At last, a response to the anti-vac misinformation!

[Reb]

Sorry if this has already been posted. I've been AFK for a week, and a quick search did not turn it up.

Good pro-vaccination article (http://www.dailycomet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/FP/20040719/HEALTHMATTERS/40716001/-1/healthmatters)


Reb

[Reb]

Preaching to the choir, I see ... ;)

Reb

[Capsid]

From the article

A research paper by physician Andrew Wakefield in 1998 established a link between measles, mumps and rubella - or MMR - vaccine and autism.

Wakefield did NOT establish a link at all! However, this myth seems to have been widely adopted. What Wakefield showed was that of 8/12 children he studied, those with autism had a bowel disorder. All of the them had received the MMR, he suggested that the MMR might be the causal factor but provided no evidence to support this statement. In truth he should never had included that statement at all. All subsquent studies have shown that the incidence of autism is no different whether the children had MMR or not. Now the Wakefield paper has been heavily criticised because the children he looked at were provided by a lawyer acting on behalf of parents who were claiming for vaccine damage. And now we know why he did suggest a link with MMR.

[Tom Morris]

Fisher grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. She said she remembers when classmates got measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox but that she believes there wasn't the incidence of learning disabled, autistic and attention deficit disorder that there is today.
Post-hoc-me-doo-dah! I put my shoes on, an earthquake happened, damn my shoes for causing that earthquake!

Don't they see? We have got far better ways of diagnosing these illnesses today than we did in the 50s and 60s. Of course the figures are going to be higher - we know what the disease is.

The anti-vaccination brigade are possibly one of the most dangerous segments of the alt-med bandwagon. We need to combat them.

[Reb]

Originally posted by Tom Morris
The anti-vaccination brigade are possibly one of the most dangerous segments of the alt-med bandwagon. We need to combat them.
This is the first mainstream article I've seen that attempts to do that.

Does it do it well enough? I'm not sure. I think the author made too much of an effort to be balanced. What does everyone else think? It sounds as if you and Capsid agree with me ...

I think there should be a media blitz of good information on this issue to counteract the misinformation being spread by these loonies. The problem is: would such a blitz do any good? We've seen so many cases where believers ignore anything that does not confirm their world-view ...

And what about those doctors who compounded the problem for the first couple mentioned in the article by giving them pamphlets instead of answering their questions?

Reb

[Benguin]

Originally posted by Tom Morris
Post-hoc-me-doo-dah! I put my shoes on, an earthquake happened, damn my shoes for causing that earthquake!

Don't they see? We have got far better ways of diagnosing these illnesses today than we did in the 50s and 60s. Of course the figures are going to be higher - we know what the disease is.

The anti-vaccination brigade are possibly one of the most dangerous segments of the alt-med bandwagon. We need to combat them.

Not only are we better at diagnosing, we don't institutionalise as much either. In the 50s and 60s children with these illnesses were far more likely to be kept out of public view.

I think Wakefield's stuff could have been effectively challenged without the need to dismiss it (though it was nonsense). I've said it before, even if one accepted his study the findings still suggested that with the MMR jab the subject replaced a known identifiable statistical risk of death or disability through infection, with a far more remote risk of autism.

Both the chances of getting the problem and the problem itself are less onerous with the jabs.

[anonimouse]

Originally posted by Reb
Sorry if this has already been posted. I've been AFK for a week, and a quick search did not turn it up.

Good pro-vaccination article (http://www.dailycomet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/FP/20040719/HEALTHMATTERS/40716001/-1/healthmatters)


Reb

The big problem with anti-vaccinators, ultimately, is that they go at the issue wrong. They have a hypothesis ("the risk of vaccines are greater than the risk of diseases") and then summarily dismiss or try to explain away any information that contradicts that hypothesis. That's why you see so many anti-vaccinators go to the "medical establishment is suppressing this information" card, because they don't have anything else to stand on.

A few quotes from the article:

''There are certain individuals with certain genetic profiles that can't handle certain vaccines,'' said Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, based in Vienna, Va. ''We believe that in the end biodiversity has to be acknowledged. Not everyone is going to have the same reaction to a drug, why wouldn't it be the same for vaccines?''

Of course it possible that a minute number of children may have serious reactions to vaccines. That's why all vaccine administrators are required to keep epi-pen(sp?) handy, that's why children with known contraindications to vaccination are excluded from the process - heck, it's why if your child is even somewhat ill, most doctors choose NOT to vaccinate them. The astonishing thing is that with a universal vaccination program, there are shockingly few credible reports of serious reactions.

''We had expressed concerns that she might be getting too much mercury at one time,'' Jillani recalled. ''They pretty much laughed at us when we told them that.''

(snip)

Jillani, spokesman for the Charlotte, N.C.-based group People Advocating Vaccine Education, said he and his wife noticed a change in Savannah after she received those shots. She developed facial ticks and twitches and was later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

Doesn't that sound like regressive falsification? They went into the appointment with a pre-determined stance against vaccines, and when their children ultimately was diagnosed with an ASD, they knew exactly what to blame. Clearly, if they had concerns about thimerosal before that, it isn't unreasonable to think they had noticed changes in their daughter before those shots and we looking to assign a cause to the disorder.

And later in the article, shockingly, Jilliani's child who wasn't vaccinated is perfectly healthy. Aren't all unvaccinated children perfectly healthy?

Fisher, of the National Vaccine Information Center, believes the older DTP vaccine injured her oldest son, Chris, who is now 26. She said after he was given the third dose when he was 2 1/2 years old, he had severe diarrhea, became limp, was very weak and changed his personality changed. She said her once precocious, happy-go-lucky child, who loved books didn't want to read anymore and became learning disabled.

Yet this child was well enough to go to college. Again, it's surprising (although not really) that Fisher assigns blame to the DTP for her son's learning disabiliity. And Fisher, who swears by homeopathy and is a staunch supporter of homeo-lunatic Harris Coulter (she even wrote a book with him) is not the most credible person when it comes to assessing scientific discoveries.

Fisher grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. She said she remembers when classmates got measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox but that she believes there wasn't the incidence of learning disabled, autistic and attention deficit disorder that there is today.

How many autistic or ADD kids were mainstreamed in the 1950's? Those kids were there. Trust me. You just didn't see them because they were either in institutions or locked up at home.