Ah 'the Amish have no autism!'
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lzhbzvlw542a
False Claim About Cause of Autism Highlighted on Pennsylvania Senate Panelquote:
Vaccines Among the Amish
As for Kirsch’s claim that in addition to autism, gender dysphoria, homosexuality, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autoimmune diseases, Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcal Infections (PANDAS) and Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome (PANS), and epilepsy are virtually nonexistent among the Amish because they are unvaccinated — that’s not right, either.
First of all, Kirsch makes the unsupported assumption that the Amish community is “largely unvaccinated.”
It’s hard to know what the vaccination rate is among the Amish community as a whole because there is no data available on that. But research on some Amish groups has shown that children are vaccinated. One paper from 2017 that studied an Amish community in northern Ohio found that 98% of the parents surveyed had immunized their children in whole or in part. Another paper from 2011 found that, of the parents surveyed, 85% had vaccinated at least some of their children.
Also, it’s worth noting that a 2010 conference paper studied autism among the Amish, specifically, which shows that the disorder does exist within that community. The paper said, “Preliminary data have identified the presence of ASD in the Amish community at a rate of approximately 1 in 271 children using standard ASD screening and diagnostic tools although some modifications may be in order.” That rate was lower than the general population, the paper noted, but that could be due to a variety of factors, including differences in how caregivers answered screening questions or genetic differences. Even if autism is less common among the Amish, there is no evidence that it has anything to do with vaccination — and indeed, numerous studies contradict such an interpretation.
Second, on the suggestion that vaccines cause people to become “transsexuals,” as Kirsch said — we’ve written before about the similar false claim that standard childhood vaccination causes gender dysphoria, which is the distress felt by some transgender individuals since their sex assigned at birth doesn’t match their gender identity.
There’s also no evidence to support the claim that vaccination is responsible for causing heterosexuality, homosexuality or bisexuality, either. But Kirsch isn’t the first to make the claim. QAnon conspiracy theorists in 2021 spread the claim that vaccines could make children homosexual after an Iranian cleric with a history of spreading fake COVID-19 cures — Abbas Tabrizian — posted about it on Telegram.
Kirsch’s suggestion that various ailments are caused by vaccines is similarly unsupported by evidence.
For example, his suggestion that “ADD” — or attention-deficit disorder, which is the old name for what is now called attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, ADHD — is a result of vaccines is also wrong.
There have been three large studies that have examined the risk that vaccines could cause ADHD. In particular, two of those studies looked at the effect of a preservative called thimerosal. Anti-vaccine campaigners have pointed to thimerosal as the trigger for various diseases — including both autism and ADHD — even though it hasn’t been included in childhood vaccines since 2001, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
All three of those studies found that there was no association between vaccination and ADHD.
“Therefore, parents can be reassured that vaccines do not cause ADHD or related conditions,” the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia wrote in a post explaining the issue.
Kirsch didn’t offer any support for his claims during his panel appearance, and we were unable to find any research suggesting that vaccines are responsible for any of the conditions that he listed.
“The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”— Bertrand Russell