Okay, so I wanted to get some writing done, but a connection on here got attacked by some anti-vaxer after sharing photos of her cute babies. (They're super cute btw) So now we're gonna do another autism talk. For those of you who weren't around last time, I'm autistic.

I'm high functioning, but if anyone farts in a ten mile radius I will know about it and I have facial blindness. Which is super fun. I'm actually not being sarcastic. Being neuro-diverse means I get a really cool perspective on all you normies.

So the reason I'm bringing this up is that crazy anti-vaxer jerk person 1. tried to link autism to vaccination and 2. literally hashtagged, "autismsucks." So answering this backwards, no autism most definitely does not suck and it has NOTHING to do with vaccination.

I'm not here to debunk studies that have already been thoroughly debunked, but the only very tenuous reason vaccination gets vaguely associated with autism is the symptoms of autism can show up around the time of some vaccinations. That's it.

And I REALLY need to stress this autism is kind of awesome. For someone who's not high functioning or has more meltdowns than I do it probably isn't but for me it's honestly really great. But you can't catch it.

Autism is a developmental difference which was probably originally evolutionary in nature. Basically people like me experience less neural paring than normal people do. Neonates have TONS of neurons and connected synapses. Through infancy those get pared back.

In an autistic person they don't reduce at all or they reduce less than normal. So autistic people experience a greater degree of neuroconnectivity. That means that we are hyper-perceptive. And then there's a whole bunch of weird cognitive and psychological stuff that happens.

I should say at this point I may be autistic, but I'm not a neurologist so my explanation here is just based on what I've read trying to understand what I'm going through. Which is actually another symptom of autism. So that's cool.

But anyway, have you ever looked at an infant and seen them look sort of concerned and confused or just look into the air where there's nothing? That's because of hyperconnectivity. They're experiencing stuff you can't anymore. Or ghosts. Whichever.

So yeah, I have meltdowns and I smell a LOT of farts, but the flip side is I can also smell flowers half a mile off and I experience emotions much more intensely than you do. I can't express them very well but ... well, I'm basically a cat.

If someone could make me not autistic I'd tell them to f off. Implying autism is bad simply means you don't understand what it is and this suggestion that autism is worse than death, well *I'm* deeply hurt and insulted. So I'm going to just carry on with this neutral expression.

But let's get back to the vaccines. Vaccines are great for you and great for public health. They're truly the greatest health intervention in history. I'm not even kidding. And here I can pull rank. I'm a palaeopathologist. Vaccines are great.

Childhood diseases kill and before vaccines they killed so much that women had to be pregnant basically all the time if they expected to raise a child to adulthood. I might be overstating a little, but in every skeletal collection there are just so many shoeboxes.

I'll be explicit here because you need to hear this. Adult skeletons are big. You have to get a big box. Infant skeletons can be fit inside a box the same size as a shoebox. So in a premodern cemetery with a normal distribution there's going to be tons of infants and toddlers.

You might be thinking that if your kid gets sick you can just rush them to the hospital. Well, treatment for measles is basically fluids and prayer. Same for a lot of these diseases. If you get there quick enough you can receive the vaccine, but after a point you can only hope.

So you might think you'll just limit their exposure to childhood diseases. That won't work either. Some of them are so contagious droplets from a sneeze or cough can infect someone else an hour later. You can easily unknowingly infect your child by just walking about.

There's also cases where people can be carriers with no symptoms. This was basically Typhoid Mary's deal. The only way to guarantee you won't kill your kid off from these diseases is if you vaccinate your kid.

So let's briefly talk about FDA regulations. Vaccinations are delivered to healthy children. To legally create and administer a medicine you have to prove using SCIENCE that the medicine is not just not as bad as the disease but will not make the person unreasonably ill.

For something like cancer which causes a horrible agonising death, patients are given some pretty horrible medicines. Those medicines are awful, but they're not as bad as dying of cancer.

Same thing goes for birth control. Pregnancy can lead to death by various horrible means, so hormonal birth control potentially causing blood clots is considered an acceptable risk. Blood clots are REALLY BAD. But ectopic pregnancy, for example, is worse.

But anything given to healthy people has to be proven to not make them sick at all. A little swelling and a slight fever are acceptable, but that is as bad as it is legally allowed to get. And children are by law doubly and triply protected.

Vaccines must, by law, not only be not as bad as the disease they prevent, but not cause any illness. And they are developed through strictly regulated and controlled medical studies. Seriously, IRBs are INTENSE particularly once you get all the way up to human models.

But my last thought here is for a disease to be eradicated and for the population to be safe from it you have to reach a threshold of about 90-95% vaccination. And there are people like cancer patients or people with immunological diseases etc who cannot be vaccinated.

So if you are healthy and your kids are healthy discuss your allergies with your doctor and get your vaccines. It's not just selfish to expect that herd immunity will protect you; it's actively dangerous. If you do not vaccinate you become a vector for disease.

In summation vaccination is awesome, autism is also awesome, these two things have nothing to do with one another except for the fact that I am also awesome and have both autism and been fully vaccinated. So, get your shots and don't kill other people.