Personally, I think that this is nonsense. But let us say you disagree.
What little survey work has been done shows only 29% of parents of autistic children blamed vaccines. The impression vaccination opponents give is that almost all parents believe what they do. But we don't hear much from them.
If you are a parent trying to decide whether to vaccinate your child, you have two choices.
Jenny McCarthy is right: Mommy knows
If the personal experience and beliefs of the parents matter, then you should go with the 70% who don't blame vaccines. Or the 80% who haven't changed their views on vaccination to be more wary of them.
Mommy doesn't know
That makes sense. Because the opinions of 70% of parents aren't any better than the opinions of 30%. So we should throw out what the parents believe and ask what the evidence shows. And the answer is that the studies and the research from many disciplines and methodologies show that vaccines do not cause autism.
So the next time you read a sad story from a vaccination opponent, remember that most of the sad stories don't have the parents blaming vaccination.
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Well we all know what kind of problems a very vocal minority causes.It's been the reason America has been on such a rapid downward spiral for the last three decdes.
ReplyDeleteI've been reading through the latest trainwreck of a thread over at Huffington Post.this being a prime example.
I'm just wondering if you had read this.It's 183 pages,but it's riveting stuff.Especially interesting is the information about the now defunct Dublin lab, Unigenetics that handled the specimens for the original Wakefield study.I don't believe most of this was mentioned enough,if at all.
You might want to read through it,and get some more ammo for your HuffPost battles.
Now get back over there and kick some antivaxer butt!
Thanks for reminding me about Cedillo. As a status report for experts thinking on autism and vaccines, the decisions by the Special Masters(judges) are excellent.
ReplyDeleteI have to correct you on Unigenics lab. Unigenics was set up specifically to provide litigation support for the UK MMR lawsuits.
Wakefield's 1998 paper was based on persistent measles vaccine virus in the guts or elsewhere of the kids. He left the impression that virology work hadn't been done. A couple of years later he published the results of a Japanese lab that purported to have found the virus in samples from the kids in the study and others.
There were slight problems with the Japanese lab work. Wakefield filed a document in his lawsuit against Brian Deer and others where he withdrew any reliance on that study. In addition to the actual samples from the kids, the lab was sent positive and negative samples. All samples were blinded. The lab couldn't identify the test positive and test negative samples accurately.
Going back in time, we have to ask who sent the samples? That would be Nick Chadwick, Wakefield's Ph.D. student who had collected and tested all samples from the kids. He then tested them for measles vaccine virus. There were positives, but they were determined to be false positive when sent out for sequencing. Wakefield knew this before the paper was published.