Slashdot Mirror
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."
I loved working on my VAX systems - a great little healthcare OS.
If you take a former playmate's advice on vaccinations, maybe the herd could do without you.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
That's the big excuse of the anti-vaxxers. That's why they fearmonger us into buying their vaccines. They need our money and they want to get rich off us. No vax for me!
Instead, let's all buy bleach at a few hundred bucks a gallon from an ex-scientology member. He sure ain't in it just for the money!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Let's also not forget that HPV causes a number of different cancers - cervical, penile, throat, etc. This vaccine dramatically reduces your chances of HPV-caused cancer. The press most often focuses on cervical cancer when they talk about it, which is why the vaccine has been more targeted to women, but boys and men also get a direct benefit, as well as all the indirect benefits through herd immunity.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Gardasil is made by Merck Sharp & Dohme.
Cervarix is made by GlaxoSmithKlein.
Note this up front: Vaccines are good for you. I have zero problems with vaccination as it is beneficial to humanity individually and overall.
Now - about this article: Way the hell too much sensationalism, too much flamebait imputed, and IMHO way too much of this attitude: '...this study is right so I am right and therefore fuck you! Get right with us or else you are not worthy of life you troglodyte!' Seriously... is this what Salon has fallen to? Well, okay, I know they've always been a bit partisan (okay, quite partisan), but TFA and summary alike are indicative of what's wrong these days - too much sturm un drang, not enough persuasion.
Interestingly enough, Slate leans a bit to the left... and most anti-vaxxers lean very much to the left, so why was the bile necessary? You'd think that instead of turning it into a contest that hardens opinions (on both sides), that they'd try to at least be a little persuasive about it. ...or has science degraded into an echo-chamber shouting match these days?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
This is part of the problem.
Big pharma are greedy, lying bastards who would climb over us to make a buck and not think twice.
The anti-vaxxers are a bunch of loonies who can't look at scientific evidence or recognize the initial claims were fabrications by a discredited scientist.
Both of them aren't trustworthy entities ... one lies about its science and the other doesn't understand it.
I fear as long as we can still point to how the pharmacy companies have lied or manipulated their findings, people will be willing to believe they're just evil corporations out to make a buck. But then you just let a bunch of drooling idiots take over the conversation.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Believing that a vaccine is by nature safe. This article makes it out like it's ridiculous to believe that a vaccine could have serious negative side effects. It's not; being a vaccine doesn't make anything safe. Yes, the data show that Gardasil isn't the cause of the various things some suspected of it. But that wasn't a foregone conclusion.
Does Japan have any additional evidence that they feel invalidates TFA or did they ban it because of crying mom and her parents association? All articles say "amid health concerns", which sounds like a herd mentality reaction to unsubstantiated data. This article suggests they are conducting their own study (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/06/15/national/cervix-vaccine-issues-trigger-health-notice/#.VpPyhd-rQUE), which may or may not match the finding of TFA.
It is good that people are conducting their own research, and would be noteworthy if their research produced conflicting results. But it is the wrong conclusion to assume that because Japan's government has done something, that it was a data driven decision produced by anything like a proper scientific study. Note the crying mom in the article I linked... that is more effective at policy setting than boring numbers.
To be clear, it is overly expensive - and most of the cost is profit. The company could recover the cost to research it and manufacture it within one year, if it cost just 1/5 the current price. But that excludes the money they spent on many other drugs that failed to make a profit. Most drugs they research fail to ever become profitable - success rates vary between 5 and 15%.
As such, a profit ratio of 5:1 is not unreasonable. It is a little bit on the greedy side, but no where near as much as the anti-vaxer 100% profit, 0% research and 0% results offer.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Call them what they really are: Hosts.
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".
Indeed. There are many different reasons for why someone might be against vaccinations, and TFA is largely strawman argumentation, with a dash of ad hominem. This is no better than "the classic post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy" he argues about.
Argue against views as they are presented; don't ascribe people views and then knock those views down, calling people names in the process.
For what it's worth, I am against vaccination precisely because vaccines are effective and have negligible side effects.
I believe that the "all lives are sacred" thinking is religious based, and not supported by science. A certain amount of predatory culling leads to fewer regressive genes being propagated, which I believe is good for the species long term. And as long as who gets a vaccine and who doesn't is largely based on what society you grow up in, vaccination seems to me to be a form of eugenics, where the rich get to decide who gets to live and who doesn't. I don't like the taste of that at all.
If we lose 10% of all children to external causes, I think it would be better for humanity. We can easily compensate for that. But the key point is that it should be external causes, not controlled by human bias. Whatever the causes are, be it wolves or measles does not matter as much as there is an external culling.
so avoiding vaccines is the safe call! Take your science and shove it!
Not having sex with someone you don't know is clean is the safe call, but hey fuck all that nonsense. Take your root cause analysis and shove it!
Big pharma lobbied for legal immunity against any vaccine damage claims decades ago. Claiming they don't have time to fight lawsuits since they are too busy "saving the world". I'll start using vaccines when they are able to actually take responsibilities of their own products.
Vaccines are not 100% effective. There are some people who do not develop the proper immunity even after taking a vaccine. There are also people who are allergic to vaccines. These people benefit from the herd immunity. There are also children not in a position to make the decision for themselves.
So yeah in a black and white world where the only people effected by negative consequences were adults who made bad choices, then the system you talk about would be more viable.
And as far as I know nobody is forcing anyone (even kids) to be vaccinated. The only measures I've heard being proposed is removing the personal belief exemption for allowing unvaccinated kids from attending public schools (while keeping the medical exemption), and forcing healthcare workers who don't want to get flu shots to wear masks. I have never heard of a mentally competent adult literally being forced to get a medical procedure they didn't want.
And while it's true that modern medicine is not perfect, comparing the knowledge of modern medicine to the knowledge of the people in the anti-vax community is like comparing modern chemists to alchemists of the middle ages.
I think a healthy skepticism of "expert opinions" is a good thing, but this skepticism in the anti-vax community is gone well into unhealthy territory.
"... 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."
Isn't it odd that we'll do everything we can to focus on the vaccination and those who might be affecting that profit stream, all while ignoring the root cause and ever-growing infection rate.
Yeah, there's a fucking herd of elephants standing in the room, but they're making us a shitload of money, so...
I question the 79 million people being infected. Per the CDC site, in the summary:
How do I know if I have HPV?
There is no test to find out a person’s “HPV status.” Also, there is no approved HPV test to find HPV in the mouth or throat.
So if there is no way to know if someone has HPV, then how the fuck can there be a count of the people with HPV.?
Maryland State Motto: If you can dream it, we can tax it.
Better safe than sorry, so don't eat chicken sandwiches on a Tuesday. You can't prove conclusively to me that eating chicken sandwiches on a Tuesday won't give your family cancer!
Why look at me, I never eat chicken sandwiches on a Tuesday, and I don't have cancer. I think.
Yah, that sounds like a great idea. Spend lots of money to vaccinate everyone to save 4000 people from dying in the United States from a problem they could have saved themselves by curbing their own actions. That is why healthcare is so expensive.
Don't worry. The drug companies provided the estimates. You can trust them. If they say we have HPV and they can cure it for only $140 a dose, why wouldn't you do it? You don't want to die do you?
No, at least not all of them.
Some people are immuno-comprimised. This would be people like infants, the elderly, children with diseases like leukaemia, adults undergoing cancer treatment, or people who have received life saving organ transplants and must take drugs that suppress their immune systems (for the rest of their lives). These people's lives depend on the rest of us doing the right thing and getting vaccinated so deadly diseases cannot take hold in the population and then find a path to the chronically ill.
I just think that it is amazing that we have developed a vaccine that can prevent a type of cancer! It's really unclear how many lives can be saved by gardisil because cervical cancer is kind of a secondary effect of long term HPV infection, but just think about it. In the future, what other cancers be preventable with a few shots in childhood? Prevention is such a better option than treatment. Both of my children have been vaccinated against HPV (male and female). We have a chance to strike a blow against a troublesome disease, HPV, and a secondary deadly disease, cervical cancer. This is truly like the fight against polio, or mercury exposure. It can make a much better life for future generations.
I don't know of anything - not just any vaccine, any thing that's ever existed in the universe - that is "accepted as 100% effective with zero side effects". That seems to be a high enough bar to be, er, perhaps obstructionist. To be honest, I wonder what your objection might be once this technique gets commercialized.
My wife and are teaching our children about how things work and what contraceptive options are available, emphasizing the effectiveness of each method, and the potential risks and benefits of sex, before and within marriage. And they either have received or will receive Gardasil, too. For much the same reason we have them wear seatbelts.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Actually, vaccines don't pull in big money for pharmaceutical companies. That's one reason why the vaccine court was formed. If pharmaceutical companies needed to face normal lawsuits (both real and baseless) over vaccines in the regular court system, they would lose money and stop making vaccines. Not because the vaccines aren't safe, mind you, but because lawsuits cost so much to defend against and vaccines bring in so little money.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I believe that the "all lives are sacred" thinking is religious based, and not supported by science. A certain amount of predatory culling leads to fewer regressive genes being propagated, which I believe is good for the species long term. And as long as who gets a vaccine and who doesn't is largely based on what society you grow up in, vaccination seems to me to be a form of eugenics, where the rich get to decide who gets to live and who doesn't. I don't like the taste of that at all.
Wow, you really don't understand evolution at all, do you?
Things like vaccines, insulin, or even eyeglasses or handwashing are beneficial evolutionary adaptations. These are precisely the things that have made our species more successful than our competitors. Caring for our sick and infirm is an adaptation that has made us more successful than our competitors. Cooperation has made us more successful than our competitors, although we are not unique in that trait. Civilization (and the wealth that accompanies it), far from being a form of eugenics, is a beneficial evolutionary adaptation. The list goes on.
Where do you draw the line? What health care do we deny people to ensure that a proper "culling" takes place? Do we not do C-sections? Do we not set broken bones? Do we not rescue drowning people? Seems to me that it smack much more of eugenics to forbid medical treatments because they prevent "culling".
Ah, but here you aren't considering where you got your numbers. For the sake of argument, let's use your risk levels. If whooping cough kills 1 in a million people now (with a vaccinated population), that bears almost no relation to what the risk is in an unvaccinated population. Nobody is worried about a hypothetical infection that kills 1 in a million people infected. If people stopped vaccinating for whooping cough because almost nobody dies from whooping cough (because almost nobody gets it in the first place, because they got the vaccine), then a lot of people are going to start dying from it.
For diseases where we either can't or haven't eradicated them, we need to keep vaccination rates up so that they don't come back. Theoretically, we could balance rates so that risk of disease is equal to risk of vaccine, but practically speaking that's not an option. Furthermore, a lot of viral infections have other long-lasting side effects that the vaccine doesn't have, so just looking at fatality rates isn't always the best way to assess risk.
Essentially, when you say "nobody is doing the complete risk analysis to see if paying Big Pharma is worth the money being poured into Vaccines", you're wrong. If we took your very basic analysis and made policy from it, we'd stop vaccinating, because it's twice as safe! And then whooping cough comes back, and it turns out that no, the vaccine is still safer. The population-level risk analysis is a lot more complicated than you're making it out to be.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Not $1B in profits - unless you're talking about spreading that over a decade or more. Vaccine trials are expensive to run, and vaccines themselves are relatively expensive to make (rightly so, for injectables). They tend to be guaranteed volume on a vaccine, but they really don't make much money off of them, especially compared to other drugs they could spend the money on.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Actually, the CDC provided the estimates. While the CDC is correct in that there's no one test for HPV status, you can test specific tissues for the virus - generally this is done via a pap smear. The estimates for overall population are partially based on extrapolating from pap smear results.
Furthermore, they aren't claiming they can cure it, just prevent most of the HPV strains that cause cancer.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
There's no common test for HPV, and a very large percentage of people have some strain of it. So let's say you have a daughter, who is magically pure and never thinks about sex but is eventually going to grow up and marry a man, and lose her virginity in order to produce children. There's a 1/3 chance that the guy has HPV and doesn't know it.
Only if he's been promiscuous.
There's a significant chance that the HPV causes cervical cancer.
Only if they continue to be promiscuous after contracting HPV...it takes multiple strains to be an issue.
So even in this optimal scenario, not vaccinating your daughter is the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with your daughter's health. In real-life scenarios where teenagers spend most of their free time making out with each other (HPV is transmitted by kissing too), she's guaranteed to be exposed to HPV unless all her friends were vaccinated.
Most strains of HPV are benign, and the body normally flushes them out quite quickly. HPV only becomes an issue when multiple incompatible strains are present at the same time. There's a reason that a vast majority of the population has been exposed to HPV but only an extremely small percentage are suffering any kind of side-effects - a percentage that is smaller than the percentage of people suffering side-effects from the supposed cure.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The problem is, NOBODY is doing the complete risk analysis to see if paying Big Pharma is worth the money being poured into Vaccines.
That is totally wrong. People don't start vaccination programs on a whim. The law is very strict on the number and type of medical studies that must be done to allow medicines and vaccines can be sold, and even more to prove their effectiveness , safety, and cost-effectiveness before large scale vaccination programs are implemented.
How many times have you laughed at some scientific study because it seems to be attempting to prove what we already "know"? That is because science does check and recheck everything. They do studies and meta-studies all the time to do risk analyses on drugs to ensure that they do more good than harm. Similarly, the bean counters in government are always looking for ways to reduce medical expenses. There is a constant struggle between what is medically necessary and what is affordable. Accountants don't care if you live or die, as long as you take the cheaper option.
If you seriously think that both medical professionals and accountants would allow a vaccination program that killed double the number of people that they saved then you are misguided and naive. And to spout such erroneous and uneducated claims here is dangerously misleading.
There are around 150 strains of HPV, #16 and 18 causes the most human cancers, If a person hasn't been immunized by age 13, the chances are they are all ready infected, and will have an increased risk of getting a HPV cancer later in life.
HPV is a sexually transmissible disease, a common cold is a sexually transmissible disease by the same criteria; I wish I had a nickel for every cold I've gotten or given to my spouse over the years.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Also: Immunizations are not effective in 100% of those immunized.
If enough of the "herd" are immunized so the exponential function of infection is quickly decaying rather than growing, outbreaks are tiny and peter out very rapidly. So individuals are protected by the immunization program even if their personal immunization failed. If enough have failed immunizations or refuse for the exponential to be growing, those whose immunization failed are S.O.L. - and if the refusnicks are the reason for the k > 1 situation, it can be argued that, in an outbreak that becomes large, they're responsible for the illnesses of those whose immunization failed or who couldn't be immunized.
(What matters for the outbreak is not the percentage unimmunized - through failure or refusal - but just the absolute number of susceptible individuals and the degree of contact between them. Those who are successfully immunized are just scenery, not players.)
(Note "immunization" rather than "vaccination" in the above text. The former is the general case and the latter a particular subclass of it. The herd immunity argument applies to all types of immunizations for communicable diseases.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The question isn't whether government scientists are right or wrong about any particular vaccine, it is whether the government should have the right to force people to inject stuff into their bodies.
That's not the question until law enforcement start showing up at your house with vaccines and guns.
Private schools can make that argument and require vaccinations to their hearts' content. Public schools, however, are bound by limits on governmental powers; for example, they can't advocate particular religions, and likewise, they shouldn't be able to impose vaccinations.
I don't see how these are the same at all. One would be a regulation on thought (i.e. religions are belief systems), the other is a regulation on public safety. If the government can prevent people from coming into government buildings with firearms, then they should be able to kids from going to schools if they are a public safety hazard due to lack of immunizations.
A compromise would be to move to a voucher system that allows kids who don't want to attend public schools to use the money to pay for private schools, but that is something progressives and their public sector union lobbyists are fighting tooth and nail.
Schools are paid for by property taxes. This is a horrible system in general. Vouchers don't fix this problem, because you are still paying for the schools if you have zero kids. Just like your taxes are paying for government buildings like courts that prohibit firearms even if you are an open carry proponent.
Law enforcement doesn't have to show up with vaccines on your doorstep in order to coerce you; they can arrest you, or take your stuff, or limit your freedom of movement, or whatever until you "choose" to get vaccinated. Those approaches are just as coercive as if they showed up with vaccines at your house.
The way government *forces* you to do something is with guns. They have other tools like fines and prison, but should you refuse to pay fines or report to prison, the guys with guns show up to your house. Simply preventing you from using some public services like public schools is not coercion. It's just a normal requirement like any other.
Whether people who don't have any kids pay for the education of other people's kids, and how that education is delivered are two entirely separate issues.
It is the same issue as the issue of paying for public schools if you don;t vaccinate your children, because in both scenarios you are forced to pay for a service you aren't using. And the reasons for this situation are the same. It is because public schools are funded by property taxes and not, for example, tuition. Everyone who is paying property taxes is paying for schools they may or may not be using for whatever reason. It's not unique to opponents of vaccination. Vouchers only "fix" one aspect of this larger problem.
Regardless of where you stand on the first point, delivering education through a public school system with politically determined curricula and policies is increasingly failing.
What political determined curricula are you referring to?
I think American schools just suck even ignoring the effect of politics. We spend more money per capita than any country in the world on public schools and our schools are terrible. It's not that public schools in general are bad, there are many examples of countries who do public schools very well. We just don't seem capable of it at the moment.