A good dissection of bullshit “science” about vaccines - this dissection also highlights good general points to think about when applying critical thinking to any such out of left field “scientific” claims on the internet or those blathering dolts on TV news segments.
https://theunbiasedscipod.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-failure-why-this-latest
Dig into things before promoting them on social media.
The incidence of intellectual disability among autistic people is notably higher than among non-autistic people, and similarly for the incidence of many other comorbidities.
That said, I’m not sure what you’re trying to argue for, here. If you’re trying to say that we should be more accepting of neuroatypical people, like those with autism, I agree; it has improved quite a lot in the last decade but it’s still not great. If you’re trying to say autism shouldn’t be considered a disease and there shouldn’t be efforts to find a cure for it, I don’t agree.
I’m not sure why antivaxxers focus so much on specifically autism as a supposed vaccine sideffect. I think it might be historical reasons (it dates all the way back to Fudenberg and maybe even older), plus the fact that it’s a mental problem rather than physical and hence trivial to motivatedly “self-diagnose” (it’s much easier to claim that after you vaccinated your child you immediately noticed “clear autism symptoms”, than to claim their leg abruptly fell off).
Where is your evidence that autism is a disease? Because that’s the sort of shit Autism Speaks says.
Why do you even thing autistic people want to be “cured?”
A “disease” is a condition that affects one adversely. Some people with the autism diagnosis are not obviously affected adversely and do not consider themselves to be (and I am not suggesting that they are wrong), but most are. The worse-off autism cases look more like “constantly keeps trying to self-harm to deal with distress caused by crippling sensory issues; needs to be institutionalized”. I think not very controversial to say that those people are affected adversely and would want to not have those problems.
I think when you see me talking about autism, you think only of the first group of people - and I agree that if that’s what all autism was like, it’d be strange to consider it a disease (and I also agree with what you said earlier, that in the context of anti-vaxxing, a lot of weird parents seem to unjustifiedly think the mild autism of their children is as bad as death). But it’s not, and hence it causes quite a lot of suffering and it’d be morally right to find a way to prevent children from getting it.
Evidence please.
You’re also arguing that it both is and is not a disease. It can’t be both.
And you still haven’t explained why people want to be “cured.” Homosexuality used to be considered a disease that can be cured too, by the way. And there are still parents who force their kids into those “cures.” That is what you are advocating here, except for autism. As if people with autism have no agency.
For adults, check out the studies referenced in this analysis, for example. A few figures from there are “never employed: 74%”, “Living independently: 15%”, “No friends with shared interests: 47%”, and institutionalization rates varying from 30% to 50% depending on how you define it. The analysis notes that the two studies which had notably better results were on samples with relatively high intelligence. As for outcomes in children, there’s this one about physical aggression, and this meta-analysis giving a figure of 42% self-injurious behavior without a significant age dependence.
It’s a matter of definitions - if you have a condition which has small chance of making you slightly better at some kinds of intellectual work, high chance of making you have too much sensory and other issues to be unable to work or live independently, and a medium chance for those issues to be so bad as to require you to be institutionalized, is it a “disease”? I’d say yes, since the overwhelming majority of outcomes are negative, but one could techically argue that the rare positive-ish outcomes disqualify it.
But more importantly, I don’t think it matters whether something “is a disease” or not (I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that word at all). It causes suffering on net, so no matter what you call it, it’s moral to research a way to prevent people from getting the condition.
I think you’re still treating this as a more complicated moral issue than it actually is. Forget for a second all the people with high-functioning autism, and consider a clearer case. Let’s say there’s an autistic child with severe sensory issues that make them distressed by random sounds to the point of screaming, which distresses them more until they start self-harming by hitting their head against a wall and trying to bite their fingers off. They are mentally disabled and non-verbal, and hence can’t tell you their opinion on medicine. And let’s say you have, in this hypothetical, a cure that can fix all of that. Is it moral to give it to them, even though you can’t possibly get informed consent? For me, it’s pretty clear that it is. Do you agree with me on this?
If yes, it seems to me that’s sufficient to argue that a cure for autism is very important to make. It’s not about the mild cases which go on to live fairly normal lives, and write newspaper articles with titles like “I don’t want to cure my autism, I want to own it”. It’s for all the severe cases for whom a normal life has never been an option.
Cool. Conversion therapy camps for autistic people and queer people it is.
Your definition of disease is patently false.
an) illness of people, animals, plants, etc., caused by infection or a failure of health rather than by an accident.
If vaccines were the cause, which they are not, then it still couldn’t be called a disease. It is not infectious, nor communicable, nor spreadable by any means other than genetic mutations presenting during fetal formulation.
**Autism is not a disease. **
Wikipedia is not a fully reliable source. It’s a great collection of knowledge but it’s not authoritative. You shouldn’t rely on it for everything.