But in that case, you see, what does SCIENCE know?
The article youâre linking is from December 2013 so itâs too fresh to have received comment and have that comment peer-reviewed, however Iâll refer you to a previous review of Greierâs work published by the National Academy of Sciences which highlights serious flaws in his previous claims on the same topic:
âFor instance, in one study (Geier and Geier, 2003a), the R2 was 0.98, suggesting that the thimerosal content of DTaP vaccines (excluding all other TCVs) explains 98 percent of the variation in autism rates. The R2 is improbably high and means that all other potential factors (e.g., genetic or environmental factors) only explain 2 percent of the variance in autism rates.â
e.g. The last time that Greierâs work was scrutinised in detail, it was found that essential sanity checks were missing. Supposing that thimerosal did cause autism and given that thimerosal is present in more than one type of vaccine, then it should be impossible for just the DTaP vaccines containing thimerosal to account for 98% of the variation in autism rates - Grierâs claims cannot possibly be true.
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Also call people who read things and understand them âSheepleâ, thatâll really ensure youâre on the ârightâ side. Also, ignore evidence in favor of emotional appeals!
Perhaps you should avoid rhetoric and target facts in the future.
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Theyâre not Anti-Vaccine.
Theyâre Pro-Disease.
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Ugh. This seems like a weird off-shoot of degree inflation. No, you donât need a college degree in the sciences to understand such a basic concept in biology. Herd immunity is something you can explain in a few sentences. Itâs much simpler than the concepts covered in a non-college prep high school biology class, much less the sort of science classes required for admission to college, or required of college undergraduates as breadth requirements.
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I donât think that itâs necessarily degree inflation, but coming from a soft science background (though I work in tech) I could see how they would see some taught by academia to argue but not understand these concepts.
A pro-disease stance has some scientific validity; the species as whole (not to mention the rest of the ecosystem thatâs being crushed by the ever increasing tonnage of human flesh) benefits from selection. But you could also describe anti-vaxxers as pro-choice, if you wanted to. Itâs accurate. They have no moral or ethical obligation to the proponents of âherd immunityâ since they put themselves at equal or greater risk. Saving or prolonging every single human life possible isnât really a moral imperative, is it? What is death, that one should fear it so? Maybe they (correctly) see overpopulation and human activities as a greater threat than plague? The Black Death created the modern world by making feudalism unsustainable, according to some, at least.
I was forcibly vaccinated as a child in elementary school, as was common in that day. I had my children vaccinated, although I personally set up the vaccination schedule and chose the vaccines based on research, rather than using the medical-industrial complexâs profit-maximizing choices. But I respect the rights of social dissidents and appreciate the value of a control population, so I donât care if you donât vaccinate. Pro-disease, anti-medicine, or âfor the good of the speciesâ, I donât care⌠Iâm against the crushing of dissent, though, and nobody owes me a disease-free community. And also I find the arguments against antivaxxers are usually mean-spirited, selfish and self-righteously derogatory, so they never convince anyone, including me.
Obviously my view is unpopular with both kinds of extremists; Iâm way out on another axis entirely. But I suspect I might speak for a silent majority who oppose coercion or recognize that the internal combustion engines of vaccinated humans create more suffering and death than antivaxxers medical practices do. In the absence of a major global epidemic, I think most people will respect choice.
Interesting, I can respect that.
The thought process that leads to somebody realizing that having an unvaccinated control group is is a viable one, I agree there is a logic behind it.
I can also agree that personal freedom is a valuable thing.
That being said, while Iâm fine with the idea of an individual choosing not to get vaccinated themselves, I can respect the though process behind it.
However, not vaccinating CHILDREN is another matter entirely. Weâre not supposed to âownâ children to the point where weâre allowed to recklessly endanger them, and the thought process behind the decision of most anti-vaxxersâ decisions to not vaccinate their children is generally more akin to reckless endangerment.
So letâs call it âpro-child endangermentâ, weâre just lucky there are so few of them. Children shouldnât suffer because their parents are acting like idiots.
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If someone genuinely sees that as such a threat, let them fight it either through birth control or by euthanizing people. Because as horrible as the latter seems to me, itâs kinder than letting for random children painfully drown in their own lungs. Anybody who sees the kind of pointless torture disease deals out and supports it as a way to keep humans in check has absolutely failed in terms of morality, thank you.
How does that work? Itâs not ok to drive double the speed limit just because you stand an equal or greater chance of killing yourself as bystanders. Itâs not ok to pollute our common air just because you are also stuck breathing it. And itâs not ok to destroy herd immunity just because you, or more likely your children, would also suffer for its absence.
Freedom of choice shouldnât means you get to take unnecessary risks for other people. In cases where we do allow that, itâs generally because it also actually creates the freedom to do a lot more things, or because society is being too stupid to deal with it properly - the overproliferation of internal combustion engines you like to bring up having some aspects of both.
If you want to deal with the stupid parts of that, I am with you, and if you want to consider what kind of choices people should be allowed, I will listen. But if you want to pretend that spreading fatal diseases is anything someone might prefer without being despicably cruel, you are nothing but wrong, and are on your own.
Maybe thatâs what you mean by self-righteously derogatory; for my part, I canât imagine any contempt greater than saying itâs moral to let kids die miserably because there are enough of them. The only reason plague is less threatening than overpopulation is how much weâve done to remove that threat.
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Letâs not forget people of all ages going through chemo.
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Yep.
Figure 11. Political outlooks and risk perceptions.
A different popular claim attributes concern over vaccine risks to a left-leaning political orienta-tion. âVaccine hesitancyâ is, on this account, held forth as the âliberalâ âanti-scienceâ analog to âcon-servativeâ skepticism about climate change (e.g., Green 2011). The survey results suggest that this position, too, lacks any factual basis. In contrast to risks that are known to generate partisan disagreement generallyâones relating to climate change, drug legaliza-tion, and handgun possession, for exampleâvaccine risks displayed only a small relationship with left-right political outlooks. The direction of the effect, moreover, was the opposite of the one associated with the popular view: respondents formed more negative assessments of the risk and benefits of childhood vaccines as they became more conservative and identified more strongly with the Republican Party
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Yep. Iâve been guilty of it enough myself, that I know how thoroughly unconvincing it is. If you want peaceful change, you have to try to be less aggressive and more persuasiveâŚ
Once we tried to kill all the wolves; and once our unction was baptism, but now itâs vaccination. What will tomorrowâs deeply held conviction be, that we will force the unbelieving to accept âfor their own good?â
Ah yes. Trying to carry out a well-supported strategy to make it so that nobody ever has to see their child paralyzed by polio again is just like trying to force a made-up religion on people. Because both are cases people thought they were doing the right thing, it only makes sense to treat them as equivalent, not a sophistic way to side-step whether there are real differences in cost and benefit.
I care a lot about freedom, Medievalist, but to me that means freedom to do things. My perspective comes from knowing people who would not have had the choice to do anything but rot, save lucky medical intervention, from a disease that could be gone by now. I donât think the freedom almost lost here, to make what you want of your life, is inherently outweighed by the freedom of others to make benefit-free choices that endanger that.
Your answer to this has been to ask if death is really such a thing to fear. Well, sure, we all die soon or late; but when people say not to fear it, they usually mean death after a life well-lived, or a heroic death, or so on, not a child twisting and suffocating on phlegm. You criticize my words as too harsh to be persuasive, but I could stay here shouting insults for a year, and I donât think it could match the disdain for other people in that argument. If youâre going to stand by it, you can please drop the tone trolling.
Should people be forced to vaccinate? I think it depends on the risks of doing it, the social costs of making it mandatory, and the risks and social costs of not doing it. Those are all questions that could be considered. But the idea that itâs only imperative to worry greatly about the evil of requiring people not to endanger others, and optional to care about torture visited on the helpless and weak? Thatâs a caricature of âfreedomâ robbed of everything that makes the concept worthwhile.
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I agree with the second sentence of your last paragraph; the only difficulty is the age-old âwho decidesâ question common to all such problems. I wouldnât trust anyone with a True Believer mindset or a completely emotion-based argument to decide. Crusaders scare me more than disease does.
I lost a friend while going through chemo because we were discussing the dangers of the flu that season and she mentioned that no one in her family had been vaccinated for anything. I looked at her in horror and said âyou know Iâm going through chemo, right?â She just looked at me blankly. I told her my family had to avoid being around her family for the duration of the process. She still looked at me blankly, not understanding why that would be.
Freedom to kill me is not really freedom, at least not for me.
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Much better argument (although the final accusatory note weakens its persuasiveness) but be careful - that same argument can be easily extended to justify permanently quarantining you due to the existence of bubble people. You donât want to explicitly posit that your own vulnerabilities are grounds for the suppression of othersâ freedoms, thatâs a really bad idea. Stick with the concept that antivaxxers will cut themselves off from their friends in need - thatâs a strong persuasion.
I hope you did educate your former friend, and I hope she is vaccinated now.
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This is what you get when people donât study science but believe in woo-woo and also believe that âMother Gaiaâ will take care of everything.
I was thinking last night that I might be OK with people refusing to vaccinate their children so long as they also agree to permanently quarantine themselves and their children in their house for the rest of their lives.
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I wasnât exactly at my most chipper, so expending energy to explain the basics of vaccines was beyond my ability at that moment. And of course she didnât magically become convinced that vaccines are medically useful and safe just because I pointed out that she could have put me in the hospital or even killed me. The fact that her choice had ongoing potential negative consequences for others at her workplace, her childrenâs schools, grocery stores, etc. was unimportant to her.
In many east Asian countries, people voluntarily wear face masks when they are out in public if they know they have a cold or are otherwise feeling under the weather. That seems a much more positive, responsible, and thoughtful personal choice to make, rather than knowingly spreading germs in the name of personal freedom.
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Are you aware that the pollution that you personally will cause to be pumped into the atmosphere during your lifetime (from your car, your home furnace, the creation of the computer that you are using to talk to me, etc. etc. etc.) may kill more people than any single anti-vaxxerâs actions ever will? Are you even capable of considering that as a possibility, or are you going to reject the idea out of hand because it contradicts your image of self?
Antivaxxers are a scapegoat. Weâre all contributing to evil, but some of us like to pretend that weâre better than ignorant people who donât understand what their best medical options are, as we scarf down our rainforest-destroying UnHappy Meals.
Carp, now Iâm being self-righteous too. Sorry, forget all that.
