I’m still trying to figure this nonsense out. How does accepted scientific fact suddenly become “unacceptable” and “unprovable” just because Jenny McCarthy and a crooked doctor say so?
The very idea that this could happen at all has me looking over my shoulder for a Trump presidency.
This morning in the comments section of a blog focusing on pseudoscience I saw this from a poster:
“Science is not exclusive to scientists.”
It’s not an unusual mindset, especially among antivaxers, anti-GMOers etc.
There is good news. There was an effort to put a proposition on the ballot in California to repeal the new required vaccination law. The anti-vaxxers failed badly - and came nowhere near the required number of signatures, even before the signatures got checked.
LavenderBlue or Kolga, would you mind posting a link to your book?
Of course Vaccines Do NOT Cause Autism. Vaccines cause rabies, and uneducated opinions count as peer review.
Antivaxers thought the study they were helping to fund would show a vaccine-autism link.
Unfortunately for them, it backfired.
Researchers looked at different groups of infant macaques, which were given thimerosal-containing vaccines, non-thimerosal-containing vaccines or control solutions, and found that vaccine administration (with or without thimerosal) was not associated with neurodevelopmental delays or other problems (the monkeys developed similarly to controls).
Alycia Halladay, the chief science officer of the Autism Science Foundation reiterates what most of us have learned time and again - no matter how much evidence piles up to support vaccine safety, antivaxers keep trying to shift the goalposts.
*"Halladay likens the challenge of disputing the claim that vaccines cause autism to “playing whack-a-mole.”
“First, the proposed association was between the MMR vaccines and autism,” she says. “Then that was disproven. Then it was the thimerosal components in vaccines; now that has been further disproven in a carefully designed animal model study that aimed to specifically examine that question. It has also been suggested that the association is because of vaccine timing, but that too has been disproven. The target always seems to be moving, and the expectation is that scientific resources will be diverted to address each new modification of this hypothesized link."*
The antivax groups that funded the study (including SafeMinds, which contributed $250,000) apparently are not happy with the results. :(:)
More money that could be used to investigate actual causes of autism (and lead to effective prevention/treatment) will probably still be wasted on studies like this one. Hopefully, we won’t have to kill off any more monkeys to placate antivaxers.
Well at least their meta-review has proven that vaccines cause mole-people.
I’m not one of the authors, but here is the link.
My response to that is that it is, but that anyone can be a scientist, or at least act scientifically.
Thanks! I love how the reviews on Amazon are pretty evenly split between five stars and one star.
Skeered people seek out those that share their fear and reject those that reject their fears. Rationality is not the amygdala’s strong point.
I got my flu shot yesterday. I’ll let y’all know when I get very late onset autism.
I think I’m getting it now; woke up with a sniffly nose and itchy eyes. Those are symptoms! Either that, or the cat slept on my head last night. I’m not sure which.
Obviously, autism is caused when pregnant mothers worry about their kids having autism.
I’d never heard that line before and I actually really like it. This probably isn’t how the commenter meant it, but I read it as a reminder that all of us use science every day, intentionally or not. It’s not just something that exists far away in labs, for academics, and can safely be ignored or dismissed as elitist; it’s a concrete part of everyone’s daily life, and you don’t get to ignore or dismiss it.
That doesn’t mean that my scientific practice is equal to the professionals’ and should be given the same credence, obviously. Any more than my singing while I cook dinner is as good as Nina Simone’s.
Whoa! Maybe I just missed seeing it, or maybe I haven’t been following the news closely enough.
Did SB 277 get passed and signed into law? Is it the law now? Did it end up with any idiotic amendments to water it down?
ETA: Aha. I just googled that for me. Gov. Brown signed it on June 29, 2015.
That’s doubtful:
Surprised nobody beat me to this.
Anti-Vaxxers Accidentally Fund a Study Showing No Link Between Autism and Vaccines
I know, let’s put vaccines in GMO foods. That’ll piss them off.
Post 66 did beat you to it.
Huh. Now how could I have missed that?