Now that the man who started all this has been proven to be a fraud what are they saying? Are they recanting and apologizing or not?
So what are the anti-vaccination people saying now that their evidence has turned to fraudulent poo?
My guess is that they will blame it on some nefarious conspiracy to discredit them because they’re getting too many people on their side.
That’s the thing about conspiracy theorists. Even when their pet conspiracies are debunked, they can break out the scare quotes and say that their theory has been “debunked” by “authorities” who have “degrees” from “accredited” institutions.
This is not the end of the anti-vac people, by a long shot.
This MPSIMS thread among other things touches on the anti-vaxer reaction, which unsurprisingly is denial and making Wakefield’s discrediting part of the conspiracy. One of the links from that thread is thisanti-vaxer site.
They are way past caring about silly stuff like evidence.
It is kinda understandable that people would have reservations about accepting this debunking - because (to the layman, at least) it appears to be arriving through the same channels that published the original claim, or in other words, if The Lancet says The Lancet was wrong at some point in the past, can we be sure it’s correct now?
(I mean, I don’t think that - voluntary admission of prior error is generally an indicator of trustworthiness in my book - but I can see how people with any kind of emotional investment in the issue might find it difficult to accept the new information, without even being particularly obtuse)
As the article says,
So nothing significant is going to change. Remember the arguments over thimerosal, the preservative? The anti-vaxxers’ used to say it was responsible for autism. Thimerosal has been removed from many vaccines, but autism diagnoses have not decreased. This makes no difference to them.
They’re out there still, Jim Carey and Jenny McCarthy are still strongly preaching against it.
But then again, it’s one thing for an actor to spout off his opinion and another if a researcher carrying weight says it.
I recall when I did data study for a university hospital, there was one mum who gave her child vaccinations and the kid was diagnosed with autism. She didn’t give her second child any. She then gave the third kid she had the vaccines and yep, you guessed it another autistic kid.
Now when you get cases like that, it doesn’t matter that there are lots and lots of way to explain it, nothing you will ever say will ever convince that mother that vaccination was NOT the cause of her children’s autism.
Vaccination is hard for a lot of people to understand, because unlike other medical proceudures it’s not medicine. It’s just giving your own body a “heads up” on which viruses can get at it. And your body is fighting the disease not any medicine.
Like the HIV-Is-A-Myth people (at least concerning a causal agent of AIDS) it will eventually die down and then be brought up back to life time and time again for the ages
Unfortunately, to the great unwashed, the opinion of an actor carries far more weight than the research of a scientist.
The fact is, he is a politician building his base-he needs an “issue” to get into the public eye. It doesn’t matter if the “evidence” he presents is excrement, he has to sell it-so anything will do.
It is a tried and true MO for proto-politicians-his uncle used the “Missile Gap” to get into prominence.
The same goes for "Global Warming"Al Gore has used his bogus “science” to make millions of $-he doesn’t care (his energy-wasting lifestyle proves his contempt for the horse manure he is selling).
I only hope some victim of the anti-vaccination hysteria could sue these conmen!
[mod note]
This is a General Questions thread about vaccination data, ralph124c. It is not a Great Debates thread about the politics of science. Please keep it on track.
Thanks!
[/mod note]
They don’t care. They’re not interested in truth, or facts, or research. They want someone to pay (either financially or emotionally or socially or just in their own mind) and pay big, for what happened to their children. They saw their children suffer a terrible condition, and someone offered them an explanation that not only absolved them of guilt (and of course they weren’t guilty of anything in the first place, but certainly it’s natural for parents to wonder “did I somehow do something wrong to cause this?”) but also gave them the opportunity to think of themselves as smarter and more informed than anyone else.
The ability to focus on Big Bad Pharma, and Big Bad Medicine, and Big Bad Science, allowed them to resolve in their own minds the dilemma of “how can random bad things happen to random people, randomly?” It’s a version of the just-world hypothesis, I suppose - bad things happen to people who deserve them, we believe. Therefore, if my child has autism, I must have done something to deserve it. Oh, no, wait - it’s THOSE GUYS’ fault! Whew, I’m not a bad person, then!
The need to find a target of blame, combined with the utter lack of scientific understanding on the part of the American public and the anti-intellectual loathing of educated people that permeates American society, will combine into a diamond-hard certainty that regardless of decades of research and tens of millions of dollars, vaccines caused my baby’s autism. Anything else is elitist handwaving.
A lot of the anti-vax people are nut jobs and have jumped on the bandwagon for no good reason, but many of them became involved in the movement because their own child had a vaccine reaction right before their eyes. I don’t think either group is going to care much about hard evidence - it’s very much an emotional issue for parents.
Vaccine reactions of various types do happen but there are many people (and doctors) who will not admit that it carries any risk at all. They are pretty rare, thankfully. It’s clear vaccines of any type don’t ‘cause’ autism, but they can indeed trigger symptoms and changes in children, or seem to trigger it in some children (since the age you get your shots is the age autistic symptoms usually begin).
When your kid is fine one day, goes in and gets his shots, and becomes very different (for the rest of his life) the following day, I can sure understand why someone would become anti-vaccination in general. I know a case like this personally, and his parents weren’t imagining things - he was a normal baby, got his shots, got quite sick from them and cried for days, developed more symptoms each day, and was highly autistic by the next week. There wasn’t any question for me that vaccinations affected this kid profoundly.
IMO it’s not a totally black and white issue. I value vaccinations though and all my future children will get theirs.
You can’t use evidence to refute a position that isn’t based on evidence in the first place.
I was banned from a messageboard (www dot mothering dot com) for arguing in favor of vaccination. It isn’t possible to get thru to them - these are people who dismiss everything the CDC says but cite whale.to as gospel.
Against really determined stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain, and I didn’t do any better.
Regards,
Shodan
My mind is made up. Don’t try to confuse me with facts.
I have never, not once, met anyone in the medical field who does not freely admit that there are risks with vaccines, nor have I ever met, not once, anyone in the medical field who knows that those risks are very small. This statement, frankly, smacks of the same kind of “big medicine and big pharma is out to get us by hiding the facts!” that the anti-vax people spout.
Doctors are not monsters lurking in evil caves deliberately misleading a gullible public by withholding information regarding possible but rare adverse effects of vaccines. Conversely, I am not saying that doctors are paragons of saintly virtue - but to say that many doctors will not admit that vaccines carry risks carries innuendo that is too often found in the woo-woo crowd.
That is a tragic situation. I truly feel for your friends. However, your last statement is the issue. FOR YOU, there was no question, and yet, your single experience in one case is not outweighed for you by the, probably, hundreds of cases of children that you know personally that got their vaccines and DID NOT have this reaction. Why, for you, does this one single case of an adverse reaction outweigh the cases of children with no adverse reactions? And if you personally don’t know of any other children who received vaccines, why does your one personal case outweigh the hundreds and thousands of personal cases of other people who know children who received vaccines and did not have an adverse reaction?
Can you not see that this emotional attachment to one extreme case is the reason why Jenny McCarthy and her ilk have derailed this issues with their rallying cries of “Big Pharma and Big Science are trying to kill your kids!”?
Your single case is tragic, again, and I do not discount it. But you, in turn, should not discount the hundreds of cases that do not show such an outcome.
Whether or not vaccines may cause adverse affects in some children is not black and white, true. However, the issues of whether or not there is a causal relationship between vaccines and autism is in fact a black and white issue - there is not one.
I apologize if I come across as attacking you, because that is not my intent. I merely wanted to address some of your statements, because they are ones that I have heard from other sources, too.
:smack:
Lemme rephrase that so it actually reflects what I was trying to say.
I have never met anyone in the medical field who does not freely admit that there are risks with vaccines, nor have I ever met anyone in the medical field who also does not know that those risks are very small.
Sorry for my morning pre-coffee futzing with the language.
[moderating]
It’s clear that there’s no way we’re going to be able to keep this thread on track for General Questions. I’ve moved it over to Great Debates.
[/moderating]
I imagine that after the apocalypse of 2012 fails to manifest there will be people who will absolutely insist that the world did end, but the whole thing was covered up.
Cite? For any of these assertions?
Vaccinations are typically given when a parent first notices changes in a child that could indicate a diagnosis of autism.
Actually it is a fairly black and white issue. Non-vaccination is fraught with consequences. Whooping cough can easily be deadly in a young baby. The side effects of measles include high fever, pneumonia and a rare type of encephalitis.
I was also banned from mothering for daring to discuss vaccination in a rational manner.
As I believe Samuel Johnson wrote, “you cannot reason someone out of a position they have not reasoned themselves into.” That is, IMO, an apt opinion of the anti-vax stance.