So, you're posulating the existence of a slew of auto-immune-diseased people with no dicernible symptoms. Is that like the minature elepahts that make electricity work?
Also, people are not being slow to accept vaccines cause autism, because when you use the same diagnostic criteria for both the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, levels of vaccination show no correspondance to levels of autism.
I think a response like this proves why non-professionals shouldn't discuss anything they can't have published in peer-reviewed journal, in theory.
You're caught like a little hampster in a rotating cage.
If our professionals in government and science were indeed looking at things on their true merits, you would of course be doing OK to just let them advise and inform and educate the public and their representatives. Where you and I disagree hangs on that "if".
But when our professional societies like the ACS, AMA, and other disciplinary leaders for any reason become biased, it all goes out the window. Unless there is enough willingness to openly challenge contemporary "settled" issues, everyone is just unwilling to risk being mocked the way you mock things you don't understand.
In the late sixties, I had and read a book called "The New Brahmins" which went into some informed criticism of establishment trends in science at that time, and it has only gotten worse. Part of the reason it has gotten worse is because science is dependent on government grants, and those grants are being handed out with political objectives on the front burner. It's "Publish or Perish", and you have to get those grants, so you have to fall in line with the political trends or you'll become a "nobody" real quick.
Another reason why science has deteriorated in politically sensitive areas of enquiry has to do with corporate and foundational grants or "Chairs", which is money coming from private sector interests which is almost always, today, with strings attached. If you're in the area of medicine, those grants come from Big Pharma and other medical corporates with specific real agendas. Scientists are little monkeys dancing for their corporate organ grinders, complete with frilly little tutus.
Yet another reason why science is not real science sometimes has to do with the whole "Peer Review" system and the ownership and advertisers in the Journals they publish. Take a look at any recent publication of this sort, and ask yourself what determines acceptance in these journals. Again, I think it has a lot to do with sponsorship and current fashions in politics.
In any economic system, if you reward any kind of behavior financially, you will get more of it.
Your little ivory tower of "All is Well" with our authoritarian system might keep you warm and enthused with your participation in it all for a while. Few people will bite the hand that feeds them, and I guess I'd be expecting too much for you to seriously question everything you get from the system you are plugged into.
In the specific case of autism studies, there is a lot of money invested in the vaccine business, and those folks will pay good money for scientists, especially those with credentials to beat the band, to weigh in with any study to deny the connection.
And let's put it this way. Binding coefficients for antibodies range from practically nonspecific and ineffective, to very very specific and effective. If there are a hundred proteins in the media, you would have millions of epitopes, or specific loci of binding to an antibody. What your body does is produce a whole range of antibodies with highly variable binding characteristics in one region, and an invariant backside. If an antibody binds to something, the actual destruction that ensues comes from a macrophage cell which recognizes the backside and knows it's bound to something, and so attaches itself and begins to release a lot of powerful digestive juices that will break down a viral particle or a bacterial cell wall, and will send back a signal for the production of more of this type of antibody. "Immunity" experiences some decrease in effectiveness over time for some pathogens, and in fact there are changes going on in the various pathogens which means a new variety might come along that might not "draw fire" from the antibodies you have to the old version.
But it's just silly to imagine that even highly efficient and specific antibodies won't sometimes find a place to bind on your natural "self" proteins. Well, actually, there is evidence that your immune system has feedback controls that have from a very young age "learned" not to attack "self" substances, but however good this system may be, it experiences degeneration with age within it's own set of functional proteins, as well as adverse effects from foreign proteins from the whole range of environmental chemicals and lifeforms we are exposed to, or even from our diet or from say vaccinations. In fact, some theories of aging include accumulated side effects of immune responses as a reason why we age.
This is a type of medical treatment that should be used sparingly, where the risks of the disease greatly outweigh the adverse possible effects. Preferably where our other resources for treatment have serious deficits as well.
And yes, indeed, Big Pharma folks put out a huge fortune to keep this type of thinking out of the news.
