Autism Warning Signs

When they aren’t allowing noted paranoid liar and professional ignoramus Jenny McCarthy to spread her anti-vaccination nonsense via ethically disastrous interviews, Time magazine occasionally offers some real science. They have an interesting article on how doctors are getting better at recognizing signs of autism in infant children, long before the typical autism diagnosis age of three years. This is important, because it’s another in the mountain of nails covering the coffin of the “vaccines cause autism” ruse. Previously, people like Jenny McCarthy claimed their autistic children were perfectly normal before receiving their rounds of vaccinations around age three, when they suddenly became autistic. This was originally blamed on mercury preservatives in the MMR vaccine. When that was proven to be untrue, they tried to shift the blame to the sheer number of vaccines given to children. When it turned out that modern vaccines actually have less antigens today than when children received fewer of them, the blame shifted to diet and environment and other vaccines and all sorts of other nonsense. But the fact remains that autism looks to have a very large genetic component, as evidenced by the fact that it can be recognized in children as young as twelve months. Once again, Jenny McCarthy and the rest of the anti-vaccination crowd are proven tragically, dangerously wrong. More details here.