Don’t forget the science that creates shiny cell phones with lots of cool apps!!!
1170 preventable deaths in 6 years from failure to vaccinate? C’mon, there’s over 3 million premature deaths from pollution each year.
Cite: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)61766-8/fulltext
My family is cancer-prone, and people burning petroleum are a far greater threat to my family than anti-vaxxers are to your unquantifiable “herd immunity”. Fact, not emotionally palatable propaganda.
@bzishi - no, cars are not regulated for pollution in the fashion that you imply. People are not required to refrain from using their pollution-causing cars simply because we know that use harms the public, and people are not forced by law to buy minimally polluting cars - in fact people have been forced by law to stop using minimally polluting cars. Cite: http://www.ev1.org/ has a good writeup of the way EV1 owners were forcibly separated from their cars against their will.
If you want to know why the environmental causes of cancer (which have a yearly death toll anti-vaxxers will never touch) have been relatively unaddressed please read the books The Secret History of the War on Cancer and The Merchants of Doubt for extensively researched and annotated explanations.
Anti-vaxxers are scapegoats who do trivial levels of harm compared to the rest of the population, most of whom gleefully suck down petroleum and actually kill other people in droves with their unnecessary pollution. You people are kicking a chihuahua because you’re not brave enough to face the wolf that’s ravaging your community. The numbers in the “Anti Vaccine Body Count” support this conclusion.
Source? AFAIK, only diesel exhaust is linked to cancer while regular ol’ petrol is not.
Also, unquantifiable herd immunity? In what sense is herd immunity unquantifiable? We have clear numbers that show what happens when vaccination rates drop below the herd immunity percentage for various diseases. We know that when less than 92% of people are vaccinated in an area for whopping cough, an outbreak will occur. We know that smallpox was eliminated when about 85% of the population was vaccinated. We have example after example of both outbreaks happening when vaccination rates drop and disease eradication when they increase past these thresholds. There is nothing unquantifiable about it.
In California we have something called a smog check that will force people to stop using their pollution-causing cars. Surely this exists in other states? We also limit sales of pollution-causing cars. Hell in California, you can’t even buy a diesel car because of air pollution concerns.
Practically, we can’t just pull every car off the road that emits any pollution right away without destroying the economy and more than a few people’s lives, but we’re certainly headed in the direction that every vehicle will eventually output little to no pollution.
It is absolutely ridiculous to advocate ignoring a small easily solvable problem because a larger problem exists. Anti-vaccine advocates are a danger to the most vulnerable in our society (babies and the elderly). The solution is minimally invasive, causes little to no hardship and is exceptionally safe.
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Andrew Wakefield.
He published a paper where he claimed to have found measles antibodies in the intestinal lumen of vaccinated autistic boys with gastrointestinal problems. That’s at least what I could figure from the paper’s abstract.
He claimed in the paper that he’d discovered a new disease called autistic enterocolitis and that it must be caused by environmental factors.
Mind, this study had a grand total of 12 subjects, so it had literally no statistical power, and from the beginning was unacceptable as evidence in favor of mmr causing autism.
With such a small sample, they could make basically any inference they wanted to. It was a fishing expedition, and should never have been published.
Andrew Wakefield is responsible for the current Measles outbreak in the UK, and if I had my way, I’d do sloppy, invalid and painful “research” on him.
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How harmful is the exhaust from a car with modern pollution controls using unleaded gas? You have danced around this topic. Until you answer this exact question with citations, your claims that the pollution from cars are not regulated enough is unsubstantiated. Not that that matters. The argument isn’t if something that affects public safety is regulated enough, but if the government can mandate actions for things that affect public safety. If anything, you have accepted my argument and are now haggling over the price. If the government can require unleaded gasoline for public safety, it can also require its citizens to be vaccinated for public safety. Unless you have a more substantial argument over why the government can’t regulate aspects of life that protect public safety, I recommend you move on and abandon this mode of reasoning. Discussing your pet peeve of pollution has nothing to do with the topic at hand other than demonstrating the opposite of your arguments.
You are comparing US anti-vaccination deaths with worldwide pollution deaths? And you don’t see a problem with that comparison? This is like saying that people don’t need to worry about clean water in Sweden because factories are polluting in China. Try this: compare the anti-vaccination deaths in Africa with pollution that affects people in Africa. Or better yet, compare current pollution against the half a billion people killed in the 20th century by smallpox.
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Given the choice, I’d rather have 23 shots in the tip of my penis over 18 months than contract polio.
Polio is awful. It’s been so long since anyone has had it that we’ve forgotten how utterly horrific it is. It’s a childhood disease with no practical treatment that can literally cripple you for life. What is being able to stand worth to you? What is preventing yourself from sickening others with polio worth to you?
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Don’t forget Wakefields monetary stakes. IIRC he was trying to peddle something to the autism community. He was egregiously unethical, and put a lot of people in danger with his crap.
I’d like to add that 23 vaccinations is a drop in the bucket compared to the pathogens, virus, and bacteria we come in contact with. If you want a really good round up on debunking anti-Vaxx crap, including this “too much too soon” baloney, I’d recommend listening to Mark Crislip’s Quack cast. http://moremark.squarespace.com/quackcast-home/
He is an infectious disease specialist, I think, and does some of the best, and sometimes snarkiest, podcasts out there on this subject.
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So because you’re upset about people dying from cancer, you think we’re wrong to be upset about people needlessly dying from measles? That’s an interesting take. Of course it would mean you’re not actually brave enough to deal with the real issues either, because you haven’t mentioned the worldwide poverty-related deaths, which are far higher still and definitely something we could do more to alleviate.
So either everyone who talks about anything besides poverty is being a coward, or maybe people can care about more than one thing at a time. And what the heck does it mean to be told we don’t care enough about other causes of mortality from someone who just called population reduction a possible good?
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@ethicalcannibal: one of my points was that 23 vaccinations will not be a drop in the bucket for everybody. And there is currently no good way to tell who is in the “drop in the bucket” category and who is not.
@LDoBe: polio is an interesting one in the vaccination department. There are still lots of live oral polio vaccinations given around the world (although in this country I believe the number is small, or zero, not sure), and they can actually lead to others getting the disease from the waste products of those who have received this vaccine. This is by no means the only problematic vaccine; but the potential problems it can create are a little more understood than with some of the other vaccines.
It is interesting to see the passions around this discussion, compared with the other topics mentioned: cancers caused by pollution (air and water), those elements polluted by transportation, power plants, etc. Few people erupt on those topics, likely because it’s much harder to connect the dots in the same manner - “MY KID DIED OF POLIO!!!” is much more definitive, and scary in most respects, than “MY KID DIED OF A CHILDHOOD CANCER CAUSED BY OUR POLLUTED WATER SYSTEM!!!”, OR “…BY THIS AIR POLLUTION CAUSED BY COAL-FIRED POWER PLANTS!!!”, because, even if absolutely true (and I have little doubt that this happens to SOMEBODY, and likely a large number of sombodys, somewhere), connecting those two specific dots is, with current science, just about impossible. Many people don’t get all that burned up by cancer clusters around Chernobyl, or Fukushima. Sure, a lot of head-shaking and “so-and-so’s head should roll for this”, but not the sort of livid invective we see around this topic (for the most part). Sure, statistically we can see that there is a considerable increase in various cancers among the populations surrounding those two nuclear accident sites, but while people say that “my [ insert loved one here ] died from lung cancer and of course it had to be Chernobyl”, there is no definitive proof short of finding a live radioactive particle at the center of the cancer, if it ever happens that way. However, you KNOW your child just died from polio; but you don’t KNOW your child’s death from lung or liver cancer was directly linked to bad air, water, pesticides, radionuclides etc. In virtually all cases. If you can show that somebody who just died (a horrible death) has an extremely high percentage of polonium-210 in their system, then someone is going to take notice, and they/we do. Otherwise? it’s very, very hard to prove what is responsible for what, in those spaces.
At least, we don’t know how to precisely connect those dots yet. I expect that day will come.
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Perish the thought! I always wondered how people who entered every discussion with “how can we worry about X when Y is happening all around us!” could justify that.
I love that guy. I keep up with Science Based Medicine and I try to keep up with Respectful Insolence, but I feel way behind there, and just try to catch the highlights. Is it Crislip or Gorski who do RI? I can’t remember.
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And you’d be wrong.
Actually I hadn’t seen Respectful Insulence, now there’s more for me to keep up with. I love those guys.
@chenille and @codinghorror: No, I do not suggest you should not worry about preventable deaths of any sort. Instead I claim that people who incite hatred against anti-vaxxers (which there is plenty of here) are pretty much all guilty of crimes at least as heinous as those of the anti-vaxxers. Am I making myself clear?
People who are actively involved in poisoning the air supply just so that they don’t have to walk off some blubber in order to get a corporate-food burrito are scapegoating anti-vaxxers. I personally am vaccinated and so are my children, but unlike Cory I refuse to countenance hate-mongering (just look at this thread) against anti-vaxxers.
I think Cory’s a great guy, and we’ve had plenty of enjoyable interactions, but that doesn’t mean he can’t ever be wrong, OK? And the standard BB anti-anti-vaxxer dogpile is nasty. People need to clean up their own acts before they start getting so rhetorically overheated, and calling for forcible inoculations is both facist and self-defeating. Why don’t y’all just consider the anti-vaxxers a control group, since vaccines might very well have multigenerational effects nobody could possibly be aware of yet. Be scientific about it instead of just indulging in promotion of enmity towards a minority opinion.
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FWIW, those immunized for measles during the early 1970s probably received it when they were too young. I got measles when I was 17, as did more than a few other kids at my school, though we’d certainly all been immunized. So it wouldn’t surprise me to see dosages change after 1970.
I’d expect someone to reply to this and say “see, they don’t even work!” Though it must have had some efficacy, as not everyone came down with measles…
I can’t say that having measles was that bad - not as bad as the flu, at least in my case - though it did screw up my hearing a little in my left ear. I certainly don’t want my kids getting nor spreading it.
If you refuse to read my cites, or study the books I recommend, I do not think you can validly complain that I am “dancing around this topic”. It looks to me like you are just more interested in slamming me (and anti-vaxxers) than cleaning up your own act; why don’t you examine your behaviour honestly, with as much objectivity as you can muster?
You can be in favor of vaccination without promoting hatred of anti-vaxxers, just as I can be in favor of cleaner air without advocating enmity towards the fools who still choose to use gasoline lawn mowers - which incidentally are expensive toxic boondoggles that contribute more to public health costs than anti-vaxxers ever will.
It’s nice to see so many new people. (A grey name means someone signed up recently, right?)
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@Aloisuis: Thank you for your comments regarding the quantification of herd immunity. I will look into it; and withdraw the word “unquantifiable” in the meantime (I won’t edit my post, though, since it would make yours look odd).
As for California, perhaps you are unaware that your rather weak pollution laws are among the most extreme in the country? Many states comply only with the even weaker federal minimum requirements, and only so that they can receive federal highway funding. I’ll bet that in most of the USA you could probably take the catalytic converter off your car in the parking lot right after your yearly inspection without anyone caring, and older cars are exempt anyway.
Where I live we have what I call black smokers - people who purposely de-tune their trucks to produce more carcinogenic pollution, in order to show their patriotism. I don’t know if that is tolerated in California.
