at around the same time that some milestones are supposed to be reached. It's the same theory as saying I gave my son a Vegemite sandwich for the first time when he was around 2 years old and then he stopped doing some things, so it must have been because he had tried Vegemite.

If a child has an Autistic brain then it was shaped that way during development in the womb, and most likely it was shaped that way because the instructions in the DNA strands were already programmed to shape it that way from the time of conception.

Some kids change at around 2 years of age even if they haven't had their shots. Each child on the spectrum is unique and all will present slightly differently even though they have many common traits.

The Autistic brain has areas with less grey matter than would otherwise be considered normal and areas with more grey matter than would otherwise be considered normal. The areas that are lacking grey matter have less neurons to experiment with as the child learns before the brain can establish the best connections to use, this explains learning difficulties. The areas that are excessive have extra neurons to play with and it takes longer for them to sort out which connections are best to use together, this explains learning delays.

The Autistic brain also fails to kill off the redundant cells as quickly as the normal brain would, so even though something has been learnt, the brain is still in constant learning mode and the redundant cells continue to experiment with each other, this explains why there is ongoing confusion, even though a skill has already been learnt.

The Corpus Callosum, which is the bit that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain is noticeably smaller in the Autistic brain, so exchanging information between the left and right hemispheres is not as effective, this explains social interaction difficulties as both sides need to consult each other to sort out left brain issues and right brain issues. What the left brain can't figure out gets sorted via a little consultation with the right brain, and visa-versa. Girls have larger Corpus Callosums compared to boys, so they don't necessarily have the same compromise if they have a reduced size, which explains why there are more boys diagnosed on the spectrum than girls. Some Girls have slightly different symptoms of Autism compared to boys and this can also be explained by the slightly larger Corpus Callosum.

So do vaccines cause Autism? Legitimate studies that haven't been set up to give a false positive by using a pre-stacked set of subjects instead of using double blind and triple blind techniques say no.

Can a vaccine cause all those physical differences in the brain structure? I don't think so. The vaccine would have to kill off some areas of grey matter, then grow excessive grey matter in other areas, then reduce the size of the Corpus Callosum and then cause redundant brain cells to remain active instead of being switched off when they were no longer required.

In my earlier blogs I have stated in various places that there is perhaps a chance that a vaccination may do something to an already Autistic brain that tips it over the edge and makes the Autism more noticeable. Legitimate studies are showing that this is not the case, so my view has now changed and the correlation between getting a vaccination and Autism suddenly being more apparent is no longer a possibility.

As stated above, some kids will show a change around the 2 year mark and some won't, and that's regardless of whether they have been vaccinated or not. If you're going to blame the vaccination for a child's Autism, even after so many studies have completely thrown that theory out of the window and even after those countries that actually made changes to their vaccinations in order to avoid the potential for Autism continue to have a steady rise in the amount of children being diagnosed with the condition, you may as well also blame whatever your child had for breakfast on that day. Like the mother said, she was looking for reasons and excuses at the time and the vaccination was an easy option to use as a scapegoat.

For the record, I was not vaccinated as a child. My mother had read in the papers back in 1965 that vaccinations were dangerous. Sensationalist and irresponsible reporting at its finest which worked. It made my mother buy the newspaper that day, and it made her decide that her unborn baby would not be getting any shots. Now here I am, close to 50 years later, typing this blog because my children inherited my Autism genes and I spent quite a bit of time researching and looking at various studies after they were diagnosed and came to the realisation that I too had grown up on the spectrum, yet had never been diagnosed. Before my children were diagnosed I didn't know anything about Autism. I was always labelled the weird, quiet kid at school. It turns out my unvaccinated brain was simply on the Autism Spectrum, along with countless others who had never been diagnosed at the time. I now know a great deal about Autism, and have learnt to separate the facts from the non-facts.

Anti-vaccers will always be around. People are capable of convincing themselves of anything, regardless of the facts, if they get fixated enough about it. Most of these anti-vaccers are most likely parents with children on the Autism Spectrum, which probably means they are also on the Spectrum, possibly undiagnosed, possibly unaware that they're even on the spectrum at all. But it also explains their fixation about being an anti-vaccer. One of the most common traits of Autism is the ability to uncontrollably fixate on something to the point that it becomes an obsession.

Anti-vaccers will hate this blog. It's a part of their fixation. Some will be obsessed enough that they may post their own blogs to debunk this one or to debunk me even. I'll get over it and the sun will rise again in the morning for me while the obsessed spread their conspiracy theories that in some cases would have you believe that I'm being paid by the vaccination companies to lie about their products. In which case you'd think I'd be quite wealthy by now. Well,... that's not what my overdraft says. ;)