Anti-vaccine groups melt down over reports RFK Jr. to link autism to Tylenol
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It isn't "basically debunked", it was a greedy scam to begin with, and have been utterly disproven unnecessarily many times since.
Edit: This comment is meant to refer to vaccines causing autism, which started as a scam and not weak statistical correlation.
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I know you are being sarcastic, but I am. And man, it is hard most days not to cry at least once.
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RFKjr’s assertions about people with autism are some of the most disgustingly uninformed things I’ve ever heard. If you’re not aware of what that side is saying it maybe sadly important to familiarise yourself with the utter balderdash because ‘know your enemy’ and all that.
Here is a PBS rebuttal of them: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-robert-f-kennedy-jr-s-statements-on-autism
Please donate if you follow the link. Heck, please donate if you don’t.
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It's not hard to understand:
Tylenol isn't all that safe (people die from Tylenol caused liver damage every year).
But for years and years experts have been pointing out
- vaccines don't cause autism, and that
- the common vaccines are all far, far, far safer than Tylenol...
... Ergo, Tylenol causes autism.
I don’t know this for a fact, of course, but I feel like practically every over-the-counter cold medicine having acetaminophen in it is a large part of that problem. People take those without realizing that they have acetaminophen in them, and then double up on Tylenol.
Like most drugs, it’s much safer if you don’t overdose on it.
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LOL I came here just for this. The collapse of the US isn't the end of the world. China will just become the new dominant economic world power. Sure the US have the nukes but unless you have a deranged leader who would launch nukes because of a temper.....tantrum.......oh crap.
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Medical experiments (as in scientific process experiment, not experiment-as-in-prototype) are exceedingly difficult for a variety of reasons. Luckily this one isn't all that difficult and the experimental procedure is straightforward:
Tylenol test group gets a bottle of Tylenol that only has instructions and experimental designation as it's label. You give them instructions that sound a lot like the instructions for taking Tylenol and you tell them not to take Tylenol or other over-the-counter painkillers. And then you trust them to either follow your instructions or honestly report any deviations from instructions.
The control group gets a bottle of sugar pills that only has instructions and experimental designation as it's label. You give them instructions that sound a lot like the instructions for taking Tylenol and you tell them not to take Tylenol or other over-the-counter painkillers. And then you trust them to either follow your instructions or honestly report any deviations from instructions. And you really hope that this group toughs through the pain because, as they are humans with free will, a sizeable portion might say "fuck-it," take a painkiller against instruction, and contaminate your results. There are reasons why people backing out is a bigger problem than just pretending they were never a part of the trial, but you didn't ask about that.
We're talking about an over-the-counter painkiller here, not cancer treatment; but still, no part of a modern medical experiment requires force. A lot of effort goes into getting around the problem of "What if the test subjects don't play along?" from simple things like daily calls to hiring personal fitness trainers. But never force.
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FOOOOLS!!!! Autism is obviously linked to that pervasive chemical x called "Oxygen Di-hydroxide!!!"
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Bobby, as they call him could come out tomorrow and say all of those things they listed are now 100% banned, and they'd still have something to say, because what does the dog do after catching the car?
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And we have lots of names for those that fail. Being almost completely unregulated, the supplement industry is so dominated by quack nostrums that "supplement" and "snake oil" should share an entry in every thesaurus.
Never forget that America is the nation where Coca-Cola sold cocaine as a cure for drug addiction. Modern Americans have no idea what life was like before the FDA, but if we keep this up, we're going to be reminded in ways and with a force that no 19th century charlatan selling baldness cures out of the back of a wagon ever dreamed of.
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Huh... I suppose that might even help explain why all American government support for developing mRNA cancer cures was defunded just as that research began producing concrete results.
(I'm not sure whether that's a sarcastic joke, or simple historical observation.)
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I think it is worth pointing out that the acetaminophen poisonings leading to that "20%" are from acute overdoses and not from chronic exposure. And we are talking doses of like 7 -10 GRAMS for an adult. Its much lower for kids ~150 - 200 mg/kg. So for my kid that is only 4-5 extra-strengths.
So it looks like the majority of events are accidental and a good proportion of the poisoning events are with children, though children are less likely to experience liver failure then adults.
I think the real take away, safety wise, is that we need to:
1) continue to make sure people are administering the right type of acetaminophen, at the right dose to their children and
2) continue to make sure the parents take extra care to keep acetaminophen/medicines away from their kids because more then anyone else they are the ones who will try to eat that stuff like m&m's
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There probably will be history books about this century. It's just that most of them will not be written in English, nor published in North America.
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I watched Mrs. Doubtfire with the kids yesterday and it struck me that if that movie had been done today there would have been a media firestorm like no other. Especially about the ending.
At the end of the movie Robin Williams character that does Mrs. Doubtfire gets their own kids show as Mrs. Doubtfire.
The right wing media would have a meltdown over that ending today.
The right wing media would have a meltdown over that ending today.
The movie made me nostalgic for the 90s in the sense that this was a high profile movie and that got greenlight and released and there was no controversy. Well it might have been, I was to young to know when it initially released. But I have never heard anyone bring up the movie in a negative way from that perspective.
There are some other things about the movie that doesn't quite feel right though.
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To elaborate on this, acetaminophen exhibits a threshold effect in terms of liver toxicity. If you consume below a certain amount, your liver is able to process it fine and suffers effectively no damage. If you consume excess amounts, the pathway is overwhelmed and serious liver damage results in short order. Do not joke around with the daily limits on the bottle.
By comparison, ibuprofen and related NSAIDs are hard on your kidneys and GI track at any dose when taken long-term, just in a more gradual/progressive way.
Put another way, at low doses acetaminophen is safer and in overdose ibuprofen is safer. It's reductive and misleading to say "acetaminophen is very dangerous!" because it could lead somebody to take an alternative pain reliever that ultimately ends up more harmful to them, depending on their situation.
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I find it unbelievably depressing that we have a public health issue of immense, immediate, material impact – and the hot debate today is between a conspiracy theorist pushing bullshit and conspiracy theory groups blowing up at him because he's pushing the wrong bullshit.
Not what has the most data and expert analysis behind it, but a battle of tribalistic nonsense theories.
Not what has the most data and expert analysis behind it, but a battle of tribalistic nonsense theories.
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This sounds like a job for Elon and his Department Of Pharmacological Efficiency
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"The alleged link between Tylenol use during pregnancy and the development of autism is not entirely bunkum, but it also is far from proven."
I stand by my description, and there's the introduction to my basis, which is a whole section of the article. What, exactly, is yours, and what is the basis of this "utterly disproven" statement?
Don't do the same thing that they are. Don't argue your feelings and attack me as a result. I'll fight back.
Edit: Rereading this, now I see the problem. You treat the word "basically" as hedge. It's not, and if you can't pull the signal from the noise in dozens of published medical studies, you haven't identified a fundamental mechanism of action at all.
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Wouldn't Johnson & Johnson (makers of Tylenol) have a cause for action with serious damages against RFKJr for even implying (a scurrilous innuendo) that Tylenol might be responsible for autism? I mean, no matter what, this is now going to hit their bottom-line as the less-gifted half of the American population stops buying Tylenol altogether.
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Well, they should have thought of that before they failed to donate to the presidential "library fund", "invest" in Trump Coins, or get into a lawsuit they could settle.
It's a shame, they didn't take advantage of any of the multiple options, to protect their nice Tylenol business...
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Keep up the excellent reporting! I feel certain that one day this archive will prove critical to the documentarians seeking to understand the great American population crash of the next decade.
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VelvetGlove
Ars Tribunus Militum
As long as the cause of autism remains murky, I think I can make the case linking autism to social media use. Worth a shot, isn't it?
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Here's a story that has nothing to do with anything except Robin Williams and how much I liked him as a kid:
He was in Hook, he was the first voice I ever recognized as a voice actor as the bat in Ferngully, he was the inimitable Genie in Aladdin. (It was a little later I heard/saw some of his early, coked-up stuff, which is pretty much the same arc for every comedian ascendant through the 70's - George Carlin, Steve Martin, Cheech & Chong.)
So.
I'm staying with my uptight grandparents (and a really awful cousin) for a week as a teenager, and we go out to rent a movie. My cousin picks something, and I see Robin Williams on the cover of a box and, to some-teen Mech, think "Robin Williams! This should be good and a safe bet for a bitchy cousin & uptight grandparents movie rental night." I picked it up, said it was my choice, and we took it back to the house and all watched it together.
That movie was One Hour Photo.
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It is the fear of having to accept that that drives the nutjobbery.
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Chocolate can a deadly toxic to dogs so better cross that off your list. dihydrogen monoxide kiils more people each year than lighting strikes and shark attacks. Big pharma doesn't want to know this.
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There is also the significant issue of the interaction when using acetaminophen (Tylenol) together with consuming alcohol -- the combination is much harder on the liver than either alone, causing smaller doses to be more harmful.
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I’m fairly sure smoking has decreased dramatically in pregnancy in the last 50 years as autism diagnoses have increased. You do the math.
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