Fact-Checking From Ignorance is Misinformation: What FactCheck.org Gets Wrong About Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and About Vaccines and Autism

Factcheck.org is, once again, fact-checked by Dr. Lyons-Weiler and their opinion-based claims are debunked.

Consider signing up for The Vaccine Course at IPAK-EDU for Sept 2023

In this article picked up by The Atlanta Voice "What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About Autism”, FactCheck.org gets it wrong about Vaccines and Autism. From their opinion article:

“No there is absolutely no evidence that vaccines cause autism,” Catherine Lord, a clinical psychologist and autism researcher at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, told us in an email. “This proposition has been repeatedly rejected including withdrawal of the first article that proposed it (and subsequent loss of medical status of its author) and every study since then,” she said, referring to the retracted Lancet paper.

They also shared:

“David Mandell, a psychiatric epidemiologist, health services researcher and director of the Center for Mental Health at the University of Pennsylvania, told us, “Every single rigorous study we have” shows “no association” between autism and vaccination.

There are two major problems with these claims.

Problem #1

The first problem is that there ARE studies that have found links between vaccines and autism. Here’s a figure of the CDC schedule in 2015.

Here’s a list of studies ignored by CDC on vaccines and autism.

And here’s a contribution about the topic by Ginger Taylor about a website that lists many more studies that found evidence linking vaccines and autism:

How Do Vaccines Cause Autism?

Then of course there’s the Hooker/Miller study.

Problem #2

The second problem is two-fold: the studies that are alleged to have reported no association suffered miserably from low statistical power, they tested the wrong hypothesis.

For the first part, see my report on their paltry weakness. For the second, everyone knows that association studies do not test causality: why are these association studies labeled “rigorous”. It’s sophomore-level statistics knowledge that association falls short of testing causality. Causal inferences require experiments; i.e., randomized controlled trials.

The opinion article published by FactCheck.org goes on to make the false claim that the Simpsonwood meeting - an illegal meeting that involved the US CDC, a pharmaceutical company, and Kaiser Permanente North from California - did not really consider any results relating thimerosal in vaccines to autism. They wrote:

“The data presented at the meeting did not in fact show a significant association between thimerosal exposure and autism, but rather a few other associations between thimerosal and neurodevelopmental disorders in specific contexts.”

First, Huh? Second, Wha?

Hmm… Let’s see the data shown at the meeting… X-axis being Relative Risk of what? Autism.

(Click on the image for a write-up on Vactruth.org)

The article then goes on to claim, in spite of the evidence in the minutes of the meeting obtained by Safeminds:

“Kennedy and others have said that Verstraeten originally uncovered a link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines and that his finding was subsequently diluted. In the 2004 letter, Verstraeten denied his findings were watered down. Versions of this rumor have been resurrected repeatedly and repeatedly debunked.”

Yet, Verstraeten’s increase reported in the Simpson meeting and shown in the figure above is not found in his paper published four years later; the methods of analysis were completely different, and there was no mention of this initial finding.

Factcheck.org once again shows its bias, ignorance, incompetence, or its intention to willfully mislead the public on a matter of public health. Take your pick, but their opinion does not trump fact.

Conclusion: Factcheck.org’s false claims about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are debunked.

Consider signing up for The Vaccine Course at IPAK-EDU for Sept 2023