So Dr. Andrew Wakefield, poet laureate and Ghandi Gandhi figure of the anti-vaccination movement, faked his data. I doubt that any of the researchers who tried and failed to reproduce his 1998 Lancet paper will register much surprise. For the rest of us though, the news, along with the anti-vax movement’s recent Dover case, makes a fitting coda for the mainstream credibility of anti-vaccination “science.” As far as I know the evidence was only considered ‘mixed’ because it included the overwhelming studies showing no connection and Dr. Wakefield’s paper.
With the latest news Wakefield’s 1998 paper is dead, defunct, no longer with us. It is an ex-paper. Dr. Wakefield is also an ex-researcher as of now, though that may be moot given the beating his credibility took over the last ten years. Wakefield’s colleagues will now deal with an ironically fitting analogy.
Measles is highly contagious. Infected people are usually contagious from about 4 days before their rash starts to 4 days afterwards. The measles virus resides in the mucus in the nose and throat of infected people. When they sneeze or cough, droplets spray into the air and the droplets remain active and contagious on infected surfaces for up to 2 hours.
Colleagues who published with Dr. Wakefield will have to explain themselves to skeptical superiors and reviewers of their own grants and papers. Students whom he might have trained will carry his name like an anchor on their CV. For comparison, the late 2005 flameout of a Korean cloning specialist is still impacting major labs in three countries.
***
On a practical level the collective freakout over vaccines never made any sense to me. Off the top of my head I can think of far better founded research listing more serious threats from processed fast food and carbonated sugar drinks. Almost 24 million Americans have type 2 diabetes, versus a million or so autistics, and we know what causes diabetes.
Or what the heck, let’s freak out about mercury. We know enough about mercury and brain development to have some real concerns, and anyone who really wants to get their freak on can revisit the Minimata story. Antivaxxers cite the mercury-based preservative thimerosal when they cite anything at all (‘not natural’ or ‘not organic’ and similarly vague statements account for much of the rest). Set aside that thimerosal is far less dangerous than the bio-active, methylated form of mercury and that most vaccines no longer use it.
For some perspective, vaccines delivered at most 50 micrograms of relatively inert ethylmercury per dose. By contrast, most of the mercury that accumulates in seafood is the far more dangerous methylmercury. Let’s see what overprotective parents feed junior every time they make a tuna fish sandwich.
So exactly how much mercury a 45 lb. child would ingest by eating one 6 ounce can of tuna per week, and how does that compare to the EPA’s reference dose? Take a look at the following calculations:
Step 1 – DETERMINE EPA’s RECOMMENDED LEVEL FOR A 45 LB CHILD
* Multiply child’s body weight by EPA’s reference dose.
* Convert 45 pounds to kilograms = 20.45 kilograms
* 20.45 kilograms x .1 micrograms per kilogram per dayEPA RECOMMENDED LEVEL = 2.05 micrograms per day = 14.35 micrograms per week.
Step 2 – HOW MUCH MERCURY IS IN 6 OUNCES OF CHUNK WHITE TUNA?
* Multiply amount of fish by average mercury level for chunk white albacore.
* Convert 6 ounces to grams = 170 grams 170 grams X .31 ppm (or micrograms per gram)**MERCURY INGESTED = 52.7 micrograms per gram
Step 3 – COMPARE MERCURY INGESTED WITH EPA’S RECOMMENDED LEVEL
* Divide 52.7 micrograms by 14.35 micrograms = 3.7
BY EATING 6 OUNCES OF CHUNK WHITE TUNA A WEEK, THE CHILD IS INGESTING ALMOST FOUR TIMES EPA’S RECOMMENDED DOSE.
Bear in mind that the above used mercury levels in albacore tuna. The levels in yellowfin and other sushi tuna can be much worse.
***
No rational reason exists to worry about vaccines as opposed to, say, half of the crap that we feed our kids every day. So how has this antivaxx issue ballooned into some sort of populist revolt? From one weak and rapidly discredited paper grew a movement that involves relatively well-educated parents actively putting their kids, their kids’ friends and strangers in danger of terrible diseases. It is baffling. You and I know that the court loss won’t kill the anti-vaxx movement and neither will Dr. Wakefield’s disgrace. The anti-vaxxers are creationists now. The movement clearly appeals to a subconscious need that comes from somewhere deep enough that ordinary logic cannot reach.
I have no idea what that might be, but Ira Glass made a respectable stab at the question on NPR a few months back. The expansion of school choices, Whole Foods, all-natural body products and whatnot lets parents ‘choose’ a better/healthier option for practically everything they consume (or make others very rich by choosing the illusion of it). One glaring exception, the one thing that the state gives parents practically zero leeway with regards to how, where or when is vaccines. Some must find that very galling.
DougJ
Excellent post.
Vince
I work with the Autism community and we have always maintained that the autism-vaccination link is bogus. We see plenty of families with more than 1 autistic child.
When siblings of autistic children have anywhere between 3 and 20% increased chance of being autistic (Zwaigenbaum L. et al. J Autism Dev Disord. 37, 466-480 (2006) PubMed ↩), then i have a hard time with the vaccine argument.
Those numbers say genetics is more to blame. without definitive studies, we’re grasping at straws.
schrodinger's cat
Its Gandhi not Ghandi, excellent post otherwise.
SnarkIntern
You people are not fooling me. Science = sorcery.
Trickery. Deceit.
Scientists themselves cannot agree on things. That should tell you that science is just another religion.
You will all burn in the eternal fires of hell.
MikeJ
Scientists don’t even really know what causes diseases. That’s why it’s called germ theory, right? It’s just a theory.
I say it’s an imbalance of humours.
Steve V
As the parent of an autistic/asperger’s kid I worry more about bpa than vaccines, but I readily admit that it’s based on minimal information.
Blue Raven
I checked HuffPo this morning to see what their resident anti-vax writers were spewing after this week’s news. Sure enough, Mrs. Imus was prattling on about how you have to "follow the money" to see that the chief debunker was in big pharma’s back pocket. I want to know how out-of-patent vaccines make them anything more than cost of distribution.
sarah
an analogy about things we freak out about:
car crash : plane crash :: diabetes : tainted food (ie PB, spinach)
It’s all about control. There’s nothing i can do to stop a plane crash, avert food poisoning (ie foods tainted in processing facilities, not undercooked chicken etc.) or keep my kid from having potentially averse reactions to vaccines other than to stay 100% away from them. Lack of control = freakout.
The autism theory took off because it was mysterious and out of someone’s personal control or comprehension.
If people trust science and regulations are adhered to everyone would be find if they just STFU
zzyzx
My theory as to why this got so big is because the vaccines worked too well. We’ve forgotten how horrible the diseases were because no one gets them anymore. If there’s a slight chance of getting autism from the vaccination and no perceived danger from not getting it, well then it must be the government trying to keep us down!
I’ve used the forgotten fear of polio as an analogy in the past to libertarian economics, where people forget how much danger our society was in when there’s no stability because the New Deal was so successful in removing that problem.
Alexandra
Thank you for the voice of common sense. That was all such nonsense.
BDeevDad
Great post! Sure you don’t write for ScienceBlogs?
Comrade Kevin
@Blue Raven: There’s also some bozo on the GOS who has been spewing similar crapola over the past few days.
Vince
sadly, the real victims of this bogus research are the parents of these children. working with this community is wonderful. they are some of the most dedicated parents you will ever meet.
crap science and wannabe, fad treatments are worse than Wakefield!!!
we see so many parents willing to try anything. fads have wasted too much of their time. real, effective ABA-based therapy is tough, but effective.
unfortunately, schools will try fads because they are cheap. real ABA-based programs cost more than the fads that come and go. but parents will try anything so school districts feed them bogus fads instead of using proven methods.
that’s the bigger story!
BDeevDad
@Blue Raven: Yet, we can never question Kirby and Wakefield’s motives. It’s for the children.
syl
I think that’s pretty insightful. It’s like reading a magazine article in the 50’s where the thinking is "Well, we already have vaccuums and televisions right now. We’ll probably live on the moon in twenty years maybe less!" People are just bad at realistically appraising cause and effect and appreciating scope.
DougJ
Agreed. That’s what’s so sick and irresponsible about Mrs. Imus and RFK Jr. and the rest of these charlatans.
Mr Furious
Keep in mind you own numbers there, John and recalculate for this…
Four vaccinations in one doctor visit for a 9-pound infant. In a worst-case scenario, if all four contained thimerosal that child just recieved 200 micrograms of mercury in a five-minute span at a point when the brain is in the very early stages of development.
Still feeling good about your tuna analogy?
I’m not saying the anti-vax crowd isn’t full of loonies who are full of shit, but the way medical CW shifts 180 degrees these days, I wouldn’t bet on much…
So, is a serving of alcohol good or bad for me this week…?
The Other Steve
I’m eating a Tuna sandwich right now you insensitive bastard.
Reverend Dennis
And what’s this week’s consensus on coffee?
Just Some Fuckhead
Great post, Tim.
The Other Steve
BTW, if they refrigerate vaccines do they need preservative?
sarah
@Mr Furious:
yeah, too bad doctors are dumb and poison children all the time. and parents are smart and send unvaccinated children to school. why do we even bother to give people fancy medicial educations if they don’t have the decency to freak out about about benign things like joe sixpack does.
Walker
If you are not going to read Tim’s (not John’s) post, then you should not make these kinds of comments. Ethylmercury and methylmercury are two different types of mercury, and therefore have completely different EPA standards. You cannot just compare them side by side (e.g. claiming 20 inches is longer than a mile because 20 > 1).
Tim is right. This is really the liberal’s version of Creationism, and it is blight to the venues like HuffPo that promote it.
Martin
Marketing trumps science every time. Science basically has no public voice. It has no governmental voice. We have a nation of people completely and utterly illiterate in science and they will continue to make decisions as if science doesn’t exist.
One of the most important things that Obama could do would be to tackle this head-on. Even from a budgetary standpoint, this is critical to have as we waste huge amounts of money on stuff that the scientific community would say is completely pointless to even consider spending money on, let alone actually spending money on. Somehow we need to see scientists have the same kind of public voice and authority as legislators. Sunday morning is packed with DC folks bullshitting about whatever the outrage of the week is, but I bet you won’t find a single prominent scientist, let alone a panel of them discussing the vaccine/autism situation, even though it has a far more direct and conclusive impact on most people than how the Commerce candidate dropping out will impact the nation.
Zach
I don’t believe this for a second. With these two events coming together ("exposing" Wakefield’s research and dismissing this case) it’s almost certain that this is a government/industry plot illicitly conceived at an isolated backwoods compound.
It’s not like scientists are immune to unjustified hysteria in our own laboratory practices… ethidium bromide alternatives that are actually more toxic.
I’d be interested in hearing a take on the effects of BPA from someone with no stake in the matter.
zzyzx
@Walker: Not just liberals. Christian homeschoolers are all about this myth.
jenniebee
Please get that goddamn JoeSam the Unlicensed Know Nothing Windbag banner ad off the top of your blog.
And great post, it’s too bad so many people persist in thinking that vaccines cause autism. Especially since this desk toy I have right here is what really causes autism.
What, can they prove that it doesn’t?
PeakVT
From one weak and rapidly discredited paper grew a movement that involves relatively well-educated parents actively putting their kids, their kids’ friends and strangers in danger of terrible diseases. It is baffling.
Are people seeking a sense of control here? The decision to vaccinate presents a clear, one-time choice – unlike the bazillions of other risks children face. And the effects are asymmetric – choosing to vaccinate might cause autism, whereas choosing not to vaccinate doesn’t (directly) cause anything.
The Other Steve
I assume now HuffPo has become the anti-Obama blog. Kind of like how Arianna hated Clinton before she hated Bush.
Dave Herman
Excellent post, Tim.
One question: you mention "researchers who tried and failed to reproduce his 1998 Lancet paper" — are there published accounts of such attempts? One thing I’ve never had a good handle on is just how often people really do attempt to reproduce results in various fields. (As an example, I watch my bio-PhD friend work with gagillion-dollar microarrays and wonder how anyone could possibly afford to waste their money simply reproducing other people’s results.)
R-Jud
@PeakVT:
It could directly cause my infant* (or anyone else’s) to get measles, mumps or rubella, should my infant be in contact with an unvaccinated child who is carrying measles, mumps or rubella. It is becoming an issue over here in Europe. These sicknesses, they ain’t beanbag:
(I can’t believe I just linked to the Sun. The fucking SUN.)
*still baking.
chiggins
No rational reason exists to worry about vaccines as opposed to, say, half of the crap that we feed our kids every day.
Hi.
Okay, first off, I’m not lookin’ to pick any fights over thimerasol or autism or anything like that. That one’s actually been studied, and the results are solid.
I want to ask another question about vaccines, safety, and what we know, but I have yet to see a discussion about this anywhere on the Toobz that doesn’t involve both sides using a lot of pejoratives on each other, a lot of personal attacks, insinuations, etc. I want nothing to do with any of that either.
Now, I’m just a simple caveman, but it sure seems to me that if the question is, "Are there any demonstrable links between vaccines and autism?", the answer is a resounding no.
But if we open the scope of the question to, "Are there risks involved in giving infants from ages ____ to ____ vaccines X, Y, or Z? Is there a better age to do it, or is there a vaccination schedule that’s less risky?" that the answers are less conclusive. And they ought to be, because separating twins at birth, and giving one the entire battery at 6 mo. while giving the other a different schedule over, say, 2 years, would probably be considered unethical and perhaps illegal if the hypothesis is that one or the other is being exposed to a higher risk of having a bad reaction. Am I totally off-base here?
The reason I ask is that I have several bio-researchers in my orbit. One has been doing heart research for years, and for a while that involved exposing rabbits to unhealthy stimuli, taking out their hearts, freezing them, and then cutting them into slices a few microns thick to see what exactly the differences were between the exprerimental and control groups. Another friend has been involved in neurological research that involved putting very small electrodes into the brains of a certain type of slug with very large neurons, and doing experiments to find consistent firing patterns.
Both are pretty grisly in one sense, but both are "good science" in the sense that the scientific method is being rigorously followed to learn exactly what it is that’s going on. I know of no such study on any vaccine that’s ever been used on people, which is good in one sense since it would be immoral and illegal. But it keeps making me flinch when the argument over vaccines devolves into "Bad Science" vs. "Good Science".
So is that not rational?
Evinfuilt
One of the big problems is anti-vaxx people don’t know the difference between an atom and molecule, and how different molecules will react to things differently even if they have the same atom in them.
Except for salt, the chlorine in it is deadly… never eat salt, it’ll kill you with its killer chlorine.
Dave C
@PeakVT:
For the bajillionth time, there is absolutely no good reason to think that choosing to vaccinate your child "might cause autism."
RusS
This hysteria is an extreme example of reporting bias.
"Well, Mrs. Smith, little Bobby suddenly displayed these {early autism] symptoms last month. Anything unusual happen around then?" "Gee, doctor, ummm, he did get his vaccinations a few months before."
Autism’s typical onset just happens to coincide with the schedule of early childhood vaccinations. Apart from Benadryl, vaccinations are probably the most extreme medical intervention in an otherwise healthy young child’s life. Isn’t that the typical autism anecdote: "He was normal and healthy, then blam-o!"
Whereas kids get these shots at each yearly checkup until age 4 or 5, most kids had vaccinations "… a few months prior…"
So Wakefield’s study would be a likely candidate for this effect. Its later irresponsible promotion only amplifies it over time.
This phenomenon has a history in at least one other politically charged story of epidemiology: abortion related breast cancer risk.
One or two small studies seemed to find a positive correlation between abortion and breast cancer. Cancer patients and a control group of healthy women were surveyed about their health histories. The desire to find some active cause to blame for their cancers caused the cancer patients who had abortions to report the fact. A reticence to report a private matter and the absence of the "need to blame" caused under-reporting among the healthy control group. The result was a false positive correlation.
Further larger studies and metastudies washed this bias out of the results. (Among other things, European studies could be checked against public medical statistics, facilitated by nationalized health coverage.) The cleanup eliminated the correlation or reduced it to statistical insignificance.
Strange how we humans can so crave rationalization that we can embrace the irrational in a choke-hold.
Punchy
I always found it strange that that compound is known as thiomersal, correct given that it’s a sulfur-containing compound, but somehow in the U.S. it got changed/morphed/typo’d into thimerosal, and wiped out the whole "thio" prefix.
Mazacote Yorquest
"If people trust science and regulations are adhered to everyone would be find if they just STFU"
I’ll never trust "science"– I trust specific methods of inquiry, experimentation, peer review, ethical treatment of subjects, etc. (the Tuskegee experiment was "science"). But I think the unconscious need is more varied than just hippy-dippy Whole Fooders. Remember that the home school conservatives also reject vaccines, especially the HPV one, and they cite all of these "studies" too. Their objection is related to why they homeschool– a sense of needing to keep pure from harmful societal influences, government initiatives, secular values.
Remember that one of the first Clinton adminstration initiatives was Hillary’s push for better immunizations. The conservative response to anything she does is to suspect it of alien gang-probing designs. Expect more of this crap when Obama tries to reform health care.
Martin
Way to prove my point. Define ‘good’. Is it good for your ability to operate a car? No, I think that’s pretty conclusive. Is it good for certain cancers? Heart disease? Depression? Is it good with whatever medication you are taking?
You ask the question as though there are magical ‘good’ and ‘evil’ foods without any consideration of what your situation is and what role that serving of alcohol will play in your overall diet. That’s marketing showing through – someone in 30 seconds trying to convince you to buy their stuff can’t really relay anything beyond goodness and badness, and now that’s pretty much the only way you know to measure things.
Zifnab
Well, in this case, the "Bad Science" was fabricated research, which – if I’m not mistaken – is like the most deadly sin in this little religion we call Science.
Science ain’t cheap, either. We’ve been paring back research grants and scholarships since the end of the Clinton administration. If you don’t think vaccine research is getting enough funding, you’re probably right. Not much of anything is getting "enough funding" unless someone sees a giant wad of cash at the end of the rainbow (see: petroleum algae, nuclear weapons, the entire pharmaceutical industry).
So you’re not irrational in the least. It would be great if we knew more about the nuts and bolts of how vaccines affected us. But that is expensive and there isn’t much profit at the end of a two year exhaustive study on how blood vessels react to various strains of flu vaccine. You’re not going to sell any more vaccine for your trouble (in fact, you might just sell less if the reports are negative). You need a larger non-profit infrastructure for research like that. And we just don’t got it.
BDeevDad
@chiggins: Actually, doing it earlier was shown to be better. Google is my friend.
MikeJ
While I agree with all of the people here who hate seeing anti-vax nonsense on HuffPo, I think they misunderstand the type of site HuffPo is. It’s much more of a left-ish leaning Slate than a blog with a single editorial voice. I agree that printing the ravings of those loons is irresponsible, it doesn’t mean everything there is useless. Like with the Times, Krugman’s not useless just because Brooks is.
Of course I still can’t read Huffpo just because the layout makes my eyes bleed.
Shinobi
Uhm, we do? Because I can definitely produce articles that disagree with each other on that topic.
The reason science isn’t as popular as, say, myth, is because science is necessarily less certain. When you are willing to base your conclusions only on evidence, and the evidence is sometimes contradictory, it makes for a much shakier worldview. It is much easier to believe in an all knowing god, or a vast conspiracy, than to drift along knowing that there is something wrong with your loved one, there is nothing you can do about it, and no one knows why it happened.
Punchy
ethylmercury =/ methylmercury. Clearance diff, solubility diff, thus effect very diff.
Not. A. Single. Study. Demonstrating. Toxicity. Of. Thiomersal. From. Vaccines. Admined. Properly. None.
Christ, how hard is this?
Mr Furious
Sarah,
Did I say doctors are dumb? But I’m pretty sure your average family practice doc isn’t doing his own drug studies—he relies on the information he gets from the drug companies and the FDA.
Both of whom have been known to be wrong.
I’m not even saying there’s a link here—it sure appears there isn’t. But if medical studies, even consensus, was final, we all would have stopped with the Lancet study ten years ago…
Xenos
No. Or at least they no longer need Thimerasol. Which is why most of the vaccines do not use Thimerasol, at least not any more.
But autism rates continue to rise…
Xenos
@Punchy:
Type it again in CAPS!!! Maybe Deirdre Imus will hear you then.
Just Some Fuckhead
Meanwhile, our office printers are killing us.
mantis
Would you say that Wakefield’s paper is pining for the fjords?
Mr Furious
Punchy,
I realize that, I’m just pointing out the flaw in John, er, Tim’s "proof" and how none of this stuff is as clear as people want to present it as.
Many of these people became convinced of a link when the only available study showed exactly that. Turns out it was crap, but it took several countries along for the ride for several years.
If there was nothing to it, why did they take the thimerosal out?
Dork
I’m now going to sue vaccine makers for having their MMR vaccine cause my child to cry in shopping malls, soil his pants, and occasionally say funny things in inopportune moments. Clearly the two are connected, as he never did these things before he was about 2 years old and vaccinated.
Shinobi
Just to spread the love, here is an article that explores some studes that conflict with the implied assertion above that sugar and processed foods cause diabetes. Some food for thought.
MNPundit
Well look. Autistic people are not conforming to the societal norm. This makes us uncomfortable even if you are familiar with it and can easily lead to frustrations and anger directed against the victim who refuses to "act normal." Combine this with the already ridiculous ideal images that permeate our culture and you have parents desperate to prove that it wasn’t their own genes that did this and to get money to deal with the person which admittedly can be very expensive.
The best step I think would be to move as a culture as more accepting of these differences than we are now.
snoey
Two things that many of people miss in these discussions.
1) The MMR never had mercury in it – it is a live attenuated vaccine. How the anti-vax hysteria moved from MMR to mercury is peculiar at best.
2) For Chiggins and others. We don’t vaccinate individuals, we vaccinate populations. For some diseases – rubella and pertussis in particular – we vaccinate those individuals who would not usually have a serious infection to build the herd immunity and thus protect pregnant women, infants and others who we can’t vaccinate. Thats why a schedule based on inoculation when a child is in for a checkup is preferred. The results are measured by infection statistics. This is a classic greatest good for the greatest number calculation.
Face
Yes. I was waiting and waiting patiently for this remark to finally rear it’s head. It was removed for precisely people of your attitude, who seem to never believe the science, never accept the conclusions, and continue to badger your daily’s op-ed page with Teh Scaree Thideathosal!
The manufacturers got sick and tired of telling The Ignants how it was safe and acceptable, and decided to pull it out just to get those people to STFU. Pure PR move.
ppcli
Actually the two events didn’t come together. Newspaper people are only now noticing the drubbing that the Lancet article has taken in the relevant scientific journals, but that’s not the same.
.
I learned this the hard way: after I read John’s post last week on the subject, I said to my research physician wife "Hey, sweetie, did you hear that the vaccine-autism article was discredited?" Then I got that look – the "oh, you math types are so cute when you talk about the real world" look I know so well – and she spun out a long string of scholarly articles going back years, demonstrating the fullofshittedness of the original Lancet piece.
Zach
@Shinobi: I don’t think the assertion is that processed food an sugar cause diabetes directly. They just promote obesity which has a strong correlation with the disease.
chiggins
@BDeevDad: Well, I see a lot of "most"’s and "may"’s and then…
Now, I’m not saying that this is wrong, or without value, or anything like that. Studies like this, in my caveman opinion, point the way towards provable hypotheses. But this isn’t the kind of "Good Science" I was talking about.
But thanks for the Google dig, always appreciated.
Maus
Sadly, HuffPo is only slightly less terrible than the Daily Beast that it spawned. Aside from being glorified RSS feeds, they both have too much worthless "original" content designed less for quality than to rile people up.
Prof. K&G
@Dave Herman: In my experience, very few people specifically set out to reproduce someone else’s results; this is indeed a waste of time. What I do frequently, is try to build on someone’s old work. So, the first thing I do is make sure I can get the same answers they did. This assures me that a) my experiment is working correctly, and b) I understand what I’m doing. If my answers and their answers disagree, 8 times out of 10, I did something wrong. 1.999 times out of 10, they did something wrong. 0.001 times out of 10, they’re lying charlatans (as is the case here).
So, if you publish something interesting, a lot of people will be checking their work against yours, because they will be attempting to extend it. Bogus results will eventually be found out; the researcher who published the false results usually welcomes being proved wrong. If they get all pissy and go on a PR offensive, that’s a good clue that they have no interest in the scientific process.
syl
That sounds good, but I prefer my alternative theory: The press release announcing the removal is actually evidence that the substance wasn’t removed and that there is a conspiracy to create kids with autism because autism drugs are more expensive than vaccines.
Shinobi
Zach,
Are you really going to make me say it? Correlation is not the same as causation.
The MSM makes it sound pretty cut and dry, get fat get diabetes, but there are lots of other issues that are not always addressed. Many people are fat their whole lives and don’t get diabetes. People with different metabolisms can eat the same food and only one of them might get fat. Even more interestingly thin people with adult onset are often diagnosed with type 1 diabetes because people assume only fat people get diabetes, even though it is not the proper way to treat them. Diabetes is also highly inheritable, as is obesity.
I’m just saying we don’t actually know what causes diabetes.
Maus
Reality is really irrelevant to the media when they have a narrative to sell, so while she’s obviously correct that it had been professionally discredited, those that associate with frauds never really seem to be held to any standard even by academia until the public opinion is near-unified against them.
burnspbesq
@The Other Steve:
For most of us, the damage is already done, so enjoy your sandwich. I think I’ll have sushi for lunch today.
Don
Why does my actor friend play along with the superstition about saying "MacBeth" in a theater when she knows it’s moronic? Because if you can accommodate the nutbags with minimal sacrifice it’s worth the effort.
In her case she’s simply avoiding histrionics. In the case of vaccines it’s an effort to find an alternative that doesn’t spook whackos so kids don’t get paralyzed and/or die.
Xecklothxayyquou Gilchrist
So how has this antivaxx issue ballooned into some sort of populist revolt?
Mother Nature is very subtle, and she recognizes that the human population is much too large. She plants ideas like antivaxx in our heads so that we’ll help the plagues along that are meant to kill off the excess.
Dave C
@Face:
I think of that question as the anti-vax equivalent of of the famous "gotcha!"-style creationist question, "If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"
peach flavored shampoo
If I wanted mercury with my lunch I’d turn on Queen while I noshed my club sandy.
burnspbesq
@R-Jud:
Somebody else’s sick kid is an externality, and liberal democracies with market economies are exceedingly bad at forcing people to own their externalities. If one unvaccinated kid causes an entire classroom to get sick, how do you make the unvaccinated kid’s parents bear all of the direct and opportunity costs incurred by the other parents (medical expenses, vacation days burned, etc.)? If you can figure that one out, I want you working in the office right next to the Oval.
gwangung
Hm. I got it beaten into my head when I was a grad student to use nothing BUT "most", "may" and "and then"……
Shinobi
They waited until GRAD school to do that to you? My undergrad profs must just have been particularly fond of beating us.
burnspbesq
@gwangung:
At least you got it beaten into you as part of your education. None of my law school profs ever told us that the first six words of any answer to any question ever asked by a client must be "it depends on your particular facts."
cervantes
To clarify, Wakefield’s fraudulent research concerned a formulation that did not contain thimerosal. The whole thimerosal thing came later, but they sort of merged in the anti-vaxers’ imaginations, and the news media didn’t do a very good job of making the distinction either. The claims about thimerosal gained widespread currency largely due to an irresponsible, fraudulent article in Rolling Stone by the despicable Robert Kennedy Jr. essentially alleging a massive conspiracy by the entire pediatric and public health establishment to suppress the "truth" about how they had knowingly afflicted millions of children with autism. Among his bizzare claims were that autism did not exist prior it’s being labeled in the 1940s; that "hundreds" of scientific studies showed a link between thimerosal and autism; and that the symptoms of mercury poisoning are similar to the symptoms of autism. (They are similar only in the most superficial sense, that mercury poisoning produces neurological impairment. There is really no resemblance.) He has stuck stubbornly to his innumerable lies ever since and refuses to retract or apologize. The guy is the sum of the earth.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@ppcli:
Cool, I learned a new word!
Tim F.
Ninth grade. I have never seen a teacher hated like my class hated Dr. Sayles. Not everyone likes to think rigorously.
chiggins
@gwangung:
Fair enough. These are two sentences I’m looking at:
There’s only 13 of them, "most" doesn’t seem necessary here. How about "7" or "10"? Or do they not know?
The cases and hospitalizations seem pretty straightforward, but two deaths? Does that not seem to you to be an exceedingly fine-grained conclusion for this kind of a survey of old data? And if it’s just a statistical estimate, does this kind of pronouncement have much value?
Respect to BDeevDad above, but the article posted is one study that doesn’t actually involve any experiments, it doesn’t mention their methods, and it’s specifically about pertussis. It doesn’t actually address my original point.
On that point, thanks Zifnab for actually addressing my point, and doing so without implying that I’m somehow one step from sending my children to the barber for a bleeding, I appreciate it.
Shinobi
My research indicates that many people may be idiots.
burnspbesq
@Shinobi:
Time for a rigorous peer review. Let’s see yer data, there, Bunky.
scarshapedstar
I just read the whole Bible and saw no mention of evolution, vaccines, or house cats.
QED.
sarah
‘there’s no i in thimerosal… at least not where you think’
Shinobi
It’s all right here. I am confident in my conclusions.
Martin
Actually, we had a little experiment with that at my kids’ school. First grader comes to school with a bunch of goop in her hair. Some other parent realizes it’s mayo and deduces (correctly) that the kid has lice and dad used the witch doctor health guide to solve the problem. Teachers aren’t allowed to reveal that the kid has lice so they do a whole school ‘lice awareness and check’ thing. But dad keeps sending the girl to school with mayo in her hair, in spite of various other parents telling him to actually take care of the problem properly. With sensitivity to the kid, who has no actual influence on the situation, the parents stage an outright revolt against the parent for being such a stupid fucking douche and risking every other kid getting a lice mayo outbreak including threatening a lawsuit (they were looking for restraining order to force the kid to say home until a doctor said that the kid was actually getting treatment, rather than being treated like a turkey sandwich).
Anyway, parents are all outraged (most of them have nothing else to do but be outraged, so it’s really all-encompassing outrage and way over the top for the situation) and in one heated gathering of parents I mentioned (mostly for my own entertainment) that fortunately lice is a nuisance and not a serious modern health risk, unlike parents that refuse to vaccinate their kids which puts quite a number of people at serious health risk.
HOLY SHIT, I can only assume that there wasn’t a gun in the room or I wouldn’t be here now. I got it from at least half the room on how that was totally different, blah, blah, and so what if 20% of the class wasn’t vaccinated, that’s the choice of the parents, etc. I’m still paying for that moment, but it was worth the battles to point out that the lice situation was exactly the same as the vaccination situation given the arguments they were presenting. I got through to a number of them, so it was worth it. But I have to say that cliquish, overeducated parents that don’t get enough critical thinking exercise are a really fucking scary group of people to deal with.
chiggins
@Xecklothxayyquou Gilchrist:
Plagues? I mean, if the plagues do us before the climate or the caldera under Yellowstone does, I’d put money on something coming out of Russian prisons, not measles.
Punchy
One day when I have kids, this will SOOOO be me. Zero tolerance for the scientifically retarded. I really hope you fired back with herd immunity, epidemiological studies, and the phrase "wanton ignorance and selfishness breeding deleterious indirect effects on the sensitive populace". I mean, if you’re going to provoke a fight, might as well bring out the bazookas.
Jon Karak
My sister-in-law is anti-vax, and I have long since stopped trying to convince her otherwise. The odd part is that she was not so crazy until she had her first child.
My own arm-chair psychoanalytical conclusion is that she is desperate to meet her exceedingly unrealistic definition of being a "good mother". It is similar to a body-image pathology like anorexia or bulimia. By fixating on the "danger" that vaccines carry, she can flaunt her "motherly" cred. Most other parents decline to follow her example, so she is able to celebrate her "courage" while at the same time undermining the parental authority of other adults.
The most troubling aspect of her behavior is that as long as most parent continue to vaccinate, her own children are in little-to-no danger of communicable diseases. So she may forever continue her irrationality with the only realistic consequence being known as that, "crazy mom".
Her children are now 2 and 4 years old. I expect that the only thing that will break her vaccine fixation is if her own children criticize her mothering, i.e. "I don’t like you," or "you’re a bad mommy." Its happened a bit already, and consequently the eldest child is the most spoiled child I know.
Prof. K&G
Martin, you don’t happen to live in Agrestic, CA, do you? Kudos for actually trying to get through to some of those morons; when confronted with that level of stupid (and especially hypocritical stupid), I tend to lose my shit. It still utterly baffles me how many otherwise successful grown-ups completely lack the capacity to discriminate truth from, y’know, not-truth. A complete lack of capacity for self-examination (i.e. furious about lice, completely fine with measles) seems to play an important role.
sarah
yikes, i don’t envy you that. did anyone else hear the story NPR did a while back on this whole granola parents not vaccinating their children issue and now people are getting measles?
Dracula
True story.
Martin
Yeah, I hit back hard. They never considered that younger children of vaccinated kids weren’t yet vaccinated and therefore were at risk – especially that in a district where all the kids can walk to school and usually the infants and toddlers are mingling with the other kids. They never considered that half of the kids there are first generation and routinely go to Asia and the Middle East to visit family where the unvaccination rate is often MUCH higher.
It really hits home when you point to one of them and say "I know you just got back from 3 weeks in India" and point to another and say "I know you have a one month old at home" and then walk them through an unvaccinated kid going to India, catching something, bringing it home and then interacting with his classmate while the one month old is there, and no you’ve got an infant with a disease that the parents of the infant have absolutely no way to prevent or even to anticipate. But physically pointing to people and drawing out events that the group knows about to paint a realistic picture takes it from being theoretical to realistic and you can see the parents desperately scouring their memory to see if little Angela was within sneezing range of Mohir after Christmas break. Some just wouldn’t listen, but for a bunch of others it really hit home.
John PM
This quote is priceless. I am going to print out and save this entire string for use if I ever run into any parents like this.
I do have to ask – did any of the parents call you a racist for using the Indiana kids as an example of those who might bring back diseases? I would assume these would also be the parents to whom you could not get through.
Martin
I don’t totally get the reference. Google says it’s related to ‘Weeds’, but I’ve never seen the show. HBO costs money that I ain’t got.
But given that I live in OC, I probably actually do live in Agrestic if I understand the show correctly.
The parents aren’t stupid. I mean, they have the capacity to be smart and demonstrate it in many ways, but baby-brain-rot should be a diagnosable condition at this point because when these parents stop working to focus solely on their kids and lose the mental challenge and adult social interaction that comes with most professional jobs, they seem to devolve into a Mike Judge caricature. I honestly think a good social investment would be intellectual functions for stay-at-home moms and dads to participate in, just to keep the gears lubed.
Punchy
He said "India", but in my experience, if you really wanted to spook the ‘rents, you really ought to say "visited Indiana". That kid not only comes back with disease, but a chunk of meth stuck in his shoe and weed in his waistband.
Martin
Oh, no. I’m pretty careful with how I do it. I work around a shitton of international people, and for every Mohir going home to visit their grandparents you have a Brittney going on safari to Africa with gram and gramp Thurston and Lovee Howell. There’s more than enough ammunition to work with when you’ve got multi-millionaires, gays, adoptees, you name it in the mix. You just need to hit enough points that everyone can identify something in their own lives that fits the example. International travel was what I was aiming for, and there are few in that circle that don’t travel internationally in one way or another.
In my experience, parents of first-gen kids don’t get hung up on crap like this. It doesn’t seem to matter where they come from, but it seems that anyone who grew up outside the US has a far, far, far greater sense of what life is like for the typical human being than most Americans – if you think of the median standard of living being someone in Russia or China or India. With that perspective in mind, it’s hard to get worked up over possible, someday, perhaps repercussions of a vaccine that a shitload of people don’t even have access to.
Dave Ruddell
Punchy,
I have wondered the same thing about the thiomersal/thimerosal switch. Perhaps there was a typo one day that got picked up and propagated by accident?
burnspbesq
@Martin:
Yeah, your story sounds a LOT like Irvine. Not that I am in a position to point fingers; those of us who live in Orange Unified are NEVER going to live down what our school board was like in the late 1990s.
Andy K
@chiggins
At least there’s an apparatus, well-funded or not, to monitor Russian prisons for potential plagues, not to mention that the prisons themselves are basically quarantine wards in the first place.
It’s the frontiers of the human realm that worry me, the homes of viruses that aren’t known yet. The laborer chainsawing into the unexplored fringes of Amazon basin isn’t as far removed from the rest of the species as were, until very recently, the aboriginals of the area from each other. The disease that may have wiped out an remote tribe only to find itself without a host after killing 100 people 50 years ago may now hop a highway to the nearest airport and spread globally within days, if not hours.
PeakVT
@R-Jud:
Again, it’s about the perception of control. Not vaccinating does not cause various diseases; it puts the children at risk at some point in the future. People often have a hard time incorporating future risks into their thinking (discounting the future), and not vaccinating is another example.
@Dave C:
Yes, I know that. I was trying to lay out what the parents might be thinking.
pseudonymous in nc
I had this discussion with a friend who’s a British expat in the US with three kids.
For her youngest, born in the US, she objected to the way that a huge number of vaccinations were administered in a short period of time, and chose to have them spread out. The motivation to load kids up early — my friend estimated that her daughter would have 46 separate shots by the time she was 12 — is that there’s the presumption that people will be squeezed by healthcare costs afterwards, and that those most susceptible to those diseases are less likely to get early treatment.
Vaccination works through a social contract: it relies on near-universal uptake.
Martin
Well, it’s a little shocking that you dialed in that specifically. Wanna go double or nothing on the neighborhood I live in – which is probably an easier pull with the clues I’ve given.
Martin
Some of it is the reality of how health care billing works. You could do a shot every 3 months but that would cost 4x as much as doing 4 shots every year and 12 times as much as the current arrangement. The shot isn’t what costs money – the cost comes simply from taking up space in the clinic. Once you’ve entered the building, the incremental cost of everything that comes after is pretty low. Some of that is artificial, to extract as much money as possible out of people that feel the need to go for every sniffle, and some of that is real as there is a real cost to collecting and tracking your information for every visit, and the biggest constraint on physicians is time. Vaccinations don’t need to be administered by a MD – an NP or PA should suffice, but given that half the parents are convinced that the shot will flush their kid out of normal society, they wouldn’t stand for it. The downside to a free market is that nobody has the balls to say no when money shows up at the door.
Gus
Hey, 50 mikes of LSD is enough to get me trippin’.
GeneJockey
But shouldn’t schools teach the controversy?
There, now the analogy to Creationism is complete.
AnneLaurie
There’s another part of the equation that Tim barely touched on in his excellent post: GUILT. Because one piece of the ‘autism puzzle’ that’s been fairly well distributed in the non-scientific press is the probability that some portion of the range of neurological disorders we currently call ‘autism’ is genetic, and inheritable. Smart, creative, driven individuals mate with other smartcreativedriven (and quirky) individuals and produce a beautiful, active, apparently healthy infant… whose progress gradually declines from "He’s so active, so vigorous, so intense" to "He spends 22 hours a day bouncing off the walls, self-stimming, refusing to make eye contact". Of course, very few high-status high-earning individuals want to accept the possibility that the same genetic factors that gave them an edge might have combined to push their beloved offspring right past the bleeding edge of the bell curve… so after they get past shaking their partner’s family tree to hunt for nuts, they join forces and bring their usual level of obsessive dedication to finding some outside Eeee-vile to blame for their child’s tragedy.
(I mean, Jim Carey and Jenny McCarthy — two individuals who have climbed to the apex of the insanely demanding entertainment industry and made millions of dollars by pushing the boundaries of normal interaction — produce a kid who’s incapable of ‘reining in’ his behavior enough to function? Since rich stars can’t possibly have ‘bad genes’, surely their child’s problem must be someone else’s fault!)
It doesn’t help these parents’ sense of misplaced responsibility that until well within the lifespan of many of us, standard medical treatment for what were then called "hyperactive retarded" children was permanent institutionalization, usually in combination with social ‘disappearance’ of the victim. As a society, we’ve chosen to ‘forget’ that as late as the 1960s/70s, the parents of what would now be diagnosed as an autistic child would be told, "Put ‘it’ in an institution. Tell your relatives/the neighbors ‘it’ died. Then you can go on to have healthy children — you don’t want your other kids to be stigmatized by having a ‘retard’ in the family, do you?" These kids, for better or worse, are out in the community now, not shunted away where they can’t "contaminate" their "normal" peers, but to the uneducated eye it just looks like there’s a new "autism epidemic" that came out of the void without warning, and therefore must be the result of some new pollution or other external factor.
celticdragon
Umm…CBS News reported last Spring that there appeared to be a deliberate avoidance of any such studies to begin with, according to a former NIS official.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/12/cbsnews_investigates/main4086809.shtml
My field is geology, not toxicology or microbiology. Beats me. I see no good reason to put any organic mercury compound into something you inject into a human body, though. Frak that. I’m sure the doctor’s made similar assurances to the thalidomide moms, and the Di-ethyl Stilbesterone moms…
Mnemosyne
Point of order — McCarthy’s son is from her first marriage and is not Jim Carrey’s biological child.
Not saying that you can’t be right about the gene combination of her and her ex-husband.
The Grand Panjandrum
You forgot peanut butter. What could possibly go wrong with peanut butter?
The Moar You Know
@Face: Mostly, as you said, because people are idiots about it. There is also a very small percentage of people, like me, who are weirdly allergic to the stuff. It won’t kill me but can be uncomfortable.
Tlazolteotl
Just two quibbles.
First, the mercury ingested = 52.7 micrograms, not micrograms per gram.
Second, there is a difference between organic mercury and total mercury as measured in various tissues. Usually these analyses are done by atomic absorption spectroscopy, and the sample prep involves digesting the sample with hydrochloric acid, which converts all of the organic mercury into elemental mercury, and this total is measured. In marine animals especially, this can give a misleading impression of toxicity, as many marine organisms (especially marine mammals) have a mechanism for dealing with the high levels of mercury present in the marine environment by complexing it with selenium. So when you do a calculation like this based on total mercury, don’t confuse that with the methylmercury level, which is probably somewhat lower. Doing the analyses of the organomercury species in tissues is difficult and expensive, most labs only do total mercury.
mcd
I often wonder if some of the uptick in autism is caused by mothers not eating enough crap. The sad fact is that we’ve evolved to the point that our bodies need the heavy metals and "contaminants" that we eat in trace levels. I wonder, if by trying to eat hyper-healthily, we aren’t actually removing something the body needs which causes problems down the road. Common sense says there’s a reason diagnoses for autism and heavy metal poisoning are conflated.
uila
@Martin: God bless you. Hell is other parents.
Bob In Pacifica
Here is a link to the "extreme male-brain theory" of autism. Don’t know how it’ll pan out, but it sure is interesting.
Brett
Not that it’s hard to tell that you don’t have the background, considering that you don’t apparently understand the idea of dosage. Do you know that water can kill you in too much quantities?
In any case, you know what I think is allowing these desperate idiots in search of someone to blame to blame vaccines and get away with it? The fact that the diseases that stalked humanity for centuries – measles, mumps, smallpox, Polio, and so forth – aren’t sitting in their faces, afflicting friends and family members. I remember my mother telling me how she had a childhood friend who didn’t get vaccinated – her parents were part of the small groups of religious peoples back in those days who didn’t believe in it, apparently – and she found out that her friend died of diptheria when she was 15.
But to most of these parents, diseases like the above don’t really exist, at least not in their mental horizon. For a while (not anymore, with measles and the like resurgent because of this shit), they could get away with "Possibly inject a harmful substance I heard about from a friend into my baby? Never! Diptheria/Polio/Measles, what’s that?"
Enlightened Layperson
Let’s face it. Most people don’t understand either statistics or causation. What people understand is annecdotes. My child had a vaccine, my child is autistic; therefore the vaccine caused the autism. Post hoc ergo proctor hoc.
The best way to fight the anti-vaccination campaign is with counter-annecdotes. Give compelling accounts of parents who feared vaccinations, didn’t get them and their children got these disease and suffered horrific effects, just as bad as autism. It’s the only way to bring the dangers of not vaccinating to life.
dmbeaster
They stopped using thimerosal because there was no science indicating that it was risk-free, or at least that the level of risk made sense to use mercury as a preservative in vaccines being given to young children. It was used primarily so that vaccines can be stored in multi-use containers (which is something you also see a lot less of these days), which lowers cost. It is cheaper than other alternatives, but hardly essential as a preservative.
So, given the lack of certainty about the level of risk, the seriousness of mercury exposure to young children, and the rather low-level need for it as a preservative, discontinuing its use was recommended by public health professionals unless the science established that the level of risk was essentially zero. And no one has established that fact.
The autism scare was bunk, but concern about thimerosal was not.
dr. luba
@Shinobi: Second that.
I am, at his moment, working in a hospital in the slums of India. Our patients are very, very poor, and poorly nourished. Obesity is not a concern in our population.
But our rate of diabetes………and hypertension…….is quite high. These are generally the two main health care issues our patients face.
I doubt that sugar consumption or processed foods figure into the equation. Our patients are vegetarians (and not necessarily by choice) who wouldn’t even know what processed foods look like. They subsist on dal and rice.
Genetics plays as strong a role here as in autism.
mere mortal
Vaccine manufacturers ‘choose’ to use as a preservative a documented neurotoxin, for use on children less than one year of age. Parents would like the ability to ‘choose’ an alternative that does not contain such a poison.
You apparently ‘choose’ to mock parents who have children with devastating developmental brain disorders, and because of that, I ‘choose’ to think that you’re kind of a dick.
It also seems that you ‘choose’ to gloss over the fact that the food supply of a staple seafood is contaminated by unsafe levels of a neurotoxin. Were you so blase about this state of affairs when the Bush administration ‘chose’ not to reduce the allowed levels of mercury released by coal burning power plants?
Do parents or voters who ‘choose’ to oppose mercury released into the atmosphere and food supply in this way also receive your disgusting, tone-deaf, condescending tripe?
chopper
@Mr Furious:
that would be an interesting sidebar if children’s vaccines had mercury in them. they don’t. except maybe the flu vaccine.
mere mortal
bad edit
Paul Kemp
One of the reasons the anti-vaccine movement caught on was because initially parents don’t know where to turn to for information and charlatans, as always, prey upon people’s fear and ignorance. Parents are desperate for a "quick fix" for their autistic child and the horrible truth is — there is none. I was told about the perils of vaccines by an otherwise reputable autism research center and the local chapter of the Autism Society of America endorses the "expert" who not only ran this organization, but also conducts the same sort of shoddy experimentation that led to the original findings. A lot of the treatments for my son are things I’ve had to come up with on my own, finding out after the fact that I am, indeed, on the same track as reputable researchers.