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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."
Locating by-State prevalence of autism stats over a decade ago, I started collecting by-State stats on hundreds of variables including vaccinations, mercury, diseases, econometerics, demographics, etc.
Three things stood out: 1) The best single-variable ecological correlation was mother's age at first live birth. 2) The best two-variable ecological correlation was Finnish ancestry and immigration from India. 3) Of all the variables, autism averaged the least powerful correlations with the wide range of by-State variables I had collected.
The mother's age at first live birth was a lower level of correlation than the 2-variable one, but it was more "robust" -- meaning that the scatter of points followed what you would expect from a "normal" distribution.
That was clear back in 2004.
I'm no pro, was not funded and didn't even have a relative with autism spectrum at that time (I do now). The fact that the CDC hasn't conducted an all-out statistical assault of like this at the county level given all the time, money and "big data" available is damning. They just don't care -- or don't want to know.
Seastead this.
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.
Vaccines contain adjuvants and preservatives. The preservatives prevent bacterial growth, since you wouldn't want to inject a toxic bacterial culture (which happened before stuff like thimerosal was used). Adjuvants induce a localised inflammatory response to increase the effect of the immune system against the virus you're innoculating against. Without it, it would have reduced efficacy, or maybe no effect at all. So the reason for their presence is absolutely logical, and was determined by empirical testing to quantify exactly how much was needed, after it was determined that they *were* needed.
You're right that these aren't "nice" things. But they *are* necessary. Like everything there's a tradeoff. In this case, the toxicity of the preservatives and adjuvant against toxic bacterial growth and then benefit of the immunity to viral infection, respectively. Given the tiny amounts used, the negative effect is absolutely minor, and it will mostly get flushed out of the body within a short time. Note that they have not been shown to be harmful. Given that the tradeoff for some of these vaccines is chosing not to have brain damage, die, or suffer other long-term debilitating consequences, any negatives from the preservatives and adjuvants are greatly outweighed. Put it this way: if vaccines did cause autism as claimed by this fraud (which they don't, but let's pretend it's true), then it would *still be worth vaccinating everyone*. Why? Because the tiny chance you would get autism pales in comparison with the ~1/1000 chance of death from measles, and the still higher chance of long-term disability or serious complications. The numbers don't lie. Even if these charlatans were correct, vaccination would still be the correct choice every single time.
Do you really think that the people developing the vaccines would add this stuff for the hell of it, or not be fully aware of the risks involved? Thimerosal usage has been greatly reduced or dropped entirely in response to public hysteria. But it can only be done in the first world where you can manufacture and distribute the vaccine in bulk for immediate usage, since it can no longer be stored. In the third world, or for less commonly-used vaccines, it's still used. And that's still absolutely fine.
As for flu vaccines, like all vaccines they use dead or attenuated virus. Of course it makes you "sick"; having a mild infection (or at least the effects of an infection without actually being infected) and consequently developing an immune response to it is the *entire point* of the vaccine. The attenuation means it's not going to spread significantly in your body or to others, but it *is* sufficient to develop an immune response. Then you'll be protected when a real infection hits you.
I'll give the parents who fall for this crap a little leeway. Being personally effected by something like this is emotionally rough on people and they want to find answers to why it happened, a possible cure to make it better, or even just some kind of better understanding.
People like Wakefield (and the other snake oil peddlers like faith healers, psychic surgeons, etc.) take advantage and prey on those emotions in order to prevent people from thinking rationally. Being able to look past your emotions and realize that even though something might make you feel better, doesn't mean that it actually helps you at all takes character in its own right.
Perhaps you've gone your whole life without being wrong and then getting pigheaded about it because you were emotionally invested in an answer, but I doubt it. Those that tend to believe that they have are usually the ones who are horribly wrong about something, but absolutely refuse to admit it and will just bury their heads in the sand even deeper no matter how much evidence you show them.
... this if someone offering aid and comfort to an individual who happily perpetuated a medical con that hurt and killed innocent children and still is doing so for his own material benefit
And he caused something that's even incrementally worse than the suffering and deaths of innocent children because their parents fell for the con: The suffering and death of innocent children whose parents DIDN'T fall for the con - but were nevertheless infected by those who did fall for it.
Immunizations aren't anywhere near 100% effective. So a substantial number of people, even though immunized, are still susceptible to the disease. They are dependent on "herd immunity" to keep their chances of exposure low. Creating a population of unimmunized offspring of suckers, large enough to switch the contagion exponential from decaying to expanding, creates the exposures that sicken and kill these innocent victims.
Then there are those who are exposed before the can be immunized, or before the immunity can build, or after it decays, or who can't be immunized for other reasons (such as a deathly allergy to a component of the available formulas), or who are immune compromized for any of a number of reasons, ...
So seeing through the fraud and doing the right thing is STILL not enough to avoid the risk of disease and death created by this jolly psychopath.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Or is there a problem pointing to where it is wrong and illustrating that?
Yes, there is a very big problem with that. People pay attention to slick films peddling easy and absolute answers. They don't pay near as much attention to cautionary statements about a lack of correlation in articles published in boring scientific journals.
Lies have a big advantage over the truth. They can be simple, clean, and confident, and concise enough to fit on a bumper sticker or a tweet. The truth is always messy, complicated, and couched in doubt. After all, we can't prove that vaccines don't cause autism, the best we can do is say that there is no evidence for that.
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.