Who is evil
Denialism and death threats.
A new book defending vaccines, written by a doctor infuriated at the claim that they cause autism, is galvanizing a backlash against the antivaccine movement in the United States. But there will be no book tour for the doctor, Paul A. Offit, author of “Autism’s False Prophets.” He has had too many death threats…[Offit] is also the co-inventor of a vaccine against rotavirus, a diarrheal disease that kills 60,000 children a year in poor countries.
So…Paul Offit collaborated on the invention of a vaccine that if implemented can save the lives of at least 60,000 children a year in poor countries – and yet ‘antivaccine activists’ think he’s evil and some think he should get death threats. That’s odd.
“[A] few years ago this ceased to be a civil scientific discourse and became about crucifying individuals,” said Dr. Gregory A. Poland, chief of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic, who says he has had threats against his children.
Vaccines prevent lethal diseases – yet people get so angry about a non-existent link between vaccination and autism that they want to kill or at least threaten people who are working on vaccines. That’s deranged.
Of course, having grown up in a world where lethal contagious diseases, apart from AIDS, are no longer commonplace, they don’t know what it’s like to live with the constant risk and sometimes reality of cholera, typhoid. TB, polio – and measles. But if they’re going to become activists on the subject, then they ought to find out what it’s like. It’s not all that difficult.
Many doctors now argue that reporters should treat the antivaccine lobby with the same indifference they do Holocaust deniers, AIDS deniers and those claiming to have proof that NASA faked the Moon landings.
In other words reporters should treat the antivaccine lobby like whack jobs.
I can remember that my father, who was a Christian missionary in India (something for which I feel the need to apologise every time I say it), once approached an India village one evening for fairly innocent (?) religious purposes. He had with him a technician and aids who was going to show some Christian films to local Christians and anyone else who wanted to watch (of course it was meant to be a form of evangelism). (TV was not known in those days, at least not in India, and no one had radios either. I never heard a radio until I was 18, except for a few months in 1952, in Hartford.)
The group were met by a crowd of men with sticks and rocks. A few people got hurt before they managed to convince the village elders (the panchayat) that they were not from the government to give vaccinations! The villagers thought the vaccinations would make the men impotent and the women infertile. That wasn’t true – they were usually innoculating against a few known villains like cholera – but they were isolated and suspicious, and their suspicious made some sense in the context.
But why, why are people in a modern democracy, with all the advantages of an education system that takes them right through high school, antivaccine? They are whack jobs, and much more primitive, in many ways, than those poor benighted villagers way back in the forties and early fifties of last century. What’s going on that this kind of unreason can take over so many people, and endanger the lives of so many too? It simply doesn’t compute. I can understand the isolated villagers in India in mid-twentieth century, but not this. It’s bizarre.
The partnership of media with any activist who can whip up controversy has not helped. The extremism is rewarded not by the ridicule it deserves, but by publicity and ‘being taken seriously’. It creates the usual activist mindset, self-righteousness against anyone who doesn’t fall in with the idea du jour.
Eric, have you read Frederique Apfel Marglin on smallpox vaccination in India?
My wife grew up in the 1950s on a dairy farm on the north coast of NSW, and in many ways the last frontier of European settlement in Australia. It was a series of river valleys; a bit like the Ozarks, the Appalachians or the highlands of Scotland – where many of their families originated anyway. Some might say it was Australia’s Afghanistan.
A bloc of five farmers half way up the valley where her cousin lived refused to let the mains power be run across their farms, because in their informed view the powerlines would make their cows sick. So they and all the farms further up the valley, whose connection to the grid they were preventing, had to use candles and kerosene lamps for lighting, well into the 1950s, and to milk their cows by hand.
Another farmer wrote to the authorities to tell them that if any government team set foot on his land with intention of testing his cows for TB, he and his sons would be waiting for them with loaded shotguns.
I dare say they were all against vaccination too.
How does one explain children that become feverish after M.M.R jabs and suffer brain damage?
There may be some primal revulsion to putting anything to do with disease into the body, some sort of purity taboo, but I suspect in the case of the contemporary antivaccination movement the great god choice, worshipped equally by left and right, has more than one hand in it. If it’s your right as a citizen/consumer to choose your lifestyle, anything imposed from above just has to be suspicious and needs to be resisted, at least by the noble few. Yes folks, it’s a matter of standing up for your rights and that can never be a bad thing can it?
Morality before reason – no longer the exclusive preserve of the religious fundies.
Eric why apologise? for the most part it was decent caring people who became christian missionaries in places like India and Africa.Desperately poor people where able to recive a decent education from missionary schools and also health care, clothing, food and safe drinking water.
Richard,
If you want to discuss MMR, please reference the studies that support your position (NB. The Daily Mail is not a valid source. For almost anything. Ever).
Both my kids have had it (2nd one a couple of weeks ago)…I did a pretty exhaustive personal trawl through all the available data, and found nothing showing abnormal risk.
I am not, I must stress, a medical scientist (or anything approaching such a species), but a sufficient grounding in methodology & basic stats seemed adequate for the job…
Perhaps the biggest problem in the MMR non-debate was the way that good old TB (the world’s most appropriate initials) & the UK government failed to respond in a sensible, timely and entirely rational manner. TB himself managed to ..erm..seriously “mislead” [OB – “mislead” should be ok?] the House of Commons when he claimed that Japan had suffered a measles “epidemic” after it switched to single jabs (as a response to MMR mk1, it should be noted, and issues surrounding mercury).
Now, the Japanese health ministry may be fibbing from out of its large collective bottom, but according to the data that was freely available on their website for year-on-year infection rates, “Holy Tony” was being extremely “misleading”. His pants may very well have been demonstrating combustion…
So by the time they finally got round to the proper research-based response, the good old tabloids (and internet) had already run away with the “pin the blame on the vaccine” story.
Oh joy.
Thanks to these scaremongering bastards, I worried myself sick – literally, physically sick – about letting my eldest daughter have her MMR jab. Then I went ahead, because I knew it was the right thing to do. Some children will have reactions to vaccines. Some children will have reactions to dental anaesthetic. Some will choke on their first peanut. Some will bang their heads and never come out of a coma. Etc etc. All these things are horrible, and they all happen, but they’re also both unpredictable and unlikely.
Richard. Why apologise? Because it was presumptuous of Christians to go to India proclaiming their way to salvation and holding the people there to be living in darkness. In all conscience, there were enough religious divisions in India already. Missionary activity was driven by the idea that those who had not accepted Christ were doomed to languish in a place of eternal punishment. I think there are lots of reasons to apologise. Yes, many of the people who went were caring, and just possibly India ended up with a net gain, since missionaries brought Western style hospitals with them, but that doesn’t diminish the arrogance of their claims.
OB. No I haven’t read Frederique Apfel Marglin on smallpox vaccination. In fact, it may have been smallpox vaccinators that the villagers were afriad of. I was only a small boy at the time.
Some children will have reactions to vaccines and some children who are not vaccinated will get seriously ill and some of those will die. The scaremongering bastards don’t scaremonger about the consequences of not getting vaccinated – perhaps because they cynically rely on herd immunity.
Andy all goverments fib about vacination risks and almost everything else to do with them. In order to acheive herd imunity you have to get the public to behave like a herd, truth would make this all but imposible.
It was presumptuous and disdainful, Richard, and sometimes they did force people, by helping only Christians during famines and such like. That happened before my father was there, but it happened. And, recall, that the rulers were Christian for a long time, and provided space for Christians to civilise the ‘natives’ (as they were invariably called).
Besides, religious telling is more than offering, it’s very often threatening and cajoling and indoctrinating. I don’t see religions as you do. They’re almost invariably unjust, and they use unfair tactics. They are not to be trusted with human minds.
I see similar qualities in these activist frenzies like the anti-HIV AIDs idiocy, and this anti-vaccinantion nonsense. They use similar types of speech acts, and they are dangerous.
“Andy all goverments fib about vacination risks and almost everything else to do with them. In order to acheive herd imunity you have to get the public to behave like a herd, truth would make this all but imposible.”
Richard, your annoyingly typical ‘Bloggertarian’ assertions without supporting evidence do not a rational argument make.
But then, you’ve been around here long enough to know that already, haven’t you?
Some children who don’t get their vaccinations, will get sick and instead of dying they lose their vision or their hearing or some of their cognitive capacity.
The whole deal with things like vaccinations and prescription meds is that MDs are trained to look at both the benefits (hmmm, won’t die from cholera) and the risks (.0000xx very teeny and unpredictable chance of getting deathly ill from the vaccination). Most have risks. The risks are infinitesimal when lined up against the benefits. If we all get our cholera shots, no one will spread cholera to other people. . . the vast majority of individuals don’t get cholera and huge chunks of populations don’t spread it around to each other.
It is shameful and deranged that people who have the luxury to say no to vaccinations are often people who say no for silly reasons and don’t mind putting the rest of us and our children in danger.
And in parts of Mexico Coca-Cola is seen as a medicine that can help the bad spirits burp their way out of you or heal cuts and burns (it doesn’t, it makes them worse). Shots from the government nurse are bad. Coca-Cola from the profit-generating company is good. Go figure.
There is enough sad derangement to go around. I want to slap (hard) anyone in the developed world who puts their own children and other people’s children at risk because they have the luxury to be willfully stupid and swallow big gulps of quackery.
Andy it is an established fact that some children are damaged by vacinations,it is only the numbers that are in dispute? My position is that goverments should admit that slight risk rather than pretend that it doesnt exist, it would avoid all the scaremongering because people would be aware of the risks.
“Andy it is an established fact that some children are damaged by vacinations,it is only the numbers that are in dispute? My position is that goverments should admit that slight risk rather than pretend that it doesnt exist, it would avoid all the scaremongering because people would be aware of the risks.”
Richard, oh for christ’s sake, risk of exactly WHAT are the UK government pretending MMR does not cause, but you are so concerned about?
(everyone else can stop reading now, BIG cut & paste warning!)
Here, freely available from the NHS website, is a precise list of risks associated with MMR:
http://www.immunisation.nhs.uk/files/MMRII_SPC.pdf
(how dare the government make this information public)
“4.8 Undesirable Effects
Adverse reactions: Adverse reactions associated with M-M-R™ II are similar to
those to be expected from the administration of monovalent vaccines given
separately.
The following adverse reactions occur commonly:
• Burning and/or stinging at the injection site for a short period.
The following adverse reactions occur occasionally:
• Body as a whole: Fever (+38.3°C (+101°F) or higher).
• Skin: Rash, usually minimal but may be generalised.
• Generally, fever, rash or both, appear between the 5th and the 12th days.
• Mild, local reactions such as erythema; induration and tenderness.
The following adverse reactions occur rarely:
• Body as a whole: Sore throat, malaise, atypical measles, syncope, irritability
• Digestive: Parotitis, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea.
• Haematologic/lymphatic: Regional lymphadenopathy, thrombocytopenia,
purpura.
• Hypersensitivity: Allergic reactions such as wheal and flare at injection site,
anaphylaxis and anaphylactoid reactions, as well as related phenomena
such as angioneurotic oedema (including peripheral or facial oedema) and
brochial spasm, urticaria in individuals with or without an allergic history.
• Musculoskeletal: Arthralgia and/or arthritis (usually transient and rarely
chronic), myalgia.
• Nervous/Psychiatric: Febrile convulsions in children, afebrile convulsion or
seizures, headache, dizziness, paraesthesia, polyneuritis, polyneuropathy,
Guillain-Barré syndrome, ataxia, measles inclusion body encephalitis
(MIBE) (see 4.3) Encephalitis/encephalopathy have been reported
approximately once for every 3 million doses. In no cases has it been
shown that reactions were actually caused by vaccine. The risk of such
serious neurological disorders following live measles virus vaccine
administered remains far less than that for encephalitis and encephalopathy
with natural measles (1 per 2000 reported cases).
• Respiratory System: Pneumonitis (see 4.3) cough, rhinitis
• Skin: Erythema multiforme, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, vesiculation at
injection site, swelling
• Special senses: Forms of optic neuritis, including retrobulbar neuritis,
papillitis, and retinitis; ocular palsies, otitis media, nerve deafness,
conjunctivitis.
• Urogenital: Orchitis.
There have been reports of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) in children
who did not have a history of natural measles but did receive measles vaccine.
Some of these cases may have resulted from unrecognised measles in the first
year of life or possibly from the measles vaccination. Based on the estimated
nationwide measles vaccine distribution in the USA, the association of SSPE cases
to measles vaccination is about one case per million vaccine doses distributed.
This is far less than the association with natural measles: 6-22 cases of SSPE per
million cases of measles.
A study suggests that the overall effect of measles vaccine has been to protect
against SSPE by preventing measles with its inherent higher risk of SSPE.
Local reactions characterised by marked swelling, redness and vesiculation at the
injection site of attenuated live measles virus vaccines and systemic reations
including atypical measles have occurred in vaccines who had previously received
killed measles vaccine. Rarely, there have been reports of more severe reactions,
including prolonged high fevers and extensive local reactions requiring
hospitalisation. Panniculitis has also been reported rarely following vaccination with
measles vaccine.
Arthralgia or arthritis, or both, are usually transient and rarely chronic features of
natural rubella. Like polyneuritis that is also a feature of natural infection, their
frequency and severity vary with age and sex, being greatest in adult females and
least in prepubertal children.
The chronic arthritis associated with natural rubella has been related to virus and/or
viral antigen found in body tissues. Only rarely have vaccinees developed chronic
joint symptoms.
Following vaccination in children, reactions in joints are uncommon and generally
of brief duration. In women, incidence rates for arthritis and arthralgia are generally
higher than those seen in children (children; 0-3%; women: 12-20%) and the
reactions tend to be more marked and of longer duration. Symptoms may persist
for a matter of months or, on rare occasions, for years. In adolescent girls, the
reactions appear to be intermediate in incidence between those seen in children
and in adult women. Even in older women (35-45 years) these reactions are
generally well tolerated and rarely interfere with normal activities. Such reactions
occur much less frequently after revaccination than primary vaccination.
4.9 Overdose
Poisoning is unlikely. Swallowing M-M-R™ II would render the live attenuated
vaccine benign, and the content of the neomycin (25 micrograms/0.5 millilitre) is
not likely to cause toxicity. Overdose has been reported rarely and was not
associated with any serious adverse events.”
So. What do you want added to that list?
I want an end to t.v adds like the baby on the mountain top surrounded by lions.I would also like to see that imformation (above) given to parents in a simple form and for health staff to make sure that the parents understand it. I would like goverment ministers to stop refering to measles ect as killer diseases, the fact that some people die from them does not make them killer diseases. Some people die in car acidents but you dont refer to killer cars?
Although I condem without reservation the people making threats on the anti vac side of the isue.
Richard – what the hell are you on about? You don’t want the government to refer to diseases like measles as “killer” diseases? Why? Your analogy with cars is one of the stupidest things I’ve seen this week.
You seem to have to been sucked in to the mistaken idea, propagated by the anti-vaccers, that vaccines are really dangerous, and maybe even worse than the diseases they prevent. Why? What evidence convinced you of this? Because it’s simply not true. Any dispassionate examination of the evidence would convince a reasonable person of that. What do you not understand?
So, Richard, what you’re saying is that the government should not try to convince the public that measles is much more dangerous than vaccinations are, is that it?
But measles is much more dangerous than vaccinations are. People don’t believe that now because vaccinations have made measles so rare that almost no one has personal experience of lethal measles. But it is vaccinations that make that immunity and hence that incredulity possible.
Fair point about immunity O.B although I would say you need to see the add I am talking about it is blatant propoganda not imformational.Josh I only have a gut feeling about m.m.r vacination and the fact that as a child I had measles and mumps and my brother had mumps and rubela. Virtualy every kid I went to school with had at least one of these diseases and none of them died or suffered long term ill effects. I am fully aware that these diseases can kill but as a rule they dont. Doctors used to tell parents to put all their children in one room so that they could all get the measles together.
Out of intrest is anybody here in favour of mandatory vacination?
Richard,
The fatality rate from measles for otherwise healthy people in developed countries is 3 deaths per thousand cases. Whether or not any of your childhoos friends were among those 3 per thousand doesn’t change that, any more than your gut feeling changes the efficiacy of vaccination.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/377712
Mandatory? Well, I’d certainly support the right of any school or playgroup to make vaccination a condition of enrollment. You must surely be aware of the spate of post-panic outbreaks.
I don’t see that as any more problematic than refusing Typhoid Mary a job in the school kitchens.
Oh, and measles parties are back (chickenpox parties never went away) but tyhey carry higher risk than vaccination.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2001/jul/26/healthandwellbeing.health
Richard, if you have only a gut feeling, then keep it to yourself. Gut feelings are beside the point on empirical questions such as the efficacy and risk of vaccination and the danger of measles. You just waste everyone’s time by starting out with great certainty and then when pressed saying you have only a gut feeling.
Richard, I can’t believe you’re not embarrassed to admit you’re taking positions based on “gut feelings.” Really? That’s pathetic.
I’m always amazed (though I probably shouldn’t be) to see people’s libertarian senses triggered by the issue of vaccination. “Mandatory” vaccination is not an instance of coercion, but of collective decision-making. It’s not that we the public can’t choose whether or not to be vaccinated, it’s that we cannot choose *individually*.
It’s like which side of the road we drive on. You can’t switch sides on a whim – you have to have an agreement.
So, maybe we vote on the issue directly, or maybe we elect representatives who in turn appoint medical experts who actually know their stuff. But once the decision to vaccinate is taken, it is binding on *everyone*.
Don I would have no problem with your sugestion if it only aplied to private schools . If it were aplied to state schools(what I suspect you mean)it basicly amounts to mandatory vacination because parents cant withold their children from school without breaking the law and incuring severe penalties up to and including prison?
Richard I said keep it to yourself – I don’t want gut reactions here (they’re no more valid if you add the word ‘strong’ to them, in fact they’re even more irrational). And don’t just dump in unexplained links, either.
And this business of refusing unless there is a public health emergency – which refusing would have created. Jesus god.
Please just shut up about it.
Well, I for one would refuse to drive on the same side of the road as everyone else unless the roads suddenly became more dangerous. ;)
Snicker.
Richard,
Yes, of course I meant state schools. Just last Monday I was fascinated to watch impetigo explode across a pupil’s face. Start of the lesson, no sign. Twenty minutes in and I’m watching blisters form. Forty minutes and the kid is scratching. I’m telling him, ‘Kid, don’t scratch.’ But what can you do? I send him to the nurse, I send the rest of the class to the hand-wash and I have the place scrubbed down. He gets three days at home. What the hell, take Friday as well.
His brother also got sent home, even though he had no symptoms. Did we violate his rights? No, he was very likely to be carrying. Schools are bloody petri dishes when it comes to infection.
We have agreed on a plan to eliminate these diseases. No-one is going to pin you down and stick a needle in your arm. But if you insist on being potentially infected, please stay away from the rest of us. It is not a human right to sneeze in my face.
Well said, Don.
Richard, ignorance is curable. And you are ignorant about the facts of vaccination. You’ve allowed your emotional reactions to get the better of you, and you’re dressing it up as some sort of reasonable defense of “liberty.” It isn’t, and it makes you look very foolish.
I suggest you read Orac’s blog:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence
It’s one of the best compendia of factual information about vaccination, and rightful criticism of antivaccination nonsense. A word of warning – stop, think, contemplate before you post. Don’t post stupid canards, and don’t go waving around your emotional reactions or you’ll get promptly smacked down. No, not because the commenters are “closed-minded,” but because no one there has any patience for willful ignorance.
“parents cant withold their children from school without breaking the law and incuring severe penalties up to and including prison?”
Sorry, but this is too easy. Homeschooling? Never heard of it? Method of choice for those whose views are too loopy to allow their children to mix with normal people. Even in the “fascist” UK it’s perfectly legal.
Makes your kids into sad loner psychos, though. The sort of people who would think vaccination was a conspiracy against their civil rights…
The working single mother would homeschool her child how? she couldnt choose a private school either because she only has one income to rely on.
She could find six other nutters and take turns. Where there’s a will there’s a way.
Richard: I said keep it to yourself. Drop it.