Reply #55: As I understand it, no.

[varkam]

And maybe I'm wrong on the facts, so by all means correct me if I am mistaken.

But as I understand that case, Poling had a mitochondrial disorder that caused her symptoms. MDs can be set off by anything that puts a stress on the system, be it vaccines or viral infection. In her case, it happened to be the vaccines that aggravated the underlying MD which, in turn, caused the symptoms. It wasn't anything special or particular to the vaccines that caused it, but they did happen to be the catalyst in her case. If it weren't for the vaccines, then it is likely that something else (such as an illness) would have cooked it off. In other words, the vaccine was a sufficient, but not necessary, condition for causation.

It may be true that there are other cases like Poling's, but since the comorbidity of MDs and autism is <10%, and that the vaccine was not necessary to set off the symptoms (and I just do not know if the normal progression is into the ASD) it seems that such a theory would, at best, explain a vast minority of cases.

Note how that differs from the genetic hypersuceptibility hypothesis (or at least a variant of it). That hypothesis posits that some children are more sensitive to mercury by virtue of their DNA. It wasn't that Poling was hypersensitive to mercury, per se, but that she was "hypersensitive" to just about anything and everything.