One of my cousins, RN, PhD, shared this graphic showing ‘the science facts about autism and vaccines’. I think it lays out the case for vaccination very well.
Not that it will change any anti-vaxxers’ minds. I know there’s a Pit thread, but I wanted to share the ‘poster’ in a non-confrontational forum.
If a person brings up any “anti-vac” stuff they get attacked pretty hard so dont expect much discussion.
Besides, would reading some poster change your mind?
That poster does lay out the case pretty well. That is, if the 25% has an open mind and can get past their non-science based “knowledge” on the completely unproven link between autism and vaccines.
Send a copy to Donald Trump, Robert DeNiro, Jenny McCarthy, and a whole list of other celebrity anti vaxers
If a person brings up concerns with an open mind and absorbs the incredible amount of evidence available to ease those concerns, they are not attacked pretty hard. If on the other hand one chooses to ignore the evidence and just parrot anti-science anti-vax points again and again, one is deservedly dog-piled on.
Why wouldn’t it? Does information need to follow a specific style manual for you to read it?
Posters are a very common form of scientific publication, for example in symposiums. I’ve got a couple myself, one in a regional meeting and another in an international one.
Cowing anti-vaxxers into silence is actually a good first move in the fight against ignorance.
The poster itself is fine. The article that presents it is not.
Wakefield’s paper has been termed (by the British Medical Journal) an “elaborate fraud”, and the ethical transgressions of its lead author (since stripped of his privileges to practice medicine) are well known. However he did not make “everything” up; elements of all presented patient histories were misrepresented.
*"The Office of Research Integrity in the United States defines fraud as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism. Deer unearthed clear evidence of falsification. He found that not one of the 12 cases reported in the 1998 Lancet paper was free of misrepresentation or undisclosed alteration, and that in no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal.
Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children’s cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross. Moreover, although the scale of the GMC’s 217 day hearing precluded additional charges focused directly on the fraud, the panel found him guilty of dishonesty concerning the study’s admissions criteria, its funding by the Legal Aid Board, and his statements about it afterwards.
Furthermore, Wakefield has been given ample opportunity either to replicate the paper’s findings, or to say he was mistaken. He has declined to do either. He refused to join 10 of his coauthors in retracting the paper’s interpretation in 2004,15 and has repeatedly denied doing anything wrong at all. Instead, although now disgraced and stripped of his clinical and academic credentials, he continues to push his views."*
Damning stuff. I’d prefer that the poster (which actually goes pretty easy on Wakefield) be presented along with a link to the BMJ editorial or a summary by Brian Deer, rather than an article that incorrectly alleges that the entire Wakefield paper was an invention.
So… because he didn’t make up the articles and verbs, it’s not a fabrication? You’d like it to be presented with %s on how much of it is fabricated?
If not a single line can be believed as presented, what do you call that?
I am in no way an anti vaxer but why all the sudden cases of autism or is it that it is more recognized now or misdiagnosed or simply a catch all for the symptoms related to Austin?
Will the anti-vaxers deny their children has autism because they think they did the right thing by not having them vaccinated?
Are there any stats on those children that contract the disease for that they should have been vaccinated?
Has anyone seen stats on what kind of things might be wrong with the children of parents who spent the 60’s in la la land or even since that decade? Seems like something would happen.
How would you prefer it to work?
Partly, it’s a broader definition (used to be only extreme cases were labeled “autistic”, the mild ones were just “weird” or “maladjusted” or something) and partly it’s better diagnosis.
Prior to modern times, such people might have been more prone to lethal accidents and/or neglect/abuse from parents and others in the community that might have pruned the number that reached adulthood. Those that did make it to adulthood had a good chance of being imprisoned in a mad house or perhaps accused of being demonically possessed or something that might also end badly for them.
Because our society is not treating these people more humanely instead of locking them away to rot they are now more visible.
And partly it’s that the word itself is pretty new.
A search for “first diagnosed case of autism” brought up this page. TLDR, the term was invented by a Swiss in 1911 for a subtype of schizophrenia, then in the 1940s psychiatrists in the US started using it to describe children with emotional or social problems.
Before 1940 in the US, and later in many other countries where the diagnosis is now used, those same kids would have been called “difficult”, “retarded”… all kinds of things, but not “autistic”, simply because the label wasn’t available to be applied. It’s a bit like asking why are there more diagnoses of adenocarcinoma (a type of cancer) now than before: partly it’s because of improved diagnostic methods, and partly that the disease itself hadn’t received that particular label until relatively recent times.
Sloppiness, bad science and outright fraud.
Not “he made the whole thing up”.
Accuracy counts, or at least should unless one wants to employ the tactics of the pseudoscience crowd.
This. One tactic of dishonest debaters (a category into which the pseudoscience crowd falls quite neatly) is to discover an imprecision in the way their opponents present a fact, and pounce on it with enormous vigor and volume, in an attempt to make the debate be about the imprecision instead of about the actual topic.
I’m trying to see the effective difference between “he made the whole thing up” and “outright fraud”. And, really, I’m having a hard time seeing any difference.
“Outright fraud” suggests acceptance that the patients cited in the study at least existed; “made the whole thing up” can be interpreted as an accusation that they didn’t.
When debating this crowd, one wants to avoid, as much as possible, carelessly imprecise idioms that can be inflated to obscure the actual topic under discussion.
Has an anti-vaxxer actually raised this point in a debate with you? Otherwise this sounds like an extremely fine hair to split and not one that makes an iota of difference - except to an opponent grasping at semantic straws.
Nope. I tend to watch these things from the sidelines, as a general rule.
That said, I HAVE seen many debates get sidetracked into chaos over one person’s attempt to conflate an inartful use of language by his opponent into invalidation of his opponent’s position.
It’s probably known as some form of Gish Gallop, among connoisseurs of the tactic.
One part of the infographic is a little too sloppy for my tastes. It starts by decade: okay, pertussis cases went from 150,000 in the 60s to 2900 in the 80s, but then the next bar is 2004, suggesting that it is a result of his paper. That seems entirely too convenient, and I doubt that antivaxers tend to be the type of people that regularly read medical journals and immediately take action that also leads to immediate disease in the same year. In other words, it’s an incredibly misleading “statistic.”
