Who IS this guy?!

'Niceguy' Eddie

Political Talk Show Host and Internet Radio Personality. My show, In My Humble Opinion, aired on RainbowRadio from 2015-2017, and has returned for 2021! Feel free to contact me at niceguy9418@usa.com. You can also friend me on Facebook.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Anti- Anti-Vaxxer Movement Rant

I know, I know. I promised one about energy.  I'll get to it, I swear.  But I HAD to tap this first.

I came accross THIS which was linked to by Skeptic Dictionary (my bible.)  It's a fantastic write up absolutely skewring the anti-vaccinemovmenet and their blatant intellectual dishonesty.  I'm coming to the realization that one of the reason I like MMFA so much is not just that it's liberal - after all, there are TONS of good, well-written liberals sites and blogs out there, and I don't spend half as much time on all of them put together!  But, what MMFA essentially focus on is the Right's intellectual dishonesty. THAT'S at the core of thearguments they make, and that kind of argument really appeals to me.

Now... I don't see the Anti-Vaxxer movement or Alternatve Medicine in General to be a partisan or a poltical problem.  In fact there are elements of both Conservtaive Anti-Science (Faith Healing, for example) and Liberal Anti-Science (Product liability, anti-corporate/big-Pharma fears) in all areas of 'Alternative Medicine.'  So honestly, I don't give a fig about the politics behind this psudeo-scientific nonsense.  Liberal or Conservative, right or left, My feelings on this, as with all matters scientific, are very simple:

"Alternative Medicine" is just another way of saying "Stuff that doesn't pass scientific muster or double-blind clinical testing." IWO: Bullshit.  And Skepdic has dozens of articles in it that do a better job tearing down this nonsense down than I even want to try.  But whatever, as long as you're not denying your children life saving medicine, opting for prayer instead - which is a nice way of saying, "MURDERING YOUR CHILDREN"- then I really don't care what you waste your money on, as long as you don't try to put into some kind of National Health Plan that MY TAX MONEY pays for.  Barring that?  Buy all the placebos you want.

But the Anti-Vaxxer movement is DANGEROUS.  Hundereds of children have DIED in this country alone and infectuous diseases that were once considered extinct in the developed world are now on the rise again in many countries.

1) As far as I'm concerned, Jenny McCarthy, as the public face (Josesh Goebels) of anti-vaxxer propaganda, shares the same proportion of blame for the 505 deaths that occured between June, 2007 and March 2010 as one might attribute to Goebles for the holocaust.  She's facing 505 counts of accessory to MURDER as far as I'm concerned.

2) If you, as a parent, have chosen not to vaccinate your child, and do not have a DIAGNOSABLE, SCIENCE-BASED, MEDICAL REASON for doing so: YOU ARE A BAD PARENT.  And if your childeren become ill and/or die, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE.

3) As the father of two autistic boys I can say this no more plainly:
  •  If your autistic child has unvaccinated younger sibilings, YOU ARE A BAD PARENT. 
  • If you have wasted you money on any number of unproven therapies you are not only a FOOL, you are a BAD PARENT for diverting resources that should have been spent paying for SPEECH THERAPY, and possibly SCIENCE BASED medication.
  • If you have exposed your child to RISKY, unproven practices such as Chealation?  If I had my druthers I'd take those kids away from you, put you in jail, and put in jail the QUACK and FRAUD of a physician that prescribed and/or carried it out.  (And one already has: in PA, for manslaughter.  If I had been on that jury, I would have gladly gone as high as 'murder in the first' for anyone carrying out deadly experiments on handicapped children.)
Science based medicine, is the ONLY medicine.  Anything else is nonsense.  No better than a bunch of stuff I just make up out of the blue. 

6 comments:

  1. Well, anti-vaccines might not be left or right, but the coverage definitely leans right - they get a lot more airtime from the right, from a few limited examples I've seen.

    One recent example was the supposedly vaccine-injured second string cheerleader for the Washington Redskins. Her plight was pushed by Jenny McCarthy's site, for sure, but the only local news coverage that I ever saw came from the local Fox affiliate. And that affiliate failed in massive ways to vet her story and provide appropriate context AND never explained that a variety of medical specialists debunked her assertion that her dystonia could have possibly been caused by the vaccine she got.

    She had a psychogenic illness - basically, it was all in her head.

    She got one regular seasonal flu vaccine. She appeared to get the H1N1 flu about 10 days later, and thought that she had gotten the flu from the flu vaccine, which any educated person knows is NOT possible. Coincidence is not causation. She then started suffering other weird symptoms and she immediately concluded that it was from the flu.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The more and more I read about and hear these whack jobs speak, I just hear conservatism. BUT - I'm trying to take into account that I lean liberal, and assume that this may just be my own bias rergarding this issue. Glad to see someone else sees it as well.

    BUT... there is still something inherently liberal about mistrustiung big-pharma, corporations, etc... And that can be HEALTHY. There's nothing wrong with a little corporate skepticism. Just look at Tobacco and cancer or big oil and global warming! The BEST science hardly comes from big corporations! So I think there are some elments of this movement that might appeal to an anti- big, for-protift corpration liberal.

    And the Anti-Vax movement (and other alternative medical movements) also has no shortage of bona-fide liberal boostrers, inlcuding the likes of Oprah, the Huffington Post and numerous celebrities.

    So when I post something like this, I really can't even tell which direction I'm going to get smacked from.

    In any case, I'm glad the FIRST comment ws apositive one. THANKS FOR THAT! LOL

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nice use of CAPITAL LETTERS to make your points. Because we all know that if you SHOUT SOMETHING REAL LOUD, it is more convincing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anon,

    Sorry... I'm a pretty loud guy in real life as well. From now on I'll try to use more bold-faced and italics in the future, just to keep you happy.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I am very pro-science, but I am skeptical of the "papercut vaccines" I'm seeing more and more of because science is discarded for money. The vaccine industry and the scientists who study vaccines needs to be more scientific and less-Pete's Dragon "money, money, money by the pound" about this. The polio vaccine, as one example, has been thoroughly tested for decades. We know it's safe, and we know what the risks are. I support this vaccine.

    The vaccines given today like candy for chickenpox, as one example, are not well tested nor are they medically necessary (the immune system requires target practice). It was manufactured to make a quick buck for two parent-working families who don't want to take a day off work for their sick child who will then gain a lifelong immunity to chickenpox. Instead, 70-80% of children gain a temporary immunity (about 1 year). Long term effects? Who cares! The CEO can now afford his 15th car. Next we'll have a vaccine for paper cuts, one for runny noses, one for hiccups, and one for bumps and bruises, all to make another quick buck with little regard for safety and effectiveness. And if you don't give them to your kid, some doc will argue, then you are condemming your child to a painful, potentially fatal experience with a paper cut. That classic liberal chess-style "thinking six moves ahead" doesn't exist here. It's "do what we tell you and don't think about it" conservatism.

    Also, most vaccines now STILL use thimerosal (C9H9HgNaO2S). Thimerosal contains a mercury atom (that's the Hg in the chemical formula). In all of my chemistry education, it's always stressed that outside of amalgams, there is no known safe level of mercury, whether free or bound. We have NO idea what happens to the Hg when thimerosal is metabolized. Why? No one has ever looked into it. It's always unscientifically assumed to be safe (kind of like swimming with a papercut around hungry sharks is "safe"). Notice what the experts say when asked, it's usually along the lines of, "We believe there is no danger." Believe? Excuse me? Believing is for Tinkerbell, Santa Claus, and underdog sports teams. Not for medicine. I want numbers. I want p-values and sample sizes and other such data. I want it yesterday, when it should have been done in the first place like true science would dictate.

    The doseage of thimerosal contained in the vaccines given to newborns is, sadly, the same as in an adult vaccine. Every other medication I know of is dosed based on age/body weight, except this. Why? Why does a 7 pound infant need the same amount of preservative - and a poorly effective one at that - as a 250 pound linebacker? Flooding a tiny body with that much heavy metal can't be good IF it's not good for an adult. Right? And yet there is nothing but foot-dragging at looking into this.

    As for getting flu from a flu vaccine, not only is it possible, but in immunology I learned that there is a certain percentage of vaccine recipients that are *expected* to get it, typically from a live virus vaccine (my least favorite). That hardly sounds like "NOT possible". Nothing is ever 100%.

    So yeah, I'm skeptical. And for good reason. The folks making money from this and raping science have no concern for the one child that may be harmed or die at the alter of profit-taking from their pseudoscience and fairy-voodoo, and I don't want that one to be mine. When my kids die, as all people will do, I at least want it to be from peer-reviewed factual scientific data. Polio vaccine? The data is there. Heart transplant? The research has been done. Dr. Harry Potter's magic wand "anti-stub your toe" vaccine? No thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  6. BuckeyeBluegrass,

    Actually I don’t think we’re as far apart as you might think.

    1) Chicken Pox? I’m with you 100%. Why give ~20 years of immunity to a disease that’s basically harmless in children, yet can be fatal in adults? That’s just… STUPID.
    2) Flu? Personally, I usually skip that too. My kids got one this year, when they got the swine vax. Which they got because there were some cases around us. But most years? We don’t bother with it. We’re not in the ‘high risk’ category for dying, so… If I feel really shitty for a couple days? Oh well. Sux to be me!

    What I’m talking about here is the anti-vax nonsense that has led to a drop in the usage of the MMR (Measles Mumps Rubella), Pertussis (Whooping Cough), Hepatitis, etc… Things that can KILL you. And what anyone of these lacks in lethality is made up for in transmissibility. Putting out bogus info that causes people to skip these is DEADLY. How deadly? Well… 500+ deaths in the country with one of the highest vaccinations rates in the world otherwise. Consider how few people in this country listen to this crap, 500 preventable deaths in 3 years is astounding to me. WAY, WAY, WAY more than the number of deaths than could be credibly linked to vaccines.

    And that’s where (I think) we differ the most. That fact is that it’s almost trivial to prove something’s dangerous, yet damn near impossible to prove it’s completely safe. So we do what we can, and we wait and see. Right now? There’s no increase of ANYTHING that can be credibly liked to vaccines. NOTHING. Autism, for example, has only risen since they REMOVED thimerisol from MOST childhood vaccines, back in 1997. (That's no matter HOW you define it. Some criteria are more forginving than others, but NONE result in a decline.) Now… correlation doesn’t PROOVE causality, as I'm sure you know, but it sure as hell is still REQUIRED for it! Bottom line? They got nothing.

    And, another place you're not quite right, is that, historically speaking, in the rare cases that a vaccine has caused even a fraction of a 1% increase in ANYTHING, it’s been pulled from the market. For more on that, I highly recommend Dr. Paul Offitt’s “Autism’s False Prophets.” It’s a great read for any science-minded skeptic, so you’ll probably find it rather interesting.

    And concern for ONE child that might die for the Vax should not trump a Vax that will prevent HUMDEREDS or THOUSANDS of children from dying. If you don’t like you’re chances with a live (yet weakened) virus vax, how do you like them with the virus itself? People died from the live Cowpox Virus after all, but the numbers were miniscule compared to the number who were dying of the Smallpox (Variola Major) that it prevented. And because of that world-wide vaccination effort, Small Pox has been eradicated. (I recommend “Devil in the Freezer” for more on Variola as well as Ebola, Anthrax and others. That's a FASCINATING read! And rather a bit TERRIFYING as well!)

    Bottom Line, the way I see there are three basic medical innovations that trump everything else combined in terms of medical progress and contributing to our longer, healthier lives:

    1) Antibiotics.
    2) Anti-septics / Sterilization methods
    3) VACCINES.

    Now sure, any and all of these CAN be overused, and I personally believe that all of them ARE being overused and/or pverprescribed. But that's not a reason to embrace the dangerous, pseudo-scientific nonsense of the anti-vaxxers and go against your doctor’s advice and the best knowledge of SCIENCE-BASED medicine!

    All you can do is knows the risks of both choices, and use your head… Just make sure your using credible information! ;)

    Thanks for you comment.

    ReplyDelete