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Originally Posted by Undertoad
If there IS evidence of falsehood, well then OMG FOUL SYSTEM BROKEN!
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Once again, the system is not failing because there are falsehoods. The system is failing (in this case) because those falsehoods are being steadfastly
unexamined. Not examined and proven false... unexamined. The CDC will not currently examine the possibility of
any environmental trigger, not just vaccines. You yourself said you had been convinced that the current epidemic is a combination of a relatively common genetic predisposition coupled with a new environmental trigger. Why is no one at the CDC interested?
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When you find yourself in disagreement with a lot of the rest of the vaccine-skeptical Autism community, what basis will you use to determine that you are right and they are wrong? How do you KNOW you are right? How do you know what you know? What is your epistemology?
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The first step for me in determining which side was right was the fact that the biomedical treatments were working. The very basis of these treatments is that autism is rooted in immune dysfunction--they couldn't possibly work if it is not (as the CDC maintains,) and the fact that they are confirms that it is. That got me to the point where you are; that it is most certainly environmental and triggered externally sometime after birth, but I was not sure yet what that trigger might be. Then step two: my daughter got her MMR shot and she stopped talking. I watched it happen, just like they said it could. After 12 months of normal bowel movements and normal speech development, she suddenly had 4 straight weeks of diarrhea and lost all her words. To this day her digestion is severely unbalanced and we must use a careful combination of foods and supplements to keep her regular.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, the MMR itself was not as big of a contributor to my son's autism--he was already showing some signs by 3 months--but it was the tipping point for my daughter. This informs my position on the relative and overall dangers of different shots. I know I am right because I watched it happen. And yes, now is when you say "correlation does not equal causation," and it's where I tell you that at some point the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. I'll go so far as to acknowledge that maybe my daughter is the only one in the world that it happened to--but I know it happened to her, and all the rest of the autism moms are saying the exact same thing happened to their kids.
So I'm faced with one side that corroborates my experience, predicted it in several cases, and offers treatments that are currently, empirically, working. And the other side dismisses my experience as impossible, predicts the exact opposite of what I'm seeing, and not only offers no treatments, steadfastly says that the other side's treatments
aren't working, in the face of said empirical evidence. Every moment of my life for the last year has shown one side to be true, and the other to be false, without exception. That is how I know I am right.
I will know I am wrong if the medical community manages to isolate a different environmental cause, removes it from the population, and the autism rate goes down. But I'm confident it won't happen, if for no other reason than they are
refusing to look at any environmental causes, so of course they will not find one.