AV Gish Gallop #1 (Pt 3)

A positive association found between autism prevalence and childhood vaccination uptake across the U.S. population (2011)
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21623535)

Delong G
https://vaccination-information-portal.com/wp-content/uploads/participants-database/vaccine_and_autism_correlation_us_2011_j_tox_env_health.pdf

This paper has received much attention.  None of it, outside the echo-chamber is good,,,

What Delong does, "[s]he correlated rates of coverage of the government recommended full set of vaccines in the 51 US states including Washington D.C., with registered rates of autism in those states six years later."  As Neuroskeptic notes, Delong's conclusion, "The higher the proportion of children receiving recommended vaccinations, the higher was the prevalence of AUT,,, The results suggest that although mercury has been removed from many vaccines, other culprits may link vaccines to autism. Further study into the relationship between vaccines and autism is warranted."

After doing some statistical magic of his own, NS states. "My conclusion is that this dataset shows no evidence of any association. The author nonetheless found one. How? By doing some statistical wizardry,,, but when the raw data shows zilch and you can only find a signal by "controlling for" stuff, alarm bells start ringing. Given sufficient statistical analysis you can make any data say anything you want."

My take from NS writing, there's no correlation between change in vaccination and change in autism.

Hoping for a bit more clarity as I am 20+ years removed from statistics,,,

One note the Orac makes concerning "just" the abstract, ",,,I can’t resist pointing out a bit of misinformation right in the abstract. For example, the reason for the rapid rise of autism in the U.S. is not really much of a “mystery.” It’s very likely the result of diagnostic substitution in the wake of the broadening of the diagnostic criteria for autism and autism spectrum disorders that occurred in the early to mid-1990s, as Paul Shattuck has shown.  Oh, there may be a genuine increase in autism prevalence over the last 20 years (although even that is debatable), but, if it exists, it’s so small that it’s not even clear that there is one."

The crux of Orac's analysis is design, methodology, and confounders:

Then there’s the design of the study itself. Jumpin’ Jesus on a pogo stick, there’s the design of the study itself! If this is the sort of research design that is considered acceptable and routine in economics and business, no wonder our economy’s in such a mess. First (and most egregious), there’s the issue of why DeLong combined SLIs (see abstract above) with autism diagnoses to do her analysis.
,,,
Then there’s the methodology chosen for trying to find correlations, described here,,, Besides DeLong’s having fallen for the ecological fallacy (group level comparisons rather than individual-level comparisons), she doesn’t provide much in the way of a good justification for why she chose ages 2 and 8 as their vaccine time point and prevalence time point.
,,,
Then there’s the issue of confounders. DeLong tried to control for ethnicity, but in explicably she used the CDC’s National Immunization Survey rather than, say, U.S. Census data to derive ethnicity figures. Other potential confounders examined included family income, other disabilities, and the number of pediatricians in each state.

The take away from Orac's analysis, "DeLong used inappropriate data to reach inappropriate conclusions. She publishes to her audience, not science."

One note of import, this study is ignored: US Department of Education Data on “Autism” Are Not Reliable for Tracking Autism Prevalence, by James R. Laidler

While I could bore y'all to death with other reactions to this paper, it is safe to say that Liz Ditz has provide a fine summation of concerns with the paper.