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Tribeca Film Festival, Robert De Niro Pull Anti-Vaccination Film
theodp writes: USA Today reports that one day after defending the scheduled screening of a controversial documentary linking vaccinations to autism, Tribeca Film Festival co-founder Robert De Niro announced that the film is being pulled from the event. The film, Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, was scheduled to debut April 24. It is directed by Andrew Wakefield, known to many as the father of the anti-vaccine movement. Wakefield authored a 1998 report on vaccinations and autism that was later retracted, He also had his medical license revoked. The decision to include the film in the festival resulted in outrage from many who are upset that the film's inclusion could offer legitimacy to a study debunked by leading scientists. "My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation around an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family," said De Niro, who has a child with autism. "But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for."
...Robert DeNiro expected more people to be on his side. He believes that horse-shit that Wakefield published in '98. He's just too much of a coward to admit it in the face of controversy, so rather than stick to his guns he's backpedalled hoping to save face...that and actually get someone talking about the Tribeca Film Festival, of course. No publicity is bad publicity.
"the father" is irrelevant. Anti-vax movement was born out of the need to blame someone for bad things. In this case, the evil vaccine overlords. That need is so compelling that the erroneous blame survives in the face of clear scientific evidence.
Streisand Effect? of course. Nobody would have pressured for the removal of the film if it was about the Flat Earth Society.
Because thinking the earth is flat does not kill you, your children or your neighbours children.
I'll take "what is an incoherent rant based on no facts whatsoever for $500, Alex."
So the science is settled. But is it? Why is there still research on vaccines, if the science is settled. There are no new illesnesses?
Yup, the science is pretty much settled. Thimerosol has been completely removed from vaccines as a result of anti-vaxxers outrage. The difference?
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafe...
Okay, so they move the goalposts and call it the vaccines themselves. Now its on shaky grounds, as there is less commonality between different vaccines.
Here's your science teacher's data:
http://www.jennymccarthybodyco...
We live i strange times, when people get their science education from Politicians and women who's main talent is taking off their clothing, and documented frauds with a plan to extract money via the sympathy gene.
But those darned scientists? Never! That's crazy talk!!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Unfortunately the carriers of these "dumb genes" not only risk their childrens' lives, but also the herd immunity of the local community. Thereby putting the immune-compromised, newborns, and the unlucky for which the vaccine didn't take effect or are allergic. Darwinism is fine until it risks the lives of others. We don't implement speed limits and gun control to protect one from turning himself into red paste, we do it to protect others from the ignorant choices of the few. Want to play solo Russian roulette with a semi? Go right ahead, its only a crime if there are other participants (Manslaughter, natch).
Thanks for demonstrating my point.
I, personally, think the anti-vaxxers are idiots. However, my own personal opinion of them should not drive an attempt to force them out of every venue and censor them using any means necessary. Their hypotheses have been shown to be flawed and this is backed up with science - backed up via reasoned thought and the scientific method.
What you're doing is evaluating what the SJW / popular opinion hivemind would think about anti-vaxxers - that they're whackjobs (which I happen to agree with) - and immediately rushing to try to exclude them from everything and censor them up to and possibly including government stepping in to censor them. "It's not free speech if I disagree with their opinion and they need to be stopped / banned / arrested" is the rallying cry of your particular brand of idiocy.
I invite you to fuck off, because we already have enough censor-happy SJW idiots oozing around the internet.
Proper science doesn't censor incorrect results, it lets them speak for themselves.
De Niro was perfectly free to show the bloody film at Tribeca. It would have discredited his film festival, and damaged him pretty badly in the process.
Freedom of expression is not freedom from consequences. If you want to show a film defending a man whose self-serving actions has lead to harm and death, then go to it. But you'll be rightfully condemned for it, and may even suffer damage to your own reputation.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
First of all, demonstrate your claim. Produce the numbers,
Otherwise it's just an anonymous guy on the Internet making claims with absolutely no evidence.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
While I'm not a virologist, I did do my PhD in an immunology lab and am fairly well grounded in how the immune system works. So it's not really "opinion", it's current scientific understanding (well, reasonably current, I've been working in another field the last four years). And it's not like the facts are not readily available. You can read about all this stuff with minimal effort. The basics are high school science (second year for me...); the more advanced stuff is in any immunology text, you can get a second hand copy of one for almost nothing, or you can look it all up online.
Regarding the outbreak, I'll defer to the other comment here regarding the numbers. However, I'll just add this: being vaccinated *does not mean you won't get infected*. It *does* mean that the body is prepared to mount a rapid secondary immune response when infection does occur. Unlike a primary immune response, which occurs on the first infection (or when mimicked with a vaccine) and takes days or weeks to elicit a response, the secondary response is much quicker since you already have the necessary memory cells waiting to be called into action, and it's also much more effective for various reasons (e.g. affinity maturation and isotype switching). You'll get over the infection quickly, and you'll likely not be as infectious to others, but you'll still have an infection for a brief period and you're still at risk of complications, though significantly reduced from an unvaccinated individual. Example: I had measles twice as a child, despite being vaccinated; the difference was it was a few days with spots feeling slightly miserable, rather than spending a fortnight seriously ill getting long term organ damage. Seriously, look up and read about herd immunity. Loss of that is a risk to the entire population, but most especially to the children of uninformed idiots who opted out of getting vaccinated. Vaccination prevents the spread of serious diseases through the population, and the stuff we vaccinate against *is* serious; don't forget that before vaccination programmes, these were routinely killing and maiming hundreds of thousands every year and child mortality was common, rather than an exception. I.e. worrying about a one in a million chance of autism when there's a one in a thousand chance of death or an even higher chance of brain or other organ damage is totally illogical.
Immunology is a fascinating field; there's a huge amount being discovered all the time, but this stuff has been well understood for many decades. There's not any doubt about any of the above, it's been studied extensively by many hundreds of thousands of researchers and medics around the world. We continue to discover new cell subsets which add extra details to the picture, and which expand our understanding of specific diseases and autoimmune conditions, but the basics were nailed down comprehensively a long while back. It's not like vaccines are new or that the way they work isn't understood. We understand how the whole lots works at the molecular level, from all the components of a virus, to how it controls the cellular machinery, to antigen presentation and detection and the selection and expansion of the immune cells to counter it, including how T and B cells vary at the genetic level, even by single base pairs, to do the affinity maturation and isotype switching I mentioned above.
What I do find incredible is that people are totally uninformed about what vaccines are, how they work, and why they are important. Not only because it's taught to everyone (it certainly is in the UK), so you don't have an excuse not to know, but also because it's trivial to *get* informed. As the comment I originally replied to showed, there's a lot of misinformed opinions flying around, partly due to irrational fear, partly due to media attention despite there being zero evidence for any problems, and partly due to irrational nutjobs. Whatever the reasons, it's takes very little effort to educate yourself about the *reality* of how this stuff works should you choose to do so, and given that the "debate" over this stuff is without any merit whatsoever, it's clear that education to get people informed is definitely needed.