Anyone else notice a huge rise in a vocal minority of lunatics who do not have any clue what they are talking about against vaccines?
Its maddening.
My friend and his wife (he is a plastics engineer and she is an (ex) school teacher) were over last week trying to push us about eliminating vaccines and/or altering the schedule.
We are also friends with our pediatrician (who we trust with our babies' life) and she really explained how dangerous these people are.
Pretty sure i agree here. Not vaccinating one's children is a HUGE disservice to those children. Its not only a risk to those children, but to mine as well. i laughed when Jenny McCarthy got egg all over her face when it came out that her kid didn't even suffer from autism.
"When all your friends and sedatives mean well but make it worse... better find yourself a place to level out."
What do you call someone who sows misinformation, stokes fear, abets behavior that endangers people’s health, extracts enormous visibility from doing so and then says the equivalent of “Who? Me?”
I’m not aware of any common noun for a bad actor of this sort. But there’s a proper noun: Jenny McCarthy.
For much of the past decade, McCarthy has been the panicked face and intemperate voice of a movement that posits a link between autism and childhood vaccinations and that badmouths vaccines in general, saying that they have toxins in them and that children get too many of them at once.
Because she posed nude for Playboy, dated Jim Carrey and is blond and bellicose, she has received platforms for this message that her fellow nonsense peddlers might not have. She has spread the twisted word more efficiently than the rest.
And then, earlier this month, she said the craziest thing of all, in a column for The Chicago Sun-Times.
“I am not ‘anti-vaccine,’ ” she wrote, going on to add, “For years, I have repeatedly stated that I am, in fact, ‘pro-vaccine’ and for years I have been wrongly branded.”
You can call this revisionism. Or you can call it “a complete and utter lie,” as the writer Michael Specter said to me. Specter’s 2009 book, “Denialism,” looks at irrational retorts to proven science like McCarthy’s long and undeniable campaign against vaccines.
McCarthy waded into the subject after her son, Evan, was given a diagnosis of autism in 2005. She was initially motivated, it seems, by heartache and genuine concern.
She proceeded to hysteria and wild hypothesis. She got traction, and pressed on and on.
In 2007, she was invited on “Oprah” and said that when she took Evan to the doctor for the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, she had “a very bad feeling” about what she recklessly termed “the autism shot.” She added that after the vaccination, “Boom! Soul, gone from his eyes.”
In an online Q. and A. after the show, she wrote: “If I had another child, I would not vaccinate.”
She also appeared on CNN in 2007 and said that when concerned pregnant women asked her what to do, “I am surely not going to tell anyone to vaccinate.”
Two years later, in Time magazine, she said, “If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the measles.” I’ve deleted the expletive she used before the second “measles.”
And on The Huffington Post a year after that, she responded to experts who insisted that vaccines didn’t cause autism and were crucial to public health with this declaration: “That’s a lie, and we’re sick of it.”
I don’t know how she can claim a pro-vaccine record. But I know why she’d want to.
Over the last few years, measles outbreaks linked to parents’ refusals to vaccinate children have been laid at McCarthy’s feet. The British study that opponents like her long cited has been revealed as fraudulent. And she and her tribe have gone from seeming like pitifully misguided dissidents to indefatigably senseless quacks, a changed climate and mood suggested by what happened last month when she asked her Twitter followers to name “the most important personality trait” in a mate. She got a bevy of blistering responses along the lines of “someone who vaccinates” and “critical thinking skills.”
Seth Mnookin, the author of the 2011 book “The Panic Virus,” which explores and explodes the myth that vaccines cause autism, noted that McCarthy had a relatively new gig on ABC’s “The View” that could be jeopardized by continued fearmongering. What once raised her profile, he said, could now cut her down.
As she does her convenient pivot, the rest of us should look at questions raised by her misadventures.
When did it become O.K. to present gut feelings like hers as something in legitimate competition with real science? That’s what interviewers who gave her airtime did, also letting her tell the tale of supposedly curing Evan’s autism with a combination of her “Mommy instinct” and a gluten-free diet, and I’d love to know how they justify it.
Are the eyeballs drawn by someone like McCarthy more compelling than public health and truth? Her exposure proves how readily television bookers and much of the news media will let famous people or pretty people or (best of all!) people who are both famous and pretty hold forth on subjects to which they bring no actual expertise. Whether the topic is autism or presidential politics, celebrity trumps authority and obviates erudition.
There’s also this: How much time did physicians and public officials waste trying to neutralize the junk in which McCarthy trafficked? As Fred Volkmar, a professor at Yale University’s medical school, said to me, “It diverts people from what’s really important, which is to focus on the science of really helping kids with autism.”
1. it is made by the same industry that gave us vioxx and other drugs that were deemed unsafe ... the same industry that will use their dollars and lawyers to go after medical professionals that try to raise awareness of the effects ... the same industry that will make up its own journal to make it seem like their drugs are safe ... the same industry that has been involved in historic class action lawsuits ... the same industry that is essentially self-regulated as the FDA has shown itself to be not independent of industry ...
2. to conduct accurate studies ... you need dollars and you need access to data ... the drug companies are not going to give you data if it potentially results in negative findings ... also, they are largely responsible for funding studies which they make sure result in positive findings for their products ...
3. the gov't regulatory boards are not in the business of keeping the public safe ... look at cancer ... we can all agree that cancer rates are way up ... but outside of cigarettes and asbestos - there aren't a lot of things that are out there that are labeled will cause cancer ... yet we know that if we inhale and ingest all these chemicals - we are increasing our chances of getting cancer ... yet - that shit is so prevalent ... our air is polluted, our water undrinkable ... our food not actually good for us ... yet ... these industries all get to pump this shit into our lives without consequence because dollars are involved ...
now listen ... before you guys start pumping articles and videos of the "safety" of vaccines ... i've heard it and it's not to say that I don't believe in vaccines ... i've had my shots ... all i'm saying is that given the track record of these industries and the regulatory bodies that are supposedly protecting AND what WE all know multin-national corporations will do to make money (see Monsanto, Exxon, Haliburton, etc.) - is it not within the realm of reason that people question what these companies want to put in our body?
so ... as it relates to this thread ... better diagnosis or not ... autism like pretty much every other illness is on the rise ... if it's not the vaccines ... then what is it?
so ... as it relates to this thread ... better diagnosis or not ... autism like pretty much every other illness is on the rise ... if it's not the vaccines ... then what is it?
Could be anything. We just don't know. But we do know that blaming autism on vaccines without any scientific evidence is irresponsible and dangerous.
just throwing this out there.................. why mercury fillings? do dentists still fill cavities with mercury? & we're supposed to trust every single vaccine is a good idea? yeah ok
could be anything. Drinking water, air, general evolution/genetics, enhanced diagnosis, over-diagnosis. The people I know who are "against" vaccines are yet to provide any compelling evidence and none of them are educated in anything related to the medical field.
0
Options
brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 40,736
I've had vaccinations and I'm not totally against them but I will say this: I know these five guys who are brothers and not one of them has ever had a single vaccinations and their parents were into natural foods and lived in the woods. As far as I know none of them have ever been sick. I don't know if that's a fluke or good genes but I do know they are very healthy people.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Comments
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/03/27/autism_in_us_kids_surges_30_in_two_years_study_finds.html
"Life Is What Happens To You When Your Busy Making Other Plans" John Lennon
Autism and the Agitator
APRIL 21, 2014
Frank Bruni
What do you call someone who sows misinformation, stokes fear, abets behavior that endangers people’s health, extracts enormous visibility from doing so and then says the equivalent of “Who? Me?”
I’m not aware of any common noun for a bad actor of this sort. But there’s a proper noun: Jenny McCarthy.
For much of the past decade, McCarthy has been the panicked face and intemperate voice of a movement that posits a link between autism and childhood vaccinations and that badmouths vaccines in general, saying that they have toxins in them and that children get too many of them at once.
Because she posed nude for Playboy, dated Jim Carrey and is blond and bellicose, she has received platforms for this message that her fellow nonsense peddlers might not have. She has spread the twisted word more efficiently than the rest.
And then, earlier this month, she said the craziest thing of all, in a column for The Chicago Sun-Times.
“I am not ‘anti-vaccine,’ ” she wrote, going on to add, “For years, I have repeatedly stated that I am, in fact, ‘pro-vaccine’ and for years I have been wrongly branded.”
You can call this revisionism. Or you can call it “a complete and utter lie,” as the writer Michael Specter said to me. Specter’s 2009 book, “Denialism,” looks at irrational retorts to proven science like McCarthy’s long and undeniable campaign against vaccines.
McCarthy waded into the subject after her son, Evan, was given a diagnosis of autism in 2005. She was initially motivated, it seems, by heartache and genuine concern.
She proceeded to hysteria and wild hypothesis. She got traction, and pressed on and on.
In 2007, she was invited on “Oprah” and said that when she took Evan to the doctor for the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, she had “a very bad feeling” about what she recklessly termed “the autism shot.” She added that after the vaccination, “Boom! Soul, gone from his eyes.”
In an online Q. and A. after the show, she wrote: “If I had another child, I would not vaccinate.”
She also appeared on CNN in 2007 and said that when concerned pregnant women asked her what to do, “I am surely not going to tell anyone to vaccinate.”
Two years later, in Time magazine, she said, “If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the measles.” I’ve deleted the expletive she used before the second “measles.”
And on The Huffington Post a year after that, she responded to experts who insisted that vaccines didn’t cause autism and were crucial to public health with this declaration: “That’s a lie, and we’re sick of it.”
I don’t know how she can claim a pro-vaccine record. But I know why she’d want to.
Over the last few years, measles outbreaks linked to parents’ refusals to vaccinate children have been laid at McCarthy’s feet. The British study that opponents like her long cited has been revealed as fraudulent. And she and her tribe have gone from seeming like pitifully misguided dissidents to indefatigably senseless quacks, a changed climate and mood suggested by what happened last month when she asked her Twitter followers to name “the most important personality trait” in a mate. She got a bevy of blistering responses along the lines of “someone who vaccinates” and “critical thinking skills.”
Seth Mnookin, the author of the 2011 book “The Panic Virus,” which explores and explodes the myth that vaccines cause autism, noted that McCarthy had a relatively new gig on ABC’s “The View” that could be jeopardized by continued fearmongering. What once raised her profile, he said, could now cut her down.
As she does her convenient pivot, the rest of us should look at questions raised by her misadventures.
When did it become O.K. to present gut feelings like hers as something in legitimate competition with real science? That’s what interviewers who gave her airtime did, also letting her tell the tale of supposedly curing Evan’s autism with a combination of her “Mommy instinct” and a gluten-free diet, and I’d love to know how they justify it.
Are the eyeballs drawn by someone like McCarthy more compelling than public health and truth? Her exposure proves how readily television bookers and much of the news media will let famous people or pretty people or (best of all!) people who are both famous and pretty hold forth on subjects to which they bring no actual expertise. Whether the topic is autism or presidential politics, celebrity trumps authority and obviates erudition.
There’s also this: How much time did physicians and public officials waste trying to neutralize the junk in which McCarthy trafficked? As Fred Volkmar, a professor at Yale University’s medical school, said to me, “It diverts people from what’s really important, which is to focus on the science of really helping kids with autism.”
1. it is made by the same industry that gave us vioxx and other drugs that were deemed unsafe ... the same industry that will use their dollars and lawyers to go after medical professionals that try to raise awareness of the effects ... the same industry that will make up its own journal to make it seem like their drugs are safe ... the same industry that has been involved in historic class action lawsuits ... the same industry that is essentially self-regulated as the FDA has shown itself to be not independent of industry ...
2. to conduct accurate studies ... you need dollars and you need access to data ... the drug companies are not going to give you data if it potentially results in negative findings ... also, they are largely responsible for funding studies which they make sure result in positive findings for their products ...
3. the gov't regulatory boards are not in the business of keeping the public safe ... look at cancer ... we can all agree that cancer rates are way up ... but outside of cigarettes and asbestos - there aren't a lot of things that are out there that are labeled will cause cancer ... yet we know that if we inhale and ingest all these chemicals - we are increasing our chances of getting cancer ... yet - that shit is so prevalent ... our air is polluted, our water undrinkable ... our food not actually good for us ... yet ... these industries all get to pump this shit into our lives without consequence because dollars are involved ...
now listen ... before you guys start pumping articles and videos of the "safety" of vaccines ... i've heard it and it's not to say that I don't believe in vaccines ... i've had my shots ... all i'm saying is that given the track record of these industries and the regulatory bodies that are supposedly protecting AND what WE all know multin-national corporations will do to make money (see Monsanto, Exxon, Haliburton, etc.) - is it not within the realm of reason that people question what these companies want to put in our body?
so ... as it relates to this thread ... better diagnosis or not ... autism like pretty much every other illness is on the rise ... if it's not the vaccines ... then what is it?
& we're supposed to trust every single vaccine is a good idea? yeah ok
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce