The British state have been following the same bone-headed formula for nearly four decades - doesn’t matter how bad it gets they parrot the same nonsense. As I pointed out to the government’s Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies in January 2019 the rates they were trying to explain away c.1999 are a tiny fraction of those at that time or those today:
“I fear we also need to return to the old data. In the 1999 schools’ mental health survey the PDD rate among secondary school children born between 1984 and 1988 was 1 in 500 compared with 1 in 250 in primary school [23], but by the 2004 survey when virtually all children in school were of the MMR generation the figure had risen to virtually 1 in 100 across the board [24]. Already in that period some of us were exercised over claims that any of this was at all normal but now if we look at what was written at the time we are still looking at relatively modest figures. For instance, Gillberg and Wing wrote in relation to the rising trend in 1999 [25]:
““The early studies yielded prevalence rates of under 0.5 in 1000 children, whereas the later ones showed a mean rate of about 1 in 1000. There was a marked difference in prevalence rates between those studies that included some children born before 1970 (low rates) and those that included only children born in 1970 and after (high rates). This is probably due to the lower rates obtained by use of criteria strictly based on Kanner's description of his syndrome.”
“Even Eric Fombonne in the same year was talking comparatively small numbers [26]:
“Over 4 million subjects were surveyed; 1533 subjects with autism were identified. The methodological characteristics of each study are summarized, including case definition, case-finding procedures, participation rates and precision achieved. Across surveys, the median prevalence estimate was 5.2/10000. Half the surveys had 95% confidence intervals consistent with population estimates of 5.4-5.5/10000…Based on recent surveys, a minimum estimate of 18.7/10000 for all forms of pervasive developmental disorders was derived, which outlines the needs in special services for a large group of children.”
“This was one of the papers that the DHSC sent to reassure me when I first expressed concern about the situation in Haringey in 2000. But this is a whole order of magnitude different from the current situation, while attempts to locate the missing numbers (as opposed to the occasional case) in a population now over the age of 30 have signally failed. In 2013, in contrast to National Autistic Society projections, of 700,000 cases across the entire population the DWP knew of only 129,000 who were likely preponderantly minors [27]. Brugha’s figure for adults in 2009 was extravagantly extrapolated, based on flawed diagnostic methodology and the hypothesis that they had somehow missed nearly 3/4s of the cases before weighting, and was downgraded by National Statistics to the status of “experimental statistics” in 2016 [28], while his 2014 data was published in 2016 as only “experimental statistics” [29]. The “they must be there somewhere” line has been playing for two decades without the cases ever being found. But if they were there, they would be a massively dependent and expensive population and they would not have to be looked for.”
The British state have been following the same bone-headed formula for nearly four decades - doesn’t matter how bad it gets they parrot the same nonsense. As I pointed out to the government’s Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies in January 2019 the rates they were trying to explain away c.1999 are a tiny fraction of those at that time or those today:
“I fear we also need to return to the old data. In the 1999 schools’ mental health survey the PDD rate among secondary school children born between 1984 and 1988 was 1 in 500 compared with 1 in 250 in primary school [23], but by the 2004 survey when virtually all children in school were of the MMR generation the figure had risen to virtually 1 in 100 across the board [24]. Already in that period some of us were exercised over claims that any of this was at all normal but now if we look at what was written at the time we are still looking at relatively modest figures. For instance, Gillberg and Wing wrote in relation to the rising trend in 1999 [25]:
““The early studies yielded prevalence rates of under 0.5 in 1000 children, whereas the later ones showed a mean rate of about 1 in 1000. There was a marked difference in prevalence rates between those studies that included some children born before 1970 (low rates) and those that included only children born in 1970 and after (high rates). This is probably due to the lower rates obtained by use of criteria strictly based on Kanner's description of his syndrome.”
“Even Eric Fombonne in the same year was talking comparatively small numbers [26]:
“Over 4 million subjects were surveyed; 1533 subjects with autism were identified. The methodological characteristics of each study are summarized, including case definition, case-finding procedures, participation rates and precision achieved. Across surveys, the median prevalence estimate was 5.2/10000. Half the surveys had 95% confidence intervals consistent with population estimates of 5.4-5.5/10000…Based on recent surveys, a minimum estimate of 18.7/10000 for all forms of pervasive developmental disorders was derived, which outlines the needs in special services for a large group of children.”
“This was one of the papers that the DHSC sent to reassure me when I first expressed concern about the situation in Haringey in 2000. But this is a whole order of magnitude different from the current situation, while attempts to locate the missing numbers (as opposed to the occasional case) in a population now over the age of 30 have signally failed. In 2013, in contrast to National Autistic Society projections, of 700,000 cases across the entire population the DWP knew of only 129,000 who were likely preponderantly minors [27]. Brugha’s figure for adults in 2009 was extravagantly extrapolated, based on flawed diagnostic methodology and the hypothesis that they had somehow missed nearly 3/4s of the cases before weighting, and was downgraded by National Statistics to the status of “experimental statistics” in 2016 [28], while his 2014 data was published in 2016 as only “experimental statistics” [29]. The “they must be there somewhere” line has been playing for two decades without the cases ever being found. But if they were there, they would be a massively dependent and expensive population and they would not have to be looked for.”
https://www.ageofautism.com/2019/01/confirmation-bias-and-the-united-kingdom-department-of-health.html
Are they just covering up, or did they mean to do it? You tell me.