I did extensive research on this when my kids were MMRd (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) - the guy who published the autism link was then cast in deep doubt, and is now completely discredited. I can’t even be bothered to find his name, he’s such a knob,
I did find a Californian piece of research that found a correlation between using mercury salts as preservatives and autism. The higher the mercury content, the more the impact. All my kids vaccines are mercury-free - more expensive, shorter shelf life.
In this world of glitzy stores and nice new clothing, people have totally forgotten the ravages of common illnesses like measles, polio, rubella etc. Nasty deaths.
What’s the matter with this crazy anti-science movement/attitude in the US? Anti-vaccine, Creationism, Global-Warming-denial - it seems the US public wants to degenerate into some sort of third-world theocracy.
The only exception is apparently science that creates things you can kill people/communists/terrorists with.
According to List of causes of death by rate - Wikipedia “Alcohol use disorders” accounts for 1.5 deaths per 100000 people per yer. During the period 2007 to 2013, that’s 27000 based on an under-estimate of the US population at 300 million. The number of “preventable deaths” from jennymccarthybodycount for the same period is 1170. That’s 4% of the number people people out there drinking themselves to death, and based only on the word of jennymccarthybodycount as to it’s relevance. Even if I bought it, I’m more worried about getting a hangnail.
I’m sorry to see Cory repeating such nonsense.
Regardless of anyone’s opinions about possible links with autism (I couldn’t care less about that axe), we are talking about a personal choice. You can speak for yourself and protect yourself, but your rationalization for wanting to expose me (and the rest of the herd) to unnecessary and unwelcome invasions of my body by hopefully-denatured diseases is unwelcome.
Remember this though: if you get to tell me how to live then I, and everyone else, get to tell you how to live and you should be ready to submit to everyone else’s idea of what is good for you. Including, but not limited to: male/female circumcision (you can’t be trusted to wash down there), what food you eat (your health is my responsibility… I pay taxes you know), where you work (supply and demand affects food prices!). I mean, let’s face it: I shouldn’t have to suffer under the tyranny of your freedom if you get to stomp all over mine. Sheesh.
What a dumb argument. Sorry, but if you wish to endanger the public with ignorance you deserve nothing more than blunt dismissal. Your opinion is dangerous, and like it or not, there is a TON of policy put in place to protect idiots from killing themselves and putting their children in danger. This is no different.
Problem is your egocentric worldview endangers other peoples health. People like you weaken the herd immunity so that others who cannot vaccinate (small children, allergics etc.) are endangered.
There are fire protection regulations for buildings in place for the same reasoning. It’s your property but you put the public at risk if you don’t follow the regulations and your house catches fire.
What no one talks about is that vaccinations are socialistic
From the point of view of the whole population, vaccinations are they way to go, for obvious reasons. From the point of view of an individual, they present a risk. The safest and best option is obviously that everyone else get vaccinated, and your kids don’t. We can also assume that even if there were a very tiny risk overall, the people responsible for the health of the entire population would and should choose to accept the risk to ensure the benefit to the whole.
I suspect part of the problem is the element of risk and trust isn’t often addressed. Personally, I found the giant scab oozing puss from my own listless toddler’s arm operated as a superficial suggestion that all is not well I have not read anything about autism in particular, but it would seem there have been anxieties about links with mental illness for a 75 years or more. My key point is if there was tons of evidence suggesting a link, we would still need to immunise for the greater good. In that case, what would we tell the public? (“There is zero risk. You are crazy.” How do you earn trust? How do you earn trust in the internet age, as the digital network discourages older forms of blind trust in authority and encourages a demand for evidence and transparency? We need to understand the anxiety, rather than prove the anxious parents are crazy.
One reason is probably the US healthcare system (or lack of). If you get free healthcare in case your vaccination has complications more people would get vaccinated. If I’m in danger of getting financially ruined because my vaccination goes wrong I would think twice about vaccinating…
Fair enough. If you go live on an island and have no interactions with other humans or animals that could transmit a disease to the rest of us, then you have that right. If you wish to live in a society where a disease that you carry can kill others, then you actually have to be a grown up and be responsible. That means getting vaccinated.
Do you like all of the neat things that humanity has created by increasing population density (science, technology, etc.)? The way we have been able to do that is by controlling disease. YOU don’t get to decide on this. If you wish to have any contact with humans that live in high density areas (which means anywhere with over 100 people), then you need to respect their rights to not get killed because of your stupidity.
Edit: and by the way, it was nice that you cited alcohol abuse deaths. Please remind me of the death rates of plagues, flus, and smallpox. Are they something we should be worried about? Or have you just cited the success of vaccinations, disease control, and herd immunity as a method to discredit it? I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, because that would be a really stupid thing to do.
The Vaccine isn’t given to very young children (under 1 I believe). Unfortunately those children are the ones who are vastly more likely to die if they get the disease. Preventing whooping cough deaths in infants is thus dependent on herd immunity.
Additionally Whooping cough vaccination has been so effective in limiting the disease that it has been fantastically rare in the US for decades so doctors are unfamiliar with the symptoms and slow to react.
You earn trust by educating, being open and honest, being transparent. As a health authority, you encourage / mandate vaccination, and examine carefully any negative consequences, invented or not. If people refuse the vaccination, you educate them as to the risks - with the internet, you can map out disease spread and hence probably provide live smartphone updates by zip / post code as to the risks.
If MERS were to go pandemic, and there was one injection that was questionable, we’d all have it anyway.
So long as everything is balanced, so long as the approach follows common sense, we’ll be ok.
Funnily enough, in the UK it was the “educated” middle classes who fell for the MMR knob telling everyone “autism”. They’ve been catching measles, btw.
That’s a cute argument, but not factually comparable. There have absolutely been cases of lung cancer linked conclusively to smoking, at least as conclusively as is scientifically possible. To claim otherwise is just a cute turn of phrase like “well gravity is just a theory, like evolution.”
For most vaccines the primary effect is that the person vaccinated will not get the disease, herd immunity is a secondary effect.
Quite a few of the vaccines don’t work all the time, or wear off after some years but the disease isn’t a big deal for adults, or make the disease far less severe rather than completely preventing spread, and there are always people traveling in from parts of the world that don’t vaccinate well so relying on herd immunity is a poor strategy.
There’s been systematic dismatling of the educational systems in the US since the 1980’s. Most likely explanation is that the myth that an ignorant public is easier to control has gained a lot of traction in certain political camps.
There’s a problem with that comparison. The rate of alcoholism is not at risk of suddenly accelerating within the world population to a hundreds or thousands of percent increase over its current norm, killing potentially millions in a single generation. Most diseases that have been nearly wiped from the planet by immunization are capable of doing precisely that.
I’m not defending the outlandish manner in which the issue gets discussed often, or a “body count” web site (which is inflammatory and unhelpful and should be left out of serious discussion on a topic, like a Michael Moore movie). However to draw a simple connection between X cause of Y deaths and the immunization debate is a bit misleading (and definitely not relevant, unless you’re talking about something else capable of causing a pandemic).
What a misleading paper to present. It runs some statistics on a database of reported adverse effects (seemingly voluntarily reported) without looking at any statistics in relation to the total population of vaccinations undertaken; or providing any other perspective. The paper basically seems to say that the number of side effects we see reported is proprtional to the number of vaccinations in the databse of vaccinations where side effects are reported. This doesn’t really mean anything. Yes, it is defintely “easy to pick meaningless (or at least misleading) statistics”.
The data in this website is complete and utter crap. As he says in the FAQ:
The vast majority of the deaths listed are for Influenza-Associated Pediatric Mortality taken from Table I of the CDC MMWR
But these are not deaths preventable with vaccines, at least not the majority of the cases. Systematic reviews of the literatures on influenza vaccines show that, in the case of adults:
Influenza vaccines have a modest effect in reducing influenza symptoms and working days lost. There is no evidence that they affect complications, such as pneumonia, or transmission.
The review showed that reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is thin but there is evidence of widespread manipulation of conclusions and spurious notoriety of the studies.
Overstating the benefits of vaccination does damage to public health, as it is so easy to debunk, and makes people doubt the real benefits where they exist.
There’s a huge difference between vaccinating against smallpox during an epidemic and vaccinating healthy people against the flu. The former is magnificently effective while the benefits of the latter has yet to be demonstrated.
The www.jennymccarthybodycount.com website is just as sensational as people claiming vaccines cause autism. Its just on the opposite side of the spectrum. Its absurd to insinuate a death was preventable just because its something that there is a vaccine for. No vaccine is 100% effective or even close (which doesn’t mean they are worthless, but nothing in life is 100%). Also I love the very scientific justification this site uses in its FAQ:
Q: How do you know that all of these illnesses and deaths are due to people not being vaccinated?
A: I don’t and I don’t believe that anyone can say that all vaccine preventable illnesses and vaccine preventable deaths are due to people not being vaccinated. However, in nearly all of the outbreak cases that I have read on the CDC website the “index patient” has been unvaccinated.
Really? Really? This is what we are going to hold up in response to “un-scientific” anti vaccine claims? Just more sensationalism if you ask me. Just on the opposite side of the spectrum.
I think both extremes of this debate get things wrong. As a whole vaccines are incredibly safe. Are they great for everyone? Absolutely not. The CDC has a great and pretty extensive list of contraindications available at: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/vac-admin/downloads/contraindications-guide-508.pdf that outline a number of conditions/scenarios where they do not recommend various vaccines. Obviously this effects a small percentage of the population but when you are talking about 300+ million people in the US, even of a fraction of a percent becomes a decent sized number. Especially if your child falls into that fraction of a percent. In that case being knowledgable of what is true (which is there are contraindications) and what is sensational (that they sky is falling & vaccines are evil) is VERY important. I would hope in a place like BoingBoing we could have this discussion with more focus on facts and less on extrimism. But then again this is the internet…
I have not read anything about autism in particular, but it would seem there have been anxieties about links with mental illness for a 75 years or more. My key point is if there was tons of evidence suggesting a link, we would still need to immunise for the greater good. In that case, what would we tell the public? (“There is zero risk. You are crazy.” 