Do antivaccers play a social function?
I received a comment on my last posting which directed me to a blog entry titled “The Social Function of Vaccine Resistors“, which makes an interesting claim, specifically that the Jenny McCarthy’s and Jim Carrey’s of this world play an important social function that they should be honored for? Puzzling, to say the least.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a Physician Assistant and have had my own kids vaccinated. Our vaccine system is incredibly safe and is still improving. But it must always be remembered, that pharmaceuticals only have our best in mind as long as our best entails our purchase of their products and thus they are not to be trusted.
I don’t quite understand the argument here. I do not think for a second that Big Pharma has our best interest in mind. As any and all other corporations out there, it is in the business of making money. That’s its main purpose. It has its, and its shareholders, interest in mind. It’s job is to sell drugs, the point though is that these drugs won’t sell if they do not work. At the end of the day, doctors must prescribe which drugs a patient takes, so that’s why Big Pharma must make its due diligence to ensure that the science is right, or else doctors will not prescribe it’s medicine. This is the checks and balances that make the system work, not crazy anti-vaccine lunatics. And guess what, when Big Pharma goes bad, and do unethical things, it is not the anti-vaccers that expose the wrong doing, not ever! Being vigilant is not the same as making unwarranted statements, endangering people’s lives and spreading misinformation. We need to be vigilant, yes, but not idiots!
Though these companies also are a huge benefit to our country, to safe guard from their dark side, our society has evolved several checks. I feel that the vaccine resistors are part of that natural check system and should be honored as such. Many of the safety checks in our present system exist exactly to appease the errors pointed by earlier resistors. We never want to make laws to stop the resistors.
First, of course we do not want to make laws to stop the resistors, no one in their right mind would even entertain such a thought. Freedom of speech allows them to say whatever they want, no matter how ridiculous it may be. Secondly, and most importantly, no they do not deserve to be honored at all. You know who deserves to be honored? The scientists carrying out the research to address these crazy lunatics’ screams. They are the safety checks that we need, not Jim Carrey, not Jenny McCarthy. What’s there to honor about someone who refuses to accept the evidence? What’s there to honor about someone who thinks they know more than the scientific establishment, about scientific issues? I do not understand how we can honor ignorance and arrogance in any way?
I think it is wise to realize that though vaccine resistors may make bad decisions and harmed themselves or their loved ones. Their resistance has helped you.
No they have not! There is nothing beneficial that is coming from the works of the anti-vaccers, no gains to be had whatsoever. These people are a peril to society and we must expose them as much as we can, not give them some medal of honor. Should we honor the flat earthers? The white supremacists? They are to be exposed and ridiculed at every opportunity not honored, and so deserve the anti-vaccers.
So, to answer the question asked in the title: NO, they play no useful social function at all, not anymore than a spreading cancer plays a useful biological function for the organism it has invaded.
National Infant Immunization Week Highlights Importance of Protecting Infants from Life-Threatening Diseases
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will launch National Infant Immunization Week (NIIW) with events beginning April 25 and continuing through May 2, 2009. Parents, caregivers and health care providers will be reminded of the benefits of vaccination and the importance of routine childhood vaccination.
“Immunization is one of the single most important steps parents can take to help assure their children grow up to be strong and healthy. We prevent millions of cases of disease and thousands of deaths in children each year through immunization,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of CDC′s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “NIIW provides a chance for us to remember how important vaccines are and renew our efforts to make sure no child needlessly suffers from a vaccine-preventable disease.”
This year marks the 15th anniversary of NIIW. Washington state and Cook, DuPage, and Lake Counties of Illinois will host special NIIW kick off events. They will be joined by hundreds of communities from across the United States in celebrating NIIW through community awareness, health care provider education, and media events to promote infant immunizations.
The UFO Mystery Solved
It seems I’ve been getting ahead of myself here, posting all sorts of mysteries and puzzles, and never getting around to giving the answers. I pledge to tie up all the loose ends before continuing down this reckless path.
So, first on the hit list, is the UFO Mystery that I posted last week. I gave enough facts that I thought you’d probably be able to figure it out, and figure it out you did. (If you haven’t read it yet, check it out now, and then come back here for the spoiler.)
A number of you guessed it pretty much right on the nose. There are some power lines above those carports, pretty high up. They’re black rubber (or whatever they make power lines out of) so you wouldn’t think they’d look like a light in the dark. But somehow, car headlights on the road outside the complex are hitting something and reflecting 90 degrees into the condo complex in a thin vertical stripe. This vertical stripe of light hits the powerlines, and makes two or three (one cable was thinner) grayish lights appear in the sky. If the car turned into the complex, the lights would shoot off to the left.
And that security guard driving up? I mentioned him for a reason. Note that the appearance and movement of the lights correlated with his car coming up the road and turning into the complex.
We couldn’t find exactly what the headlights were reflecting from. There are a lot of buildings and stores and signs and stuff across the street from the entrance, and I think you’d probably need to climb up onto the powerlines to see exactly where the reflection is coming from. But a reflection it is, as even the most modest patient investigation clearly reveals. It happens whenever a car turns in, and doesn’t happen whenever a car doesn’t turn in. The condo complex is very quiet and isolated from the shops, and there’s no sense at all that you’re seeing an intrusion from that direction.
Fire Marshall Bill discusses vaccines and autism on The Huffington Post
After writing about a new low of pseudoscience published in that repository of all things antivaccine and quackery, The Huffington Post (do you even have to ask?), on Tuesday, I had hoped–really hoped–that I could ignore HuffPo for a while. After all, there’s only so much stupid that even Orac can tolerate before his logic circuits start shorting out and he has to shut down a while so that his self-repair circuits can undo the damage. Besides, I sometimes think that the twit who created HuffPo, Arianna Huffington, likes the attention that turds dropped onto her blog by quackery boosters of the like of Kim Evans. Certainly, the HuffPo editors seem utterly untroubled that, among physicians and medical scientists, HuffPo is viewed with utter contempt and ridicule. Certainly, I view Arianna’s vanity project that way whenever it publishes the antivaccine stylings of ignoramuses like Deirdre Imus or cranks like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and David Kirby, especially now that HuffPo’s decided that antivaccine nonsense isn’t enough and that it needs to “kick the pseudoscience up a notch” with its latest quack recruits.
Apparently, HuffPo has decided that even Kim Evans is not enough to bury its reputation when it comes to any form of medical science so deep into the mud that it would require nuclear weapons to blast it out; that is, if you even accept the contention that HuffPo even has a reputation for medical science. What am I talking about? I’m sure many of you know; you’ve deluged me with copies of links to this article. No, no, don’t worry, I’m not annoyed. It tells me that you, my readers, feel that this article is something that so desperately cries out for a heapin’ helpin’ of not-so-Respectful Insolence and that said Insolence is what you desperately want to see applied to it.
Never let it be said that I don’t give the people what they want.
In fact, I so wanted to give the people that what they wanted on this one that I decided to save the post as a web archive and write this on the plane as I was coming home from Denver last night, leaving only the addition of relevant links as necessary upon my arrival home. So, welcome the latest arrogant idiot to the Huffington Post’s merry band of antivaccinationists. No, it’s not Jenny McCarthy, although I’m surprised that HuffPo didn’t recruit Jenny McCarthy to blog for it long ago. Unfortunately, it did recruit her boyfriend, perhaps because his A-list celebrity (as in danger of fading to B- and C-list as it is) far outshines Jenny’s D-minus-list celebrity. Yes, I’m talking about Jim Carrey, who applies his “intellectual firepower” (such as it is) to an article entitled The Judgment on Vaccines Is In???
Oh, the stupid, it does so burn.
You know, reading this article, a horrific vision came into my head. What if Jenny and Jim actually had a child? What if they actually reproduced? What would their offspring be like? I fear he would be the Antichrist of Stupid, whose power would suck all intelligence, reason and science out of the world, the better to usher in an Armageddon of Stupid against which the armies of reason might not be able to stand. If that were to happen, it would usher in a new age of dumb, a dumb so deep and profund that it might be thousands of years before humans were able to rub two stones together and make fire again.
But I digress.
Unsolved Serial Killings Haunt NM; Where are the Psychics?
My home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico, is making national news again, and it’s not the kind of press Mayor Chavez wants. It seems that there may be a dozen or more victims of a serial killer whose bodies were buried in a vacant lot on the West Mesa, dating back at least several years.
As writer Sarah Netter noted in the Feb. 17 Albuquerque Journal, “The bodies were found by chance, starting with one bone sticking out of the dirt…The bones were believed to have been unearthed by excavation work in the area.” At last count, the remains of eleven people have been found at what Police Chief Ray Shultz describes as one of the largest crime scenes in New Mexico.
It’s a horrifying story that brings up a curious issue. There are hundreds of psychic detectives across the country who claim to locate missing persons and solve crimes for police. I’d guess that there are dozens of psychics in Albuquerque who, if they have the abilities they claim, could do the same. Yet Albuquerque has about 25 open cases of missing adults, and hundreds of unsolved homicides dating back decades.
It’s a fair question to ask: Why haven’t any psychics helped locate missing persons, bring their killers to justice, or save lives by stopping serial killers before they could kill again? Why are police forensic teams and the Office of the Medical Investigator spending weeks identifying bodies on the West Mesa when gifted psychics could presumably do it in hours? Why are the remains of these victims being discovered only now—by accident—instead of years ago by psychic-led search teams?
Among New Mexico’s high-profile missing persons cases:
* Albuquerque native Nick Garza disappeared after a party at Vermont’s Middlebury College, where he was a student, on February 5, 2008. For months, his family and police searched in vain; at least one psychic claimed to communicate with Garza’s spirit, but could not help locate him. Garza’s body was finally found by police and cadaver dogs in a creek near the college on May 27, 2008.
Headline writers do it again-Acupuncture cuts dry mouth in cancer patients
Actually, I cannot fault the journalists too much on this one. While their headline is highly misleading, given that the pilot study was done on 19 subjects, with no blinding or placebo control or anything of the sort, the fault rests more on the study’s authors, one of which apparently is a certain Mark S. Chambers, a professor in the dental oncology department at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, who was the Senior Author. According to these guys:
CONCLUSIONS: Acupuncture was effective for radiation-induced xerostomia in this small pilot study. Further research is needed.
I call bullshit. Why a professor in the dental oncology department of the University of Texas would make this sort of conclusion, based on such a poorly designed study, baffles me. You’d expect him to be much more careful with his wording and load his conclusion with words like “it appears”, “it suggests”, but no, not Marky. He is positively sure that in “this small study” acupuncture was effective. Not even the slightest hesitation that maybe the result was an artifact of the way he ran the study, not even the slightest worry that his study would score a big fat 0 on a simple Jadad Scale. Nope, in his study acupuncture worked and he’ll tell the world goddamit.
Another thing that baffles me is that there would be an actual press release about this. A press release about a 19 patient, not randomized, not controlled, unblinded study. Wow, here is a real scientists doing exactly what we acuse the quacks of doing, highly sensationalized claims about some highly implausible CAM modality based on a highly badly designed study. I guess this is how you find scientists that will sign Intelligent Design petitions and stuff right?
A Champion Grubby Speaks Out
I hardly know where to start… First, see americanchronicle.com. This account is just so packed with mis-statements, outright lies, and scientific howlers, it would take me all day to itemize them – but it can still do a lot of harm just because the ignorant reporter – Peter Fotis Kapnistos – has published the material. I suggest he may now want to return to his former calling in fashion and advertising photography, rather than continue to pose as a “journalist.”
To quote him, he says, first:
…it was alleged that Uri Geller was caught cheating in an Israeli TV documentary that has lately also circulated on YouTube.
No, it was proven that Geller was doing one of the only five tricks he knows, and second, that was not any “TV documentary,” at all. It was simply a TV entertainment show. Kapnistos continues:
The accusation was that a slow motion shot revealed him producing a small magnet from behind his ear or out of his hair to influence a compass needle.
Well, anyone who might have said that, would not have been a magician, I’ll tell you that. In any case, I’ve never seen such a statement, except from Geller himself – because he knows that it’s a ridiculous scenario, as I’ll show you up ahead, one that can’t be supported. No “slow motion” was required to show that Geller blatantly placed a thumb-tip – a very common and often-used magician’s prop – onto his thumb, which then seemed somehow magnetic, because it caused the very sensitive marine compass to turn as soon as it was brought near the instrument. Kapnistos, again:
…we see a wide overall view of the controversial Israeli TV video scene where Uri Geller’s critics accuse him one way or another of allegedly plucking a slightly thick “hidden magnet” from the edge of his hairline.
No, that’s not true. The magicians – particularly the Israeli magicians, who are seriously embarrassed by this crude trick from their countryman – never made any such silly statement. That’s like saying that a magician produced a rabbit from a hat by having it shot there from a concealed offstage cannon. But this “journalist” really reveals his ignorance by this next statement:
…the video footage makes it readily understood that Uri could not possibly have placed pointlessly thick thumb magnets on both of his hands.
“Both his hands”? Suddenly we have two “thick thumb magnets” being wielded by the magician? Believe me, one is more than sufficient, folks, as I’ll show you next week. But just how “thick” – or massive – does a magnet have to be to dramatically affect a marine compass, one of the size that Geller used on the TV show? Just 1/16″ thick by 3/16″ diameter – and you can easily get a number of those tiny discs into any thumb-tip! Does Mr. Kapnistos really think a responsible journalist would describe such a miniscule object as, “thick”? The fact is, that we magicians are astonished that Geller actually chose to use a plastic thumb-tip, rather than just taping a tiny disc to his finger!
As for the Swedish person Kapnistos says has so carefully researched magnets and their effects on compasses, he’s an incompetent, too. His ignorance of the subject is apparent. One statement by Kapnistos says that
…a magnet small enough to hide in someone’s hairline can’t possibly make a compass needle shift as much as it does in the Uri Geller video.
Au contraire, both of you “experts”! A tiny neodymium magnet contained in a plugged-on thumb tip sure can!
Edgar Mitchell is at it again. Yawn.
A lot of folks have been asking me if I heard that Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell has been talking about UFOs again, and CNN felt the need to carry the story.
The thing is, this isn’t a story. Mitchell isn’t saying anything new, and it’s certainly not surprising that CNN would write this fluff piece.
I’ve written about this before: Mitchell is an Apollo hero, but that doesn’t give him any authority at all when it comes to flying saucers. And, of course, he still has no real evidence at all for his claims. It’s a rehash of the same tired old stories, and there aren’t even blurry photos for this one.
Skepquote of the day
Among professional organizations that defend the teaching of evolution, perhaps the biggest offender in endorsing the harmony of science and faith is The National Center for Science Education. Although one of their officers told me that their official position on faith was only that “we will not criticize religions,” a perusal of their website shows that this is untrue. Not only does the NCSE not criticize religion, but it cuddles up to it, kisses it, and tells it that everything will be all right.
Why is Censorship of Scrutiny so Much a Part of Intelligent Design?
While Michael Egnor is accusing the scientific community of censorship, the Institut Discotheque is advertising a summer seminar on Intelligent Design, and there’s something very interesting about the advertisement. Applicants for the seminar are required to provide various information about their grades and their interests, as well as “a letter of recommendation from a professor who knows your work and is friendly toward ID, or a phone interview with Dr. Bruce Gordon, CSC Research Director.” Now that’s interesting—a letter from someone who is “friendly toward ID”? What is this if not a litmus test—a gatekeeper device to prevent critics or doubters from attending their seminar?
Can you imagine if an organization devoted to evolutionary science required applicants to provide such bona fides? If the AAAS required applicants to provide them with a letter from someone “friendly” toward evolution, before you could attend one of their seminars? Real scientific seminars are open to anyone who is respectful and willing to listen to the evidence and weigh ideas, even if they don’t actually believe in those ideas. Anyone can attend U.C. Berkeley’s seminar on evolution tomorrow without providing any evidence about your beliefs; even creationists are welcome. Some years ago, Professor Michael Dini at Texas Tech got in a lot of trouble because he refused to write letters of recommendation for students unless they attested that they believed in evolution. But the DI requires that you fly the right colors before they’ll let you in—while they have the gall to accuse the scientific community of censorship and closed-mindedness!
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