Bill Gates Says Anti-Vaccine Effort Kills Children

Hugh Pickens writes writes "CNN has an interesting interview with Bill Gates who says that unbelievable progress is being made in both inventing new vaccines and making sure they get out to all the children who need them. The improvements could cut the number of children who die every year from about 9 million to half that. But Gates has harsh words for those who engage in anti-vaccine efforts, especially Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who falsified data to 'prove' a fraudulent link between vaccines and autism. 'It's an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids,' says Gates. 'Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn't have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today.'"

Comments

Wow

[DFENS619]

Someone mod Bill +1 hero so he gets out of the troll area

Re:Wow

[commodore64_love]

Even if it were true (vaccines cause autism), as Penn & Teller wisely argued: Vaccines SAVE more lives than they kill/damage.

See the video for yourself - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfdZTZQvuCo

Re:Wow

[sortius_nod]

I must agree with him, and I didn't realise how bad this was in the US until I saw a documentary the other night on the "war against vaccination" in the US. Pretty much the people against vaccination keep changing the reasoning why the vaccinations are "bad".

One minute it's the MMR vaccines that cause autism, then it's the mercury based preservatives, then it's the amount of shots kids get, blah blah blah. Basically all the reasons have been refuted by scientific studies (Denmark was used quite often as they keep medical records on all their citizens).

One of the anti-vaccine idiots even had the balls to say that it was up to the scientific community to disprove that vaccines are dangerous.

Jim Carey and that other bitch both need to be hurt with hot pokers. The simple fact that autism becomes apparent at the time when kids get their vaccinations does not mean that the vaccinations cause autism. In fact, the studies showed that vaccinated kids had the same rate of autism as non-vaccinated kids.

Pseudo-science will always win because the media outlets can get "passionate" famous people behind the campaigns.

Re:Wow

[dkleinsc]

Bill's charitable work is actually quite awesome. Among other things, his foundation is very good at making sure that their funding goes to projects that actually work (surprisingly unusual in the non-profit world).

Now, I don't approve of how he made his money, but I do approve of him using his money to help people rather than just hang out and be rich with Warren Buffett all day.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is worse than that. Just look at the number of famous, retarded actors who became scientologists.

Re:Wow

[Brett Buck]

Agreed. Bill got this on right. Modern Western society has gotten so comfortable assuming that their every need will be taken care of by someone that they, in about a generation, have forgotten the horror of all the childhood diseases. The chance of dying from whooping cough, if you get it, is orders of magnitude higher than the incidence of autism (once you take out the current over-diagnosis - autism is the new trendy thing to think your kid has, just like ADD ten years ago).

      I even hear of people refusing *polio* vaccines. Mine was the first generation of children that didn't have to spend all summer dreading signs of the flu and wondering if you were going to be *living the rest of your life in an iron lung*. Believe me, if you have ever seen that - you are going to get your kid all the vaccines they make,

Re:Wow

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that the comment you note is largely correct. Back when this was still on view at your friendly local hospital, people had a certain... urgency about vaccinations.

I suspect that there is one other slightly subtler sub-factor: the difficulty of intuitively comparing small risks. The vaccines that draw the most fire today are the ones for comparatively non-scary sounding diseases. Everybody knows that things like polio and smallpox were Seriously. Bad. News. Things like Measles and Mumps, though, just don't sound that scary. However, Measles, for example, does have a .3% mortality rate, and the risk of encephalitis or corneal damage isn't fun either. However, people are very bad, intuitively, at comparing very small and very large values. The rate of complications and fatalities from the MMR vaccine is lower than that of the diseases it helps prevent(even weighted with the less than 100% probability of getting the disease); but not quite zero. However, since both values are very small, they both fall into the "small; but gnawingly nonzero" risk category, which makes them feel close to equivalent. With something like Polio vs. Polio vaccine, the high risk/low risk intuition is straightforward and emotions match math. With low risk/lower risk, the math holds up; but intuition and emotion don't necessarily fall into line...

Re:Wow

[LordLucless]

I agreed with most of your post except this:

One of the anti-vaccine idiots even had the balls to say that it was up to the scientific community to disprove that vaccines are dangerous.

It is. Or if not prove, at least demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt. If someone's telling me to inject this cocktail of drugs and denatured organisms into my kids' bloodstream, I'm going to want some sort of assurance that it's not going to do harm. It's the reason the US has the FDA. So that drug companies can't just go off propounding their latest money-spinner without verifying that it doesn't cause irreparable harm to those that take them.

That said, I think most commonly-used vaccinations have long since proved themselves in that regard.

Re:Wow

[c6gunner]

It is. Or if not prove, at least demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt.

There's a big difference there. You can't prove a negative, just like you can't prove the non-existence of something. To use our favorite analogy: I can't prove that a god doesn't exist; the best I can do is look at the god you posit, and demonstrate that it's unlikely to exist. Replace "god" with "unicorn", "leperchaun", "santa", or "autism causing vaccine" as required. With vaccines, we showed that removing mercury from them did not lead to a reduction in autism rates - in fact, the rates were completely unaffected. The reasonable conclusion based on that data is that mercury in vaccines does not cause autism, but it doesn't "prove" that vaccines do not cause autism.

Re:Wow

[khallow]

which in certain parts of the world contributes directly to overpopulation which has an even *higher* death toll from hunger and secondary effects like war.

But here's the rebuttal. Sick people eat, but they don't work. That reduces economic activity and wealth per capita, the latter which has a strong negative correlation with female fertility.

That's what you're missing in your concern about overpopulation. For example, malaria infects hundreds of millions of people a year yet only about a million die each year. The rest while sick (which can be a long time off and on with chronic malaria) aren't working and aren't improving their lives or their society.

Re:Why would some people think that ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Countries with high child mortality rates have a greater problem with overpopulation. That is, if you know half your kids will die of pertussis, you will have more kids. It is paradoxical, but preventing child mortality actually decreases overpopulation.

Re:Microsoft and vaccines

[AndrewNeo]

Hey, go with what you know. Getting to use it to save lives, all the better.

Re:Why would some people think that ?

[ShanghaiBill]

So, how in the hell could better vaccines and better health care help lower the world population? They can't.

Yes they can, and they do. As parents become more confident that their children will survive, they have fewer of them, and invest more resources in each child. Vaccines, good healthcare, good nutrition, and good education, all reduce population growth.

Re:So...

[uglyduckling]

It's one thing for people to choose not to have vaccines, that is a right and it would be an assault on their person to force it upon them. It's another thing entirely for groups with an agenda to promote misinformation and falsified, unethically conducted research in order to try to influence people into refusing vaccines. The lives of the children that die from diseases that can be prevented by vaccination should be on their consciences.

Re:Why would some people think that ?

[TapeCutter]

Sorry to interrupt your "Evil Bill's got a needle" rant but better health means people don't have ten kids in the hope that two will survive past the age of five. A "vaccine" substitute for the pill means you only need one shot a year rather than paying for pills once a month (assuming you can find a reliable source for the pills).

Re:He's right

[Gonoff]

Anti-vacc parents will have anti-vacc children

Anti-vacc parents are more likely than me to have dead children. Who will sue them now?

Re:Add Bill Maher to your list

[catmistake]

I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that he's been on something of an anti-vaccination crusade, especially when it comes to flu shots. He basically is of the position that the whole campaign to inoculate people against H1N1 is in and of itself a conspiracy. He's adamant that you don't need vaccines if you eat right.

I believe you are overstating his position. If your immune system is weakened, get a flu shot. If you're a hypochondriac munchausens case, we'll, if it will shut you up, go ahead, get a shot. But I believe his point (speculating) is the vast majority of the healthy population doesn't need a flu vaccine. He certainly isn't boasting he's found the cause of autism.

snipped:

And it's precisely because I am a Darwinist that I fear the overuse of antibiotics, since that is what has allowed nasty killer bugs like MRSA to adapt so effectively that they are often resistant to any antibiotic we can throw at it. There are consequences to vaccines and antibiotics. Some people want to study that, and some, it seems, want to call off the debate.

I wouldn't stick Bill in with the pseudoscientists... he's a comedian and a talk show host... he wants a debate, not a paradigm shift.

Re:Reason for the hullabaloo wasn't as stated

[MightyMartian]

He was a liar and a scam artist. He fabricated a scientific study. Does it matter who pursued him?

I don't understand you people who want to beatify the guy. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Re:Add Bill Maher to your list

[246o1]

If your immune system is weakened, get a flu shot. If you're a hypochondriac munchausens case, we'll, if it will shut you up, go ahead, get a shot. But I believe his point (speculating) is the vast majority of the healthy population doesn't need a flu vaccine. He certainly isn't boasting he's found the cause of autism

Not a smart point. If you are healthy, you should get a vaccine, because you could carry it to your old granny or your 3-week-old infant niece, and kill them. The vast majority DOES need a vaccine, that's how we get "herd immunity."

Re:Add Bill Maher to your list

[whoever57]

My god, what an appalling piece of writing. If one wanted to claim to state a position and then not make it, I don't know if they could waste so many words as Mr. Maher. Any little information on what he believes or not is made moot by his apparent lack of understanding of the differences between vaccines and antibiotics. There are clear reasons why we should lessen the use of antibiotics, but whether that is so or not, is completely irrelevant to the use of vaccines. So, I for one will put him down as a dangerous fruitcase. One who doesn't understand the limitations of his own knowledge.

Re:This is bullshit, and you know it.

[chooks]

A serious question for you: from what you have written it appears that you have set a threshold for chance of injury for your child to be 1:10,000. If this is the case, then do you allow your children to be in cars? What about other risky behavior where the chance of injury is high (contact sports for example)? With respect to Guillain-Barre, this can also be caused by food poisoning from campylobacter jejuni. C. jejuni poisoning most commonly occurs with chicken (which carry the bug). Do you forbid your children from eating chicken?

It would seem that to be logically consistent you would need to curtail these activities. However, in the talk about risk to children from vaccination, there are other much more prevalent (and immediately deadly) risks to which parents seem to have no problem exposing their children. As someone who apparently has made the choice about acceptable risk for your children, how do you logically reconcile foregoing one (extremely debatable) "risk" versus allowing many other well documented and serious challenges to your children's life and limb?

Again, I am not attacking your beliefs (although I do not agree with them). I am wondering at the thought process behind your beliefs in the context of other risks that you willingly put your children through.