At least, they do in monkeys. It’s going to be harder and harder for the vaccine apologists to continue denying the vaccine-autism link now that there is empirical evidence supporting the theory:
If vaccines play absolutely no role in the development of childhood autism, a claim made by many medical authorities today, then why are some of the most popular vaccines commonly administered to children demonstrably causing autism in animal primates? This is the question many people are now asking after a recent study conducted by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh (UP) in Pennsylvania revealed that many of the infant monkeys given standard doses of childhood vaccines as part of the new research developed autism symptoms.
For their analysis, Laura Hewitson and her colleagues at UP conducted the type of proper safety research on typical childhood vaccination schedules that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should have conducted — but never has — for such regimens. And what this brave team discovered was groundbreaking, as it completely deconstructs the mainstream myth that vaccines are safe and pose no risk of autism. Presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) in London, England, the findings revealed that young macaque monkeys given the typical CDC-recommended vaccination schedule from the 1990s, and in appropriate doses for the monkeys’ sizes and ages, tended to develop autism symptoms. Their unvaccinated counterparts, on the other hand, developed no such symptoms, which points to a strong connection between vaccines and autism spectrum disorders.
For decades, vaccine advocates have begged the question by claiming that proper double-blind studies can’t be ethically performed on children. So, while there is still some legitimate question of whether what has been shown to cause symptoms of autism in macaque monkeys will also cause them in human children, it does lend significant more weight to the hypothesis. It should be noted that no one has ever done a proper double-blind study on the potentially harmful effects of a single vaccine, much less the entire recommended vaccine schedule.
No doubt Orac and other devoted vaccine propagandists will attempt to dismiss this study for one reason or another, but eventually, sooner or later, the pro-vaccine hypothesis is going to be put to the scientific test and the results will supercede all of the rhetorical and pseudo-scientific defenses they have been making. We’ll have to wait and see what those results actually entail, and whether they support or destroy the pro-vaccine position, but if the hypothesis of the link does continue to hold up in actual scientific experiments, it will certainly be a pleasure ramming the copious volumes of all their past words down the intellectually dishonest throats of those who comprise the current faux scientific vaccine consensus.