I’m not sure what “changes” you’re talking about here. You’re correct that autism often begins to manifest itself around the time that certain childhood vaccines are given and this misleads some parents to blame the vaccines. It has however been noted that in numerous cases these same parents noticed something “different”/concerning about their child before vaccination, and autism experts have detected subtle signs in children occurring well before the administration of vaccines like MMR that have wrongfully been blamed for autism.
Your anecdote about the child who supposedly became “highly autistic” by the next week after getting shots is not only unreliable, it does not make sense.
After all the research and clinical experience we’ve had with vaccines, it is at this point a black and white issue - there is no valid reason to believe that vaccines cause autism. What we do know is that fearmongering as well as crappy and unethical research of the type performed by Wakefield and others (who see parents of autistic kids as a cash cow) leads to resurgence of preventable and potentially deadly infectious diseases (for instance, the outbreaks of measles in Britain as a result of the MMR scare). Good to see that you intend to protect your children through vaccination.
You cannot get through to the hardcore antivaxers. Following the Wakefield disciplinary decision by the GMC, they’ve retreated even further into their world of imagined conspiracies and made him a martyr. Parents who still have worries about vaccines but are not prey to delusional thinking can be reassured by educational efforts and quality reporting (by news media that include the N.Y. Times and the Chicago Tribune), and they’re the ones (along with the public in general) that we need to concentrate on.
I really disagree with this argument. If vaccines did cause autism in one out of hundred, or one out a thousand kids, that would be a significant effect. Essentially, your argument just replaces one anecdote with another.
The studies don’t show that there’s an effect at that level, they show that, to the limit of their accuracy, that there is no effect.
I think a lot of the cases of “I noticed my child change the next day!” after vaccination are unreliable memory and wishful thinking said months or years later. If your child becomes autistic and someone implants the idea in your head that the vaccinations caused it - and for whatever reason you decide that that explanation is psychologically pleasng - you probably construct your memories around the idea that it was right and that you knew it was the start.
IIRC, Jenny McCarthy now describes a scenario in which her “mommy instinct” was setting off alarms in her head as her kid was getting the vaccine, and almost immediately after her child was clearly changed, but it doesn’t mesh with the timeline she’d described in the past as far as noticing the symptoms of autism. Memories are surprisingly flexible. No doubt she actually believes the shit she’s spewing, but she’s completely unreliable in every way.
Anyway, as to the OP - what reaction can they have? Others have covered this pretty well - once you enter the conspiratorial mindset, any evidence that debunks the conspiracy actually strengthens the conspiracy. “Wow, this conspiracy is so powerful that they’re faking even more evidence! I WAS RIGHT!!!”… there’s essentially no way to break someone out of this mindset. Any piece of evidence that objectively weakens their position actually subjectively strengthens it.
Besides - imagine someone like Jenny McCarthy realized on some level that she was totally wrong. After she’d invested so much emotionally in this issue. She’s been out there leading the anti-vax brigade for years, and she’s had some success - the rates of vaccination have been getting lower across the board. Kids are actually getting and dying from practically eradicated diseases. Jenny McCarthy in a very real way has inspired action that has lead to the death of children. If she accepts that she’s wrong, and accepts her part in this, she would have to accept that, and she doesn’t have the mental fortitude. Easier to just keep believing the lie.
Zenbeam, my response was to simply say that thousands and thousands of cases, randomly sampled through valid scientific research methodology, trump the single anecdotal case personally known to rhubarbin. I was trying to use language that was similar to that used in his/her post for a reason.
I phrased it that way because I did not want to be dismissive of the personal experience related. I think that’s the best way to drive people away from the discussion - to basically say to them that their personal experiences “don’t count.” Because to the individuals involved, they DO count - I’m just trying to get people like rhubarbin to see that while they “count” in terms of personal experiences, they need to be placed into a larger context.
I think one of the mistakes made by those of us who are trying to educate people about vaccines is to preemptively be dismissive of these experiences. We’ve taken scared, concerned parents, who truly believe that they’ve seen what they’ve seen and know what they know, and basically told them that they’re stupid or that they’re lying. I don’t think that’s the way to win minds over to the scientific evidence.
Of course, I’m not talking about the hardcore anti-vaxxers - those people I DO dismiss with contempt. But rhubarbin did not present in that way, so I wanted to try to discuss the difference between one personal experience, and the “thousands and thousands of personal cases” which constitute the subjects of the larger research which, indeed, has shown no effect.
Of course not - and I don’t know of any public health experts, immunologists, vaccination activists or evidence-based vaccine information sites that do this. I’ve never even seen posters on the Dope claim that parents are “stupid” or “lying” for believing that vaccines caused their children’s autism.
On the other hand we have little patience with antivax activists who continually repeat falsehoods about vaccine “toxins” or misrepresent research, and who use their agendas to mislead parents searching for answers.
Shodan and LavenderBlue described being banned from mothering.com for presenting pro-vaccine views. This is part of the spectacular hypocrisy of antivax activists. On the one hand they’re going ballistic about “censorship” of disgraced researcher Andrew Wakefield and (in the case of notorious antivaxer Barbara Loe Fisher) calling for a “fearless” conversation about vaccination. Meanwhile antivax message boards and websites routinely ban posters and delete comments favorable to vaccination. Fisher meanwhile is just the latest antivaxer to sue pro-vaccine scientist Dr. Paul Offit for “libel” - part of a pattern that looks a lot like harassment and attempts to silence an effective proponent of immunization.
One prominent antivaxer recently attempted to justify banning opponents from an antivax website by comparing them to atheists expressing themselves on a religious site. How telling - antivaccine activism has indeed taken on the trappings of a religion, if not a cult. Believers are not about to be swayed from their fervor by mere facts.
I don’t know of any experts or sites that do that, no. However, I just wanted to be careful in my addressing of rhubarbin’s issues that I did not come across as dismissive or contemptuous. I do, however, sometimes feel that I can and do come across and dismissive and contemptuous of hardcore anti-vaxxers (for good reason) and didn’t want to express that same to someone who didn’t seem to be in that camp.
If we, in our attempts to educate people about the issue, don’t at least recognize and consciously address personal stories like rhubarbin’s, we run the risk of at least implicitly communicating our dismissal of their personal experiences. For a parent struggling with the issue, that can be a frustrating thing. We need to take that frustration into account and directly address it while at the same time moving them gently toward a larger understanding.
Again, I am in no way suggesting that we use this method on the Jenny McCarthys of the world. And I am well aware of the censorship of differing viewpoints in the anti-vax camps.
One of the good ways to tell if something is truly evil is this - if the issue weren’t so serious, it would be funny. As an example, I post the disclaimer from the website mentioned earilier -
Kafka was a great writer because he could capture this kind of spirit. Cynthia Moser, who wrote the above, can do so as well.
It’s so stupid, that it has a certain charm. “We welcome both sides, except one.” I actually think they are worried that, if they allowed people to argue against their nonsense, a small percentage of their membership might actually figure out what the anti-vax folks are up to.
You can count three Dopers who have been banned from MDC for the same reason. There is no reasoning with these folks, and they are in the process of making Wakefield into a martyr over this issue.
Shodan is certainly right that they are afraid for their members to be presented both sides of this issue. And Jackmannii is right that it has the trappings of a cult. They know that vaccines cause all kinds of problems, and no scientific research is going to convince them otherwise. In their minds, all the research that you and I would consider legitimate is nothing more than the tool of The Man. The powers that be over there do not want too much logic being presented, lest this house of cards start crumbling.
One of the many reasons the anti-vaxxers will never admit they are wrong is because they hope to sue the pharmaceutical companies for lots of money.
Better, in their eyes have a child that was damaged by an “evil scientist” or a money grubbing corporatist. Far better to have something to hate outside of yourself rather than to admit that autism maybe reclassified learning disabilities and mental retardation or even have genetic causes.
Doctors are mostly good people who do their best, true. Health care in some ways comes down to the relationships between individuals (patients and caregivers) and that colors everyone’s perceptions.
I don’t think I was clear enough in my last post.
I believe that vaccines are both beneficial and necessary, and if I wasn’t clear, it’s obvious there is no evidence besides anecdotes to support the ‘vaccination theory’ of autism. What I have seen personally that indicates the possible side-effects of vaccines (including but not limited to a anecdotal link with ASDs) for a teeny minority of kids, isn’t enough to make me distrust them or credit the anti-vax movement with any kind of coherency.
It’s just that I hate to see all anti-vaxers tarred as willfully ignorant, stupid, or malicious. And I can understand why many of them believe what they do. A lot of them are reasonable and intelligent people.
Well… whatever. There’s nothing to prove here, as it’s an eyewitness experience (one of the most unreliable forms of information). It happened, I saw it. The kid lost the ability to talk and make eye contact as well as developing other symptoms typical of autism in the course of a week. He appeared to be an average toddler, to his mother, before. I am NOT saying his vaccinations ‘caused’ a neurotypical child to ‘become’ autistic. I am saying he appeared neurotypical, got his shots, nearly immediately developed extreme symptoms that indicated autism, and shortly thereafter got a diagnosis of autism, and continues to this day to be low-functioning. They call this regressive autism.
Due to the rarity of this sort of thing, it could very well have been a total coincidence. Or, it could have ‘triggered’ at around the same time if the kid had gotten a cold. We still don’t know what ‘causes’ ASDs, or what causes them to manifest so differently in different kids. We do know that vaccines don’t ‘cause’ them. That doesn’t, to me, mean that vaccinations can’t contribute to a sudden worsening of symptoms in a child that already showed signs of autism…
I don’t really know anything about this subject, so please everyone, continue to educate me.
Well, let’s look at the subject of this thread - how antivaxers are responding to the Wakefield debacle.
What would “reasonable and intelligent” antivaxers do when presented with overwhelming evidence that Andrew Wakefield was unethical in his research, concealed gigantic conflicts of interest (he was making huge sums of money from lawyers hoping to sue vaccine makers, and had quietly applied for a patent on a competing vaccine whose prospects would be greatly helped by damage done to the MMR), and did bad and sloppy science to boot?
Reasonable and intelligent people, while not likely to suddenly abandon their antivax ideas, would certainly reject Wakefield and everything he stands for.
As it’s turned out, antivaxers have rushed to support Wakefield, invoked imaginary conspiracies against him and are trying to turn him into a martyr.
Find me all those prominent antivaxers who’ve turned against Wakefield. In fact, just one will do. Best of luck.
“Reasonable and intelligent”…on the surface, on other topics, perhaps. The other night I was watching 9/11 Truthers on the National Geographic Channel. Some had advanced degrees and seemed like affable folks. When it came to their obsession however, reason and intelligence went right out the window.
All excellent points in this post, and good advice for so many topics of debate (well, when you’re hoping to change people’s minds – not always the point of debate, I know!).
There is no more evidence that vaccines contribute to a worsening of autism than there is evidence that vaccines cause autism. There is no evidence of any connection between vaccines and autism at all.
The symptoms of autism, including regressive autism, tend to appear at around the same times that most people have their children vaccinated. This leads to the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. And this is sometimes made worse by the way scientists look at, and describe, the process of science.
There are two apparently paradoxical, but simultaneously true, statements.
[ul][li]Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and [/li][li]it is very difficult to prove a negative[/ul]The correct response to an anti-vaxxer saying “Vaccines cause autism” is “there is no evidence of that”. The correct response to an anti-vaxxer saying “Prove that vaccinations don’t cause autism” is “what evidence do you have that they do?” [/li]
Sure, there are some. The tendency towards fallacies of attribution is a strong one in humans.
I guess the bottom line is if someone can examine evidence instead of dismissing it, he or she is not the sort of anti-vaxxer that is found on the MDC board.
I hope I don’t come across as lumping you in with them.
It’s worth noting the timelines involved here. The Lancet’s retraction is not the beginning of the debunking of Wakefield’s work; it’s the end. Everything about Wakefield’s lying and treachery has been known for years. Everything that was reported last month about his dishonesty and corruption was public knowledge ages ago. His claims have failed to stand up to real studies for years. The OP sort of implies that the anti-vax evidence just NOW was found to be fraudulent; in fact, it was known to be fraudulent years ago.
So it’s to be expected that folks who’re anti-vax now won’t be swayed, because they’re the people who were ALREADY not swayed by the facts. Anyone still holding on to this nonsense has been holding on to it through an entire decade of evidence demonstrating that it’s hroseshit.
What you don’t see are the many people who’ve been frightened by the nosnense but then were reassured by doctors, nurses or their own research that vaccinations are safe - because, of course, they were probably convinced long ago, and they’re not the ones who make a fuss. And there ARE lots of those people.
It’s true that news about Wakefield’s misdoings has come out before - but it’s been piecemeal. Not everyone has been following Brian Deer’s excellent investigating reporting on the affair. The latest news about the British medical panel’s findings has provided an opportunity to summarize all of Wakefield’s scandalous behavior.
To demonstrate the importance of high takeup of the MMR vaccine, look at the current East Coast outbreak of mumps. A quarter of the infected kids did not receive the recommended two shots. And the index case (the one who got sick first and spread mumps to the others) apparently contracted the virus on a trip to the U.K., where (thanks largely to Wakefield) MMR vaccination rates plummeted after his bogus research got published and mumps has resurged.
The mumps vaccine is only about 90% effective with proper vaccination, making it essential that as many are vaccinated as possible, providing “herd immunity” which makes it tough for a single imported case to cause an epidemic.
Not to step on anyone’s points here, but with or without Wakefield’s study, it was relatively easy to get a good idea of vaccination by doing a little research before he was completely discredited. All the good knowledge available was simply ignored by people with an agenda, and it appears they are continuing to do so.
As to what the antivaccination people are saying, here’s one who’s into the conspiracy-against-Wakefield thing, and has constructed an elaborate flowchart to document this web of iniquity.
Unfortunately, the author failed to mention other key players, like the CDC, Dick Cheney, the Queen of England, COINTELPRO, Mossad and David Icke’s reptilians in human form.
Needless to say, I’m pissed off that I didn’t get mentioned.
It’s actually been extremely thoroughly debunked. The rates of vaccination have been declining (especially in Britain) and it’s a serious public health hazard - serious money and effort has been put into big, high quality studies from multiple angles. None have showed any validity whatsoever to any link.
Plus, Wakefield’s conflicts of interest have been known for at least 6 years now, how he was paid by lawyers hoping to sue vaccine manufacturers, how he had a patent for an alternative MMR vaccine and stood to benefit from discrediting the current one, etc.
Really, there is about as much evidence now for this subject as you can practically have. It’s an easy, open and shut, slam dunk case. It doesn’t matter - conspiracy theorists, which is pretty much all this is - are idiots.
