I think it does.
Also:
(from the same link)
Does that mean these kids would have developed Dravet Syndrome no matter what? Or did the vaccine trigger the syndrome in them?
I doubt this will convince the crazies but I think the issue should be settled for most rational parents.
This doesn’t settle anything. To the extent that anyone bases their position on the matter on science, it was settled long ago. To the extent that people base their opinions on senseless irrational hysteria, they’ll continue to do so.
So basically, this changes nothing.
Yes; the problem is that the anti-vaxers are overwhelmingly not just ignorant but irrational. It’s like trying to convince a Truther that buildings really do fall down when you hit them with fuel filled airplanes or the Moon-landing-was-faked guys that a fake wouldn’t have been possible with the whole world watching.
I think that most “rational” parents, or at least those that actually do any research on the topic already know that vaccines are good for children to get.
To answer your question: “In retrospect, the whole-cell pertussis vaccine may have played little role in the underlying illness in many of these children other than to serve as its first trigger.” The kids already had the illness but the vaccines just helped “trigger” the problems earlier then they might have without the vaccine.
You are right that nothing will convince the “crazies.”
I don’t know. I’ve never seen this Dr. Clayton on the cover of People. I’d rather hear it was safe from somebody like Sandra Bullock or Tom Hanks.
There is nothing to settle. Vaccine hysteria is a conspiracy theory, just like faking the Moon landings, 9/11 conspiracy theories, AIDS as an artificially engineered disease, etc. Conspiracy theories by definition have no evidence in support of them, so no amount of real evidence will convince idiots who believe this stuff.
Believers do not operate on the basis of evidence anyway, but of emotion. This emotional need to “believe” seems to me to match up pretty well with incidence of psychological disorders, from the relatively mild like mean world syndrome to all-out delusional paranoia.
You can’t really argue with people like that, and any evidence you present to them will be dismissed as tainted, manipulated, false, etc.
I disagree with you. A “conspiracy theory” is not, by definition, without evidence. It is a theory and may or may not have supporting evidence. After the Watergate break-in and the following cover-up, there were conspiracy theories that some said led all the way to the White House. They were right. Conspiracies exist.
That said, I don’t know that there was ever a conspiracy involved in the “vaccines are dangerous” debaucle. For a while some believed that vaccines were dangerous and without much evidence, spread the word. They were terribly misinformed and, as a result, did a lot of damage.
Yes, it is hard to change their minds once they’ve gone on a nation-wide crusade. There is a natural human response for some people to save face and dig in their heels. That is not a psychological disorder.
Would you provide a cite please for mean world syndrome and a cite that indicates that some people who thought that vaccines were dangerous had all-out delusional paranoia?
I was a classroom teacher and never believed that vaccines were the danger, but I remained openminded until it became obvious that the real danger continued to be, as always, not being vaccinated.
One well-known, widely-trusted talk show did a great disservice by having a misinformed mom on her show to discuss vaccines rather than having scientists on. I think the mother was an actress (which may have given undeserved weight to her words). I heard a lot more about the dangers of vaccines after that. I’m sure that the talk show host and the mother were well-intentioned and not delusional. The mother was wrong and the host had made a poor decision.
There was, on both sides. The antivaxxers believe there’s a coverup meant to downplay the purported vaxxine-autism link. Meanwhile, in reality, there was an actual conspiracy to fake the vaxxine-autism link in order to commit fraud.
In moderation, sure. But once your stupidity is getting innocent children killed, a decent person will put not killing more children above the goal of saving face.
This latest report from the IOM will settle remaining uneasiness among parents in general and perhaps more importantly, sway members of the news media who like to promote a “debate” on this issue, convincing them to move on to other manufactroversies. For certain, the hardcore antivax crowd doesn’t think the issue is settled.
One wonders what “important research” the IOM (deliberately? :eek:) excluded. The famous Generation Rescue phone survey “proving” a vaccine-autism link? The groundbreaking papers the Geiers generated via the “research” they did at home in their “world-class” lab?
And of course we’ll get to hear more about the antivaxers’ insistence on a “vaxed vs. unvaxed study” - where they want to have a large group of unvaccinated children serve as guinea pigs for their delusional beliefs.
I think antivaxers are increasingly marginalizing themselves, but time will tell.
One interesting thing to look for - will the usual alt med/woo sources feel any angst about denouncing the IOM report, seeing as up till now they’ve made frequent use of IOM estimates of deaths due to medical errors. If the IOM is now part of the Pharma Conspiracy, it must be undependable in general - right fellas?
Right there with you, Jackmannii.
The end of the article:
We will never convince everyone.
True enough.
The evidence behind the autism-MMR vaccine link is that the symptoms of autism often begin to show shortly after the vaccine is administered. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
Jenny McCarthy, I believe (may she suffer from droopy tits and crow’s feet).
The other factors are
[ul][li]“There is no evidence of a link” is not exactly the same as “we know for certain that there is no link”. The efforts of real scientists to speak accurately allows the nuts to speak inaccurately. It is like creationists saying “evolution is just a theory”. Yes, it is a theory, but that is not what you are implying.[] Add to that the fact that the exact cause of autism is not known, and you leave enough room for the fruitcakes.[/li][li]Any evidence on vaccines is likely to be done at least partially by, or funded by, the dreaded Big Pharma. Since there really isn’t any link between the MMR vaccine and autism, the evidence is going to come out showing that, by and large. []Therefore, the researchers are in the pocket of BP, and of course they came out finding no link - if they had, they would threaten all the money BP is making poisoning our children. [*]Since herd immunity and other factors reduce the incidence of childhood diseases that once were common (and occasionally serious), the anti-vaxxers can get away with saying “I never vaccinated my children, and they never were sick a day in their lives.”[/ul][/li]
Bottom line is that you cannot use reason to change a position which is not based on reason in the first place.
Regards,
Shodan (who has about a 10% hearing loss in one ear because he did not get the MMR in time)
As I recall, the phone survey showed that vaccinated children had a smaller chance of having autism. Heh.
As Jenny McCarthy said, on “Oprah,” about proof, she pointed to her kid and said, “That’s all the proof I need.”
Same thing for people who think they have allergies, or even me. Just mention bed bugs and I start to itch. I’m scratchnig my back now.
Conspiracies exist all right. Conspiracy theories exist too, but one of their essential characteristics is the lack of good evidence in their favour. When such evidence does surface (as in your Watergate example) they are generally not called conspiracy theories. It is an unfortunate and grievous misuse of the word “theory” (which, incidentally, regularly leads to conspiracy theory proponents challenging sceptics with catch-phrases like “Gravity is a theory too, you don’t believe in that either?”).
If you’re not aware of the conspiracy theories behind vaccines, I suggest you do a bit of reading on it. It is very entertaining (my favourite is the one that says vaccines are pushed on us by Big Pharma in order to make us sick and more dependent on their drugs).
The entire vaccine debacle arose thanks to Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent and irresponsible claims, which he planned to capitalize on. His bullshit study unfortunately made it into The Lancet, though it’s now been retracted. Since then, it’s taken on a bizarre life of its own that real evidence has little chance of quashing.
Misinformation is not, agreed. But the persistence of irrational beliefs that are directly contradicted by the available evidence (and not supported by any decent evidence at all) is indeed a disorder in the sense that it is blind faith in that which is demonstrably false. It is, at the very least, irrational denial and quite possibly a touch of paranoia or schizophrenia. I’m not sure how much exposure you’ve had to conspiracy theorists but one thing you notice very quickly is the desperate need to believe in some grand and malignant plan that it is the theorist’s heroic duty to notice and - in some cases - expose. Cue entrance of Truthers.
Whether the conspiracy is the claim that the Moon Landings were faked for political gain, or that Big Pharma wants your kids to be autistic, or that the US government carried out the 9/11 attacks, it doesn’t matter. Regardless of the subject, true believers of conspiracy theories all share important characteristics, such as the automatic rejection of evidence that speaks against their viewpoint and what I earlier referred to as mean world syndrome - the vaccine controversy is a perfect example.
Mean world syndrome is a term coined by George Gebner (who set up Cultivation Theory which, if nothing else, has several decades of data behind it) to describe certain reactions to a world that is perceived as more dangerous and more intimidating than it really is, often as a result of high television exposure. Gebner argues (fairly convincingly IMO) that modern communication media have accelerated the increase in such worldviews. From my own observations, social media is seriously aggravating this problem, with conspiracy theorists A) easily able to spread misinformative conspiracy theories to thousands of people at will, and B) homogenizing their social media circles with groups of like-minded people who end up reinforcing each other’s irrational beliefs and panic attacks followed by indignant outrage.
I don’t have strong support for the association between psychological disorders and conspiracy theories at the moment, but I don’t think this is a particularly novel claim. Note that I distinguish between someone who is merely misinformed or ignorant, and someone who HAS to believe in conspiracy theories even when presented with strong contradicting evidence. The latter group can hardly be called free of disorder, like (as Wikipedia puts it) “one or a combination of well-understood psychological conditions, and other hypothetical ones: paranoia, denial, schizophrenia, mean world syndrome”.
At the very least, the ‘question’ has (hopefully) made parents more aware of what they’re injecting their kids full of.
When I was a kid, I probably had about 5 to 8 shots. Now, my son is supposed to have 18 by the age of 7.
The anti-vax vs vac dispute will end when a cost effective, safe, broad spectrum antiviral make vaccines obsolete.
Which ironically would be a concession by the vax crowd.
Oh dear.
You realize that shots are mostly water? And what is in the shots is harmless in such small quantities?
I’m very happy that they now have more shots now.
Take just one vaccine, the hib:
As a result of the vaccine:
Parents should be aware of stats like that far more than they should be aware of whatever stupidity comes out of Jenny McCarthy’s tiny brain.
I literally have no idea what position you’re endorsing based on this post.
I sent the link (just for laughs) to an acquaintance who is an anti-vaxer and her response was that this proves nothing, that it’s all part of the conspiracy by the government and Big Pharma(tm…arr) and that it’s a shame that people can’t see the truth and the fact that the deaths and maiming of these kids is simply to make Bush(yep) and the corporate fat cats profits, blah blah blah blah blah…
So…no, it doesn’t answer the question. For the gods sake, people still think that a cabal of government officials (lead by Chaney and Bush) with Jews and possibly space aliens took down the twin towers and bombed the Pentagon with a shark jumping cruise missile! You figure that the anti-vaxer types are any less nuts??
-XT