Slashdot Mirror
Famous British Autism Study an 'Elaborate Fraud'
Charliemopps writes "An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was 'no doubt' Wakefield was responsible."
This guy tracked down subjects all the way over in the United States:
Child 11 was among the eight whose parents apparently blamed MMR. The interval between his vaccination and the first "behavioural symptom" was reported as 1 week. This symptom was said to have appeared at age 15 months. But his father, whom I had tracked down, said this was wrong.
"From the information you provided me on our son, who I was shocked to hear had been included in their published study," he wrote to me, after we met again in California, "the data clearly appeared to be distorted."
He backed his concerns with medical records, including a Royal Free discharge summary. Although the family lived 5000 miles from the hospital, in February 1997 the boy (then aged 5) had been flown to London and admitted for Wakefield’s project, the undisclosed goal of which was to help sue the vaccine's manufacturers.
Sadly, CNN couldn't even bother to have a single citation to the actual source text that is uncovering this. Of course they have all sorts of links internal to their site ... gotta keep those page clicks up, don't want eyeballs over at the BMJ.
My work here is dung.
Sadly, there's a lot of money in junk science.
People are still going to ignore all the retractions from the real medical and scientific community in favor of Jenny McCarthy saying on TV that "Vaccines gave my baby autism!"
Sad when Big medicine can get to the authors of this study and the BMJ, getting them to retracted this study.
At least Jenny McCarthy can be thankful her child won't get polio.
This has grown beyond Wakefield now. It's become a self-sustaining conspiracy theory, independant of it's source, and no mere facts are going to even slow it down. Parents want to worry, it's in their instincts to protect their children - if they can find no real dangers, they'll inflate anything that looks remotely threatening regardless of true risk.
Thanks to Jenny McCarthy and others of her ilk some large percentage of the unwashed masses now have it fixed in their brain that vaccination=autism.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
http://www.generationrescure.org/ already has it's rebuttal, including a NEW study which shows a link between Hepatitis-B shots and a 3 times higher risk of autism.
When will they stop?
It's a sad world when some money-grubbing fool can publish a fudged article claiming that a vital, lifesaving tool can cause horrible, debilitating disease, get international attention, and when he's finally disproven all the "concerned parents" of the world ignore him because The Man wants to keep their kids autistic, without sparing a thought to the possiblity that maybe The Other Man just wanted a quick buck.
Sent from my CR-48
I would like to know more about the consequences which the lawyers who wanted Wakefield to produce the falsified study will face. From the article, Wakefield has been stripped of his medical license. So what about the lawyers?
Everyone knows how conspiracy theories work. All the wingnuts will just claim this is a political chop job designed to cover up Big Brother/Big Pharma's Big Evil plan. The BBC could play video next week of Wakefield snorting coke and doing an underage hooker, all the while shouting that he had falsified his results, and it wouldn't matter. At some point they'd probably decide that Wakefield was a deep-cover government plant intended to discredit the movement.
Has something to do with me having a bad reaction when I was a baby to vaccines. I almost died.
I think the concept of vaccines are good however when they stop putting mercury and other toxic additives then that will be another story. When a doctor looks me in the face and says mercury won't harm my kid I know he is lying to me, WHIMIS / OSHA both say no amount of mercury is safe for a child as it stops proper development of nerve sheaths in the brain. Now when the doc lies to me his credibility is shot and I can't trust him.
People do realize the number of increased cases of autism has proportionally risen to the acceleration of our population growth...right?
Generally, when the numbers are bigger...
Living With a Nerd
Why is this making the news now? This study has been debunked for a while; I saw a PBS frontline program in May that cast substantial doubt upon the veracity of Wakefield's findings.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/vaccines/view/
As mentioned in the above program, dozens of studies have already failed to duplicate Wakefield's findings. Essentially, he blamed autism on a mercury-base preservative that was found in vaccines administered to babies. Even though there was no proof that this preservative had anything to do with autism, manufacturers ceased to use it in vaccines, but this only caused the anti-vaccine to go hypothesis hunting once more.
Why is this elderly CNN moderator shouting all the time? Or am I too sensitive and its just the normal way they talk at CNN HQ? Just curious...
Part of the reason why this fraudulent BS was accepted was that we don't actually know what causes Autism. No criticism of medical science implied here, there is all kinds of research going on, just no definitive answer. If we could say, "No, Autism is not caused by vaccines, it is caused by ....." the vaccine issue would mostly go away. Right know we are left trying to prove a negative. The saddest part of all this is that children have now died from these entirely preventable diseases.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Here's Brian Deer's publication at the British Medical Journal. Although lengthy (and apparently the first of a series to come), it has a lot of critical details about how this was fixed. It also has 124 citations through the article -- now that's journalism! This guy tracked down subjects all the way over in the United States:
Child 11 was among the eight whose parents apparently blamed MMR. The interval between his vaccination and the first "behavioural symptom" was reported as 1 week. This symptom was said to have appeared at age 15 months. But his father, whom I had tracked down, said this was wrong. "From the information you provided me on our son, who I was shocked to hear had been included in their published study," he wrote to me, after we met again in California, "the data clearly appeared to be distorted." He backed his concerns with medical records, including a Royal Free discharge summary. Although the family lived 5000 miles from the hospital, in February 1997 the boy (then aged 5) had been flown to London and admitted for Wakefield’s project, the undisclosed goal of which was to help sue the vaccine's manufacturers.
Sadly, CNN couldn't even bother to have a single citation to the actual source text that is uncovering this. Of course they have all sorts of links internal to their site ... gotta keep those page clicks up, don't want eyeballs over at the BMJ.
Don Imus' wife has been beating this junk science trashcan lid for years, and making loads of money off of the Wakefield fraud too. If anybody listens to that show I am curious to know if it was mentioned.
Home of The Suki Series
When will they stop?
They won't stop.
The anti-vax kooks have been in this game for so long and have so much time and energy invested in it they cannot back out now.
Even if Wakefield came clean and admitted it was all bogus data, the Age of Autism/Generation Rescue quacks won't believe it.
This is their business!
Trolling is a art,
Ah, the classic "We never claimed that [discredited evidence] supported our position, you must have been imagining things. *hastily edits old articles*" approach.
What really amazes me about this business is the behavior of the mainstream media in relation to the development of this 'story' in the first place.
Wakefields paper was just a collection of 12 anecdotes - meaningless in any clinical sense. He's clearly an idiot and should simply have been struck off and ignored.
You don't need to be an expert to work out that MMR and autism are both fairly common, and to find some cases of kids that have both is not that unusual - certainly not enough to start the newspaper and TV frenzy that occurred. That the media decided not to ignore him and tried instead to promote the scare, is to their great shame.
What is also incredible is the fact that that media deliberately ignored studies that proved no connection at all between MMR and autism.
It's appalling that this effort to boost ratings almost certainly cost the lives of infants and probably still does.
When will they stop?
When we slashdot them off of the internet?
Done.
Reason why there is hope for the future generation #364:
"I wish my grass was emo so it could cut itself."
... to see the MMR makers sue Wakefield and, especially, the trial lawyers who paid him.
http://www.uow.edu.au/~/bmartin/dissent/documents/AIDS/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7037462.stm
Safe huh?
this jackass goes on to continue to make up lies about autism.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You mean you're just coming to this realization???
I love how they didn't post the full text of the study, just the abstract.
it is hard to quantify, but the amount of idiots of didn't get their kids vaccinated because of this guy's "research" probably resulted in many unnecessary deaths of children. and this includes children who were vaccinated: an effective vaccine relies on "herd immunity". if enough kids are resistant to say, whooping cough, whooping cough can't get a leg up into a given population. but if enough aren't immune, the disease gets a certain amount of circulation in the community, and is able to try to infect many more kids. eventually, it is able to infect kids of parents who dutifully got their kids vaccinated (since for every vaccination, many vaccines don't take), and eventually, it is able to kill many kids
oh, and someone infect jenny mccarthy with whooping cough, that ignorant bitch. let her know what her "advocacy" really means
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's curious that the US gov is funding a Compensation Program for those injured by vaccines.
Wakefield’s Lancet Paper Vindicated
Um, yeah, this article was already thoroughly debunked and disowned by its original publisher, Lancet, back in 2004. Ten of the twelve original contributing authors made an official statement in Lancet that they'd been deceived by false data created by Wakefield and wanted to get their names erased from that lie. Why is this still news?
Are you suggesting some sort of DDOS attack?
TERRORIST!!!11!
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
...than science-is-bad Luddites: The cynical snake-oil salesmen who exploit them.
Regards;
Spanking Deficit Disorder
So a completely different vaccine has the same effect: autism! I have another explanation that is much more plausible: people who tend to believe in wild conspiracy theories have a 3 times higher risk of having children with autism.
many vaccines don't take....
So then vaccines don't always work I thought they were infallible and foolproof or so says the man in the lab coat getting rich.
Persistant misbehavior by children just wasn't acceptable 25 years ago.
Today parents are too busy twinking their buddies on friendbook, or watching TV to properly raise their children.
I've heard the parents of Autistic kids ranting about how vaccines caused their kids' condition. That's fine and we should allow people to raise their children as they see fit but within the moral bounds of society. We also can't legislate morality no matter how hard we try. That means if a kid will get polio because he doesn't have the vaccine or represents a health risk to others by spreading a disease, then that child needs to be quarantined. Anybody remember Leper Colonies?
I'm not trying to be cruel here but we still have people on this planet who believe that the Earth is flat, that man didn't land on the Moon and that Sarah Palin is a worthy political candidate for the Presidency. Why? Because we don't have a vaccine for stupidity yet.
Let the lemmings go off the cliffs because nothing we do or say will change their minds. Jenny McCarthy included.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
People are still going to ignore all the retractions from the real medical and scientific community in favor of Jenny McCarthy saying on TV that "Vaccines gave my baby autism!"
Fortunately, those people's children will have a greater than average probability of dying young, which will improve average human intelligence in the long run.
I don't want them to stop. Stupid parents not vaccinating their stupid kids can only improve the gene pool in the long term.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Parrellels to the global warming fraud are astounding.
There is a lot of good info here:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=9552
For people that listen to podcast I highly recommend quackcast.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
My daughter was in ER the evening after having the MMR, no other reason for her to fall sick. We didn't let her have the booster.
The doctors told me they took no records of correlation with other medical treatments.
There is no evidence.
This man may be a fraud, but we have no way of knowing. The public health authorities don't want to know.
Sadly that isn't the case. Their kids become petri dishes for the viruses to grow and mutate in. Eventually, a virus that could have been prevented with a vaccine, has now evolved into one that can't.
Unfortunately not everyone is able to be vaccinated due to unrelated health issues and other people lacking vaccinations lowers herd immunity to the point were innocent people contract diseases that are 100% preventable.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
There is little good in this. I'm pleased beyond punch that another quack is exposed, and a falsehood exposed. But the damage is so massive, parents will refute this for a generation. Dierdre Imus will NOT give up, and Jenny McCarthy will continue to probe for the coverup and corporate malfeasance. Autism will continue to be overdiagnosed, and the DSM V will only add to the confusion. Many children will grow up so misdiagnosed that it should be considered a crime.
And yet, I cannot be happy that this lie was successful, and that we may now start the witch hunts for other fabrications, good science will be hampered by the additional hurdles of more and more research and checking, and ultimately we may lose faith in science a little bit more.
There is little good in this. Why do lies seem to live longer than the truth? I know, since I don't have an autistic child, I don't understand. And I only understand a little that urge to find a cause, identify the culprit, punish the guily. But my dear friend who does have an autistic daughter has long ago given this up, and now just works to ensure she will be cared for after he is gone. He believes this is all he can really do. And of course visit her and stay involved. I do not envy him, because he will leave this world and leave behind a child dependent on the care of others.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Hey Tea party. We really need your help here. These new events, and stunning piece of journalism has put this media sustained conspiracy in jeopardy. If you guys don't pick this up, this issue may die down. If you need a candidate to rake this up in the congress, I am willing to be your candidate. I will even go on TV and claim that I am not SATAN.
Viagra?
It's the same reason they moved from 'mercury poisoning' when vaccine companies stopped using it and autism didn't go down.
This is exactly the same sort of 'science' as 'intelligent design'...it's 'invent a position and desperately scrabble around for any possible reason it could be true, and latch onto it until someone disproves it, and then latch onto something else that proves the same thing.
That is not anywhere near how science works.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
heres the direct link to the FDA page on Thimerosol:
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
We have "scientific studies" that show vaccinating your kids causes autism. We have "scientific studies" that say eating a high-fat, no-carb diet is healthy. We had "scientific studies" that said smoking actually causes rainbows and happy puppies. We also have scientific studies that show dangerous climate change. And the scientists wonder why no one believes them. I'm not saying the association is accurate, rational, or healthy. But it shouldn't be surprising, either.
...Made an excellent point on subject in their last episode
Like:
Data show the earth isn't warming on average.
The data that show earth to be warming on average is faulty.
The earth is warming but greenhouses gases aren't the cause
The earth is warming because of greenhouse gases of non human origins.
The earth is warming because of athropological greenhouse gases but it's good news.
It's not good news but adapting (increasing the climatization in my office) is cheaper.
In hindsight adapting was not the best solution at the time but it's too late now to do anything.
Probably there are copyright restrictions on printing the whole text.
I feel a lot better about injecting my children with shredded virus dna stored in a mercury solution.
My favorite "science for the cause" was the bogus but widely believed Top Scientist's report that 70's college kids are going blind from looking at the sun after dropping acid (LSD.)
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
TFA specified that the study was:
famous
published by the British medical journal BMJ
performed by Dr. Andrew Wakefield
an 'Elaborate Fraud', and deliberately so
About the only thing it didn’t tell me was that it was the famous study linking autism with vaccines, which was sort of the most important point...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
There is a problem with letting mornic parents do there own thing. It can (and does) hurt the children of responsible parents too.
There are two main ways for the children of a responsible parent to come down with one of these childhood diseases:
1) The vaccine just "didn't take". It happens. They aren't perfect. However, if EVERYONE was vaccinated, this wouldn't matter, as the disease would be eradicated (or nearly so), and then you don't have to worry about catching it. Instead, kids where it didn't take pick it up from kids whose parents were morons.
2) A child is too young to be vaccinated. These vaccines are not administered at birth, and some of them require several doses before immunity is achieved. It is quite possible to pick up the disease from the child of a vaccination-refusing parent. To top things off, the older unvaccinated child is more likely to survive the disease, while the newborn is quite vulnerable.
Yes, it is possible for the diseases to be transmitted solely among children with failed vaccines or those that are too young to be vaccinated, but those cases are quite rare. Measles was well on the way to being eradicated in the Western World before this clown came along. Imagine what a disaster it would have been if this guy was peddling his quackery prior to the eradication of smallpox or the near-eradication of polio.
Thimerosol (sp?), the trace-murcury-containing preservative you are thinking of, is no longer used in US childhood disease vaccines. Hasn't been for many years. And when it was gone, whadda-know, autism rates didn't drop.
Just wondering, how many of these people only have one child?
If you put all your eggs in one basket, you might tend to be overprotective of that basket.
That's an even better example, but I didn't want to use it.
Yeah, you can actually figure out how plausible a scientific position is the more the facts change and people (are forced to) accept the new facts, but then still argue the same conclusion.
And it's not really even the same 'conclusion'. It's past the conclusion. It's the same 'So now that we've figured that out, the thing we should do is...'
If I stand there and argue, on a trip, that we should drive down, say, highway 141 to get to Gainesville, and it's pointed out that highway 141 doesn't go to Gainesville, and so I argue that we should drive down 141 to get some Taco Bell, and it's pointed out that there's a Taco Bell on the actual route to Gainesville, and then I argue that Gainesville is a stupid place to go and we should go to Lawrenceville down 141 instead, and it's pointed out while that's technically possible, that's not a very good way to get to Lawrenceville...
At some point, people really should realize I obviously have a motive to drive down 141, because every single plan I invent involves driving down 141.
Likewise, at some point people need to realize the climate change deniers have some sort of motive to not do anything about climate change. (What that motive is is rather obvious if you look at the funding sources.)
But even if you knew nothing who was funding that, it's clear there is some motive, because every. single. one. of their conclusions is 'We shouldn't do anything', no matter what facts they've decided to finally accept. It might exist, it might not, it might be us, might be the sun or volcanoes, it might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing, whatever it is, we sure as heck shouldn't demand people change their behavior, ever.
Same with the anti-vaccine crowd. First it was mercury in vaccines, then it was this study, now I'm sure some other bogus thing will come up. But every single solution is 'less vaccines'. Actually, if you look real close, you'll see every single solution is 'traditional medicine bad, alternative medicine good'.
People who sit and argue the same 'problem solution' despite the problem constantly changing are dishonest, and not scientists, and people need to stop listening and call them out on it the very first time they do that.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
And if we all believe really hard Santa will show up at Christmas? Yes, Vaccines work. Agreed, they're a good thing. I grew up seeing kids in Iron lungs in hospitals and I certainly don't want to with that on anybody. All my kids are vaccinated. They can't go to school without their shot records and I also have them de-wormed on a regular basis.
But this isn't really about vaccines is it? It's about a fraudulent study of 12 kids that linked vaccinations to autism. There's lots of things wrong here but by in large a reasonable person might question a study with a population group of 12 to begin with. I'll contend that more people get inappropriate touching by the TSA in one hour than were in this study.
Now, you have a group of people, parents of kids with Autism who have latched on to this phony baloney report and said "I'm not getting my kids vaccinated" even after they have been diagnosed with Autism. Cripes! that logic is ridiculous but moreover you have other parents who look at the parents of Autistic kids and say "Hmm, they may be right." WTF?!? Now if that study were over a period of say 20 years and had 10s of thousands of parents and kids and medical histories tied to it, that could be the foundation of some scientific proof on the matter.
It reminds me of the "South Park" episode (http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/153517/martha-stewart-living) when Martha Stewart eats a Turkey with her ass then everybody thinks it's a great idea and starts doing it.
Sure, if a parent wants to be a Luddite, they have the right to be that. More power to them! I also have the right to keep them and their kids, who will also be Luddites, away from me and my family.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I know there's some airheaded nutjobs out there saying that vaccinations are evil because there's an infinitesimal chance of getting sick from them, but to the pro-vaccine crowd I say: doesn't the idea of government mandated vaccines bother you just a little bit? People like Dean Edell basically say that parents should be thrown in jail for not vaccinating their kids. Others think that employers should have the right to mandate the injection of a vaccine as a pre-requisite for work. We can agree that vaccines are a Good Thing, but doesn't the final decision of what vaccines to take or not take lie with the individual or parent themselves?
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Name me three CURES Big Pharma has come up with. They have no desire or intent to cure anything, but only to sell you high-margin drugs that will keep disease and death at bay - provided you keep buying them. Diabetes, AIDS, even the Common fraking Cold: they don't want a cure as they couldn't (or wouldn't be allowed to) charge enough to make up for decades of selling to - if you will - addicts. In other business circles, I believe this is called Vendor Lock-In. So at least in one facet, Junk Science and Big Pharma are equally morally bankrupt (and profitable).
Should the lawyers who 'backed' this charlatan not be disbarred too?
If it was only their kids at risk, I might agree with you. But when a parent doesn't vaccinate their child, they put OTHER people at risk too. Perhaps a baby is too young for the vaccine or perhaps there's a valid medical reason why the child can't get the vaccine (allergy, immune system issue, etc) or perhaps the person in question is an elderly adult whose immunity has worn off (it does happen). In those cases, the parent not vaccinating their child could cause another baby/child/adult to get sick and even DIE! That's not improving the gene pool, that's randomly firing a gun off into the gene pool and shrugging your shoulders at the result.
Don't think it happens? Tell that to the parents of 4 week old Dana McCaffery who died of whooping cough because immunization rates were too low to provide herd immunity. http://www.danamccaffery.com/
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Science is only as Honest as the scientist researching it is Ethical.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think it's worth looking at the original Wakefield paper again: http://www.autismresourceconnection.com/documents/Ileal-colonic-lymphoid.pdf
It's a typical science/medical journal article; boring and inconclusive. It explicitly states it hasn't proven a causal or statistical link between MMR and autism or gastrointestinal disease (the primary focus of the study). No one with any scientific background would look at this study of 12 children and some anecdotal stories and believe such a conclusion even if they had made that conclusion. The hysteria associated with the paper came from the media, and not the article.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
you are safe as long as you don't threaten the money maker like vaccines. what the hell was he thinking?
make up some shit that will make everybody rich, like antioxidant keeps human young, then you are safe forever, even after your study got busted.
If I stand there and argue, on a trip, that we should drive down, say, highway 141 to get to Gainesville, and it's pointed out that highway 141 doesn't go to Gainesville, and so I argue that we should drive down 141 to get some Taco Bell, and it's pointed out that there's a Taco Bell on the actual route to Gainesville, and then I argue that Gainesville is a stupid place to go and we should go to Lawrenceville down 141 instead, and it's pointed out while that's technically possible, that's not a very good way to get to Lawrenceville...
With my friends, I then know that there's a tittie bar on 141 that they'd like to accidentally drop in on.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Keep in mind that Dr. Wakefield has several vaccine patents that have potential for large financial returns if the current vaccines are discredited. One is a measles vaccine that is a direct competitor to the MMR. He files the patents in 1997 and begins to do that very thing - discredit the MMR in early 1998. Coincidence? Now everyone's children are at a slightly greater risk because of the decreased utilization of the MMR and the greatly increased incidents of measles outbreaks.
Sadly, there's even bigger money in Big Pharma.
Okay. Let's look at this clearly: Big Pharma is a mixed bag of positive and negative. They have undeniably provided products of great benefit to human health. And there is also undeniably many cases of them providing unnecessary vanity products, unintentionally harmful products, and products they knew were harmful or useless which they skewed data to get approved. I have lots of problems with Big Pfizer^H^H^H^H^Hharma.
Junk science is not a mixed bag. At best it causes people to get ripped off buying placebos, and at worst causes significant harm by making people not seek real medical treatment when they need it, or not vaccinate their kids so you get outbreaks of measels or whooping cough that affect not just their children, but the children of people who didn't buy into the junk science.
Please let us not talk about these things as if they are equal. There should be lots of money in legitimate pharmaceutical research and manufacturing, but we should also push to solve the problems with it. The problem with junk science, homeopathy, anti-vaccination movements, etc is the junk science itself.
The enemies of Democracy are
But what about warmers whose only answer is either to return us to the standard of living of the cavemen, or to impose a new tax regime an draconian controls. When the temperatures go up, it is due to man caused global warming, "scientist" need more funding for studies, and the government needs more regulatory control. When the temperatures go down, it is men causing global warming, "scientist" need more funding for studies, and the government needs more regulatory control. When it is pointed out that the records have been manipulated, it is brushed away as "scientific debate", the "scientist" need more funding for studies, and the government needs more regulatory control. When it is pointed out that the measurement instruments have been recording bad data due to local heating sources, the "scientist" claim to have added "correction factors", then claim they need more funding for studies, and the government needs more regulatory control.
It's clear there is some motive, because every. single. one. of their conclusions is 'We need more funding for studies and move regulatory control', no matter what facts they've decided to finally accept or dismiss.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
So in your example, we should obviously question the motives of the people who don't want to drive down 141, right?
http://www.generationrescure.org/ already has it's rebuttal, including a NEW study which shows a link between Hepatitis-B shots and a 3 times higher risk of autism.
When will they stop?
Do they actually vaccinate small children against Hep-B?
Vaccines will make you autistic to the point where you'll believe anything! Like the first sentence in this post.
There is no -1 Disagree.
Vaccinations aren't 100% effective. Much of their effect comes from the herd immunity that develops because the disease can't spread within its lifespan. If enough people don't vaccinate, everyone's risk goes up.
he didn't say whose gene pool was being improved :)
That is why study comparisons are very important. Unfortunately, they are far from trivial to do properly.
But it also serves to help keep the people who would be reading this stuff ignorant as to the methods used, possible flaws in the studies, etc.
Just have the pharmacies research what is causing the current epidemic of autism and come out with a cure and the whole issue goes away. And no, it is not a matter of more people being diagnosed with autism, there actually is an epidemic.
Sadly that isn't the case. Their kids become petri dishes for the viruses to grow and mutate in. Eventually, a virus that could have been prevented with a vaccine, has now evolved into one that can't.
Do you have any specific examples of this?
The exactly same argument applies to those that insist we must always do something about the environment. CFC in cups destroys it. Oh, wait, no, Freon does. Oh wait, car emissions do. No, no, it's emissions from ships. Nahhh, really, this time its the garbage dumps doing it.
Both sides have the same damn vested interest and it pisses me off when I explain that, NO, replacing your old 20 mpg car with a 31 mpg car is probably actually worse for the environment due to what goes into making it (even worse if it's a hybrid due to batteries), and I explain that NO using solar cells actually damages the environment from the toxic chemicals leeched into tonnes of water for them, and I show how sending your used electronics off to be recycled kills people in the countries that do it, people assume I'm on one side or the other.
BOTH SIDES ARE WRONG. The right side considers both sides and comes to the correct argument (generally one that doesn't involve either of their solutions). But nobody likes to admit that not only are the oil industries wrong, but Greenpeace is too. Because there's not a lot of mouthpieces for moderation, I suppose.
Actually, in the specific case that you mentioned they were ALL culprits, admittedly to lesser degrees. Freon is a CFC. It was the "low hanging fruit" banning (almost) CFCs reduced the threat to the ionosphere. It didn't eliminate it, because CFCs are persistent, but it stopped the increase, and they do break down over time. (Though I forget the average half-life.)
Garbage dumps are a source of methane. This is a stronger IR blocker than CO2, but less persistent. Reducing methane emissions has quicker results than reducing CO2 emissions by the same amount. And ships *do* emit lots of CO2 in a manner that's essentially uncontrolled.
That said, the argument against hybrids due to pollution from their batteries is reasonable, and I don't know any answer, except to keep working on supercapacitors. For now we're still driving a 1990's station wagon that still gets more than 25 mpg. Not great, but as you point out the pollution created by buying a new car is an immense amount to write-off.
As for solar cells...sorry, but you're wrong there. Yes, making anything damages the environment, but solar power is less damaging over time than fossil fuels. (Don't know if this was always true, or is true no matter who builds your particular cells. But I suspect that currently it's true for all solar cells. Waste is expensive, and I think all manufacturers of modern ICs realize this. Yes, it still happens, but they try to minimize it. [This doesn't mean that workers aren't being poisoned in many plants, but that's a separate issue. And it will change as robots get cheaper.])
P.S.: If you think that fossil fuels are clean, go look at a working coal mine or oil well.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1929880&cid=34773824 where I see you have committed felonious acts against others here clone (or should I say, Stephen Alongi?)
What enraged me the most about the initial round of this here in the US was the fact that a preservative in vaccines was, in fact, giving children an unsafe level of lead (lets forget about any link to autism for now). It was an unsafe level of lead.....and the organization that was supposed to protect the people decided to keep this information "embargoed" rather than be up front and clear about it. Regardless of the flaws in the study it DID uncover an unsafe practice and goverment did not do anyone any favors by not being up front about it.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1929880&cid=34773824 where I see you have committed felonious acts against others here clone (or should I say, Stephen Alongi?)
Jenny McCarthy's son is an anecdote. (Obviously not in human terms or anything, but in terms of "evidential quality" if you like.)
Even if you accept the premise that her son is actually better from whatever JM is doing/not doing (rather than incorrect/biased perception by JM, placebo effect, whatnot), a single data point is not very convincing in statistical terms.
That's why people who care about efficacy, safety, etc. carry out double-blind controlled trials. Once JM does that she can start talking about how "treatment X" helps against "malady Y". Until then she can fuck off.
HAND.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1929880&cid=34773824 where I see you have committed felonious acts against others here clone (or should I say, Stephen Alongi?)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1929880&cid=34773824 where I see you have committed felonious acts against others here clone (or should I say Stephen Alongi?)
There are no general (legal) standards for what consistutes a "study". A study can mean anything from "we gave people carefully worded questionnaires designed to weed out intentional/unintentional bias for every week over several years" to "I thought about it for 5 minutes."
So, that's why you should never just trust anyone backing up their claims with "a study".
HAND.
Actually, that's how natural selection works. It's mostly random, but only after a bunch of generations, the law of averages kick in, and even a small benefit can gradually take over a population (or in this case, a small detriment can be eliminated). In the process, killing off other people with issue vaccine (allergy, immune system issue, etc) is also applying selection pressure to the population. Hey, nature is cruel, but that's how evolution works.
That said, the argument against hybrids due to pollution from their batteries is reasonable, and I don't know any answer, except to keep working on supercapacitors.
No, it's not really a 'reasonable' argument.
Even if they produce as much 'bad stuff', it would appear to be much better to have some random pollution that only possibly screws up a small area of the earth, vs., oh, blowing up the climate.
Not all problems are equal, and certain forms of pollution are worse than others, especially as we're near the tipping point of CO2.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It's funny how you try to claim that both sides are manipulating facts, but in actuality all the environmental facts you list are true. No one has changed their minds about CFCs, or Freon, or car emissions, or ships, or garbage dumps.
All of those are harmful, all of those need(ed) to be worried about. (Some of those have been fixed so, um, we don't worry anymore.)
replacing your old 20 mpg car with a 31 mpg car is probably actually worse for the environment due to what goes into making it
The 'replacing car' argument is stupid. All cars that were ever made are going to be operated until they die, at which point they will be dismantled and put into other cars, etc.
No one's taking their car and throwing it away. There are a finite amount of cars on the road, and any car you own will be part of that until it stops working. This has nothing to do with whether you own it or not. You car continues to exist, and will be used for transportation.
Someone purchasing a new car vs. someone else purchasing one, simple changes what cars exist on the road. For every environmental friendly one purchased new, that's a non-environmentally friendly one that doesn't get made.
If there are 100 cars and car owners on the road, and one of them breaks, there will very soon be 100 cars back on the road. Either an idiot with an SUV sold him the SUV and then bought a Hummer, or someone environmentally conscious sold him the 20 mpg car and bought a 31 mpg car. In one universe, the average pollution went up, in the other, it went down.
If only new car purchasers, and no else, cared about good mileage, car mileage would much higher than it is now. Likewise, if only used car buyers, and not new ones, cared about mileage, it would be much lower. New car purchases entirely decide what cars exist on the road, and, as such, entirely decided how environmental everyone else is.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
wheres your scientific proof of this?
By your definition asia should be oozing out 1000 viruss daily killing millions.
Not the case.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Ask him/her about vertebral subluxation, then ask him how Simon Singh is going. A Chiroquackter is the last person you should be asking about peer reviewed, double blind, substantial number of client, research! The media got hold of this and pushed it for all it was worth. 12 people is not a large enough sample set to change practices - it might be enough for investment in further research, but it is not enough to change practices. It is just bad science
Get over it moron.
Most of the reason why humans got less sick and healthy in the 30-40s were due to being cleaner and washing more.
I just happens that vaccines were used not long after that as well.
Now on a side note, throwing people in prison for refusing a matrix style nazi injection is just evil. Your the retard sovient erra monster. Your're the stupid prick that belongs to the new world order of nazis. Your're the one who believes everything the government says, like "pot is bad" and "taxes are legal" .
Recently the aussie govt stopped all vaccines for children under 5s as the new super vaccines had too many in them at once, overwhealming the young human system. TOO MUCH RNA.
So stop being a lame ass pussy, harden up. Stop being such a protectionist.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/vit-D-theory-autism.shtml
MIght be of interest...
See also: http://www.amazon.com/Disease-Proof-Your-Child-Feeding-Right/dp/0312338058
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I dunno about the US, but Hep-B is typically given at 2 months (and again at 4 and 6 months) up here in Canada, unless the mother is a carrier, then it's done immediately at birth, then at 2 and 4 months. Or alternatively, sometime between 7 and 17 years on the same staggering schedule.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
It most certainly is: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/protect/vaccine/thimerosal.htm Most specifically in untested seasonal flu vaccine
Why would he stop wearing it?
This work is finally done and this study published in 2011, after this study, consisting of all of twelve (12) alleged cases, was published in 1998, twelve (12) years ago, years after the original journal withdrew its sponsorship, after court proceedings based upon and challenging this study were long over, and after countless studies failed to reproduce the results and otherwise called this into question. We have seen some newer studies into the cause or causes of autism but, as of now, still don't know what causes it, how to prevent it, etc. I'm 72. This is said to affect a lot of individuals, I've seen figures from one in 158 to one in 142, and I know people with it, and others who have studied it, in recent years, but never saw or heard of anyone with these symptoms when I was in school. If they redefine it in the DSM-V, we'll never decipher the results. It's not the only terrifying medical problem, back to polio in the early fifties. for the cause or transmission of which I have seen people fervently committed to theories. This isn't in my expertise, though evidence is, and I don't know.
If you read my post, you will see that I specifically said the preservative was no longer used in CHILDHOOD disease vaccines. As in, MMR, Polio, Chickenpox, Whooping Cough, Tetanus, etc. Your link confirms this. I know it is still present in some forms of the seasonal flu vaccine.
And the seasonal flu vaccine is not "untested." It most certainly is tested before being released to the public every year.
When will they stop?
Sadly, when enough dead babies parents start gathering together and sue Jenny McCarthy and Dr. Andrew Wakefield out of existence.
The poster said that "stupid parents" not vaccinating their "stupid kids" would improve the gene pool. The implication here is that the improvements would be made by removing the "stupid kids" from the gene pool. I was pointing out that many of the victims of the anti-vaccination movement aren't kids of non-vaccinating parents but babies/children/elderly who just happen to pass within disease transmission range of these kids.
Non-vaccinated child sticks his hand in his mouth and wipes it on his shirt. Then he picks up a box in the store which the parent puts back. You come along ten minutes later (never having seen them) and pick up the box. As you put it in your cart, your child touches it. Congratulations! They've been exposed and might now die! All because Wakefield faked a study and a playboy bunny said vaccines are bad for you.
This isn't natural selection at work. This is parents inflating the risk of a very safe medical procedure and deflating the risk of a very dangerous disease and then putting the results of that bad risk assessment on other peoples' kids.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Actually, that appears to not be true: http://www.rxlist.com/acthib-drug.htm
When ActHIB® is combined with AvP DTP vaccine by reconstitution, each single dose (0.5 mL) is formulated to contain 10 g of purified capsular polysaccharide conjugated to 24 g of inactivated tetanus toxoid 8.5% of sucrose 6.7 Lf of diphtheria toxoid, 5 Lf of tetanus toxoid, and an estimate of 4 protective units of pertussis vaccine. Thimerosal (mercury derivative) 1:10,000 is added as a preservative to AvP DTP vaccine. (Refer to product insert for AvP whole-cell DTP.)
So a completely different vaccine has the same effect: autism!
I wonder, if that's such a big deal in US, maybe you guys should just start using a different word instead of "vaccine"? Kinda like NMRI was quietly renamed to MRI? It's painful to contemplate bowing down to this idiocy, but if it actually means more kids getting immunized and staying healthy, perhaps it is worth it?
What an interesting argument.
Let's look at that for a second...
Global cooling is going to kill us all! We're about to go into an ice age, crops will die, cities destroyed, disease, famine, pestulence, the end of the world is nigh! We must DOOOOO something, RIGHT NOW! Our models are perfect and can't be wrong.
Global warming is going to kill us all! Crops will die, cities destroyed, disease, famine, pestulence, the end of the world is nigh! We must DOOOOO something, RIGHT NOW! Our models are perfect and can't be wrong.
Global climate change is going to kill us all! crops will die, cities destroyed, disease, famine, pestulence, the end of the world is nigh! We must DOOOOO something, RIGHT NOW! Our models are perfect and can't be wrong.
At some point people need to realize climate disaster whackos have some sort of motive to do somethinb RIGHT NOW about the apocolypse that'll happen tomorrow. (What that motive is is rather obvious if you look at the funding sources)
But even if you knew nothing who was funding that, it's clear there is some motive, because every. single. one. of their conclusions is 'We must do something RIGHT NOW, and who gives a flip if it's effective, necessary, or what the consequences are!', no matter what beliefs and religious myths they've decided to finally accept. It might exist, it might not, it might be us, might be the sun or volcanoes, it might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing, whatever it is, we sure as heck can't make sure we're right this time and doing the right thing, and not making things worse, no we have to act RIGHT NOW!
People who sit and argue the same 'problem solution' despite the problem constantly changing are dishonest, and not scientists, and people need to stop listening and call them out on it the very first time they do that.
Oh, wait, there ARE people doing that... Those pesky skeptics who want science, not politics and eco-religion in the discussion.
SISSy... I love it!
so where is this fantasy world you live in? I'd like to go visit. The vaccination-causes-autism claim is bs. Well and good. But viruses grow and mutate regardless of vaccinations. In point of fact, vaccination can reasonably be expected to increase the variations of a disease due to it making the current strain less fit for survival compared to mutations.
Maybe in your fantasy world the over usage of penicillin has had no effect and vaccinating against any and every disease is a useless hope to somehow rid the world of all disease can be successful. But in the real world this simply isn't the case.
For some diseases, such as polio, vaccination makes a lot of sense. For the flu, where an AMA study established that those with the vaccine had a 2% chance of contracting the flu vs a whopping 3% for those who didn't, it really doesn't make any sense. Influenza is a constantly mutating disease and each year the vaccine is a pot-puris of guesswork as to what it might be like -- it really isn't a good case for vaccination. But the military requires it of every member.
Probably the nut jobs will simply take this as another "proof" of the conspiracy. I believe that the only solution is ridiculing these people and better education. The scary thing is that these things are contagious - soon these nut jobs will be hear in every country.
Remember: mockery is fun. Mockery works!
Wakefield is personally and quite directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of children who weren't vaccinated. He did this for money. He knew this would lead to deaths of children. How is this not considered a crime for which he is either incarcerated until the Sun burns out, or outright executed? Why is he walking free?