Okay, I’ll try not to be snarky too. What I’ve been trying to explain to you is that you don’t follow the flow of threads before shooting from the hip sometimes. Here, for example. My post was #3, and it was responding to #2, which talked about Maher’s views on prohibition laws. He used to be much more conservative (he supported Bob Dole in 1996) — thus, the observation that he has moved leftward.
Bill Maher has a lot of nutty ideas about medicine and health.
In addition to the drug/vaccine goofiness, Bill doesn’t believe in the germ theory of disease.
Got that? Everything medical science has learned from Pasteur through present times is wrong, Bill knows better. A quote on the subject of microbes and vaccination:
“I don’t believe in vaccination either. That’s a… well, that’s a… what? That’s another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur theory, even though Louis Pasteur renounced it on his own deathbed and said that Beauchamp(s) was right: it’s not the invading germs, it’s the terrain. It’s not the mosquitoes, it’s the swamp that they are breeding in.”
Oh, the swamp that is Bill’s brain. In case you think his views are especially bizarre, I have actually run into Beauchamp believers on other forums. And of course obsessive antivaxers are all over the place.
This is a main point, and the other being a belief in “disease cycles” - that is, that there are rises and falls in disease rates, vaccinations or no, and that pertussis, polio, et al were declining or going to decline right when mass vaccinations began, and that current outbreaks among the immunized shows that the disease cycle may be moving into a period of growth again and vaccinations won’t stop that.
Another point you often hear is that most of the vaccine preventable illness - measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox and whooping cough in particular - are just not that severe or life threatening in most cases, and letting your child acquire them naturally confers stronger and more long term immunity than vaccines.
Almost all the staunch anti-vac people I know have shared the number of the doctor in town who will offer selective vaccination (which is actually against state law - here it’s either everything or nothing, based only on your religion), and *everyone *gets polio, regardless of their political stance. That one scares even the granola crunchers.
I’m NOT going to defend the anti-vac position, so don’t ask. I’m just telling you what’s out there in the anti-vaccination crowd. For a better and more thorough explanation, check out Aviva Romm’s Vaccinations: A Thoughtful Parent’s Guide. It presents BOTH sides of the debate in what I think is a fairly balanced and thoughtful manner, with cites and everything. It’s a good insight into the anti-vac brain without being so over the top as to make you throw the book away in disgust without reading it. (I think.)
There was a story that just came out saying more people are dying from prescription drugs than street drugs now. He was fired up about that.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/47945.php Plus Ledgers death apparently was due to a combo of prescription drugs.
He went off against vaccines once and Dave Foley pointed out the success of the polio vaccine. He had no response, IIRC.
Like Baldwin, I agree with a lot of what he says (and hence he is right on those issues ;)) and that makes it a bit of a surprise when he goes flying off to bizarro world.
How the hell is anyone supposed to know you are responding to post #2 instead of the OP? It’s not like you quoted it or anything. Why don’t you follow the flow of how people actually post, and not blame Guin because she isn’t a mind reader?
By the way, condescending isn’t really better than snarky. :rolleyes:
Wow, how convenient. :rolleyes:
If you want facts without false “balance” (“well, some say vaccination is useful, and others say it is useless and DANGEROUS”), go to cdc.gov or check out a comprehensive list of sites offering useful evidence-based views and advice on immunization such as this one.
Getting back to Bill Maher, since he is full to the brim of quacky health ideas, I started to wonder if he was a Ron Paul supporter (Paul is a hero to alties, thanks to his opposition to mandatory vaccination, the FDA etc.). Sure enough, Ron Paul is apparently Bill Maher’s hero too.
Because it was post #3, and it followed from post #2.
The irony. It burns.
He’s moved leftward on that, too. He’s an Obama boy now.
Missed that part of your post. There are lots of examples of threads are just flowing conversations. Here’s one in which there are no quote tags as of the first five posts, but people are conversing. It’s not like I did something weird or anything, so why are you bristling so much? Even **Guin ** said it was no big deal, and she meant no snark. What was it that made you say to yourself, “I’d better plop my ass into the middle of that conversation and stir shit up since they’re being civil to each other.”?
Does anyone seriously suggest that the disappearance of smallpox was a result of cycles? Or that it is a bad idea to vaccinate dogs for rabies? I am seriously baffled by such a position.
Smallpox specifically? No, I don’t think so. The ones Romm details with quotes from medical researchers and CDC and WHO statistics which show a decline irrespective of vaccinations are pertussis, measles, polio, rubella, scarlet fever, influenza and diphtheria - some of them are suggested to be in decline because of sanitation and nutrition, and other do to microorganisms waning in virulence. Did you follow the link? It’s to Google book search, so it has some of the pages published there where these ideas are discussed.
I have not heard that, but my personal experiences are not exhaustive (although they are sometimes exhausting.)
Okay.
I will ask what your point is in detailing these bullshit claims in connection with “CDC and WHO statistics”, when obviously the CDC and WHO
are in the forefront of health organizations backing vaccination, and base their views on solid research and statistical evidence.
I’m sure there are people who put credence in the “balanced” approach of Aviva Romm (who among other things has touted connections between the MMR vaccine and autism, claims debunked by much good research). After all, Ms. Romm is a Certified Professional Midwife and Herbalist, so she must know more about vaccines than the CDC and WHO. :rolleyes:
WhyNot, I’m mainly responding to Mahers presumed position that “vaccinations are bad.” it seems to me that if I can show one example of vaccinations being good his whole position collapses.
That’s a lot to read, and I will do so in more depth later, but two things stand out in the bit I read. She equates the “horrors of the disease epidemics prior to vaccines,” with the “[overwhelming] number of heartbreaking stories of vaccine damaged kids,” while providing no cite. Is it possible that these two are even remotely similar? That deaths pre-vaccine are the same as deaths caused by vaccines? That seems like a naked emotional appeal to me.
She also states that if (your) child is the one who has an adverse reaction, then the risk of such a reaction “is 100%,” showing a complete misunderstanding of what “risk” means. Odds are calculated before an event happens, not after. Anything that has already happened has a probability of 1:1.
I am?? It’s not working, I tell you.
From my admittedly rusty memory of paleoepidemiology, there’s a lot of possible reasons for cyclic disease prevalence and a lot of those reasons are far less benign than increased sanitation. Some diseases, for instance, are so virulent that they kill people before they have the chance to be a carrier, so what you might see are isolated flare ups. I don’t know enough about small pox, pertussis, polio, or whatever to know about their epidemiology, but I’ll take my chances with vaccinations.
I provided the information asked for in the thread by **Baldwin *and begun to be answered by Master Blaster, namely, what is it that the anti-vaccination crowd (of whom I am not one, BTW) believes, and a link to a book detailing those beliefs (and debunking some of them).
*I am anti-MANDATORY vaccination, but I am not anti-vaccine. I am simply in favor of medical decisions being made by doctors and patients, not by legislation.
One of the deceptions antivaxers use is to cherry-pick points on a disease incidence graph in order to claim that infectious diseases were already declining before vaccines were introduced and that vaccines shouldn’t get the credit for their relative scarcity today.
For instance, if you look at this graph of measles incidence in the second half of the 20th century, you’ll notice that measles cases spiked and waned in a cyclical manner in the 1950s, with one peak occurring in the late '50s followed by a drop to a low shortly before the measles vaccine was introduced. If you ignore the cyclical changes and focus only on what happened from the late '50s onward, you can claim that measles incidence was dropping and changes due to the vaccine were negligible (this is of course nonsensical given how radically measles declined after the vaccine came into use).
I have seen antivaxers use truncated graphs and tables in this manner to give false statistical backing to their claims.
I watched this due to this thread. I tend to agree with Maher in essence but not in fanaticism. We overprescribe, but he needs to learn that every substance, including plants are chemicals, and that everything is about dosage. Too much Oxygen will kill you, or too much water, Wee for a Wii! It’s all in the dosage, but we don’t need most of the drugs we take, unfortunately we are a health illiterate society.
After all if it were not for an over-abundance of antibiotics we wouldn’t have MRSA.
Maher showing his religious fanaticism was quite amusing.
Thanks for clarifying your position.
Of course, the success of vaccination depends on nearly everyone participating and establishing herd immunity, so opposing mandatory vaccination effectively means gutting these programs.
The same principle applies for various other things mandated by law in the public interest. There are people who think it’s fine if I pay my taxes, but believe they should be exempt.
Maybe you’re not as factually out to lunch as some antivaxers, but your stance puts you squarely in their camp, I’m sorry to say.