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Anatomy of a Failure: Why This Latest Vaccine-Autism Paper is Dead Wrong
(theunbiasedscipod.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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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.
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.