Bad Science
I would just like to state, for the record, that virtually everything in this article is complete rubbish.
1. There is no scientific study to determine whether vaccines have really prevented diseases.
Wrong.
2. There are no long-term studies on vaccine safety.
Wrong.
3. There has never been any official attempt to compare a vaccinated population against a non- vaccinated population to know what vaccines are doing to the children.
Wrong again.
… Independent private studies (Dutch & German and the most recent KIGGS (Aug 2011) study involving 7724 children worldwide) have revealed that vaccinated children suffer much more than their un-vaccinated counterparts.
The KIGGS study? You mean, this one? (Just out of curiosity, can anyone explain to me why people who pooh-pooh science findings inevitably try to produce their own science?)
4. The child receives not one but many vaccines. There are practically no tests to determine the effects of multiple vaccines.
5. There is no scientific basis for vaccinating infants.
Measles, TB, Rubella, Pertussis… a number of diseases are (a) more likely to be fatal to infants and children; (b) more likely to cause severe complications in infants and children; and/or are more likely to be contracted by infants or children. This number point is egregiously stupid, all by itself.
6. Children are vaccinated simply because parents can be frightened to forcefully vaccinate their children.
See previous point.
… Vaccinating infants is the most profitable business both for the manufacturers as well as the doctors.
Here, let me link to this old post again. Just on the numbers, this shows that the person writing this article doesn’t understand business or economics, as well as science.
7. Infants, who are advised ONLY mothers milk till the age of six months and beyond because their fragile system will not tolerate anything else are given 36 extremely toxic vaccine shots, including booster doses, an act that defies both logic and science.
8. The Government of India has come out with a quarter page advertisement in The Hindu warning parents not to vaccinate beyond the Government approved vaccines.
I’m honestly confused if this is supposed to tell me that India has a problem with private clinics, the vaccination schedule, or… what.
9. The Orissa Chapter of the Indian Association of Pediatricians has admitted in a letter to the CM, Orissa, that private clinic and hospitals are ill equipped to store vaccines and warned parents not to vaccinate upon the advice of private practitioners and hospitals. In a recent private survey in India 94% of the doctors surveyed expressed concerns about the maintenance of the cold chain in India, 54% of the doctors have said they are afraid of vaccinating their own children and 88% fear that vaccines are unsafe.
OH, okay, so #8 and #9 belong together. Wait, so is this supposed to tell us that we ought not to get vaccinated in a rural clinic in India, but vaccinations are otherwise okay?
10. ALL THE VACCINE INGREDIENTS ARE EXTREMELY TOXIC IN NATURE.
Someone needs to read the Wikipedia page on how toxicity actually works. Here. Water is toxic in nature, given a large enough dose of it.
Here’s another Orac post. For the short version: “The dosages needed to cause hearing, kidney, or nerve damage are at least three or four orders of magnitude higher than the amount of the traces of these antibiotics that are found in any vaccine. Indeed, the usual doses of these antibiotics for an adult are in the gram, not milligram or microgram range…
Sodium chloride is in the vaccines! Table salt! Run away! The vaccines are going to kill us all! Or maybe give us hypertension. But what about potassium chloride? Lots of foods have potassium chloride, lots of potassium chloride. Bananas, for instance, are famous for having a lot of potassium. So do Romaine lettuce, spinach, celery, broccoli, cucumbers, and a number of other vegetables. Oh, no! Not that too! The vegetables are going to kill us all too! (Now I’m getting an image of a certain episode of Lost in Space.) But what about calcium chloride? Well, it’s used in lots of foods, too. It can be found in sports drinks as part of the electrolytes used, in various snack foods, and in other foods.”
11. Vaccines contain highly toxic metals, cancer causing substances, toxic chemicals, live and genetically modified viruses, bacteria and toxoids, contaminated serum containing animal viruses and foreign genetic material, extremely toxic de-contaminants and adjuvants, untested antibiotics
Virtually every clause is either incorrect or missing important context, like the median lethal dose in the previous note about toxicity. There are no untested antibiotics in vaccines.
… none of which can be injected without causing any harm.
Speaking purely from an epidemiological standpoint, there’s an awful lot of unharmed folks around who have been vaccinated.
12. The mercury, aluminum and live viruses in vaccines may be behind the huge epidemic of autism
No. Just no. No, no, no. Nuh-uh.
13. The CDC of USA, the vaccine watchdog, has publicly admitted that its much-publicized 2003 study denying any link between vaccines and autism is flawed…
Here’s a link for the first. And another. More here.
… The Chief of CDC Dr. Julie Gerberding (now head of the Vaccine Division of Merck) has confessed to the media (CNN) that vaccines can cause “autism like symptoms”.
… and that’s not exactly what she said. She said: “So if a child was immunized, got a fever, had other complications from the vaccines. And if you’re predisposed with the mitochondrial disorder, it can certainly set off some damage. Some of the symptoms can be symptoms that have characteristics of autism.” (which makes the vaccine a proximate cause of a symptom, the fever is the root cause) and she also said ten seconds later in the same interview ” But there have been at least 15 very good scientific studies on the Institute of Medicine who have searched this out. And they have concluded that there really is no association between vaccines and autism.”
14. In the year 1999, the US Government instructed vaccine manufacturers in the USA to remove mercury from vaccines “with immediate effect”. But mercury still remains a part of many vaccines. The vaccines with mercury were never recalled and were given to children up to the year 2006. “Mercury free” vaccines contain 0.05mcg to 0.1mcg of mercury, still posing a danger to the infant considering that mercury tends to accumulate in the body and that there are today many sources of mercury exposure…
Do I need to put more links in to put the whole mercury thing to rest?
… As per an American Academy of Pediatricians study: “Mercury in all of its forms is toxic to the fetus and children and efforts should be made to reduce exposure to the extent possible to pregnant women and children as well as the general population.”
I’ll just put this link to the American Academy of Pediatricians’ page on vaccinations right here.
That’s as far as I can go today.
I’ve come around to @russell-saunders ‘ way of thinking about this. We should not force people to vaccinate their children, but we should presume that they do want this. But if they opt out, they should be given a comprehensive lecture and a suggestion that they find a pediatrician willing to treat the diseases in question, be required to sign a form indicating that they have been counseled that they leave their children in particular and children in general more vulnerable to otherwise-preventable but very serious to in some cases fatal diseases, and advice that their insistence that their children not be vaccinated may be used against them later as evidence that they have made decisions contrary to their childrens’ best interest.Report
The only Problem with this argument is that it still leaves the rest of us vulnerable to the effects of unnecessarily high numbers of unvaccinated people. Where this matters most is in the case of those too young to be protected (infants) and those who legitimately cannot use certain vaccines due to allergies or the like. These individuals will be subject to the decreased resistance of the ‘herd’ and to increased likelihood of coming into contact with infected individuals.
I’d be just fine with people not vaccinating, if it only affected themselves, but when parents make these decisions for their children, and then pass on the costs even more widely, there is a real problem.Report
The hope is that if the system were changed to make it mildly more difficult to opt out the high rates of -non-vaccination would diminish significantly.Report
I am working on a lengthier article on this very subject at this very moment in time.
I’ll let you know if/when it gets published.Report
Given your recent announcement I’ll be astounded and awestruck to see much beyond your Stupid Tuesday posts for awhile. Pleased, but bewildered.Report
I submitted my piece about mandatory vaccination over at the outlet where the idea was pitched to me. We’ll see if the editor there likes it.
And I’m trying to get at least one thing per week to Daily Beast. One of the things that was negotiated as we considered the recently-announced expansion of our family is that I would have time set aside to write, and the Better Half has been true to his word.Report
Would you say that they should be denied access to public schools, parks (this one would be hard to enforce), and libraries unless documentation of vaccination could be proved?Report
This is one of those times when I kinda hope that our litigious society solves this problem for us.
Why nobody has sued the living daylights out of someone for exposing their child to measles is beyond me.Report
@patrick in the law there is a concept of “causation.” My failure to meet a legal duty must somehow cause the damage you suffered. If we legislatively impose a legal duty to vaccinate a child (a duty that does not currently exist), you must still prove that my failure to vaccinate my child is what caused your child to get the mumps. Seems to me that could be a pretty tall order.Report
@burt-likko
Technically, it’s do-able. Given a small population of infected, a Zero can be found. Logistically & legally it’s much trickier, as you would need to be able to take infection DNA profiles from the Zero & enough of the population to work up a profile of the infection progression. Basically we would need a legal obligation on the part of the un-vaccinated to submit to a swab/blood sample every time there was an infection in the relevant population.
So a law that says the public health agency can come around to your house and test your kid anytime there is a local case of whatever your kid in not vaccinated against.Report
And at this point, we’re imposing duties that are (debatably, I realize) even more restrictive of freedom and privacy than having to submit to a mandatory vaccination.
What made me move away from advocating mandatory vaccination is that it is an imposition on freedom. And parents do have a right, a Constitutional right, to control the raising and upbringing of their children. See Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 43 S.Ct. 625, 67 L.Ed. 1042 (1923), and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 45 S.Ct. 571, 69 L.Ed. 1070 (1925). In my opinion, these rights have been interpreted by courts so narrowly as to be next to meaningless, and that’s on balance a bad thing.
Moreover, since we can’t be sure that any particular baby will or will not later develop a preventable disease, we can’t say that the state has a compelling interest in abridging that freedom, so much as I dislike the result, we just can’t have a law. Your point that if we impose additional burdens on the exercise of this freedom will let us gather more information, while perhaps helpful, again doesn’t seem to advance a compelling interest (even protecting health, safety, and life) since once the disease is out, figuring out where it came from doesn’t appear calculated to affect treatment or further prevention in any meaningful way.
Parents unquestionably have the right to make medical decisions for their children and that includes opting out of treatments their doctors recommend. So we have no choice but to respect the rights of parents to control the way their children are raised — even if they use their rights in ways that personally, I strongly disapprove of. Because that’s what it means to take rights seriously.Report
you must still prove that my failure to vaccinate my child is what caused your child to get the mumps. Seems to me that could be a pretty tall order.
Your daughter got the mumps. You’ve told everyone all about the evils of vaccination for years.
“My son got the mumps. Nobody else has the mumps. I contend that it’s reasonable that your daughter gave my son the mumps, as they’re in the same class. I’ve had a swab done, and a DNA analysis performed on my son’s mumps, and you’ve refused to test your daughter to show that her mumps didn’t infect my son.”
I haven’t served on enough personal injury juries to know how well that would fly, as an argument (or even if you could make it without an objection), but that sounds like the sort of argument that might get some traction among a jury.Report
What made me move away from advocating mandatory vaccination is that it is an imposition on freedom. And parents do have a right, a Constitutional right, to control the raising and upbringing of their children. … In my opinion, these rights have been interpreted by courts so narrowly as to be next to meaningless, and that’s on balance a bad thing.
This is the real issue. As reasonable as it seems to say parents should have to vaccinate their kids, when parental rights are “interpreted…so narrowly as to be next to meaningless,” then the line that keeps us from demanding lots of unreasonable things has been wiped away. I know a guy who wants to prosecute parents who raise their kids in church for child abuse, for teaching them to believe in a fairy-tale, non-scientific world. If we can demonstrate harm to the kids, why not?Report
@jm3z-aitch
That’s more or less where I come from on the pyramid scheme thread, point of fact.
Given the current rate of under-vaccination, it doesn’t currently fall into a “big enough problem to require that solution” territory.Report
@patrick the res ipsa loquitor argument is indeed powerful in certain factual situations. With the embellishments you add, this one too. Without them? Well, we’d have to see.Report
I agree with @burt-likko and @jm3z-aitch . While I agree wholeheartedly with @patrick that not vaccinating children is wrong-wrong-wrong, I struggle with coming up with an appropriate way to require it.
I understand vaccination is somewhat unique in A) the harm it can cause others and B) the more direct lines we can draw between the behavior and the associated risk*. I’m just not sure it is unique enough.
* What I mean by this is that raising a child in a home filled with hate (e.g., one that actively promotes Neo-Nazism) probably increases the likelihood in the aggregate that the child will do harm to others, some will rebel against the teachings or be largely immune to them. It is a much less direct, one-to-one action-to-risk relationship.Report
Understandably, medical science is one field where there is a lot of incomplete knowledge.
But I am still amazed at how aggressively presumably intelligent people push back against the areas where things are well studied. I remember reading about how Eugene, OR at one time (maybe it currently does) had a large population of very well educated people who refused to vaccinate for one or more of the reasons you link to.Report
@mad-rocket-scientist
I’m not so amazed. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), I’m sometimes prone to a knee-jerk sympathy for a lot of these groups (anti-vaxxer, anti-anthropogenic-global-warming, young earth creationism). On some level I actually “get” them, even to the point of getting defensive when I hear perfectly reasonable and fact-based criticism of those positions.
Frankly, I’m not sure I understand my own sympathy. I accept the pro-vaxxer, pro-AGW, and pro-evolution+maybe-some-first-cause-but-it’s-a-hard-thing-to-prove-or-know positions. I also realize that some of the positions toward which I have this knee-jerk sympathy, such as anti-vaxxism, can wreck real harm.Report
That’s Eugene alright. I’m never going to Eugene, due to the preponderance of death threats.Report
On a related note, did everyone see this Twitter exchange?Report
That’s awesome.Report
A whole series on bad science is going to be super space awesome. Now that you’ve started, I can’t believe you haven’t done this until now.
Very excited for this.Report
They’re surprisingly easy to get into, and then you get into a weird space, and then you start to lose patience, and then you wind up sounding like Orac every day, and you wind up hating people for being uneducated, which is psychically trying to say the least.
The trick is to take a break when you’re still just in the weird space.
Kinda like binge-reading Travis McGee novels. You can really get into them and then all of a sudden you’re feeling suicidal.Report
Really well written rebuttal with good research 😉
You guys all know about Ben Goldacre and Bad Science, right?
AdamReport
Yes, I’m a fan of Ben.Report
I should very much enjoy more posts like this, @patrick . Just sayin’.Report
It occurs to me that a series of posts on Good Science is probably a good idea as a primer.
It’s also sort of a Ordinary University class. Hm.Report
Hello from Taiwan,
Haven’t been here for awhile. Like this topic, thought I’d posit this rough and tumble as an example of the “proper” way to do science versus the Borg groupthink exhibited by the climate crowd. There should be diversity of opinion not 94% alignment of “models” 100% of which were wrong in the identical wrong direction compared to reality. But what do I know, I’m only here presenting at a scientific conference (plus some sight seeing).Report
Wanted to add this link to the actual science:
http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2014/03/13/autism-and-intellectual-disability-incidence-linked-environmental-factors
Report
I smell a lawsuit!
[level of the tobacco ones, and I’ll say no more.]Report