You are wrong. There are studies that compare vaccines (modified virus proteins plus adjuvants) against adjuvants.
No, you are changing the subject. My point is in no way wrong. There are many studies that compare vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. Placebo controls are not necessary in these studies for purposes of uncovering safety concerns--in fact, I wish there were more placebo controls in these studies because it would make vaccines look even safer than they are.
This is not a true comparison, because if the were negative side effects from vaccines, they could have been caused by the adjuvants
The vast majority of studies in this area (including but not limited to epidemiology studies) examine un-vaccinated individuals as well. Unvaccinated individuals are just as good as placebo-injected individuals for discovering safety concerns--in fact, you will routinely get plenty of false safety concerns if you don't include a placebo group.
You are arguing against your own cause.
A proper control would then be vaccines controlled against for instance distilled water, that's why I put emphasize on (true) placebo controlled studies.
Distilled water should never be injected into the bloodsteam, you scientifically illiterate jackass.
You are a liar and a peddler of nonsense. You have continued to pump out moronic lies about the purpose of placebo-controlled studies even after I explained at length why you were wrong.
Therefore, I will no longer be debating these other issues you (even though you are still obviously wrong and/or lying about them), but will instead be simply warning people about you and directing them to the appropriate posts. Anyone is free to read the actual text of the Walker-Smith judgment to see how it is completely inapplicable to Wakefield. If it were applicable to Wakefield as you tried to claim, he would've been able to get his license back by now. But he has not been able to.
And are they all dying from infectious diseases? I don't think so.
Moronic babble from someone who doesn't understand the first things about statistics, or is hoping the reader doesn't. 70+ years ago, hundreds of millions of unvaccinated people didn't die from smallpox, either. And hundreds of millions of unvaccinated people did die from smallpox. The vaccine clearly worked, which is why smallpox was completely eradicated from the face of the earth immediately following an aggressive vaccination campaign, no thanks to the scientifically illiterate fear-mongers like you.
Quick, go ahead and imply that better hand washing eradicated it again. Go look at the Wikipedia page and see the Bangladeshi child. Do you honestly expect anyone to believe that smallpox was eradicated in places like Bangladesh through "better hygiene", and that it had nothing to do with the massive vaccination campaign?
I see you're still spreading this lie. A lack of placebo controls cannot be argued to imply that there are lingering safety concerns, period.
Placebo controls do not reveal hidden safety concerns. It is literally impossible for placebos to do what you are claiming. There have been large trials on safety and they are more than sufficient. Your babbling about double-blind "gold standards" demonstrates a profound ignorance of how medical studies actually work and what the purpose of placebo controls are. Adding a placebo control would either do nothing or make vaccines appear even safer, depending on what is being measured and how.
I see you've chosen to reply only to this response I've given you, instead of the multiple responses where I've dissected the lies and nonsense you are pumping out. You are continuing to claim that a lack of double-blinded studies implies we can't fully appreciate the dangers of vaccines.
I have demonstrated what a moronic thing this is to say that I will continue to respond to every single post of yours I find that rambles on about this nonsense. By ignoring my posts and continuing to spread your idiocy about placebos, you have proven yourself a liar and a charlatan, and not merely someone who is misguided. Therefore, I will keep my response to your epidemiology claims will be brief and to the point, as there is no use in trying to convince anyone who is knowingly engaging in deceit.
In autism there is still clearly a rising trend, you know...
No, there is clearly not a rising trend. There is a clearly a rising trend in autism diagnosis. 30 years ago, people didn't get routine mental health screening and the definition of autism was much, much narrower than it is today. "Autism spectrum" was not a phrase that was often used 30 years ago. Aspergers was considered a different disorder entirely. Any psychologist can confirm this for you. Examination of older editions of the DSM will confirm this. Examination of access to mental health care confirms this. A conversation with any psychologist will confirm this. I will not link spam at this time as I don't have the time to gather it in a neat stack for you, but as you are a proven liar I hope this is not necessary.
perpetuated*, Christ almighty... what is wrong with me? I'm officially going to blame inattentive use of the spellchecker, but I've a sneaking suspicion it's actually the internet rotting my brain.
Have you actually seen children's TV in the past 10 years? I don't complain about it because it's not actually harmful (the more over the top anti-SJW nutcases will scream endlessly about it), but it's invariably a wince-inducing, contrived mixture of black girl, asian boy, boy in wheelchair, token healthy white girl, etc. with personalities that appear to have purposefully been selected to not support any stereotype. Adult TV is different I'm sure, but children's TV hasn't been what you're describing in a very long time.
If every role model of a programmer you see until you're a teenager is male.
The only age-appropriate programmer role model I can think of offhand from when I was a kid and teen is the girl in Jurassic Park. And later on, let's see... well, there was Edward from Cowboy Bebop. I'm trying to think of a good male example as a strong character (not a pathetic clown), but nothing is coming to me. When it comes to positive computer programmer role models in the stuff I watched growing up, females are honestly the first thing I think of. Male programmers are usually portrayed, first and foremost, as creatures of pity.
Also, I'm curious if you are at all concerned about our profound lack of female sanitation workers? Female fisherman? Female homeless people?
For the record: none of this is offtopic. Gweihir interjected some nonsense to tweak me, and then he played dumb because he's too lazy and beaten down to trot out his old non-arguments. The above mini-rant is relevant to that prior argument we had, and that he brought up.
My thesis statements here: He is a fraud who knows nothing about cryptography, whereas I'm a self-professed layman who knows enough to realize how messed up the status quo is. The biggest easily-solved problem regarding passwords right now is in their hashing, transmission and storage, which is currently being handled in a criminally negligent manner at most places (gweihir disagrees. Incoherently, but strongly.) We absolutely should make some sensible long-term plans for a migration away from crypto that is vulnerable to Shor's algorithm.
(For a more realistic defense against quantum computing, of course I would recommend one of the asymmetric algorithms that apparently do not suffer a catastrophic decrease in security with the availability of quantum computers. This should ideally be implemented on top of RSA/ECC at least until we can be fairly certain that no breaks are forthcoming. Lower-end devices could use a legacy RSA-only option to save cycles if need be until hardware acceleration could be deployed. I wasn't super serious about suggesting a stateful solution, hence my tone, although it would be *great* in principle... the inertia behind having a stateless system is just too strong. But don't be fooled by the obsession with "pre shared" or "out of band". That's a red herring. It's the state vs. stateless that's the real sticking point.)
The "OMFG 47 VACCINES AT ONCE" thing is painfully stupid as well. You might feel perfectly healthy, but your body is fighting off dozens of minor infections right now. That what it does.
Furthermore, your immune system is mostly on / off (or to be more accurate: high intensity / low intensity). All this nonsense about splitting up and spacing out the MMR vaccines just increases the duration of the side effects and increases the chance of a serious side effect (rare though they are) because it significantly increases the amount of time your immune system spends in the "high intensity" mode. Am I parrotting what I read somewhere? No! I'm telling you what happened to my coworker's kids when he spaced them out. It's not "dogma" and I don't have to have some scientist or doctor explain it to me because it makes perfect fucking sense for anyone who has a middle school level understanding about the human body.
But your other point about the placebo controls was so much more precious than this. Please, PLEASE read my other post. Or one of the seven others I've written on this joyful little tangent you anti-vax people have stumbled on. I can't believe this is a thing.
As I've said elsewhere, adding a placebo control does not help you uncover hidden dangers. Ever. It will, in fact, usually tend to make something look SAFER.
Read those sentences a few times, then if you don't understand please click that link I've helpfully provided and read *that* post, and if you *still* don't understand then click the two links I gave in that post and read THOSE two posts... and if you still don't understand please take an Applied Statistics 101 course at your local community college, go read up on how placebo testing works, put on your thinking cap, get a nice cup of coffee, do whatever it is you need to *do* to properly absorb and ponder things and see if you can wrap your head around this:
A vaccine that is shown to be safe in a study without doubling blinding via placebos, will either look equally safe or will look even safer (depending on how the data is being collected and categorized) if you added a placebo control.
There is no mechanism whatsoever by which a placebo control could reveal "hidden" dangers in the vaccine.
I'm feeling a bit giddy right now. Is this a thing? Is this the new big anti-vaxxer thing, this obsession with double-blinded studies? That's awesome. I wish I were conceited enough to believe that I'm the first one to spot the flaw in this brilliant new tactic but it's just so friggin' obvious that I'm sure I couldn't possibly be.
I try not to bring up polio in these debates (usually, I turn to smallpox) because that's kind of a thorny one... the most commonly used polio vaccine is one of the very few that has, at times, done significant damage (because it's live virus, it's actually caused a minor outbreak or two of polio as I recall.)
Of course on the whole it's done much more good than harm, and it also has no wildlife reservoir and we're *this* close to stamping it out... ergh. But I have to admit, that last round of "just to be safe" polio vaccine in a region that is almost at the polio-free stage... for those specific people (and not the human race as a whole), the risk may actually outweigh the benefit. Or would it? Damned tricky, that one is.
If there were any English-speaking countries that still had polio, I don't think I could've possibly typed the above. That's a hard thing to admit because truth and clarity are really, really important to me but there are times.... "at what cost?"
As I have repeatedly said to other people around here, a placebo controlled study (that you appear to be hinting at here) cannot uncover hidden safety concerns. Adding a placebo will either do nothing or it will reduce the apparent harm of a vaccine (or "vaccine schedule") as compared to a study without placebo controls.
Placebos are there to avoid getting worked up over nothing (safety concerns that are illusory) and to establish efficacy. Efficacy is very well established for most of these things with broad scale epidemiology studies, so we're left only with safety.
There have been safety studies. There have been multiple safety studies. They have all come back as showing vaccines as being pretty darn safe and worth the risk. Ok fine, they aren't placebo controlled... now what? If we added controls, what do you expect to happen? At the most, we'll simply see more of the supposed adverse reactions explained away as coincidence. We wouldn't suddenly notice a monsterous lurking danger that wasn't visible until the placebos were added. That's not how placebos work.
I don't like to think of myself as a sadist, but I do wish I could see your and slashrio's faces when you read a sentence like that.
You might be tempted to argue a lack of double-blinded study makes efficacy questionable. This isn't an obvious and over-the-top moronic claim to make (unlike the safety one), but it is still stupid and/or deceitful as it demonstrates a willful ignorance of the mountains of epidemiology data we have access do which does show strong efficacy for most vaccines, particularly ones that have been around a long time like MMR.
There is no need to perform even a single double-blind study on these established vaccines. We already know they're safe enough; using a placebo control will only make them look even safer. And in terms of efficacy, epidemiology studies effectively and very reasonably take the place of small scale patient-focused studies.
You may or may not have a tiny, tiny point here regarding newer vaccines, but it almost certainly wasn't the point you thought you were making.
You've already admitted that efficacy isn't your big concern here, but safety. Double blinding can only make things look safer. Double blinding cannot expose hidden dangers. See this post for more details
Let it be sufficient to say that you are a stupid idiot.
So says a person who apparently didn't know that smallpox was wiped out (or if it was wiped out, hints that perhaps it was "good hygiene" that wiped it out and not the MASSIVE vaccination campaign that immediately preceded its decline), spreads baldfaced lies about Wakefield being exonerated (the Walker-Smith ruling appears to fully re-affirm Wakefield's sins and errors), and doesn't understand that double-blinding with placebo controls cannot possibly uncover any hidden safety concerns.
You've already admitted that efficacy isn't parents' big concern here, but rather the safety. Double blinding can only make things look safer. Double blinding cannot expose hidden dangers. See this post for a longer explanation.
This buzzword bingo of yours isn't going to work on anyone with basic scientific literacy. The "gold standard" you reference has nothing to do with safety.
You've already admitted that efficacy isn't parents' big concern here, but rather the safety. Double blinding can only make things look safer. Double blinding cannot expose hidden dangers. See this post for a more verbose explanation.
What an excellent idea. I think I'll respond to each and every one of your responses in this thread, pointing out that you don't have the slightest idea how placebo controls actually function.
Wow, this is a clever obfuscation of the fact that their is no double blind placebo controlled study regarding the safety of the vaccines.
No, if you care to re-read what I just said, you'll notice that I'm fully embracing this argument of yours. You don't understand the implications of your own argument. The argument you are making helps my side, not your side (i.e. the side of liars, charlatans and poor deluded parents. I'm hoping you are one of the latter, otherwise we're just wasting our time here.)
Add double-blinding to any study and the reported prevalence of side effects like, for example, fever will drop in frequency (as in decrease, become smaller, etc.) once these numbers are corrected with the placebo controls. This number will not go up if placebo controls are added. Please explain to me how the presence of a placebo control could plausibly results in an INCREASE in the adjusted number of fevers, seizures, "regressions" or whatever other horrible symptoms you're thinking of.
The problems parents have is not with the efficacy, it is with the safety.
Let me try to restate what I just said even clearer: if you can find someone willing to waste money on a double-blind study I say go for it. It will only strengthen what I'm saying. It cannot conceivably help your case here. I don't mean, "I'm so sure that I'm right!"; I mean even if I'm completely wrong about vaccines and they were crazy dangerous, there is no way that adding placebo controls could make them look anything but safer.
The only reason your side could plausibly be concerned about the lack of double-blinding is due to efficacy concerns (which I've already shown is ridiculous given the wealth of data we have on this vaccine's effects.) If you add double-blinding then one of two things happen:
1. The vaccine looks just as safe as it looks now.
2. The vaccine looks even safer because it might turn out that a lot of parents in the placebo group are reporting (for example) fevers, and thus we'll immediately know that X% of the fevers in the vaccine group are actually not caused by the vaccine.
Buzzword bingo doesn't work on me, sorry. I fully understand why placebos exist and they have nothing to do with detecting an otherwise hidden safety concern. It causes me physical pain somewhere around my solar plexus when I think about the likelihood that there are loads of intelligent (but lazy) people out there who nonetheless believe that a lack of placebo controls means that vaccine safety is questionable.
that's why the Vaccine Injury 'Court'
I was already aware of the vaccine court fund. It was not founded for scientific reasons, but bureaucratic / political ones. The CIA spent a lot of money investigating mind control techniques in the 60s; that doesn't mean they actually work. Various parts of our military have spent money investigating UFO reports; that doesn't mean that aliens are real. Bureaucracies do dumb shit sometimes. This was one such dumb idea, although to the extent that it probably was intended to encourage more vaccine development by alleviating legal liability I suppose it was good-intentioned.
The question for me is: How many cases of smallpox are prevented by the smallpox vaccine that would have occurred in spite of the decline caused by better overall conditions?
Do you realize that smallpox is eradicated? It used to be everywhere. You couldn't prevent it through regular handwashing; it was extremely virulent.
And now it is literally nowhere except in a test tube in some guarded vault somewhere. Smallpox used to be in parts of Africa where they didn't have running water. They still don't have running water there, and they still get all kinds of horrible infections, but guess what? Smallpox is gone, just GONE. Because vaccines work. My father had a s
It is quite well accepted that improved hygienic, nutritional and medical conditions had already contributed to a serious decline in the infectious diseases.
These diseases, and others, have for periods been completely eliminated in some countries that have passed a certain threshold of vaccination. You cannot find a single credible voice who has proven that this was the result of better hand washing.
It is "quite well accepted" that vaccines work. There's no reason at all to think that they don't work. They've been shown to be highly effective even in third world countries where running water is a luxury.
Andrew Wakefield has been proven not to be a fraud in the juridical case... axed down by the judge as being highly unprofessional and also wrong for that matter in revoking his license, and had to re-instate the same.
Nope. I took ten minutes out of my busy day to examine this and it's completely untrue:
Do you have any sources showing otherwise?
Are you going to own up to that little mistake / lie or are you going to carry on like nothing happened? Your intellectual credibility, such as it's worth, is on the line here.
Even if his license were eventually reinstated through some horrible technicality, that does not excuse his highly suspect and unethical behavior. The most charitable possible interpretation is that he was extremely reckless in misusing terminology to support his extraordinary theory, but the evidence points much more strongly towards an obvious intent to deceive, particularly when taken in combination with his later statements and actions. I would dissect that entire incident at length for your benefit, but at present I'm not entirely convinced you'd be interested or willing to hear me.
It is entirely on-topic as a closely related parallel phenomenon. You claimed that autism rates have been increasing, possibly even implying a large increase. This is absurd; we only know that autism diagnoses have been increasing. Obviously, mental/emotional/developmental disorders do exist and are a big problem for millions of people, but this is just a subjective questionnaire type of diagnosis administered by a psychologist[1]. There's no actual evidence whatsoever that the disorder itself has increased in prevalence.
The ADHD "epidemic" is another example of this exact same phenomenon that I am presenting to rebut your naive assertion. Most people realize that ADHD-suffering people have obviously existed throughout history... the disease obviously didn't magically spring up overnight and spread like wildfire in the latter half of the twentieth century. Slightly fewer people realize that the same is obviously true of autistic people. A century ago, higher-functioning autistic people were simply considered strange or eccentric, while the lower functional ones were often lumped into other umbrella diagnoses.
1. I hate to break it to you, but psychology is nowhere near being a hard science. Neuroscience is a real, hard science. Epidemiology and the biology behind vaccines are real, hard sciences. Psychology is fad-ish guesswork based almost entirely on subjective assessments (sometimes, but very rarely, with a little bit of neuroscience tossed in to try to make it look more like a hard science) and tortured statistics. The DSM V defines 'delusion' as "[blah blah blah]... except for religious beliefs". This is a clear indication of the fad-like, public-relations nature of psychology. No real science allows religious beliefs to dictate what is and is not a phenomenon of a given class.
Even most psychologists will admit much of this; they'll emphasize and interpret their statistics-backed studies a bit more than they're worth but very few of them would dispute that disorders like autism and ADHD became "widespread" due to changing diagnosis practices and an increase in mental health screenings. I've chatted to one or two psychologists myself about this very thing.
He said different ciphers with different keys. Separate ciphers (algorithms) with separate keys for each would indeed offer you extra protection. I suppose a reasonable and more realistic compromise/stopgap would be to do this with an asymmetric algorithm that isn't known to be vulnerable to super-efficient quantum algorithm attacks and then use this on top of RSA or ECC (which are known to be vulnerable.)
I still think a stateful solution with would be the best going forward, but I'm not realistically optimistic about getting people to sign up. But if we somehow could get enough people to make that jump, it becomes crazy robust and flexible.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish there were more placebo controls in these studies because it would make vaccines look even safer than they are.
I meant to say, "would [correctly] make vaccines appear even safer than they currently appear to be."
You are wrong. There are studies that compare vaccines (modified virus proteins plus adjuvants) against adjuvants.
No, you are changing the subject. My point is in no way wrong. There are many studies that compare vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. Placebo controls are not necessary in these studies for purposes of uncovering safety concerns--in fact, I wish there were more placebo controls in these studies because it would make vaccines look even safer than they are.
This is not a true comparison, because if the were negative side effects from vaccines, they could have been caused by the adjuvants
The vast majority of studies in this area (including but not limited to epidemiology studies) examine un-vaccinated individuals as well. Unvaccinated individuals are just as good as placebo-injected individuals for discovering safety concerns--in fact, you will routinely get plenty of false safety concerns if you don't include a placebo group.
You are arguing against your own cause.
A proper control would then be vaccines controlled against for instance distilled water, that's why I put emphasize on (true) placebo controlled studies.
Distilled water should never be injected into the bloodsteam, you scientifically illiterate jackass.
You are a liar and a peddler of nonsense. You have continued to pump out moronic lies about the purpose of placebo-controlled studies even after I explained at length why you were wrong.
Therefore, I will no longer be debating these other issues you (even though you are still obviously wrong and/or lying about them), but will instead be simply warning people about you and directing them to the appropriate posts. Anyone is free to read the actual text of the Walker-Smith judgment to see how it is completely inapplicable to Wakefield. If it were applicable to Wakefield as you tried to claim, he would've been able to get his license back by now. But he has not been able to.
And are they all dying from infectious diseases? I don't think so.
Moronic babble from someone who doesn't understand the first things about statistics, or is hoping the reader doesn't. 70+ years ago, hundreds of millions of unvaccinated people didn't die from smallpox, either. And hundreds of millions of unvaccinated people did die from smallpox. The vaccine clearly worked, which is why smallpox was completely eradicated from the face of the earth immediately following an aggressive vaccination campaign, no thanks to the scientifically illiterate fear-mongers like you.
Quick, go ahead and imply that better hand washing eradicated it again. Go look at the Wikipedia page and see the Bangladeshi child. Do you honestly expect anyone to believe that smallpox was eradicated in places like Bangladesh through "better hygiene", and that it had nothing to do with the massive vaccination campaign?
Psychotic ravings of the lunatic fringe. 30 years ago, people said fluoridated water would do all kinds of crazy stuff, too. It doesn't.
Anyone who might be tempted to respond to him, be aware he is a proven liar who is spreading patently absurd misinformation about the purpose of placebo controls in addition to spreading lies about the non-existent "exoneration" of Andrew Wakefield and even implying that smallpox was eradicated through good hygiene.
I see you're still spreading this lie. A lack of placebo controls cannot be argued to imply that there are lingering safety concerns, period.
Placebo controls do not reveal hidden safety concerns. It is literally impossible for placebos to do what you are claiming. There have been large trials on safety and they are more than sufficient. Your babbling about double-blind "gold standards" demonstrates a profound ignorance of how medical studies actually work and what the purpose of placebo controls are. Adding a placebo control would either do nothing or make vaccines appear even safer, depending on what is being measured and how.
I have demonstrated what a moronic thing this is to say that I will continue to respond to every single post of yours I find that rambles on about this nonsense. By ignoring my posts and continuing to spread your idiocy about placebos, you have proven yourself a liar and a charlatan, and not merely someone who is misguided. Therefore, I will keep my response to your epidemiology claims will be brief and to the point, as there is no use in trying to convince anyone who is knowingly engaging in deceit.
In autism there is still clearly a rising trend, you know...
No, there is clearly not a rising trend. There is a clearly a rising trend in autism diagnosis. 30 years ago, people didn't get routine mental health screening and the definition of autism was much, much narrower than it is today. "Autism spectrum" was not a phrase that was often used 30 years ago. Aspergers was considered a different disorder entirely. Any psychologist can confirm this for you. Examination of older editions of the DSM will confirm this. Examination of access to mental health care confirms this. A conversation with any psychologist will confirm this. I will not link spam at this time as I don't have the time to gather it in a neat stack for you, but as you are a proven liar I hope this is not necessary.
Autism is not like heart disease. This is a moronic thing to imply. The definition of heart disease doesn't radically change every 15 or so years. More to the point, autism rates have not fallen among individuals who have refused MMR or other vaccinations.
perpetuated*, Christ almighty... what is wrong with me? I'm officially going to blame inattentive use of the spellchecker, but I've a sneaking suspicion it's actually the internet rotting my brain.
If every role model of a programmer you see until you're a teenager is male.
The only age-appropriate programmer role model I can think of offhand from when I was a kid and teen is the girl in Jurassic Park. And later on, let's see... well, there was Edward from Cowboy Bebop. I'm trying to think of a good male example as a strong character (not a pathetic clown), but nothing is coming to me. When it comes to positive computer programmer role models in the stuff I watched growing up, females are honestly the first thing I think of. Male programmers are usually portrayed, first and foremost, as creatures of pity.
Also, I'm curious if you are at all concerned about our profound lack of female sanitation workers? Female fisherman? Female homeless people?
For the record: none of this is offtopic. Gweihir interjected some nonsense to tweak me, and then he played dumb because he's too lazy and beaten down to trot out his old non-arguments. The above mini-rant is relevant to that prior argument we had, and that he brought up.
My thesis statements here: He is a fraud who knows nothing about cryptography, whereas I'm a self-professed layman who knows enough to realize how messed up the status quo is. The biggest easily-solved problem regarding passwords right now is in their hashing, transmission and storage, which is currently being handled in a criminally negligent manner at most places (gweihir disagrees. Incoherently, but strongly.) We absolutely should make some sensible long-term plans for a migration away from crypto that is vulnerable to Shor's algorithm.
(For a more realistic defense against quantum computing, of course I would recommend one of the asymmetric algorithms that apparently do not suffer a catastrophic decrease in security with the availability of quantum computers. This should ideally be implemented on top of RSA/ECC at least until we can be fairly certain that no breaks are forthcoming. Lower-end devices could use a legacy RSA-only option to save cycles if need be until hardware acceleration could be deployed. I wasn't super serious about suggesting a stateful solution, hence my tone, although it would be *great* in principle... the inertia behind having a stateless system is just too strong. But don't be fooled by the obsession with "pre shared" or "out of band". That's a red herring. It's the state vs. stateless that's the real sticking point.)
Just a few notes for posterity.
The "OMFG 47 VACCINES AT ONCE" thing is painfully stupid as well. You might feel perfectly healthy, but your body is fighting off dozens of minor infections right now. That what it does.
Furthermore, your immune system is mostly on / off (or to be more accurate: high intensity / low intensity). All this nonsense about splitting up and spacing out the MMR vaccines just increases the duration of the side effects and increases the chance of a serious side effect (rare though they are) because it significantly increases the amount of time your immune system spends in the "high intensity" mode. Am I parrotting what I read somewhere? No! I'm telling you what happened to my coworker's kids when he spaced them out. It's not "dogma" and I don't have to have some scientist or doctor explain it to me because it makes perfect fucking sense for anyone who has a middle school level understanding about the human body.
But your other point about the placebo controls was so much more precious than this. Please, PLEASE read my other post. Or one of the seven others I've written on this joyful little tangent you anti-vax people have stumbled on. I can't believe this is a thing.
As I've said elsewhere, adding a placebo control does not help you uncover hidden dangers. Ever. It will, in fact, usually tend to make something look SAFER.
Read those sentences a few times, then if you don't understand please click that link I've helpfully provided and read *that* post, and if you *still* don't understand then click the two links I gave in that post and read THOSE two posts... and if you still don't understand please take an Applied Statistics 101 course at your local community college, go read up on how placebo testing works, put on your thinking cap, get a nice cup of coffee, do whatever it is you need to *do* to properly absorb and ponder things and see if you can wrap your head around this:
A vaccine that is shown to be safe in a study without doubling blinding via placebos, will either look equally safe or will look even safer (depending on how the data is being collected and categorized) if you added a placebo control.
There is no mechanism whatsoever by which a placebo control could reveal "hidden" dangers in the vaccine.
I'm feeling a bit giddy right now. Is this a thing? Is this the new big anti-vaxxer thing, this obsession with double-blinded studies? That's awesome. I wish I were conceited enough to believe that I'm the first one to spot the flaw in this brilliant new tactic but it's just so friggin' obvious that I'm sure I couldn't possibly be.
I try not to bring up polio in these debates (usually, I turn to smallpox) because that's kind of a thorny one... the most commonly used polio vaccine is one of the very few that has, at times, done significant damage (because it's live virus, it's actually caused a minor outbreak or two of polio as I recall.)
Of course on the whole it's done much more good than harm, and it also has no wildlife reservoir and we're *this* close to stamping it out... ergh. But I have to admit, that last round of "just to be safe" polio vaccine in a region that is almost at the polio-free stage... for those specific people (and not the human race as a whole), the risk may actually outweigh the benefit. Or would it? Damned tricky, that one is.
If there were any English-speaking countries that still had polio, I don't think I could've possibly typed the above. That's a hard thing to admit because truth and clarity are really, really important to me but there are times.... "at what cost?"
As I have repeatedly said to other people around here, a placebo controlled study (that you appear to be hinting at here) cannot uncover hidden safety concerns. Adding a placebo will either do nothing or it will reduce the apparent harm of a vaccine (or "vaccine schedule") as compared to a study without placebo controls.
Placebos are there to avoid getting worked up over nothing (safety concerns that are illusory) and to establish efficacy. Efficacy is very well established for most of these things with broad scale epidemiology studies, so we're left only with safety.
There have been safety studies. There have been multiple safety studies. They have all come back as showing vaccines as being pretty darn safe and worth the risk. Ok fine, they aren't placebo controlled... now what? If we added controls, what do you expect to happen? At the most, we'll simply see more of the supposed adverse reactions explained away as coincidence. We wouldn't suddenly notice a monsterous lurking danger that wasn't visible until the placebos were added. That's not how placebos work.
Overwhelming medical evidence huh? Show me the double blind placebo safety test performed on a vaccine. I bet you can't show me one.
Oh look, we have another player of buzzword bingo! I thought it was just slashrio.
As I explain in this post, double blinding with placebo controls does not and cannot reveal hidden safety concerns. Adding a placebo control will only make a vaccine (ANY vaccine, even if it were the most dangerous vaccine ever made) look safer.
I don't like to think of myself as a sadist, but I do wish I could see your and slashrio's faces when you read a sentence like that.
You might be tempted to argue a lack of double-blinded study makes efficacy questionable. This isn't an obvious and over-the-top moronic claim to make (unlike the safety one), but it is still stupid and/or deceitful as it demonstrates a willful ignorance of the mountains of epidemiology data we have access do which does show strong efficacy for most vaccines, particularly ones that have been around a long time like MMR.
There is no need to perform even a single double-blind study on these established vaccines. We already know they're safe enough; using a placebo control will only make them look even safer. And in terms of efficacy, epidemiology studies effectively and very reasonably take the place of small scale patient-focused studies.
You may or may not have a tiny, tiny point here regarding newer vaccines, but it almost certainly wasn't the point you thought you were making.
You've already admitted that efficacy isn't your big concern here, but safety. Double blinding can only make things look safer. Double blinding cannot expose hidden dangers. See this post for more details
Let it be sufficient to say that you are a stupid idiot.
So says a person who apparently didn't know that smallpox was wiped out (or if it was wiped out, hints that perhaps it was "good hygiene" that wiped it out and not the MASSIVE vaccination campaign that immediately preceded its decline), spreads baldfaced lies about Wakefield being exonerated (the Walker-Smith ruling appears to fully re-affirm Wakefield's sins and errors), and doesn't understand that double-blinding with placebo controls cannot possibly uncover any hidden safety concerns.
You've already admitted that efficacy isn't parents' big concern here, but rather the safety. Double blinding can only make things look safer. Double blinding cannot expose hidden dangers. See this post for a longer explanation.
This buzzword bingo of yours isn't going to work on anyone with basic scientific literacy. The "gold standard" you reference has nothing to do with safety.
You've already admitted that efficacy isn't parents' big concern here, but rather the safety. Double blinding can only make things look safer. Double blinding cannot expose hidden dangers. See this post for a more verbose explanation.
What an excellent idea. I think I'll respond to each and every one of your responses in this thread, pointing out that you don't have the slightest idea how placebo controls actually function.
Wow, this is a clever obfuscation of the fact that their is no double blind placebo controlled study regarding the safety of the vaccines.
No, if you care to re-read what I just said, you'll notice that I'm fully embracing this argument of yours. You don't understand the implications of your own argument. The argument you are making helps my side, not your side (i.e. the side of liars, charlatans and poor deluded parents. I'm hoping you are one of the latter, otherwise we're just wasting our time here.)
Add double-blinding to any study and the reported prevalence of side effects like, for example, fever will drop in frequency (as in decrease, become smaller, etc.) once these numbers are corrected with the placebo controls. This number will not go up if placebo controls are added. Please explain to me how the presence of a placebo control could plausibly results in an INCREASE in the adjusted number of fevers, seizures, "regressions" or whatever other horrible symptoms you're thinking of.
The problems parents have is not with the efficacy, it is with the safety.
Let me try to restate what I just said even clearer: if you can find someone willing to waste money on a double-blind study I say go for it. It will only strengthen what I'm saying. It cannot conceivably help your case here. I don't mean, "I'm so sure that I'm right!"; I mean even if I'm completely wrong about vaccines and they were crazy dangerous, there is no way that adding placebo controls could make them look anything but safer.
The only reason your side could plausibly be concerned about the lack of double-blinding is due to efficacy concerns (which I've already shown is ridiculous given the wealth of data we have on this vaccine's effects.) If you add double-blinding then one of two things happen:
1. The vaccine looks just as safe as it looks now.
2. The vaccine looks even safer because it might turn out that a lot of parents in the placebo group are reporting (for example) fevers, and thus we'll immediately know that X% of the fevers in the vaccine group are actually not caused by the vaccine.
Buzzword bingo doesn't work on me, sorry. I fully understand why placebos exist and they have nothing to do with detecting an otherwise hidden safety concern. It causes me physical pain somewhere around my solar plexus when I think about the likelihood that there are loads of intelligent (but lazy) people out there who nonetheless believe that a lack of placebo controls means that vaccine safety is questionable.
that's why the Vaccine Injury 'Court'
I was already aware of the vaccine court fund. It was not founded for scientific reasons, but bureaucratic / political ones. The CIA spent a lot of money investigating mind control techniques in the 60s; that doesn't mean they actually work. Various parts of our military have spent money investigating UFO reports; that doesn't mean that aliens are real. Bureaucracies do dumb shit sometimes. This was one such dumb idea, although to the extent that it probably was intended to encourage more vaccine development by alleviating legal liability I suppose it was good-intentioned.
The question for me is: How many cases of smallpox are prevented by the smallpox vaccine that would have occurred in spite of the decline caused by better overall conditions?
Do you realize that smallpox is eradicated? It used to be everywhere. You couldn't prevent it through regular handwashing; it was extremely virulent.
And now it is literally nowhere except in a test tube in some guarded vault somewhere. Smallpox used to be in parts of Africa where they didn't have running water. They still don't have running water there, and they still get all kinds of horrible infections, but guess what? Smallpox is gone, just GONE. Because vaccines work. My father had a s
That last link was messed up; it should have been this: http://www.bmj.com/content/340...
It is quite well accepted that improved hygienic, nutritional and medical conditions had already contributed to a serious decline in the infectious diseases.
These diseases, and others, have for periods been completely eliminated in some countries that have passed a certain threshold of vaccination. You cannot find a single credible voice who has proven that this was the result of better hand washing .
It is "quite well accepted" that vaccines work. There's no reason at all to think that they don't work. They've been shown to be highly effective even in third world countries where running water is a luxury.
Andrew Wakefield has been proven not to be a fraud in the juridical case... axed down by the judge as being highly unprofessional and also wrong for that matter in revoking his license, and had to re-instate the same.
Nope. I took ten minutes out of my busy day to examine this and it's completely untrue:
1. It was widely reported in 2010 that he lost his license.
2. As of March of this year, he still hasn't been reinstated. Note that the Walker-Smith stuff you allude to happened in 2012.
3. Then I saw an article from just two months ago explaining at length that not only has he not been exonerated, but we can be fairly sure he will NEVER be exonerated despite the legal happenings involving John Walker-Smith that you allude to.
Do you have any sources showing otherwise? Are you going to own up to that little mistake / lie or are you going to carry on like nothing happened? Your intellectual credibility, such as it's worth, is on the line here.
Even if his license were eventually reinstated through some horrible technicality, that does not excuse his highly suspect and unethical behavior. The most charitable possible interpretation is that he was extremely reckless in misusing terminology to support his extraordinary theory, but the evidence points much more strongly towards an obvious intent to deceive, particularly when taken in combination with his later statements and actions. I would dissect that entire incident at length for your benefit, but at present I'm not entirely convinced you'd be interested or willing to hear me.
It is entirely on-topic as a closely related parallel phenomenon. You claimed that autism rates have been increasing, possibly even implying a large increase. This is absurd; we only know that autism diagnoses have been increasing. Obviously, mental/emotional/developmental disorders do exist and are a big problem for millions of people, but this is just a subjective questionnaire type of diagnosis administered by a psychologist[1]. There's no actual evidence whatsoever that the disorder itself has increased in prevalence.
The ADHD "epidemic" is another example of this exact same phenomenon that I am presenting to rebut your naive assertion. Most people realize that ADHD-suffering people have obviously existed throughout history... the disease obviously didn't magically spring up overnight and spread like wildfire in the latter half of the twentieth century. Slightly fewer people realize that the same is obviously true of autistic people. A century ago, higher-functioning autistic people were simply considered strange or eccentric, while the lower functional ones were often lumped into other umbrella diagnoses.
1. I hate to break it to you, but psychology is nowhere near being a hard science. Neuroscience is a real, hard science. Epidemiology and the biology behind vaccines are real, hard sciences. Psychology is fad-ish guesswork based almost entirely on subjective assessments (sometimes, but very rarely, with a little bit of neuroscience tossed in to try to make it look more like a hard science) and tortured statistics. The DSM V defines 'delusion' as "[blah blah blah]... except for religious beliefs". This is a clear indication of the fad-like, public-relations nature of psychology. No real science allows religious beliefs to dictate what is and is not a phenomenon of a given class.
Even most psychologists will admit much of this; they'll emphasize and interpret their statistics-backed studies a bit more than they're worth but very few of them would dispute that disorders like autism and ADHD became "widespread" due to changing diagnosis practices and an increase in mental health screenings. I've chatted to one or two psychologists myself about this very thing.
He said different ciphers with different keys. Separate ciphers (algorithms) with separate keys for each would indeed offer you extra protection. I suppose a reasonable and more realistic compromise/stopgap would be to do this with an asymmetric algorithm that isn't known to be vulnerable to super-efficient quantum algorithm attacks and then use this on top of RSA or ECC (which are known to be vulnerable.)
I still think a stateful solution with would be the best going forward, but I'm not realistically optimistic about getting people to sign up. But if we somehow could get enough people to make that jump, it becomes crazy robust and flexible.