Remember a few months ago, all that negative hype about the H1N1 vaccine? Remember all the parents saying, “Not gonna test it on my baby!” Today, those parents should have one less reason to be fearful. Nearly all negative sentiments towards vaccines, weather conscious or not, were founded on a single study back in 1998 which proposed vaccines being linked to Autism. Before that, vaccines were seen as boons to society. Well, today it has been reported that the British publication, The Lancet, which originally published the article has officially retracted it, citing several incorrect sections in the study. The scientific community, which has long doubted the study, considers this something of a formality, and will go on acting as if the study never happened.
Parents, however, will still be idiots. People love to have a little something to warn about way too much to give up on this juicy wive’s tale. After all, you’re sitting around with folks, and one of them brings up a disease, or a shot, or anything to do with a medication, and you get to sit there and break the conversation, “You know, these vaccinations aren’t safe. No, it’s true. They don’t hardly test them. Most of the time, they put your kid at a helluva lot more risk than they are at without the shot. Not for me, and certainly not on my kids. I’m going to be raising a natural child, thank you very much. Nobody’s gonna make my kids their laboratory.”
So let’s just look at this very, very simply. Vaccines work by introducing a shell of a virus into the blood so that your immune system can learn to recognize and disarm it. It’s roughly the same as if we had captured some prototype tank that, say, the Russians had built. The tank, itself, is perfectly safe. It’s off. It has nobody driving it. But we get to look at it and figure out how somebody might take it apart or blow it up. After that, we just put a whole bunch of mines out in the field which go off specifically for that tank, so that if the tank ever appears on our native land, BOOM, no more tank.
Now, is there any reason to be afraid of this process? There is are some good, ligitimit concerns, by some intelligent people, and I’d encourage parents to read their arguments as well.
But, when it comes to the history of the fear, the one study which started the whole damn debate has been thoroughly debunked. In fact, it had been debunked for years.
So why are parents worried? They are worried because other parents are worried. Everything else they say, after that, is unfounded. Being afraid of something because other people put fear out there is fine, but do some thinking and ask, “what do I know and is that the same as, ‘what have I heard.’”
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Excuse me? I am well aware of how vaccines *work* by introducing a “shell virus”, and many vaccines in the past have saved thousands of lives, but the new vaccines that are being churned at light speed by Big Pharma, desperate to find new sources of profit during a recession, contain toxic ingredients *never tested on human beings* – i.e., I am not creating “negative hype” about vaccination, the problem is not the shell virus, but the additives in new vaccines, such as glycine and aluminum hydrochloride.
Out here on the west coast of Canada, local health magazines such as “Common Ground” debunked the H1N1 panic – it killed far fewer people than are killed by “normal flues” each year. No one here died of H1N1 – a bunch of germ-riddled people living together in the very small space of metro Vancouver!
So…I *still* have yet to hear a convincing argument from the pro-vaccination side of this “debate” – this certainly doesn’t qualify as one.
p.s. – if you had taken the time to read all of the material on vaccination that I have written as a graduate-level medical researcher, you would find that I am not a parent, and do not plan to be one – I simply like to inform my parent friends of the risks of injecting toxins into the bodies of their babies – do you have a degree in medicine?
“The Lancet” is about as far from a legitimate source of accurate medical data as you can get!
Many great points. First, let me point out that this piece was not in any way a response to anything you have said or written (and you’re right, having the words “negative hype” as the link was a gross error on my part (will see what I can do about that).
Yours is actually the first bit of really interesting, solid explanation that I’ve seen against vaccines. And though at the time of its writing I had decided that I felt the vaccines worthwhile despite the glycine and aluminum issues, I still appreciate them as intelligent concerns.
What did inspire this piece, and what it was in response to, were the parents I was speaking with who were patently against vaccines for no other reason than that they had “heard they were bad” and/or “that they didn’t trust the government.”
I disagree with the anti-vaccine stance, but not so whole-heartedly that I’m not interested in, for example, your research. What I am against is what I consider an ignorant fear response. These parents had sp0ken with no doctors, nor read your work, nor even though to grasp a basic understanding of what was going on in the process.
I applaud your work and passionate reply, and am eager to send such people your way for a good look at some solid information.
Oh and, yeah, Lancet, not a lot of rep, but somehow started a whole lot of mess.
Hey, thanks for writing back on my points! I must excuse myself for ranting and raving about it a bit on my blog – I’ll remove that post.
I understand where you’re coming from – blind trust in an “anti-___” stance is just as dangerous as blind trust in the safety of any substance given to you by a doctor. Both of these attitudes remind me far too much of folks that are deeply religious, but then when you try to discuss the reasons for their faith, they attack you – it makes me wonder, how strongly do you really feel about those beliefs if you can’t even have a conversation about them? Or, do you have any idea what you’re talking about? – have you read any of the Bible/Koran/Upanishads/etc.
I’m very open-minded to hearing opinions that differ from mine. For example, I’m not at all religious myself (spiritual, but not religious – I can hear Bill Maher laughing in the background
), but my mother-in-law is. However, she knows the Bible like the back of her hand, and talks about her kind of faith with me, and I talk about my kind of faith, and it usually turns out that our lines of thought about the Universe aren’t so different after all – I just don’t rely on any particular “book”!
Same goes for my research – I’m not a dogmatist about anything; I have my favourite theorists and researchers, but they are in no way perfect – I don’t idolize anyone, and if I do choose to be “anti” something, I don’t walk around carrying a picket sign, I try to actually do something about it.
It frustrates me that my audience is usually “the academy”, which is why I started the blog.
I wouldn’t call myself “anti-vaccine” either – no way. Luckily, I’m past the age of needing many vaccines myself (unless I stepped on a nail and needed a tetanus shot or something – of course I would get it – that vaccine has been around for decades and has never harmed anyone). If I had children (which I don’t plan on – I believe that there are so many kids in this world without homes that I don’t need a “mini-me” – if I ever chose to be a parent I would adopt) — however, I think it’s great when one of my friends has a baby ; their choice, way to go, you’re braver than I am, as I think bringing up a child in this world would be incredibly difficult. Why? For one, because of the nastiness, and indeed dogmatic attitudes, that surround everything from letting your kid watch television to which vaccines you decide they should get. The young parents I know become pariahs among other parents when they do something against the grain of the mainstream in child-rearing.
I’m so happy that you followed up on this – you are officially the only person who has been willing to discuss this with me without attacking me – so I think that you do deserve to call yourself the modern sophist.
Please excuse my nasty comment on your other page – I thought you were just using seeded buzz to plant more seeds by linking to articles that caught your eye without reading them, and this turned me off. Obviously, you listen to others and like me, are willing to change your mind a bit through intelligent discussion with others. A very rare trait these days – the extent of which I have discovered through the whole “H1N1 panic”.
One last thing – my 6 year-old cousin actually did get H1N1 in Mexico. She didn’t get any vaccines, and it ended up to affecting her anymore than a regular old flu. However, the media of course jumped in – she was the only child to get the virus in the small (in terms of population) province of Manitoba at that time. When she returned to school, none of her classmates would talk to her anymore. She actually had to transfer schools because of all of the slack she got – her peers started treating her like she was a monster.
Mainstream media is such a powerful “source of information” that it had this effect on a grade one class! And trust me, I hate Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy’s rampage against vaccines and insistence that they caused their baby to develop autism, but then somehow magically cured it themselves (I don’t recall how they did this, I just heard them nattering on Larry King once). Using one’s celebrity status to advocate for something that I’m guessing they haven’t researched themselves – i.e. I’m guessing they got this information from a particular doctor and then started repeating what he said to the masses – is pathetic.
Again, my apologies for being presumptuous about you and your blog!
Best Wishes,
scars
oops – that was “not” affecting her – I am anti-type-o hehe.
I also, as far as my doctor was concerned, got the H1N1. It sucked, but not any worse than any other.
Meanwhile, I don’t really mind a nasty post about my site: you certainly wouldn’t be the first (see boob and titty posts). They generate traffic at the very least, and I’m always up for a conversation.