Vaccinations (Countering the misinformation of Anti-Vaxx Movement)

[KanadaHye]

Re: Vaccinations (Countering the misinformation of Anti-Vaxx Movement)

i couldn't agree more. and, i'm very familiar with herd immunity, which is the complete opposite of herd vaccinopathy - vaccination is not immunization. i closely know two families that home school their children due to required immunizations, as well as a failing education system. all of these children are very healthy, as well as bright and well-rounded. when i have children, i will do the same.

School is just a day time baby sitter... you have to teach your kids what you want them to learn at home and discipline them as well since schools can't do either. And you can feed them peanut butter at home.

[armogrid]

Re: Vaccinations (Countering the misinformation of Anti-Vaxx Movement)

Sure, it's a choice, but if you want to be out around people or in public school it should be required. Read up on herd immunity. Your decision shouldn't kill someone else's child. We shouldn't have to force people to do anything. They should follow their doctor's advice, not a has-been playboy xxxx. Why should we have to require people to do what's best for their child and our communities as a whole?

Personally, I wouldn't let my children play with other kids who aren't vaccinated. I'm certainly on board with schools requiring it. You still have a choice though... you don't have to enroll your children; you can home school.

i couldn't agree more. and, i'm very familiar with herd immunity, which is the complete opposite of herd vaccinopathy - vaccination is not immunization. i closely know two families that home school their children due to required immunizations, as well as a failing education system. all of these children are very healthy, as well as bright and well-rounded. when i have children, i will do the same.

[Siggie]

Re: Vaccinations (Countering the misinformation of Anti-Vaxx Movement)

Sure, it's a choice, but if you want to be out around people or in public school it should be required. Read up on herd immunity. Your decision shouldn't kill someone else's child. We shouldn't have to force people to do anything. They should follow their doctor's advice, not a has-been playboy xxxx. Why should we have to require people to do what's best for their child and our communities as a whole?

Personally, I wouldn't let my children play with other kids who aren't vaccinated. I'm certainly on board with schools requiring it. You still have a choice though... you don't have to enroll your children; you can home school.

[armogrid]

Re: Vaccinations (Countering the misinformation of Anti-Vaxx Movement)

I know, I was only reiterating the point. I also wanted to mention how Avatar is the shettiest movie ever made

[Muhaha]

Re: Vaccinations (Countering the misinformation of Anti-Vaxx Movement)

That was my point throughout this entire long winded debacle.

Was it?

[KanadaHye]

Re: Vaccinations (Countering the misinformation of Anti-Vaxx Movement)

Whatever you believe regarding vaccination, it's a personal choice and should not be dictated or enforced upon others (regardless if you deem their beliefs as "irrational"). Furthermore, talking heads like [douche bag] Maher and [douche bag] Shermer provide biased information, as do many websites packed with disinformation, even when disguised with "randomized, double-blinded, blah-blah-blah studies". Be critical in your approach to all information, from both sides, and make a decision for yourself.... not parroting some douche bag.

That was my point throughout this entire long winded debacle.

[armogrid]

Re: Vaccinations (Countering the misinformation of Anti-Vaxx Movement)

After reading your back-n-forth regarding vaccination, I want to make a comment not about vaccination, autism, H1N1, or mercury... I want to comment on how this topic (and many other open-ended, controversial topics) waste your time, energy, focus, and life. They interfere and distract with your true purpose as a human.

Listening to puppets (Maher & Shermer) zealously defending their [pointless] point-of-view only causes emotional reactivity. They are arguing over two-sides of the same coin. Keep tossing that coin and settle on heads or tails. In the end, you will stick to your heads/tails families and divide from the rest. This applies to most divisive subject matter (politics, religion, history, ethics, etc.). In the end, we suffer through our continued division and inability to unite for REAL solutions.

And, despite saying I wouldn't mention it, I must say the H1N1 scare came and went... just like Y2K, SARS, bird flu, Mad Cow/prions, [insert any issue the media will bombard you with to the point of disgust/exhaustion/complacency]. I see the last time anyone commented here was 02/2010... that's more than half a year ago.... about the same time the media stopped their H1N1 propaganda and started focusing on: the Winter Olympics, Tiger Woods, Healthcare Bill/Reform, Toyota brakes, Avatar the [shettiest] movie, airport body scanners, and eventually the BP oil spill. The revolving door of fear-based news leading to a fear-based existence.

Whatever you believe regarding vaccination, it's a personal choice and should not be dictated or enforced upon others (regardless if you deem their beliefs as "irrational"). Furthermore, talking heads like [douche bag] Maher and [douche bag] Shermer provide biased information, as do many websites packed with disinformation, even when disguised with "randomized, double-blinded, blah-blah-blah studies". Be critical in your approach to all information, from both sides, and make a decision for yourself.... not parroting some douche bag.

[Siggie]

Re: Vaccinations (Countering the misinformation of Anti-Vaxx Movement)

Helpful explanation of (ir)rational choice theory a couple paragraphs in...

True Believers
Why there's no dispelling the myth that vaccines cause autism.
By Arthur Allen
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2010, at 1:56 PM ET
On Tuesday, the medical journal the Lancet retracted a 1998 paper that linked the MMR vaccine to autism. The controversial paper was challenged and debunked by the scientific community, but it nevertheless sparked a panic among many parents. In 2007, Arthur Allen explained why scientists are unlikely to convince the parents of autistic children that vaccines are not to blame. The original article is reprinted below.

At the recent 12-day hearing into theories that vaccines cause autism, the link between the disorder and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine came across as shaky at best. As for the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal, which was used in other vaccines, witnesses showed that in all known cases of actual mercury poisoning (none of which caused autism), the dose was hundreds or thousands of times higher than what kids got during the 1990s. Powerful population studies showed no link to either MMR or thimerosal-containing shots.

None of that moves Mary Wildman, 47, whose son's case is before the court and who drove from her home near Pittsburgh to watch the hearing, which ended this week. "I know what happened to my son after he got his MMR shot," she told me. "I have no doubt. There's no way they'll convince me that all these kids were not damaged by vaccines."

It is difficult to challenge a mother's knowledge of her own child. And also to fight off the staying power of the vaccines-cause-autism theory and other such notions that verge on the irrational.

People who study irrational beliefs have a variety of ways of explaining why we cling to them. In rational choice theory, what appear to be crazy choices are actually rational, in that they maximize an individual's benefit—or at least make him or her feel good.

Blaming vaccines can promise benefits. Victory in a lawsuit is an obvious one, especially for middle-class parents struggling to care for and educate their unruly and unresponsive kids. Another apparent benefit is the notion, espoused by a network of alternative-medical practitioners and supplement pushers, that if vaccines are the cause, the damage can be repaired, the child made whole. In the homes of autistic children it is not unusual to find cabinets filled with 40 different vitamins and supplements, along with casein-free, gluten-free foods, antibiotics, and other drugs and potions. Each is designed to fix an aspect of the "damage" that vaccines or other "toxins" caused.

"Hope is a powerful drug," says Jim Laidler, a Portland scientist and father of two autistic boys who jumped ship from the vaccine conspiracy a few years ago. In reality, autism has no cure, nor even a clearly defined cause. Science takes its time and often provides no definitive answers. That isn't medicine that's easy to swallow.

Another explanation for the refusal to face facts is what cognitive scientists call confirmation bias. Years ago, when writing an article for the Washington Post Magazine about the Tailwind affair, a screwy piece of journalism about a nonexistent attack on American POWs with sarin gas, I concluded that the story's CNN producers had become wedded to the thesis after interviewing a few unreliable sources. After that, they unconsciously discounted any facts that interfered with their juicy story. They weren't lying—except, perhaps, to themselves. They had brain blindness—confirmation bias.

The same might be said of crusading journalists like David Kirby, author of Evidence of Harm, a book that seemed to corroborate the beliefs of hundreds of parents of autistic children, and UPI reporters Dan Olmsted and Mark Benjamin (the latter now with Salon).

Systems of belief such as religion and even scientific paradigms can lock their adherents into confirmation biases. And then tidbits of fact or gossip appear over the Internet to shore them up. There's a point of no return beyond which it's very hard to change one's views about an important subject.

Then, too, the material in discussion is highly technical and specialized, and most parents aren't truly able to determine which conclusions are reasonable. So they go with their gut, or the zeitgeist message that it makes more sense to trust the "little guy"—the maverick scientist, the alt-med practitioner—than established medicine and public health. "History tells us that a lot of ground-breaking discoveries are made by mavericks who don't follow the mainstream," says Laidler. "What is often left out is that most of the mavericks are just plain wrong. They laughed at Galileo and Edison, but they also laughed at xxxo the Clown and Don Knotts."

And to be sure, there was some basis for suspecting vaccines several years ago, before definitive studies had discounted a link. When the first vaccine theory was proposed in 1998, it appeared in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet and was published by an established London gastroenterologist, Andrew Wakefield. Two years later at a congressional hearing, Wakefield and an Irish pathologist and molecular biologist, John O'Leary, announced they had found measles viral RNA in the guts of autistic kids with severe bowel problems.

The air of respectability fell away over the years as we learned that Wakefield had serious conflicts of interest (including a 1997 patent application on a measles vaccine to replace the potentially soon-to-be-avoided MMR shot) and that a subsequent publication on measles RNA was probably an artifact of false positives, a common problem in polymerase chain-reaction technology.

The thimerosal theory emerged in a different context. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, concerned about cumulative mercury exposures in young children, asked manufacturers in 1999 to phase out thimerosal-containing vaccines. In other countries, such as Denmark and Canada, thimerosal was removed because of new vaccine combinations that either didn't require thimerosal or would be damaged by it. Nowhere was thimerosal removed because of evidence of harm.

But the first CDC study of children's exposures to thimerosal-containing vaccines was difficult to interpret. And anti-mercury activists jumped on the transcript of a 2000 meeting at which the study was scrutinized to argue that something improper was going on. The transcript shows no such thing. But the activists unleashed a public-relations campaign alleging a government and "big pharma" coverup.

That, in turn, proved to be eye candy for environmental groups already enraged by the Bush administration's enlistment of former industry officials in the squashing of environmental regulations. Anti-pollution lawyer Robert F. Kennedy zealously jumped on the thimerosal bandwagon in an "expose" published in Salon and Rolling Stone.

No surprise there. What editor or writer doesn't want to "reveal" that drugmakers and the government conspired to poison a generation of innocent kids. (Kirby's book won a 2005 Investigative Reporters and Editors award.) Where's the passion in the story that some public-health bureaucrats quietly moved to blunt a danger that turned out to be nonexistent?

In the pre-Internet days, the parents of an autistic child living in a small city might have found a handful of other parents in their predicament. Now, they instantly find thousands online. The denominator—healthy children—has disappeared. This is a good thing if you're looking for answers. But the answers may not be good ones. Joined together on the Internet, these actors create a climate of opinion that functions as an echo chamber for conspiracy dittoheads. Even the women's division of the Methodist Church has gotten in on the act, presumably on the grounds that it is fighting for social justice by decrying mercury poisoning, although there was no mercury poisoning, and social justice would be better met by promoting confidence in vaccines.

Kennedy, who wrote blithely in the Huffington Post during the trial that "overwhelming science" had confirmed the link, continues to believe it. So does Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., whose circuslike hearing room aired many such claims. Neither cites any solid studies, because they do not exist.

If and when the vaccine court rules against Michelle Cedillo, the 12-year-old autistic girl at the center of these first hearings, it won't change their minds. Long ago, the famous Dr. David Livingstone interviewed a rain doctor in Botswana. When Livingstone accused the rain doctor of being irrational or a cheat, the rain doctor replied, "Well, then there is a pair of us." If it rains, I take the credit, he said, and if your patient gets better, you take the credit. In neither case do we lose faith in our professions. You see, the rain doctor said, "what we believe is always more important than what actually happens.

source

[Siggie]

Re: Vaccinations (Countering the misinformation of Anti-Vaxx Movement)

It's about freakin' time... This study was thoroughly discredited and retracted by nearly all co-authors so long ago. Wakefield is possibly one of the most unethical researchers I have ever read about. This article doesn't even cover the crap he did (e.g. fabrication of data).

Lancet Retracts Study Tying Child Vaccine to Autism (Update2)


By Michelle Fay Cortez

Feb. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The Lancet medical journal retracted a 1998 study that linked a routine childhood vaccine to autism and bowel disease after a U.K. investigation found flaws in the research.

The U.K. General Medical Council, which licenses doctors, concluded in a report last week that three researchers led by Andrew Wakefield at the Royal Free Hospital in London carried out invasive, unnecessary tests, failed to act in the best interest of the children, and misused public funds. It also said Wakefield didn’t disclose a conflict of interest as he was involved in legal claims against the vaccine makers.

“It has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation,” the editors of the Lancet wrote in a statement today.

Immunization rates plunged in the U.K. to less than 80 percent by 2003, as parents concerned about the possible health risks refused the vaccine, according to the Health Protection Agency. Ten of the 12 authors, in a 2004 article in the Lancet, backed away from the suggestion that autism and bowel disease were linked to the vaccine. A panel of U.S. government advisers found the same year that childhood vaccinations probably don’t raise the risk of autism.

The original study, involving 11 boys and one girl aged 10 and under, found bowel disease and developmental disorders in the previously normal children. The parents reported symptoms in eight of the children after they were vaccinated for measles, mumps and rubella.

‘Outrageous’

“It was outrageous,” Jeffrey Boscamp, a pediatrician at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, said by email. “Most of the authors asked for their names to be removed from the study. It’s unfortunate that it undermined confidence in vaccines when in fact it wasn’t true at all.”

With today’s action by the Lancet, the paper was retracted from the published record, stripping it of its scientific claims.

Wakefield oversees the research program at Thoughtful House, a treatment center for children with developmental disorders, in Austin, Texas.

“The allegations against me and against my colleagues are both unfounded and unjust, and I invite anyone to examine the contents of these proceedings and come to their own conclusion,” Wakefield said in a statement provided by Thoughtful House today.

source

[Federate]

Re: Vaccinations (Countering the misinformation of Anti-Vaxx Movement)

Doubts cast on H1N1 scare

Video report from Al Jazeera English


The severity of the H1N1 outbreak was deliberately exaggerated by pharmaceutical companies that stood to make billions of dollars from a worldwide scare, a leading European health expert has claimed.

Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, has accused the makers of vaccines for the virus of influencing the World Health Organisation's (WHO) decision to declare a pandemic.

The council, a Strasbourg-based body responsible for the European Court of Human Rights, has decided to investigate Wodarg's claims in an emergency debate on the issue to be held later this month.

Wodarg said the crisis led to governments around the world ordering and stockpiling millions of doses of anti-flu drugs which were not needed.

'Inefficient work'

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Wodarg said: "There is a very inefficient work of our agencies. They made a big panic with the bird flu and they made big panic with the swine flu.

"The national governments spent billions of euros to buy their vaccines [for H1N1] so we have to investigate what was behind it, we cannot afford such agencies that spent the money for useless health measures."

In a statement to Al Jazeera, Aphaluck Bhatiasevi, a media officer for WHO, said: "Providing independent advice to member states is a very important function of WHO, we take this work very seriously and guard against the influence of any vested interests.

"We welcome any legitimate review process that can improve our work."

In response to Wodarg's comments, GlaxoSmithKline, one of the makers of H1N1 vaccines, said: "Allegations of undue influence are misguided and unfounded. The WHO declared that H1N1 swine flu met the criteria for a pandemic.

"Responding to it has required unprecedented collaboration. As WHO have stated, legal regulations and numerous safeguards are in place to manage possible conflicts of interest."

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2010/01/20101111330498806.html