Tag: Anti-vaxxers

  • Guest post: Lies wrapped in emotional appeal

    Guest post by Jen Phillips, originally on Facebook and posted here by permission.

    The movie ‘Vaxxed’ is showing at the David Minor Theater in Eugene this week. It’s billed as a documentary, but, like many other films claiming that genre, it’s chock full of inaccuracies and spin. For a ‘reality based’ gal like me, most of the time I just find that annoying, but in the case of ‘Vaxxed’, I find it dangerous and infuriating.

    Why dangerous? Because lying about vaccine safety scares a significant number of parents into opting out of vaccines for their children. That puts the children and their communities at risk for serious diseases. “Lying” isn’t a term I throw around lightly, but that’s exactly what this is: lies wrapped in emotional appeal. William Thompson, the so-called CDC Whistleblower, was taped without his knowledge, and the filmmakers spliced his words together to fabricate meaning that was not in his original statements. What does Dr. Thompson actually say about vaccines? Here is a direct quote:

    I want to be absolutely clear that I believe vaccines have saved and continue to save countless lives. I would never suggest that any parent avoid vaccinating children of any race. Vaccines prevent serious diseases, and the risks associated with their administration are vastly outweighed by their individual and societal benefits.

    Vaccines do not cause autism. The MMR vaccine (the focus of this movie) does not cause autism, or make children more susceptible to autism, or have any influence whatsoever on the manifestation of autistic characteristics. Andrew Wakefield is a disgraced and defrocked former physician who has gotten rich by fearmongering to vulnerable parents. He is not a reliable source of information on vaccine safety OR autism.

    Why infuriating? So many reasons. It’s infuriating that this misinformation puts the health of so many vulnerable people at risk. It makes me fidget with frustration that this is STILL being debated, when mountains of research and population level studies all over the world have shown that it is a non-issue. Mostly, though, it’s that the filmmakers and many of their associated anti-vaccination activists demonize autism as a fate worse than death. Presenting the possibility of death or serious disability from vaccine preventable disease as preferable to autism is as harmful as it is heartbreaking. Depicting people on the spectrum as ‘damaged’ or ‘ruined’ in some way is a standard tactic with which to scare parents into not vaccinating, and it’s disgusting.

    If you choose to see this movie, please, please, go in with your eyes open and be aware that it is so far from factual that Andrew Wakefield might as well be beaming in his commentary from a space station orbiting Sirius.

    If you have questions about vaccine safety or autism prevalence, I would be more than happy to provide evidence-based, accessible information if you reach out to me.

  • Doctor of horseshit

    The Australian reports that the University of Wollongong has accepted a PhD thesis from someone in “the social sciences” (it fails to specify, which is frustrating) which claims that there’s a massive conspiracy between the WHO and Big Pharma to promote vaccinations.

    The candidate in question is a prominent anti-vaxxer.

    Judy Wilyman, the convener of Vaccination Decisions and Vaccination Choice, submitted the thesis late last year, concluding Australia’s vaccination policy was not a result of independent assessment but the work of pharmaceutical industry pressure on the WHO.

    The WHO convened a ­“secret emergency committee” funded by drug firms to “orchestrate” hysteria relating to a global swine flu pandemic in 2009, Ms Wilyman said in her thesis.

    “The swine flu pandemic of 2009 was declared by a secret WHO committee that had ties to pharmaceutical companies that stood to make excessive profits from the pandemic,” she wrote.

    Several medical researchers and public health advocates have slammed the PhD thesis — to be awarded through the university’s School of Humanities — with some calling for it to be sent to the university’s academic board for review.

    If she’s in a literature department, maybe there are no criteria by which the thesis would be considered All Wrong and Incompetent and thus rejected, but in any other department…there would be, wouldn’t there? Or should be?

    Ms Wilyman has been the subject of controversy for several years, most notably falsely linking vaccination with autism and questioning whether a family was paid to use their young daughter’s death to promote vaccines.

    In October, she circulated an interview on her Vaccination Choice Facebook page in which anti-vaccination campaigner Sherri Tenpenny suggested Nazi scientists had “infiltrated” new medication research and were working to make “everybody on the planet sicker”.

    Senior immunology academic John Dwyer, spokesman for the Friends of Science in Medicine, said he would write to the university and express his concerns. “The ­candidate (Ms Wilyman) has endorsed a ­conspiracy theory where all sorts of organisations with claimed vested interests are putting pressure on WHO to hoodwink the world into believing that vaccines provide more benefits than they cause harm,” Professor Dwyer said.

    Can people just say any old bullshit and get a PhD?

    The thesis was supervised by Brian Martin, a professor of social sciences at the university with a long history of supporting controversial PhD candidates.

    Another of Professor Martin’s students was Michael Primero, associated with Medical Veritas, a self-described journal of “truth in health science” that alleged the Rockefeller Foundation had declared a war on consciousness through the imposition of musical tuning standards.

    Professor Martin dismissed concerns about the paper, saying they were “not genuine concerns about quality and probity but instead part of a campaign to denigrate viewpoints they oppose”.

    Oh jeezus – it’s not a matter of viewpoints, it’s a matter of making shit up.

    Ms Wilyman’s thesis cited a 27-year-old paper that claimed there was no clear link that human papillomavirus infection is causally related to cervical cancer, despite more recent work suggesting 70 per cent of cervical cancer is related to HPV.

    “The promotional campaigns for HPV vaccine misrepresented the risk of HPV infections and cervical cancer to women in different countries,” Ms Wilyman wrote.

    “This was done in order to create a market for the vaccine.”

    Plus, they’re extra-terrestrials.

  • Guest post: The HPV vaccine saves lives

    Guest post by David Robert Grimes, first posted on Facebook and posted here by permission.

    I like to think I’ve become immune to bad science stories in mainstream media, but every now and then a story so rife with obscene errors and dangerous precedent that it rudely awakens me from my creeping nonchalance. TV3’s abysmal and completely bad faith scaremongering on the HPV vaccine tonight did just that. I’ll be writing one of two longer features on this shortly for a few different publications, but there a few crucial points I think needs to be clarified….

    (1) The HPV vaccine saves lives. There are dozens of strains of HPV, and most sexually active adults have at least a few hanging around. Some are benign, harmless. Others cause genital warts. And others still can lead to mutation and induce cancers, usually of the cervix and sometimes of the penis. And yes, these cancers are often fatal. The HPV vaccine saves by preventing these negative consequences.

    (2) Every vaccine related “illness” outlined in the ostensible documentary could be much more readily explained by common psychological and physical illnesses. Humans as a rule are bad at cause and effect, and this is no exception. A veritable ton of scientific data exists on the HPV vaccine, including a huge trial published this year. None of these alleged side-effects have been observed in studies to date.

    (3) False balance is a thing – the makers of this documentary will no doubt claim that they’re acting in the public interest and presenting “both sides” of a story. This is tangible bullshit which they probably believe themselves. There may well be two sides to any story, but that does not mean those two sides are equal or deserving of equal airtime: If one side is buttressed by vast swathes of evidence and the other totally bereft of it, then it is complete nonsense to paint them as ideas on equal footing. The same staggering stupidity happened with coverage of the MMR vaccine in the early 2000s, and it lead to children dying. In fact, it still bloody well leads to young people dying – Measles infections have broken records each year as the toddlers whose parents refused to get them immunised turn to teens who mingle with no immunity and get infected.

    (4) And that brings us to what will happen here – young women will die because their parents watch this kind of nonsense and come away with the false impression that the HPV vaccine is dangerous. Fuck that – if you have kids, please, for the love of Jesus in a fucking batmobile, get them immunised.

    I rarely bring up my work here, but having dedicated the last few years of my life to cancer research, I am more familiar than I’d like to be with the negative aspects of this class of disease, and it is simply insane that ill-founded nonsense might cause people to succumb to an illness we have the means to harmlessly avoid. I’m pleading with people not to fall for this bullshit and please do not let it go unchallenged. I’ll link up more when I’ve written it, and am slightly less annoyed.

    Dr David Robert Grimes is a physicist and cancer researcher at Oxford University. He is a regular Irish Times columnist and blogs at www.davidrobertgrimes.com. Twitter: @drg1985. He was a joint winner of the 2014 John Maddox Prize for Standing up for Science 

  • For crying out loud, there is no controversy

    On the Media did a great segment on anti-vax this week. You should listen to it to get Bob Garfield’s biting tone, but I want to hit the highlights anyway.

    CLIP:  “The measles outbreak spreads to a fifth bay area county. One local pediatrician accuses vaccination opponents of undermining a basic survival concept…

    BOB: Yes they did, which is why this outbreak was literally inevitable. The Measles Mumps Rubella vaccine had essentially eradicated those childhood diseases in the United States, but when parents began to stop vaccinating their kids, they were creating not just potential patients, but vectors, spreading the disease to the vulnerable. Such as the babies, pre-vaccination age, infected this week in a Chicago day care center.

    And why, and how? Wakefield’s scheme to fill his pockets, and the media’s habit of pretending everything is a “controversy.”

    The nightmare began in 1998 when a British con-man named Dr. Andrew Wakefield faked results and published an article in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet fraudulently claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. It was a lie, which the journal should have figured out long before finally retracting the article 12 years later.

    See what he did there? He said it was a lie. Not a controversy, not a debate; a lie.

    By then, the bogus linkage had already spawned a movement of heartbroken parents struggling to understand what — or who — was to blame for their childrens’ afflictions. Trading as it was on the counterfeit currency of pseudoscience, that movement first languished as a relatively obscure internet subculture — until it was given vast exposure and lethal credibility by…. the media. The likes of Larry King and Oprah simply could not resist the apparent controversy, combined with the celebrity of the anti-vaccinators’ sexpot spokesperson, Jenny McCarthy.

    So now diseases that had been eradicated in this country are storming back – pertussis and measles.

    CLIP:  The US measles outbreak and the vaccine controversy; parents, doctors, even politicians weighing in…on both sides.

    CLIP:   First on the rundown, the escalating numbers of measles cases and the growing debate over vaccinations. It’s turning into a full-fledged political firestorm.

    CLIP:   As the measles outbreak spreads to fourteen states across the country, the debate over vaccinations intensifies.

    BOB: Those clips  aren’t from 1998. They are from this week.  For crying out loud,  there is no controversy. There is no debate. Cynical politicians like Rand Paul and Chris Christie may pander all they want to frightened moms and the tinfoil-hat crowd–just as 49 US Senators can deny man’s role in climate change. But there is no rational basis for their beliefs. They are simply wrong — and when the media frame such idiocy as one side of a debate, they are not only legitimizing ignorance and demagoguery, they are threatening the lives of children.

    That was a treat to listen to.

  • His child is pure

    Here’s a “doctor” who should be struck off.

    An Arizona cardiologist told CNN in an interview that went online Monday that he doesn’t care if his refusal to vaccinate his kids gives other children grave, preventable diseases.

    “I’m not going to sacrifice the well-being of my child. My child is pure,” Dr. Jack Wolfson said in the interview. “It’s not my responsibility to be protecting their child.”

    Wolfson was responding to a public appeal for all parents to vaccinate their children from Arizona pediatrician Dr. Tim Sacks…

    That’s the one we read about yesterday.

    Wolfson dismissed his fellow doctor’s appeal to anti-vaxxers.

    “As far as I’m concerned, it’s very likely that her leukemia is from vaccinations in the first place,” Wolfson said.

    The CNN interviewer asked Wolfson repeatedly if he could live with himself if his unvaccinated child got other children, like Sacks’ daughter, fatally sick.

    “I could live with myself easily. It’s an unfortunate thing that people die, but people die. And I’m not going to put my child at risk to save another child,” he said.

    That’s a disgusting human being right there.

  • Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000

    Mary Wisniewski at Reuters tells us there’s a measles outbreak in Chicago.

    Five babies at a suburban Chicago daycare center have been diagnosed with measles, adding to a growing outbreak of the disease across the United States, Illinois health officials said on Thursday.

    Officials are investigating the cluster of measles cases at KinderCare Learning Center in Palatine, said a statement from the Illinois and Cook County health departments. All the children are under 1 year old and would not have been subject to routine measles vaccination, which begins at 12 months.

    Infants. With measles. Thanks, anti-vaxxers.

    Public health officials have reported that more than 100 people across the United States have been infected with measles, many of them traced to an outbreak that began at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California, in December.

    “These cases underscore the need for everyone who is eligible for the vaccine to ensure that they have been vaccinated,” Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, said in a statement. “There are certain individuals who, because of their age or clinical condition, cannot be vaccinated.”

    A local news station here in Seattle reported last night that there’s a Waldorf school where 38 point something percent of the students are not vaccinated.

    On the advice of health officials, the KinderCare center is excluding until Feb. 24 unvaccinated children and staff who may have been exposed to the virus, according to a statement from Knowledge Universe, KinderCare’s parent company. The center was given a “deep clean” on Wednesday night, the statement said.

    Let’s go back to the good old days when there were no vaccines and diseases kept the population in check.

    Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000 after decades of intensive childhood vaccine efforts.

    Oops.

  • Hey kids – want to get dead?

    Ohhhhhhhhhh dear god. Meet Stephanie Messenger, author of a children’s book about the wonders of having measles.

    As Reasonable Hank points out, measles make you sick.

    Measles can be deadly. Recent outbreaks in Australia, the US, and New Zealand are all traced back to unvaccinated individuals. The overwhelming majority of those infected are unvaccinated or undervaccinated individuals. In Europe there have been several deaths this year alone.

    Yet there’s an imbecile who wrote a book teaching children that vaccinations are ineffective and to embrace childhood disease. Fuuuuuck.