Anti-antivaccine crap. (NWS)
So there's a few articles going around (this is something like a 4th order of commentary at this point, commentary on a commentary on an article about a situation...), one that I've simply seen reproduced is by Bill Sardi. Bill has written a book, so he's clearly far smarter than I am. Actually, lots of books. So he is *waaay* more smarter than I am.
The original article that Sardi is commenting on, by Amy Wallace at Wired.com, can be found here.
The point that they're going for (they make this clear elsewhere) is that in the before-time, rates of Autism were low and so were rates of Vaccination. Now, rates of Autism are high and so are rates of Vaccination. Perfectly healthy babies get vaccinated, and shortly thereafter some of those babies are diagnosed with Autism.
The claim is that there is a positive correlation with vaccination rates and rates of Autism spectrum disorder (at the societal level), and a positive correlation temporally between a particular individual being vaccinated and that individual being diagnosed with autism.
"Correlation + correlation = causation" is the argument, but they object to it being placed in those terms (because it's clearly wrong when put that way). Their argument has developed over time. Initially Thiomersal was the culprit of choice, but many of the claimants moved away from that as it was shown to not be related to Autism rates (Thiomersal was removed from many vaccine programs, and the autism rates did not drop in response). Some of the less naive arguments are that genetic predispositions plus 'lots of vaccines' equals autism. Evidence? None.
The fundamental error in all these arguments are Black and White thinking: something is either always good, or always bad; Correlation/Causation fallacies (seeing two things happening at once, and declaring that one is causing the other); Confirmation bias over-riding data; and general demands that governments/medical establishment 'solve the problem' while not knowing what the problem is.
Never mind the ad hominems... Oh, the Ad Hominems.
And yes: I'm insulting these idiots. But I'm not saying that their argument is bad because they are idiots: they are idiots because of the arguments they are making. That's the difference between just being an ass, and being a fool. (I fully accept an accusation of the former, which doesn't invalidate my points at all. cf. Ad Hominem)
Sardi's article has been reposted (verbatim) repeatedly, and even when different articles are posted, they contain the same nuggets (of shit) as his. So, to address those points:
In the interest of clarity, I'm going to deal with his points in order. I'm going to quote in context (as much as I can), and I'll embolden the important parts of his statements. Ideally this will avoid any concerns about being taken out of context, and should allow people to follow what I'm saying fairly closely.
Wired.com, that Conde Nast online publication that caters to techy people, has published a wave of articles critical of those who oppose massive over-vaccination of the American population.
This presupposes that there is, indeed, over-vaccination of the population. In fact, the argument put forward by the various 'people' that Wallace derides *is* that there is over-vaccination taking place. Evidence for this claim? None.
These articles declare those individuals who oppose mass vaccination to be "misinformants." Celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, Don Imus and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who openly oppose submission to mass vaccination, are belittled. These articles claim those who don’t get vaccinated are endangering everybody else.
Misinformants: There is a body of information that is established. You want to argue against that, go ahead: go get a science degree and run some rock solid tests. If you want to deny the germ theory of disease, or establish that vitamins can create a total immunity to disease: get out there and do the research. Because it's not out there right now. That which is out there already is, by definition, established. To claim that what is established (with a significant body of data and tests behind it) is wrong, to *declare* it wrong, and to advise a line of action that runs counter to the established information: this is misinformation. Such a person giving out misinformation is a misinformant. Object to the term, fine, but until you do the research (which none of the listed people have done; none of them have any science qualifications at all), you are a misinformant.
Submission: this is a recurring theme, that vaccination (like TV) is a personal choice and should not be 'forced' upon the population. To keep this short: personal liberty is king when the choice affects you and you alone; personal liberty is set to one side when your choices will harm others (cf. blood transfusions for the kids of Christian Scientists; seatbelts). When you refuse vaccinations for your children, you are opening them up to illness, and you are also providing ground for the illnesses to spread (cf. recent measles deaths in the UK).
"These articles claim...": we typically use 'claim' when we want to emphasise that something is just a bare assertion, with no data in it's favour (like my repeated use of the word in this article). In Sardi's case, he's using it falsely: there *is* data backing up the claim that a highly vaccinated population is more disease resistant than one that's less vaccinated. It's basically the germ theory of disease: if you get an illness, you will spread the illness to other people. If you don't get the illness, you won't. If you are vaccinated, you won't get the illness. If you are not vaccinated, even if you don't show symptoms, you can be a carrier of the illness.
These wired.com articles are written by skilled writers and they make strong though narrow arguments. The second title, "How to win an argument about vaccines" suggests those who oppose vaccination are irrational and ill informed and their thinking needs to be changed by those of superior intelligence.
Let me clarify: if these articles merely suggest that those who oppose vaccination are irrational and ill informed, then those articles are making a basic mistake.
If you don't know how vaccinations work, and the data behind them: you are ill informed.
If you have read the appropriate information, and have simply decided that it's nonsense: you are irrational. (key phrase here: "simply decided")
If you refuse to read about vaccinations, refuse to get some basic medical knowledge, and reject the germ theory of disease: you are both irrational and ill-informed.
Strong words? Yes.
I will not soften words for people whose actions are leading to deaths caused by otherwise-wiped-out illnesses. If there's a kid with cancer (or otherwise immuno-suppressed) in your neighbourhood, your unvaccinated child puts the other child at risk. Your idiocy may lead to their death.
The war is not vaccines versus alternatives, but is characterized as science versus pseudoscience. The authors of the wired.com reports haven’t the brainpower or critical thinking to question the twelve published studies that conclude vaccines don’t cause autism. What matters is that their god of science has been challenged. And there may be nothing wrong with those studies, it’s just that the vaccine proponents aren’t looking outside the box, about questions that aren’t being asked but should be.
Alternatives: because the alternatives are pseudoscience. Simply changing one's diet does not make one immune to measles. After you catch Measles, your body may successfully fight it off; vitamins don't teach your immune system how to better combat measles.
Twelve published studies: So "there may be nothing wrong with these studies" ("that conclude that vaccines don't cause autism"), but we should keep claiming that vaccines cause autism? This is just blatant stupidity. To paraphrase: 'the science is done, and correct, but we should just keep claiming the wrong thing over and over. But don't call us irrational or ill-informed!'.
Here is how reporter Amy Wallace poses the battle:
"And finally, the so called ‘bogus’ treatments for autism don’t exist in opposition to scientific treatments, they exist because of an absence of scientific treatments. There is no cure and as of yet, no known cause for autism. The medical community is still working out how to even test kids for autism. How can you possibly fault a parent for being fearful and wanting to help their child and using whatever method is available to them. Every disease has gone through this phase, before cancer had a clear cut medical approach to treatment people tried all sorts of treatments that we now consider scientifically unsound."
Of course there are no cures for cancer either. Cancer treatment results in a faster demise of the patient. So the example provided here is flawed.
This is a non sequitur. There are several cures for several types of cancer, and timely cancer treatment frequently results in remission of that cancer. To some extent, his argument here is a form of equivocation, in that Sardi is implying that 'cure' means 'and it never comes back'. (this is, essentially, a 'get out' clause to his argument)
Wallace is using 'cure' in the weak sense (gets rid of symptoms), and Sardi is using the strong sense. Cheap move.
Recognize that vaccines, antibiotics and anti-flu drugs are driving humanity towards a box canyon. Eventually there will be no antibiotics, vaccines or man-made drugs that germs haven’t developed resistance towards. Follow these vaccine pied pipers and there will be a day when billions of people die of needless plagues because of over-reliance upon vaccines.
So vaccines and antibiotics work in entirely different ways: antibiotics attack bacteria with an aim to directly destroy the bacteria. The bacteria that survive are could have survived due to an immunity to the agent that was deployed. Those bacteria could multiply, and in the future there could be a strain of bacteria that are now immune to that agent. (ie the agent only killed off the ones that weren't immune)
Vaccines are different. To claim that they operate in the same way is to fundamentally misunderstand how they work. One would have to be grossly ill-informed and/or irrational to believe that vaccines work in the same way as antibiotics.
A Vaccine is not an agent designed to kill a certain type of microbial life form: a vaccine is a modified microbial lifeform that is, in large numbers of the unmodified form, dangerous to our health. Much like introducing new food to a dog, the vaccine presents the lifeform to the immune system, so it can learn about the lifeform.
Viruses out in the world cannot become immune to vaccines, because the vaccines don't interact with the virus.
When that day comes, humanity will be using remedies that are now being ridiculed by the proponents of vaccines - vitamin D, vitamin C, the trace mineral selenium and extracts from oregano (carvacrol), garlic (allicin) and grape skins (resveratrol, quercetin) to quell future epidemics without treatment resistance.
These "remedies" don't work. Period. They're not going to magically start working in the future, in the same sense that me flapping my arms is never going to get me off the ground.
Amy Wallace recounts here experience at an anti-vaccine conference:
"To a one, the speakers told parents not to despair. Vitamin D would help, said one doctor and supplement salesman who projected the equation "No vaccines + more vitamin d = no autism" onto a huge screen during his presentation. (If only it were that simple.) Others talked of the powers of enzymes, enemas, infrared saunas, glutathione drips, chelation therapy…"
Yes, we who oppose unquestioned vaccination want good scientific underpinnings behind treatments for infectious disease too. It just depends upon what science you are reading.
Right: are you reading science, or pseudoscience? If you're talking about "the powers of enzymes, enemas, infrared saunas, glutathione drips, chelation therapy…", then you are reading pseudoscience.
How about "Vitamin effects on the immune system: vitamins A and D take centre stage," recently published in the journal Nature Review Immunology (Sept 2008 8(9):685-98), written by researchers at Harvard Medical School.
Here Sardi (lying sack of shit that he is) implies that the research here has anything to do with the above list of nonsense, when it doesn't. From that link:We present and discuss our current understanding of the essential roles of vitamins in modulating a broad range of immune processes
Nowhere does it say "we present and discuss how taking vitamin supplements will make you immune to all disease!". Nor does the research relate or pertain to enemas. Linking to this article is, again, a non sequitur.
Modern medicine wouldn’t be hiding any of its vaccine mistakes in the closet, would it? Uh, think again, a vaccination program in 1993 was so lethal that it set back the life expectancy of Americans for the first time since the 1918 Spanish flu, but it was completely white-washed - never even reported. (See here.)
Irrelevant. Appeal to Fear, Appeal to Ignorance, Poisoning the Well fallacy. I'm impressed that Sardi managed to roll so many fallacies into a single small paragraph...
What "people" were in involved in 1993? Are they the same people as now?
What "vaccination program" is he talking about?
If you check his link, it leads to an article written by a "Bill Sardi"... oh, wait... Same guy. Who posits that an increase of deaths in 1993, of a large number of death-by-flu was caused by a flu vaccine. He asserts this. Evidence? None. Correlations? Sure, there's a couple. It must be nice living in a world where you can imply and posit something in Article A, and then in Article B claim A as a definitive source for your bullshit.
As you read my rebuttal to the vaccine cartel here, you should not be intimidated by scientists or doctors who claim to know more than you do. I’m going to take you on a short course to examine some recent research studies for yourself. You can click on the links to read the abstracts of these studies.
Cartel: implications of criminality.
Knowledge: the doctors/scientists spent at least 10 years in various Universities studying their rear ends off. Unless you *also* have an MD or Ph.D after your name, they do know more than you, in their area of expertise. That is not to say that one shouldn't ask the doctor questions, or put them on the spot. Do some reading, for sure, but while you may have spent an hour or three researching a specific topic, your short, specialised education does not weigh the same as the body of knowledge they have spent a large percentage of their life learning, and internalising. You're damn straight that they know more than you. And they are fallible. These are not exclusive traits.
Abstracts: please, please read the abstracts of any study Sardi puts forward. They largely don't support the conclusions that he's drawing, and he's relying on the fact that you will just adopt the "well, he wouldn't reference studies that don't support him" stance. He would, and he does.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota note that prenatal viral infection is associated with the development of schizophrenia and autism. These researchers took laboratory mice and exposed them to flu viruses in the womb and found that this produced a gene expression pattern consistent with what is seen in autism. [Schizophrenia Research 2009 Jul; 112(1-3):46-53.]
In 2005 the same researchers showed, for the first time, that prenatal flu virus infection in early pregnancy leads to "alterations in a subset of genes in brains of offspring potentially leading to permanent changes in brain structure and function." [Synapse. 2005 Aug; 57(2):91-9.]
Ok.
So... here's the studies that he's claiming for his case. Here are some questions to ask (Sardi is all about asking questions, right?):
Why doesn't Sardi mention the "sublethal dose of human influenza virus" that the abstracts mention?
What is a "sublethal dose of human influenza virus"?
Is a "sublethal dose of human influenza virus" the same as what is in a vaccine? (hint: no)
Is there a difference between a brain of an x-trimester foetus, and the brain of a 2-year-old child? (hint: yes)
Sardi wants you to conflate these studies with vaccinations, when they are entirely different.
From the same study, examine the tremendous difference in brain chemicals (called neurotransmitters) between flu-infected and uninfected laboratory mice. [Schizophrenia Research 2008 Feb; 99(1-3):56-70.]
What is the name of this study?
"Maternal infection leads to abnormal gene regulation and brain atrophy in mouse offspring: implications for genesis of neurodevelopmental disorders."
That's right, not "the effects of vaccinations on a mouse-brain".
This study is about the effects of flu when the mother gets infected with flu, and passes it to the child in her womb. This is what we're trying to avoid through vaccination. Ill-informed? Irrational? He read the papers, and then lied about what they were about: I judge 'asshole' to be appropriate.
This science is being inappropriately used to target pregnant women for early flu vaccination. I wrote these researchers, saying their studies are a tacit admission that vaccines could potentially induce brain disorders in the womb since the vaccines ARE the virus, or at least less active forms of the flu virus (the nasally-instilled flu vaccine IS the "live" virus). Show the public the gene expression patterns in fetal mice exposed to the flu vaccine. This is an experiment they don’t conduct.
Vaccines are the virus: this is a lie. Way above I mentioned that vaccines are modified viruses. In an injected vaccine, the virus is dead. That's the modification: not-alive. In the nasal-spray, the virus is modified in such a way that it can only survive in the nasal passages, and dies if it moves elsewhere. Go look it up. The CDC is a good place to start. If you don't trust the CDC: it was nice knowing you. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. I'm not claiming the CDC are infallible, but just rejecting the CDC out of hand is just irrational and ill-informed.
After here, the article descends into hyperbole, where Sardi says:
Where are all these communicable diseases coming from that require a plethora of vaccines? America needs to practice preventive medicine by screening entrants into the country. Whooping cough, hepatitis and tuberculosis travel over the border in large numbers every day and there is no public health screening program, not even in schools or food establishments where immigrant children and workers abound. We are allowing disease to be spread to create a larger market for the vaccines.
Seriously. Wtf.
Sardi has just demonstrated racism. Hold him up as a leader of your cause at you own risk.
As for the analysis of all the stuff here:
Am I a scientist? No.
Am I even studying science? No.
But I spent an hour reading his article, Wallace's article, and the information that they both referenced. I spent time trying to read what the researchers have said, and how that compares to what Sardi has said.
If you would prefer to be neither ill-informed nor irrational: it takes work. Put in the effort, or you may have a racist as your cheerleader. The choice is yours.