Shame on me for linking to Ace of Spaces, but his misunderstanding of the Lancet retraction is good illustration of people not understanding how scientific studies work. Ace writes:
Unless I’m reading this wrong, and I may be, the problem isn’t so much that the study’s data set was fudged, but that the researcher behaved unethically in getting it.
He then excerpts (from a CNN article about the retraction):
The General Medical Council, which oversees doctors in Britain, said that “there was a biased selection of patients in The Lancet paper” and that his “conduct in this regard was dishonest and irresponsible.”
A biased selection process is a form of “fudging your data.” I would think that even wingers would know this.
Ace also writes:
The left doesn’t like the “anti-science” vibe they believe is going on with the MMR-autism link; they have this weird desire to establish scientists as some kind of technocratic fourth branch of government. And they hate when people don’t listen to scientists. (Except when scientists say things they disagree with, of course.) And they also hate the idea that vaccine avoidance is a much bigger phenomenon on the right than the left.
Is it true that anti-vax stuff is bigger on the right than on the left? I wasn’t aware of this.
chopper
well, you have to remember, ace is an idiot.
aww
it’s up to you to decide who owns the black helicopter crowd…..
Chyron HR
It really chaps my hide that there’s more raving loons on the right than the left, I tell you what.
Napoleon
If I had to take a shoot from the hip guess it would be that anti-vax is more prevalent on the left.
cleek
what a fucking idiot. he needs to take a few days and interact with people who aren’t figments of his imagination.
DougJ
If I had to take a shoot from the hip guess it would be that anti-vax is more prevalent on the left.
The anti-vaxers I know are FDL types. And there’s a lot of anti-vax stuff on HuffPost. So that is what I though too.
RodeoBob
AFAIK, the anti-vax crowd is pretty apolitical. They’re anti-government, but also anti-big business. They’re against government intrusion into private choices, but they’re also for organic foods and unregulated herbal supplements.
Like many things (movies, music, TV), it’s neither “left” nor “right”, no matter how many conservative commentators try to claim otherwise.
Alice B. Stuck
Ace doesn’t get his ass is attached to his pie hole.
J. Michael Neal
My guess is that anti-vaccination sentiment is more prevalent among those without enough fucking clues to have a political ideology.
Edit: And, frankly, a prevalence of such posts at HuffPo mostly reinforces my point.
Church Lady
Why are you ashamed? Ace of Spades HQ tends to be pretty entertaining most of the time (whether or not you agree with their takes) and their morons are usually pretty funny in the comments – you know, kind of like it USED to be around here.
FlipYrWhig
I thought anti-vaccination weirdness was an offshoot from the kind of paranoid anti-fluoridation weirdness satirized in _Dr. Strangelove_.
dr. bloor
Interesting question. I have some friends well to my left on the politcal spectrum who are antivax. In a world overseen by a benevolent FSM, Darwin’s theory would work its magic selectively and wipe out right-wing antivaxers, but this will be a public health nightmare for everyone if it gets legs.
RedKitten
Well, if the responses on some of the mothers’ forums I frequent are anything to go by, most of the anti-vaxxers tend to be distrustful of government and doctors in general, and a lot of them really don’t seem to be all that educated, if their writing skills are any indication. So I think a lot of the anti-vaxxers are relatively apolitical, but if you asked them their viewpoints, they’d match up more with the right wing than with the left.
Mike in NC
Anyone old enough to remember the dastardly Communist plot to put fluoride in our drinking water? Same old same old. {Edit: #11 beat me to it!}
DougJ
@Church Lady:
Actually, I found the comments on this one pretty good.
It’s possible I’m not being fair, but the other posts of his I read were very stupid.
geg6
@Chyron HR:
LOL! You beat me to it, but that was my very first thought on reading this.
geg6
@DougJ:
A huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge number of anti-vaxers that I know are home schoolers and religious nuts (anecdotally, I’d say about 95%).
Perhaps that’s just a Western PA kind of thing, though.
MattM
Wasn’t Beck pushing a lot of anti-vax memes during the peak of the H1N1 news cycle?
The Raven
I don’t know that it is, but some right-wing conspiracy theorists are big anti-vaxxers.
Alice B. Stuck
@Church Lady: Then why are you wasting your time on Balloon Juice Douchebag Lady.
Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich
Living in the touchy feely part of Northern California (about as blue state as one can get), there is a rather large undercurrent of “holistic” approaches to health care. I find it fascinating because an ostensibly educated rather financially well off contingent of left leaning people exercise willful ignorance when it comes to issues of health and health science.
I get extremely annoyed by people seriously extol the virtues of things like acupuncture and chakra manipulation. It makes me unpopular at my wife’s commune reunion.
Arguing with Marin County soccer moms about how they won’t vaccinate their kids because the mercury gives kids autism (even though its been debunked numerous times) is an exercise in futility. They just believe it despite the evidence.
Reminds me of other such intransigent people….
geg6
@Church Lady:
Well, no one is holding you captive here, you know.
Andrew
All the anti-vaxxers I know are either really hippies and into all sorts of anti-science health practices (homeopathy, chiropractic, herbal medicine) or they are the Ron Paul/Truther type, who pretty much believe everything is a conspiracy.
jeffreyw
Good article on the issue here.
Lev
Anyone else see that debate between Bill Frist and Bill Maher a few months ago? Frist wasn’t so good on the evolution stuff, but he was pretty scientifically knowledgeable and was definitely pro-vaccination. Maher obviously believes in evolution, but other than that he came off as uninformed and stupid, and was vaccine-skeptic.
Admittedly, this is just an anecdote. But it was interesting. Of course, I’ve never thought much of Maher (aside from that he’s obviously very funny), so it wasn’t earth-shattering or anything.
Sarcastro
Lefties don’t like vaccines because they think they may cause autism.
Righties don’t like vaccines because they think they may remove one of God’s punishments for women who like to screw.
One side it terribly and dangerously wrong. The other side is terribly and dangerously fucking insane.
Delia
As a resident of Eugene, OR, I can testify that anti-vax sentiment is pretty big with the DFH crowd here, including those young enough to have babies. We also don’t have fluoride in our drinking water, because too many folks around here believe it’s not organic. As a result children from poor families have rotting teeth.
On the other end of the spectrum there’s this little faith-healing sect some ways north of here that keeps letting their kids die of curable illnesses because they don’t believe in doctors.
So there’s plenty of crazy to go around.
Flugelhorn
@Delia:
I believe you already said you were in Oregon. No need to be redundant.
Church Lady
Not absolutely positive I am recalling this right (and too damn lazy to Google it), but I think Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (pretty far left) is one of those people that are convinced about the link between vaccines and Autism. I seem to recall listening to him blather on about it on that program he used to co-host on Air America.
twiffer
why do people proudly declaim their ignorance of how science works? so, this one study finds a link…then 14 studies after it (i think that was the number) fail to replicate the findings. now it turns out the original was horribly flawed.
that’s how science works. you claim something, a bunch of other people check it out. if no one else agrees with you, you are considered to be wrong. particularly if you disregard ethical standards.
also of note: why aren’t these loons noting this guy behaved unethically and cruelly in testing children? aren’t they usually all over the whole “save our kiddies” thing? won’t they think of the children? or do we only have to protect them from nipples and not stuff like polio?
Lev
@Delia: Well, it’s true, Fluoride isn’t organic. Neither is water. But technically, gasoline is organic. So’s cyanide.
Ah, the hippies. God bless them.
Tim I
It’s the conspiracy theorists on both sides of the political spectrum that fuel this stuff.
To believe that science has covered this up for many years indicates a fairly high level of paranoid thinking.
SpotWeld
I think it’s more a case that there are fringe lunatics that are so far outside reality that they defy any sort of political motivation and they are willing to appeal to the worst segments of both sides of the spectrum in order to gain credibility and/or support for thier personal theories.
The right wing is still running under a top down model, so when a specific bit of insanity is picked up at the top it us just more obvious.
Lyle4
anti-vacciners come in two types:
1) hippies. REAL hippies, not DFH
2) crazy religious nutty types who don’t trust anyone or anything
I wouldn’t say it’s a predominately right or left thing, but more of a crazy-person type of thing. I’m not understanding why we would be upset though if, as this guy says, there were more on the right? Why…..would we care?
licensed to kill time
I don’t know any anti-vaxxers (sp?) but what I hate is that the whole controversy has caused reasonable people to hesitate and question the value of vaccination, if only briefly.
If you have no experience with polio (iron lungs, withered legs) or smallpox (horrific facial scarring) or (insert disease here) it is easier to fear/blow out of proportion the risks of vaccination. I have had to have this discussion in my own family though thankfully reason prevailed.
I still remember the films we saw in school with the dark shadows stalking kids at swimming pools and playgrounds (Polio! it’s lurking!) and how happy our parents were when we got the polio vaccine on the sugar cubes. (Us kids thought that was pretty cool, too – the sugar cube part.)
Tim F.
Huh. I always thought that the antivaxx movement largely overlaps with people who shop at Whole Foods.
To be fair the conservative movement has trained its followers to hate and distrust empirical knowledge. All it would take is one diatribe from Rush or Beck and the abortion idiots would start picketing family practitioners. Still, this is the first I have heard about it actually being an issue with them.
Joel
You’d think that right wingers would be gung ho about vaccinations, given the persistent threat of Al Qaeda releasing measles, chicken pox, or shrivelling penis disease into the general population.
arguingwithsignposts
I will repeat the quote from the earlier anti-vax thread from Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet (link, found via wikipedia):
ETA: As discussed in the previous thread, there appears to be a significant overlap in anti-vax sentiment between evangelical fundamentalist/right-wing types and well-educated progressive types. I would love to see some polling data on this.
JGabriel
Ace of Hades:
I’m even sure where to begin with that. Assume for the moment that the left is just as evil as Ace always implies. Then shouldn’t we be happy that the right is applying natural selection to itself by ensuring a bigger die-off from viruses that we on the left innoculate ourselves against?
Of course, we’re not evil, so we don’t actually think that way. But it seems weird that Ace complains when we don’t.
.
ChrisZ
I am becoming more and more convinced that the reason people on the right claim that those who disagree with them are just blindly and uncritically following some authority figure (“Science” or “Darwinism” or whatever) is that it is exactly what they do. They think the left wants to establish “Science” as an authority because it’s what they would do if “Science” synced up well with their preconceived notions about the world. They don’t understand people who don’t have that same need for an always-right authority.
New Yorker
To me, the anti-vax stuff is like 9/11 truth stuff: neither left nor right, just insane. Of course, this doesn’t prevent the idiot right from accusing it of being “left-wing”.
aimai
The anti vax stuff is a left/right issue because it mostly involves *parents*–on both sides of the issue who feel extremely vulnerable having to be the primary interface, as they see it, between their helpless children and an uncaring and dangerous world. Sometimes, on the far right, that is “big government” which is conceived of as liberal. Sometimes, on the left, that is “big pharma” which is conceived of as heartless and capitalist/authoritarian. Sometimes it meets up in a detestation of modernity–the conservatives because modernity is too scary and liberal and ungodly and the liberals because modernity is heartless and rootless and based on cash exchanges.
Both groups participate in networks of information sharing in which they both come to distrust “authorities” like scientists either because they are seen as representing atheism, or capitalism, or both.
aimai
arguingwithsignposts
@New Yorker:
Actually, I believe Stanley Kubrick wrote and directed “Eyes Wide Shut” as an apology for his part in faking the mercury=MMR vaccine link. (reference for the uninitiated)
I am contemplating writing a 6,000-word epic blog post explaining the connection in collaboration with BoB. When I start, I want you to find me and shoot me in the back of the head.
Delia
I think one of the big problems is that Americans and Europeans have become largely isolated from the devastation these diseases once caused. I believe I remember reading once that Paul McCartney and his wife Linda refrained from vaccinating at least some of their children and one of them contracted whooping cough. They were horrified at how sick the kid became. I have a friend who had polio when she was eight. She spent months in the Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake, many miles away from her family. She was left with a partially damaged left hand, so she’s one of the lucky ones. Even measles or mumps can kill. People don’t think of these things anymore.
Combine this with the spreading levels of paranoia and distrust of authority throughout society and it’s really not too surprising that a movement like anti-vax can take off. After all, you’ve got a lot of instances where federal officials have not been looking out for the health of ordinary people. (how about a little e coli in your spinach salad?) For most people with diffuse critical reasoning skills (and those aren’t a high priority in education these days), it all sort of flows together, and can come out on either the right or the left or somewhere in between.
PK
And then you come to the US, found your own clinic in Texas, based on your garbage science and make your fortune!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article5728998.ece
The Raven
“Biased selection process” is technical language. It’s entirely possible that Ace didn’t know what it meant, nor understand how seriously scientists take the ethical violations implied by it.
I think one of the problems science has in persuading the public is that many people don’t understand its demanding ethics and disciplines, and don’t acknowledge their force.
Wag
I don’t really subscribe to the whole right-left dichotomy thing. I prefer to think of it as The Great Circle of Idiocy, where as you go further to the extreme of one political pole or the other, the line wraps around and meets forming a circle, not a line. the idiots meet at the bottom of the circle.
Not only does this explain why the Unvaccinators come from both the far right and far left, it also explains the similarities between Hitler and Stalin and it explains how FDL and Brother Grover came to agree about our President.
Zach
There’s a recent anti-vaccine uptick on the right in regards to the H1N1 vaccine being one of Obama’s Communists plots to infect and eliminate real Americans, but most of the dangerous action on the MMR/autism front comes from the left. Namely, from RFK Jr. and the politicians and publications (such as Rolling Stone) who frequently give him a microphone to espouse his brand of bullshit.
It’s unfortunate that it’s anathema to say no to a Kennedy in the Democratic party. Luckily, the publicity generated when Obama, Clinton, and McCain simultaneously appeared to embrace anti-vaccine hysteria appeared to be a turning point in favor of actual science. The H1N1 stuff was a step back from rationality, but not nearly as damaging (people who got the vaccine didn’t get the flu. case closed).
daveX99
It’s where the wingnuts of both parties loop around the spectrum, hold hands and come together.
@Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich: I’m in West Sonoma County (the leftiest left it can be), and I have never met a right-wing anti-vaxer (or many a right-wing anything since moving here). A lot of my friends skipped vaccinating their kids, but they’re a bit older now. The debating was done as they were just entering school. This was before the study was debunked. I wonder if they believe it… Not that I’m eager to open that can o’worms.
Mnemosyne
@Delia:
That’s definitely a big part of the problem. I pointed out in the thread below that the WHO is very triumphant that they reduced the number of deaths from measles from 750,000 in 2000 to 159,000 in 2007 through massive vaccination programs in developing countries. That’s right — in 2000 three-quarters of a million people died of measles.
We have the luxury of denigrating vaccination because enough people are vaccinated that herd immunity is still (for the most part) holding. I predict that there will be a major epidemic of an otherwise preventable disease like measles or mumps here in California within the next 10 years (at most) since California has very weak vaccination requirements and we’ve already had several serious outbreaks because of it.
But people like Jenny McCarthy can live in their gated communities and protect their precious little snowflakes, so why should they care if hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of other people’s children die of preventable diseases?
Face
How do hippies get their non-vax’d kids into schools? Kinda hard for an atheist to claim the religious exemption, right?
Amanda in the South Bay
@Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich:
Oh, I agree. Its amazing how ostensibly well educated, smart, affluent people who you otherwise claim to be all rational and so forth, believe in such nonsense. Tis the downside of the SF Bay Area.
Blue Raven
Guys, when there are scientific studies backing the efficacy of acupuncture and chiropractic care for the easing of pain, don’t throw those in the bathwater with anti-vax, for the love of Mike. Makes you look ignorant.
As for the core point, I would agree that anti-vaxers are just plain stupid. Ideology has nothing to do with it.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich:
Oh, I agree. Its amazing how ostensibly well educated, smart, affluent people who otherwise claim to be all rational and so forth believe in such nonsense. Tis the downside of the SF Bay Area.
Morfydd
A lot of the right wing anti-vax mindset can be found in the survivalist communities. They’re people who don’t trust a) the government’s motivations b) that the government would be able to provide services in a crisis even if it tried.
So they’re already cutting themselves off from the mainstream just by worrying about providing for themselves in whatever the catastrophe is. Then they’re trying to figure out how to get medical care in said catastrophe, and they’re just sitting ducks for the herbalists and the colloidal silver hawkers. Once they’ve gone that far into alternative medicine, being anti-vax is just a natural progression.
From a) my interest in herbs and gardening b) my interest in self-sufficiency and c) my tendency toward paranoia (hi earthquake subduction zone) I’ve been exposed to a lot of different forums along those lines, and they’re all very right wing.
syl
I think the anti-vax sentiment is largely just a remnant of nearly every person’s belief that he himself is above average, and, accordingly, his own personal evalation of a situation is worth more than anyone else’s evaluation. Whether the difference is 1.1x or 1,000,000x can vary on the situation, of course. The anti-vax situation involves something extremely personal and emotionally charged (protecting your children from harm) so it seems like a good situation for someone to go full wingnut on, were he already to have those tendencies. Add in the fact that judgments of parenting are largely outcome based (i.e. she grew up to be successful therefore her parents must have done a good job) and there’s a benefit to finding a no-one-could-have-predicted culprit, or better yet a this-thing-that-everyone-said-was-right-was-actually-wrong culprit, even for something obviously unworthy of “blame,” like a child’s illness.
Groucho48
One of the Kennedys was really pushing the anti-vaccine thing a few years ago…
Back then, there was some evidence supporting the connection. I’ve not followed it closely, recently, but, he’s still pushing a connection.
Evinfuilt
@Napoleon:
Exhibit A: Huffington Post
The rest of the reality based society looks on in disgust.
Does the the right-wing have anything as anti-science as that? Okay, they do.
Exhibit B: Worldnet Daily (Vaccines are part of a UN conspiracy to impurify our precious bodily fluids.)
Exhibit C: Creation Museum (there aren’t any viruses, just a bunch of demons needing to be exorcised.)
I’ve always thought Vaccine denial is a blight on society as a whole, not a political ideology.
Tazistan Jen
Anti-vax is big in my area (Boulder, CO), so I always thought it was a crunchy-granola lefty thing. And it isn’t just crazies – plenty of educated, middle class parents don’t vaccinate their kids.
If wingers do this too, I am somewhat less embarrassed by my side of the political spectrum, though I can’t be happy about yet another hit to herd immunity.
GeneJockey
I think Ace made a typographical error, and meant to say “And they also hate the idea that vaccine avoidance is a much bigger phenomenon on the left than the right.”
If you assume that, then, FSM forbid, it actually makes sense.
RFK Jr. pushing the anti-vax line is an embarrassment to those of us on the Left, whereas the Right embracing it would not only be par for the course, but actually a boon, in a Darwinian sense.
BTW, I really love the whole ‘Pharma sells vaccines to reap billions!’ line. Vaccines is a hard market to make big margins in, since generally people will pay WAY MORE to get well than to avoid getting sick. Pharma could make a lot more selling drugs to help people deathly ill of Polio or Whooping Cough than they make on those vaccines.
Evinfuilt
@Church Lady:
He did a rolling stones expose on it, and it was based solely off of Andrew Wakefields “paper.” He’s been given many opportunities to retract his stance seeing how thorughly discredited Wakefield is (paper was pre-paid by trial lawyers being the first clue.)
ChrisZ
@Blue Raven:
Citation please.
I don’t know much about studies into chiropractic, but many of them basically practice physical therapy so I wouldn’t doubt that it has some efficacy (but since chiropractic also espouses stupid pseudoscientific nonsense I’d just go to a physical therapist), but from what I know about studies into acupuncture the only studies that show an effect better than placebo (unless that’s the effect you are talking about) are studies that are either poorly blinded, not placebo controlled or both. The studies that are best controlled and blinded cannot show acupuncture to be any better than a placebo.
And before you ask, here is the newest well performed study I am aware of.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19433697?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
Evinfuilt
@Face:
Anti-Vaxxers on the left will use the religious exemption for their “Wiccan” religion. I have yet to find a single follower of his noodlyness become Anti-Vaccine, as to be a follower of the FSM requires a true skeptical mind, and not a conspiratorial.
This whole thread has made me realize how Firebaggers came to be, they do have a lot in common with Worldnuts. Its an Authoritarian seeking conspiratorial complex. They want someone to tell them what to do, just not the person in charge.
Dr. J
http://briandeer.com/mmr-lancet.htm
Link to Brian Deer’s work summarizing the entire history of the case. The links at the end include the link to the article where Deer argues that Wakefield distorted information (e.g., some subjects had been identified before they were vaccinated).
Wakefield may have been the primary source of this problem in England, but in the US much of the responsibility goes to Robert Kennedy Jr., and to my knowledge he has not commented on the GMC ruling. Best commentary on this (and very shrill) is Orac at Respectful Insolence, or David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine (one and the same).
Evinfuilt
@Blue Raven:
No, its “sham-acupuncture” thats been proven to work as reliably as placebo, and without any nasty side effects like having an actual needle poked into you. Meanwhile Chiropractors are running one of the biggest legalized scams in America. I’m sorry, that your alt-med magazine says its real. The real studies show that you can and will kill people with chiropractory or at least cause real damage. The only “proven” pain relief from either is no greater than a placebo, and both take advantage more of relaxation and massage which are oddly enough science-based, than the chi they pretend to alter.
Glad I still don’t live in England where you will be sued for Libel for saying Chiropractors are quacks for pushing allergy cures by realigning a back.
Save money, save yourself a lot of pain. And get help from a real Physical Therapist. They spent years in a real college to work on your back. A Chiro spent month in their own personally accredited Academy.
trollhattan
@ geg6
Nope, also a California thing, also. The further you get into the hills the wingier things get, with home-schoolin’, the meth & guns lifestyle, and a great distaste for bowing to the dictates of our medical overlords. Also, too.
Punchy
Nope. There was never any evidence supporting this connection, besides this bogus paper.
Pseudonym
If nothing else, Ace’s post at least demonstrates the lamentable tragedy that there’s still no vaccine for stupid.
MTiffany
@Wag:
And in the US one can find that bottom of the circle in almost any corporate boardroom or chamber of Congress.
binzinerator
@Napoleon:
The anti-vaxer family I know of is Left. Highly educated too. Go figure.
Apparently when you go too far left organizations like the AMA look too authoritarian, and the consensus of medical experts becomes conspiracy and medical science becomes suspect.
All I know is these people have small children who may or may not be vaccinated against those diseases that used to kill half of everyone’s kids back in the 18th century.
Ironically it works for them now because there are still enough of everyone else’s kids vaccinated.
But there’s a tipping point (which will adversely affect even the vaccinated kids) where the resevoir of unvaccinated kids becomes large enough to enable a resurgence of polio, measles, diphtheria, etc.
Personally I don’t think of them as Left or Right. I just think of them as fucking irresponsible morons.
And don’t get me started on their insistence on un-pasteurized milk.
It’s like they believe what Pasteur figured out was only a belief system that has no place in theirs.
theturtlemoves
@Delia:
Hey, shout-out to my neighbor, then. We are not wanting for DFHes around these parts and I can definitely see how they would be amongst the anti-vax crowd…
Breezeblock
Gary Null (radio) is BIG anti-vax. And no one could ever accuse him of being a reichtard.
eemom
I don’t know much about R Kennedy Jr — people have said he’s like, totally groovy on environmental issues — but I have always despised him for his part in perpetrating this fraud. Sensationalist asshole.
Carol
I’m near ranting. I have some alternative beliefs too, but think on the balance modern medicine has been a force for good in the world, and come from a philosophy of “the more the merrier”.
To me, it’s as much a class issue than anything else. Jenny McCarthy doesn’t have to worry about her kids not getting insurance because of pre-existing conditions due to preventable childhood diseases. She can take her child out of school at the slightest sniffle, and send her child to school in a chauffeured limousine, far away from children who may have communicable diseases. Her doctor won’t make her wait 3 weeks for an appointment. She won’t have to sit for hours in a crowded Emergency room in line behind the car crash and shooting people. So she can blithely tell people without her resources not to get vaccinated.
And while autism is pretty bad, measles, mumps, and various childhood diseases can kill and cripple. Imagine spending your life in a wheelchair (polio) because of a disease that could have been prevented by a shot.
That brings to me another point: what solutions do the anti–vaxxers have to mass diseases? Colloidal silver?
eemom
THAT, is really all that needs to be said.
Third Eye Open
Speaking as a relatively educated, and somewhat skeptical consumer: How much non-methylated mercury can a childs’ system hold without consequences later in life?
I know when I got into college, they balked at my immunization records, because they were signed by a nurse practitioner, so not accepted by Florida standards. They told me I would have to get all my shots over again so they could verify them. I obviously told them to take a hike, that I wasn’t paying for a new set of shots, nor taking the extra dose of mercury. I am sure this happens a lot. Are there obvious externalities we are missing, or am I just being thick-headed?
trollhattan
@ Carol
A three-part solution: hills, the; guns, lots; food stash, major.
frankdawg81
I hate being late to the party! I wanted to use the “Great Circle of Stupid” line myself! I have found that the far edges of right and left overlap each other a lot more than the middles do.
@ss of spuds does what all shallow thinkers do when they are at a total loss for reason: attribute what you don’t like to them & what you do like to us.
BombIranForChrist
I just finished a book called Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. It tackles the MMR topic and other things. If you already know a lot about stats, there are some parts that may bore you, but overall, it’s a nice survey of various medical-based whackadoodle out there.
I am not sure if we are allowed to link down here, but here is the Amazon link to it, don’t kill me:
http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Science-Ben-Goldacre/dp/0007240198
CalD
A biased selection process… methinks I detect the invisible hand of ACORN!!!!
celticdragonchick
@RodeoBob:
There is no “political” side to being scared to death that big pharma may be poisoning your kids to make a profit for the share holders. It may not be true in this instance, but after all the horror stories of thalidomide, di-ethyl stilbesterone (DES) and gods-know-what else, people have some reason to be sceptical towards American pharmaceuticals.
celticdragonchick
@Third Eye Open:
Nobody really knows, because studies in the 1940’s looked kinda bad (from what I understand) so they were shut down. Nobody is studying that right now. You have to extrapolate from methyl mercury guidelines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy
Delia
@theturtlemoves:
Hello, then. I thought I was the only Eugenean (?) around here. Lot of Portlanders, though.
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne:
Looking out for other children (especially millions of children that you will never meet) is an abstraction that most parents simply do not account for. Your primary concern as a parent is “your little snowflake” and that is the way we evolved. If you don’t like that, than I don’t know what to tell you. Nature doesn’t give a damn about opinions.
celticdragonchick
@Delia:
I lived in Eugene for a bit back when I was a student dancer with the Oregon State Ballet. :)
binzinerator
@licensed to kill time:
This.
Again, what makes work for them now is there’s still enough vaccinated people to make it seem as if you can do without vaccinations.
The success of of the last 50 years of vaccinations has made it possible for these people to opt out with little immediate feedback into the stupidity of what they are doing — i.e. getting polio or having their kids die from diphtheria. And the lack of experience with such victims also insulates them from readily observable consequences of such idiocy.
HumboldtBlue
While I haven’t run into too many of the California Hill People Troll mentioned above, we’re pretty rural up thisaway, and the folks who are most strongly against vaccines and fluoride live in very liberal, very wannabe hippy, Arcata.
Over and over again the fluoride issue comes up and every time it’s shot right back down again and we thank our stars that rational people outnumber the “back to the earth” clowns and the “anti-govt” wannabe revolutionaries.
Someone upthread mentioned un-pasteurized milk. I’m too lazy to find the piece, the Daily Triplicate, a newspaper in Crescent City right on the Oregon border did a multi-part story on a woman who found herself, and still finds herself, in a terrible world of hurt after drinking it.
A former dairyman and friend of mine literally lost it when he heard about the story. He’s a rather conservative fellow himself, but stupid is as stupid does and he just could not believe people consume raw milk, for any reason.
Cassidy
Parents who won’t vaccinate their kids need a visit from CPS.
celticdragonchick
@HumboldtBlue:
I didn’t know the Bircher “fluoride” thing was still around.
Talk about zombie conspiracies that never die. The unpasteurized milk thing is waaaaay over the top….
Sentient Puddle
I can’t really add much in the way of observation in whether or not the anti-vax crowd skews left or right. The crowd I roll with is techy, which means they have a passing familiarity with science, which means they think this shit is bananas and never even talk about it. The only time I ever really hear about it is in the random letter to the editor of the local newspaper whenever this pops up again.
But to me, the important thing here is, if Ace wants to give the right credit for the anti-vax hysteria, then by all means, they can have it. The less idiocy associated with my side, the better.
Prof. K&G
@celticwhatever: *irony overload*
DougJ
I think one of the big problems is that Americans and Europeans have become largely isolated from the devastation these diseases once caused.
You call that a problem?
celticdragonchick
@Prof. K&G:
I beg your pardon?
Carol
@ trollhaven, when they go to the hills, they think that diseases won’t follow them….and that their guns will keep the sick away. Didn’t Poe have a story about that once?
Mnemosyne
@celticdragonchick:
Wow, I didn’t realize that irrationally refusing to vaccinate your child and being indifferent to the health of other children — including your own additional children who were infected by their sibling — is a completely unchanging behavior determined by evolution.
celticdragonchick
@Carol:
I’m not sure that “Masque of the Red Death” is exactly the right match here…but extra points for cool literary reference.
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne:
If you feel your child’s life is endangered by something, it is unlikely that you will politely wait defer to other parent with sick children. Your first responsibility is to your own flesh and blood (or your genetic legacy, if you want to be real cold about it) and this will apply even if you are badly mistaken (as I believe Jenny McCarthy is) about the situation.
Worrying about somebody elses kids is not your responsibility as a parent, and most parents “get that”. You worry about yours and let the other parents worry about theirs.
I am not sure what is so difficult about this. There is nothing controversial from an anthropological standpoint here as least as regards our culture.
kuvasz
I would like to mention that the nation with the best scientists win their wars.
scav
@celticdragonchick:
Ah yes, the we must necessarily trample everyone to death on the Titanic rushing for the lifeboats view of Humanity and Western Civ.
nah, I’m not even going to bother with your mechanistic, robotic, pseudo-Darwinistic self-justification for ignorance, greed and selfishness.
and as for your assertation about about what all anthropologists think, in a word: Crap.
ChrisZ
@celticdragonchick:
I think that is because you misunderstand him criticism of your statement. He was not arguing that you would be wrong to assert that many parents (maybe even most) care far more about their own children than others. His criticism was that you described this tendency not as a general but variable tendency of parents but as an immutable law of nature as the result of our evolution.
Mnemosyne
@celticdragonchick:
And yet, as I pointed out with my link, by not vaccinating their child, the parents actually made all of their own children sick. Their decision that other kids could go fuck themselves because their precious little snowflakes shouldn’t risk being vaccinated landed all of their own children in the hospital, along with several innocent bystanders.
I’m not quite sure how you can defend this as “parents protecting their children” when the parents’ actions almost killed their children, unless you’re trying to argue that parents are totally irrational who can’t make good decisions about what’s best for their own children.
ChrisZ
@Mnemosyne:
I think that is pretty much what celticdragonchick is arguing. I don’t think celtic was ever arguing that the actions of Jenny McCarthy etc. were justified, merely trying to describe their mindset and why certain criticism might have no effect on them. I think that while her original post might have been a bit over-the-top you are making an enemy where none really exists. Such is the way of conversations on the internet though.
Liberty60
@Pseudonym:
I’ve argued over there a few times. It is definitely the home turf of Dale Gribble.
Bobby Thomson
Anti-vax is more prevalent among the fucking stupid, regardless of ideology.
Punchy
There’s so much fail in here. #1, vaccs dont have mercury in them. #2, I really hope you’ve completely eliminated fish and seafood from your diet, and even HFCS. Otherwise, laughable are your vax concerns.
Mnemosyne
@ChrisZ:
I have absolutely no patience for NIMBY parents. You know, the ones who insist that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes that support the public schools because their little snowflake is going to private school. They can buy all of the books their child needs, so why have a public library? Etc. The anti-vaxers seem like just another manifestation of that to me: I have health insurance and can take my child to the doctor if s/he gets measles/mumps/rubella, so why get him/her vaccinated?
HeartlandLiberal
We visited relatives in Seattle last fall. Their daughter was a genius mathematician. She and her husband BOTH worked for Rand Corporation. They have a small baby. The are both loony tune avoiders of vaccination. Totally irrational. They bought the now revealed as faked studies hook, line and sinker. Both are as far left in political views as you can get.
Face
Orphanage Jesus just wept.
ChrisZ
@Mnemosyne:
Right, we have absolutely no disagreement there. I was merely pointing out that while celticdragonchick was describing the motivations of NIMBY parents, I don’t think that it was her intention to defend them.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“So I think a lot of the anti-vaxxers are relatively apolitical, but if you asked them their viewpoints, they’d match up more with the right wing than with the left.”
Not sure about this. The vector for anti-vax sentiment tend to be the “Doctors” of Chiropractic, and about 30% of Chiros don’t believe in the germ theory of disease (as the theory behind “straight” chiropractors is that disease is caused by fluxions of the spine).
So folks going to chiropractors tend to pick up anti-vax sentiments. ‘Cos you’re not going to ask your chiropractor whether or not they think Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch were assholes before you ask them to treat your carpal tunnel. And I wold have thought there’d be more practicing chiros in DFH-stan than Jesusland.
I used to wonder why so many MDs hated chiropractors. Now I know. I’ve resolved never to see a chiropractor, and only go to Physical Therapists instead.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
” but after all the horror stories of thalidomide, di-ethyl stilbesterone (DES) and gods-know-what else, people have some reason to be sceptical towards American pharmaceuticals.”
Thalidomide didn’t get approved in the U.S. One story has is that the FDA wasn’t convinced of the safety of the drug, another that the regulator responsible at the FDA had a really appallingly messy office and the file for the drug sat so long in his pile that the teratogenic effects became evident in Europe before he got round to acting on it.
It’s still used for leprosy (because an MD treating a leper didn’t have any other sedative to give a patient to make him comfortable, so used thalidomide, and noticed the next day his lesions looked a lot better) and certain cancers.
media browski
The only anti-vax stuff I’ve ever seen was on dkos, and it was from veteran kossaks, not rat fucking trolls.
What was most distressing was the deployment of anti-science CTs worthy of a climate skeptic, and the sense of surprise that other progs didn’t agree that there was a conspiracy.
And Kennedy is a menace.
Andrew
@SPOTGS
They hate chiropractors because they are quacks. Chiropractic has only shown an efficacy in the treatment of lower back pain. And even then it’s questionable whether or not it is more effective than rest and relaxation. Considering the expense and the un-needed MRI’s and X-Rays a chiropractor may give you, I know which one I’d choose!
If you get a chance you should read Treak or Treatment by Simon Singh. If possible, buy the damn the thing. He needs all the help he can get since the chiropractors are suing him in England.
Third Eye Open
@Punchy: Hey, fuck-face, Go fuck your face. Kindly ;-)
Tlazolteotl
Punchy is right. Tuna, swordfish, and even HFCS have so much more mercury in them than any vaccine that may still have thimerosol that worrying about the ‘extra mercury’ from shots is not the thing to worry about.
Plus….unless you eat tuna (or other long-lived, high trophic level fish) every day, or are a woman of childbearing age, it isn’t something to be really worried about in the first place.
arguingwithsignposts
@celticdragonchick:
There is so much wrong wrapped up in that statement that it is almost mind-boggling.
I worry that “somebody else’s” kids will not receive adequate parental supervision, and end up killing my kid in a car accident. I worry that “somebody else’s” kid is going to NOT GET VACCINATED and become a vector for diseases that will maim, cripple and/or kill my child. I worry that “someone else’s” kid will not receive an adequate education or adequate job opportunities growing up and end up committing an act of crime that will affect my kid.
Worrying about “your” kid is not a one-way street.
In fact, if your concern for “your” kid is a threat to public health, I’d say it is in the interest of society – and every other parent – to worry about “somebody else’s” kid.
In fact, that statement encompasses perfectly what is wrong with the past 30 years of our nation’s politics: IGMFU parenting skills.
Tlazolteotl
Thimerosol contains ethyl mercury, which is not as neurotoxic as methyl mercury (the form found in fish) by a long shot.
scarshapedstar
Yeah, I’d say so. They’re the Party of Paranoia.
gwangung
I think the answer depends on time and place. The dynamics of extremist groups change with time…
Svensker
@arguingwithsignposts:
Dear AWSP,
What you said.
Thank you,
Svensker
jcricket
Wow – what a great thread. I knew I was among like-minded people here at BJ.
The facts are that there are potential adverse side effects from vaccines. But they are almost always mild, and short-lived (fever, discomfort, rash). And the chance of getting a side effect from the vaccine pales in comparison to the chances of seriously negative effects (horrible pain, scarring, death) of the diseases themselves. So if I’m choosing between a 1:1,000,000 chance of serious permanent injury from a MMR vaccine and a 1:300 chance of death from, you know, measles, I’ll take the vaccine. Frankly, when I ask Doctors, they are aghast b/c parents don’t seem to know how bad even things like chicken pox and rotovirus can be.
It’s absolutely a over-privileged “white-person” attitude to think vaccination is optional.
Usually, when confronted with these facts, the anti-vaxxers move the goal posts and start arguing that vaccines don’t actually give people immunity. Or they respond like Jenny McCarthy with the “I don’t need stats, I have my kid” type of nonsense.
I think if you don’t want to vaccinate your kid you should be allowed not to, but your kid can’t attend public school, and your insurance rate should go up tremendously – just like it does when you smoke, or engage in sky diving (not always fatal, but increases your chances of death). I’d at least make it “painful” to go the anti-vaxx route, just like it’s hard work to homeschool your kids and you can’t opt out of taxes just for choosing to do so.
jcricket
@arguingwithsignposts: Word. We are not mere apes. Empathy, altruism, seeing the forest (not just the trees) – we’re all capable of it. That’s why we function pretty well as a society (certainly when compared to the middle ages).
People who are only “in it for themselves” are embracing their reptilian brain, but failing to use a couple of other important parts that are in there too.
suzanne
@Mnemosyne:
WORD.
It’s just another incarnation of “I got mine, fuck you”, and, as such, should be roundly criticized as the hate that it is.
celticdragonchick
@scav:
LOL!
I don’t defend it. I merely observe it. Talking about this strikes me to be as senseless as arguing the chemical formula of potassium feldspar.
It is what it is.
We evolved to defend our own immediate offspring over and above the offspring of others.
Also, calling anthropologists names does not a rebuttal make.
Just sayin’.
Bubblegum Tate
@Sock Puppet of the Great Satan:
Good resolution.
Over the past couple months, I’ve had several friends–all of whom are to the left of me politically–remove themselves from the realm of actual medical science, preferring instead some combination of that bullshit Master Cleanse, accupuncture, “ancient [Chinese/Indian/Native American] healing herbs,” chiropractors, and “energy work”/”chi adjustment.” It’s been a pretty odd and somewhat frustrating thing–I ask them why they do these things, and they can never really explain why, they just mumble something about “do you think Western medicine has all the answers?” and change the subject. I just worry that they’re going to end up with serious health problems because of these things and then turn to those very things for “treatment.”
celticdragonchick
@arguingwithsignposts:
My concern for what you find wrong is overwhelming.
*rolls eyes*
It is great that you worry about more than your immediate concerns. However, you may notice that this is not the Gware culture of Kenya or some other pastoral culture where there is considerable inter dependence for survival and less reliance on individual autonomy.
Our culture has emphasized certain traits of individualism and that is reinforced to some degree by evolutionary pressures wrt care for offspring.
If you don’t like certain aspects of our culture, you can always try another. Emic perspective anthropology can be a bit rough, though.
arguingwithsignposts
@celticdragonchick:
My local grocery store, fire and police department, hospital and public school district (among many other examples) would like to have a word with you.
Certain aspects of our culture talk a good game about individual autonomy and self-reliance, but it’s myth-making, not reality.
Which is why our forefathers had many offspring because they knew that some would die in childhood. You’d think we’d have evolved beyond that. Evolutionary pressures being what they are and all – seems the pressure would be on *getting* the vaccine.
Perhaps McCarthy and her ilk are evolutionarily inferior and – following natural selection – deserve the fate they get. /sarcasm
Mnemosyne
@celticdragonchick:
Evo-psych, is there nothing you can’t prove?
celticdragonchick
@arguingwithsignposts:
Why the sarcasm tag? You may be correct, sadly.
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne:
I am not really interested in “proving” anything here, inasmuch as it is possible to prove much of anything in anthropology. That is why I am a geology major. Rocks don’t argue with you. :)
I am making general observations, and I confess that Hobbesian pessimism informs my outlook.
Mnemosyne
@celticdragonchick:
In other words, classic evolutionary psychology: looking at a specific cultural trend within a particular social class in a single country and deciding that it must have evolved through natural selection because it sounds so much more science-y that way.
matoko_chan
So is belief in creationism.
There is both genetic and memetic evolution. Sadly, there is a correlation between lower IQ and people who believe homo sap. walked with dinosaurs.
And they are breeding.
J. Michael Neal
The other thing I notice about the response among Ace’s brilliant braintrust of commentors is that they don’t seem to understand much of the basis of scientific journals. They act as if it is somehow shameful for the Lancet to have been duped by Wakefield. It’s embarrassing, sure, but the fact is, scientific journals operate on a basis of trust. If someone blatantly fakes their data, a journal probably isn’t going to catch it. There’s no possible way that they could take the time to investigate every article that seriously prior to publication. Frauds happen, and get retracted. My impression is that the journal’s approach here has been pretty straightforward.
Thus, the commentors also miss the whole point of having a journal article published. That doesn’t *end* the debate; it *starts* it. Someone conducts a study. It gets peer reviewed by a small number of other scientists to make sure that the claimed methodology makes sense and that the conclusions drawn from it are reasonable. It gets published. Lots more people than the peer reviewers then read it. Some of those people go off and try to replicate the findings. Some of them then start the process over by submitting journal articles on their results, and the conversation continues.
Obviously, that’s an idealized description of the process, which often gets messy along the way, even without blatant misconduct. That’s the purpose, though. Scientific articles get refuted all the time. That’s the system functioning properly.
Along with this, they also confuse The Lancet’s position on this. It comes with gratuitous reference to the Iraq studies, of course. A paper published in a journal is not necessarily an indication that the journal agrees with it. AFAIK, it was never *The Lancet’s* position that MMR vaccines cause autism. They were just a forum for the subject to get discussed in a scientific way.
Delia
If this thread is still going: As far as the chiropractor debate goes, I started seeing one some years ago in California. My HMO had sent me to perfectly useless physical therapy for lower back pain. The chiropractor helped a lot and I’ve been seeing another one up here about once every month or so for the same problem. Combined with yoga and exercise at the gym I can keep it under control. The chiropractor’s deep into all the New Age shit and has practitioners who offer aromatherapy and all other sorts of nifty stuff. But I can ignore that and concentrate on what works for me.
scav
@celticdragonchick: LOL yourself. You still don’t speak for all anthropologists. Actually, you sound like exactly 0% of the anthro classes I took. Even Chagnon was more nuanced than your take and he’s a bit of a ranter.
@Mnemosyne: Ditto.
scav
Oh, and I’m just fascinated by the space-time continuum that would allow evolutionary pressures to alter the psychology of people inhabiting specific cultures, even assuming human behavior was as hard-wired as you seem to assume it is. Stick with rocks. Seriously.
celticdragonchick
@scav:
I don’t recall claiming too, but maybe you read me that way. Are you going to argue that protecting one’s offspring, possibly to the detriment if others(or even in utterly mistaken belief), is not an evolutionary imperative?
Oh…maybe God/Gaia/Zeus did it. My bad.
In any event, that has been my(rather consistent!) point, and I find it astonishing that others here take issue with that. I think it likely that our cultural norms of individualism have actually enhanced that aspect, but I am open to other theories.
By all means, though…Try to convince me with flame wars.
maus
@HumboldtBlue:
I’m an incredibly pro-vaccination guy and raw milk cheese is delicious and raw milk is essential to making proper euro cheeses. I don’t go out of my way to get plain raw milk, but I do drink the occasional unpasteurized cider.
Also, again there’s a strong undercurrent of (pseudoscience, not legit non-pharma treatments) alt-med in conservative political culture, has been since the early 1900s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Brinkley
I woud also suggest you pick up http://www.amazon.com/Charlatan-Americas-Dangerous-Huckster-Flimflam/dp/0307339882 , which is about conservative politics, PR, quackery, and the modern AMA.
David Moisan
I’m one who thinks antivaxers and anti-science belong to both the right and the left. But I had a depressing observation about my own town:
Salem, MA, Halloween capital of the world. And one of the bluest towns in the state.
We had a member of the board of health whose only qualification was getting a degree in alternative medicine (from a big school, IIRC.) She was removed this past years for reasons I’m not sure of, probably because her term expired and she went crossways with the mayor.
And my alma mater, Salem State, announced that Deepak Chopra is speaking at the 2010 Speakers Series.
Facepalm.
maus
@scav:
I have a degree in sociology and anthropology and find her arguments utterly disgraceful to the social sciences. She’s totally abysmal at separating signal from noise, subjectivity from objectivity.
hamletta
@maus: Do not be ashamed. She already admitted upthread that she’s a geologist, and knows nothing about anthropology at all. She made some comment “from an anthropoligical standpoint,” but that was just fancy words for “pulling it out of my ass.”
Back to the OT, I had measles and chicken pox, because I’m old, and that’s what kids did in the ’60s and ’70s.
But dear Lord, I wish the vaccines had been invented earlier, because I got shingles a coupla years ago, and I cannot describe the agony. Back in the day, chicken pox was an amusing childhood disease that went around and made you all pimply and you had to take oatmeal baths.
Shingles was something old people got. Haha!
Maybe I’ve been reading too much medieval history, but I think we should offer parents the choice: either vaccinate your child, or we will slit his throat.
And I’d like to offer a word in the defense of ethical chiropractors. We have a very good practice here in Nashvegas. They limit themselves to spinal maintenance with no woo whatsoever. They also maintain a cadre of physical therapists to continue the healing. They saved my ass when I woke up crippled one morning, despite being in really great shape.
I haven’t been there in 15 years, but that was their stated intention.
matoko_chan
@scav: ummm….cognitive anthropology is a relatively new domain, as is SBH (social brain hypothesis). We actually can’t say social brain theory yet because there is insufficient data.
But it is pretty firmly established that the selfish genes code for three things and three things only: reproduction, survival, and death.
And that genetic and memetic demes (breeding populations) exist.
matoko_chan
A good example of a homo sap. memetic deme is Yearning for Zion. YFZ represents a genetic breeding population that is not closed, in that the polygs recruited fertile young women from the outside.
However YFZ is (or was perhaps) memetically closed in that young men and boys that didn’t subscribe to YFZ memetics were “exiled” out of the community.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“The facts are that there are potential adverse side effects from vaccines. But they are almost always mild, and short-lived (fever, discomfort, rash). ”
That’s not, well, really true. Part of this ‘cos many vaccines are made using really old technology, aren’t particularly pure. There are deaths and other serious adverse effects from vaccines, but they’re pretty small compared to the impact of the disease pre-vaccine. But they are there.
Don’t get me wrong – I loathe anti-vaxers, and go ballistic on parent email lists I belong to when chiros and Waldorf education freaks post against vaccinating your kids. I believe parents who don’t vaccinate their kids are parasites and put immunocompromised kids at risk by weakening herd immunity. But I think we shouldn’t respond to anti-vaxers dishonesty by pretending the safety problems of vaccination, which, while small, are still higher than zero.
There is a database of adverse events from vaccination maintained by the FDA/DHHS called VAERS (see http://vaers.hhs.gov/). But it ain’t great quality, as Orac says here: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/01/how_vaccine_litigation_distorts_the_vaer.php – basically there’s little quality control on what gets into the database, and anti-vax lawyers have been essentially spamming it with dubious cases.
Further, over half the deaths in it are from the old whole-cell pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine that got withdrawn decades ago. See http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/statistics_report.htm#claims_filed
So a lot of the anti-vaxers are basing impressions of highly unsafe vaccines on problems decades ago.
BTW, another bogus argument that anti-vaxers make is that the sanitation was responsible for the drop in disease, not vaccination. Which is true, to a point: there was a 90%-95% drop in the prevalence of e.g. measles before the measles vaccine was developed, mostly because of better hygiene. However, there was a 90% drop in measles *after* vaccination was introduced. But if you scale the graph right (by not using a log scale), you can make it look like the measles vaccine was ineffective. Man, the anti-vaxers make my blood boil.
brantl
Some anti-vaxxers, like me, aren’t anti-vaxx at all, we’re anti-thimerosol. If the industry would do the right thing, and remove thimerosol from the vaccines that they are still in (they are only there to let them make the cheapest container that they can get away with) I wouldn’t have a problem with vaccines. I don’t allow them to give vaccines that contain thimerosol to my son, anymore. Although I have a lot of reason to believe that he damage was already done.
Odd that they took thimerosol BY LAW out of food-animal vaccines, and left it voluntary on removal from human vaccines.
maus
@brantl:
Do you have any links for the livestock ban? Either way, there’s absolutely no greater science behind any animal removal than the human hysteria.
http://skeptvet.com/Blog/2009/06/veterinary-vaccines-fact-and-fiction/
Original Lee
@Sock Puppet of the Great Satan: Exactly. For instance, 1 out of every 3,000 children who get the MMR vaccine develop one of the 3 diseases in the vaccine. They are pretty sick little puppies when this happens. However, this is better than the alternative.
BTW, does anybody remember when the Health Dept. would slap a quarantine on households that had more than one child sick with the Big Five? Whatever happened to the public health use of quarantine?
Being ancient like several others on this thread, I also spent kindergarten bringing home many of the childhood diseases commonly available at that time, and promptly giving them to each of my younger siblings. I had measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, fifth disease, strep throat (twice, but fortunately no scarlet fever), and the flu, all in 9 months. They nearly held me back because I hadn’t been in school enough days. My poor mother had at least one significantly sick child at all times that year. We were very lucky that that was all that happened to us. Our neighbors sent their children over to get exposed so they could “get it over with”.
Mark
Third Eye Open (and others with Mercury fears):
The amount of mercury in a vaccine is the same amount that’s in half a can of tuna fish. We’re talking orders of magnitude difference in exposure here.