Gardasil Cleared of Anti-Vax Nonsense (slate.com)

New submitter Zane C. writes: A new study once again shows vaccines have no link with yet another batch of medical disorders. The vaccine in question is a relatively new HPV vaccine called Gardasil, mainly targeting preteens to reduce infection. Phil Plait has more on this, debunking anti-vax claims and explaining why you should receive the vaccine: "It’s another typical anti-vax call to arms due to a complete and gross misunderstanding of how reality works. To them, if something happens after something else, it was caused by that first thing. This is the classic post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. But the Universe doesn’t work that way. And this kind of bad thinking has consequences. In the U.S. alone, 79 million people are infected with HPV. That’s more than a quarter of the entire population. Fourteen million new cases crop up every year. Gardasil can substantially cut those numbers back—it’s working, and working well, in the U.S. and Australia—but not if the fearmongering falsehoods by anti-vaxxers get traction."

Comments

Yet another blatantly biased submission.

[Anonymous Coward]

As somebody who wholly supports vaccines and vaccinations, I absolutely hate it when I see really shitty submissions like this one. It doesn't even attempt to present something resembling an objective view of the situation. It's extraordinarily biased and sensationalist, with childish name-calling like "anti-vaxxer", and self-righteous babble like "fearmongering falsehoods".

Submissions like this just make those who support vaccines and vaccinations look like total kooks! This submission has the same "holier than thou" attitude that we see from those who push the Rust programming language or those who support systemd or those who moderate at Stack Overflow. Instead of even considering the concerns of their opponents, these people just go on spewing vitriol, and look like total assholes in the process. Normal people see them behave like this, and these normal people think, "What the fuck..." and write off everybody who is even slightly associated with the egomaniac's viewpoint.

Slashdot, please don't tarnish the image of all vaccination supporters by putting total shit like this submission on the front page. Shitty submissions like this do so much more harm than good!

Re: "other people"

[Archangel Michael]

"Thankfully no infants died in that case."

Risk analysis is never used. Vaccines are "Safe" even if the risk is greater than the actual disease. Let say, that Whopping Cough kills 1:1,000,000, but the Vaccine kills 2:1,000,000, it is considered "safe" but twice as risky as not having a vaccine. The 2 don't count as "unsafe" even though it is less safe than nature. After all, vaccines are proven effective!

The problem is, NOBODY is doing the complete risk analysis to see if paying Big Pharma is worth the money being poured into Vaccines.