MMR Vaccine = Autism? Week 3

1. What is one key argument or knowledge claim?
The key argument that has been formed is that the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine has directly caused autism in a number of children. These claims that the MMR vaccine is closely connected to autism were published in the well-known medical journal, The Lancet, by a Doctor Wakefield. The paper was retracted and Wakefield was stripped of his medical practice in 2010.

2. What evidence supports this claim?
There were twelve children that were studied for the report, eleven boys and one girl. All these children had seemingly grown up naturally with no significant problems in their development, until the vaccine. It was reported that after receiving the MMR vaccine, these children began to have problems with their hearing, speaking and other developmental disabilities. Two of the children were later diagnosed with regressive autism and the other children were diagnosed with other mental disabilities such as Asperger's syndrome. It was reported that symptoms of these disorders occurred in a very short time after receiving the vaccines.

3. What evidence challenges this claim?
Although those reports were made there have been medical records that show that the children had not been developing as normally as reported before the vaccine. It is written in the medical records that many of these children had, in fact, already began showing signs of developmental disabilities before the vaccine had even be given. Another child had been reported to have showed signs of autism a few weeks after the vaccine,  yet medical records insisted that it was months after the vaccine and the child was at the stage in life when symptoms of the syndrome began to appear, so that the vaccine had no direct connection with autism.

4. How is your confidence in a knowledge claim affected by understanding the type/quality/reliability of the evidence?
Your confidence in a knowledge claim can be reinforced or strengthened when there is reliable and factual evidence that is given before you, such as a chronological description (not just personal opinion) of the children's development before, during and after the vaccine. Then you would be able to be more confident with determining whether the vaccine had directly caused the mental disorders to develop. Unfortunately, the government will not allow for any more studies that could possibly resolve this case. This seems to place them in the wrong as it seems to suggest that there is something that the government is attempting to hide. When all the information is gathered of both unaffected and affected children and of the chemicals used in the vaccine and how this could have caused the mental disabilities, then we can begin to determine whether the arguments are true or false.

2 Feb 2011

What are your impressions?
At first I was quite unsure of what to think of the TOK subject. I felt that it had a quite a strong similarity to psychology and that it was really interesting. The discussions that we had were rather fascinating and by the end of the lesson I felt that my brain had gone through quite a rough work out. Many of the topics that we touched on also left me thinking quite a bit, and left me questioning things that I originally would not have.

What are you most interested in or surprised by?
What I found most interesting in today's lesson was when we were discussing the meanings and definitions of certain words. At first we thought that the task was fairly straightforward but when entering deeper into discussion we realized that it was much more difficult to define them than we had guessed. I found it interesting how many things we had believed to have known were harder to prove than we had thought.