Anti vaccine bullshit

[wautd]

A friend of mine recently showed the websiteto a certain "dr" Tenpenny (she's an osteopath) who he finds a credible anti-vaccine spokesperson. At first sight the sights seems to be filled with pseudoscience and misinterpretations of conclusions but he challenged me to refute her arguments.
As he seems to believe in every consperancy theory out there and has no scientific background whatsover it's probably just a waste of time and it's probably better ignore it. But if anyone with some actual background in medicine and immunology feels like breaking it down, be my guest

[Borgholio]

I don't have any background in medicine, but the pro-vaccine argument is very simple. In science, consensus is key. For something to be widely accept as factual, it has to be proven or reproduced repeatedly. With vaccines, it has been proven that the observed side effects are few and far between. These anti-vaxxers like to latch on to a single study whose results have not been widely reproduced, or the testimony of a single individual who may even have been ostracized by his / her peers. In short, they lack evidence. One instance of a child who became autistic supposedly after being vaccinated is not proof that it's happening all over...or even proof it happened this once. It could be coincidence for all they know.

If your friend is a conspiracy theorist, then really nothing you say can convince him otherwise. Any attempt to show that this person is on the vastly minority side of medicine will only reinforce his idea that she's right and everyone else is evil. Any rational person would say "Well none of this woman's claims are taken seriously by anyone else, she is not accurate in her claims and figures, and her logic is fuzzy...thus she's probably a whack job (or at the very least incompetent). But conspiracy theorists are not rational people.

[Adam Reynolds]

Here is another way you could argue this. Is it really better to risk a potentially deadly disease then it is to have a higher risk of autism? That doesn't kill people.

[Simon_Jester]

There are medicines that can cause side-effects bad enough that the cure can be worse than the disease (e.g. antibiotics napalming your intestinal flora and screwing up your digestion for the rest of your life, when you took them as a treatment for a routine ear infection that would have almost certainly cleared up on its own).

Vaccines, as a rule, are not on that list of medicines.

And there are so many utterly a-rational people who refuse to even talk about the subject in a statistics-based, fact-based way that as a private individual, there's not much point in even getting involved.

[Broomstick]

Here is another way you could argue this. Is it really better to risk a potentially deadly disease then it is to have a higher risk of autism? That doesn't kill people.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work against people who think autism is worse than death - and such people really do exist. There's a crowd out there that views disability of any sort, no matter how minor, as horrific, intolerable, and to be avoided at all costs.

Some anti-vaxxers are amenable to reason and logic. Many are not.

[Adam Reynolds]

Here is another way you could argue this. Is it really better to risk a potentially deadly disease then it is to have a higher risk of autism? That doesn't kill people.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work against people who think autism is worse than death - and such people really do exist. There's a crowd out there that views disability of any sort, no matter how minor, as horrific, intolerable, and to be avoided at all costs.

Some anti-vaxxers are amenable to reason and logic. Many are not.

In an odd sense, for those that have to deal with someone who is an extreme case, I could actually see the selfish logic in this. Dealing with a severely autistic person is extremely frustrating and you will be stuck with them for life(and in the case of parents probably have to consider what to do to care for them after you die). On the flip side, while they might die due to disease, they also might recover and be fine. Either way, they are not a problem for the caregiver for very long.

[Purple]

Before I start.
- Note that I am not anti vaccination and do not endorse such messages. The following is simply meant to explain how I think these people think and feel and not how I think and feel.
- Also note that I am going for a very exaggerated notion of what autism actually is. The description given here is not designed to accurately portray it but to portray how fearful parents who always (you know it's true) fear the worst for their child see it.

---

I don't think its these people being selfish or evil as you describe. I think it's actually fear born out of love. Imagine if you had a child, a beautiful little thing that came from you. And you love it more than anything in the world. Everyone else who has children is going to watch them grow, go to school, college, get jobs, a wife and lead a happy life. They get to watch them become people that they can be proud off. And in the end they can go to their grave happy in the knowledge that their child is on the right path toward a happy life once they are gone. Not you though. You don't get that. Your little child is newer going to become any of those things. Instead you get to watch it live a tortured existence as the worst possible case of autism. Your child is newer going to be self sufficient or get a girlfriend or anything. Nobody but you is going to love him. And once you die it's going to starve to death with nobody to care of it.

That sort of thing is frightening. And if you can't put your self in the mind of a parent thinking this way and understand that fear than frankly you have less empathy than I.

---

What's my point in this? Well it's simple. It's too easy to dismiss these people as idiots and hate them. But by doing so you are doing them an injustice. They are just frightened parents, like any parent ever. And they have been duped into a lie that sounds just real enough to be true. Something to think about at least.

[Elheru Aran]

Fear is no excuse for abandoning reason and logic.

[Broomstick]

The problem is, even the most rational and logical of people can find their reason and logic uncertain when it concerns their children.

[Elheru Aran]

The problem is, even the most rational and logical of people can find their reason and logic uncertain when it concerns their children.

It's still not an excuse to swallow the bullshit. Yes, autism or whatever sucks. You know what sucks worse? Putting a small coffin in the ground. Or never having grandchildren because your kid's ovaries got blasted by measles. I've seen too many Third World beggars with various ailments-- blindness, deafness, physical handicaps up to and including having legs bent so far in the wrong direction (from polio) that they have to crawl around with rubber flip-flops on both their hands and knees-- to give a utter shit about anti-vaxer claims. Either vaccinate your child or accept that you are, in essence, responsible for allowing that to happen if it does.

It doesn't help that anti-vaxing often goes hand in hand with a bunch of shitty wacko alternative health stuff like everybody should eat gluten free or drink kombucha or whatever. Makes it even more obvious how much of a lunatic fringe it is. About the only thing that's worse out there are the people who think you can treat autism with bleach, or gargle kerosene for your health.

There is no excuse. None. You want your child to be safe? Remain in good health? Listen to the goddamn doctors (most of them, anyway). Not some has-been Hollywood actress or a discredited quack.

[Adam Reynolds]

Before I start.
- Note that I am not anti vaccination and do not endorse such messages. The following is simply meant to explain how I think these people think and feel and not how I think and feel.
- Also note that I am going for a very exaggerated notion of what autism actually is. The description given here is not designed to accurately portray it but to portray how fearful parents who always (you know it's true) fear the worst for their child see it.

---

I don't think its these people being selfish or evil as you describe. I think it's actually fear born out of love. Imagine if you had a child, a beautiful little thing that came from you. And you love it more than anything in the world. Everyone else who has children is going to watch them grow, go to school, college, get jobs, a wife and lead a happy life. They get to watch them become people that they can be proud off. And in the end they can go to their grave happy in the knowledge that their child is on the right path toward a happy life once they are gone. Not you though. You don't get that. Your little child is newer going to become any of those things. Instead you get to watch it live a tortured existence as the worst possible case of autism. Your child is newer going to be self sufficient or get a girlfriend or anything. Nobody but you is going to love him. And once you die it's going to starve to death with nobody to care of it.

That sort of thing is frightening. And if you can't put your self in the mind of a parent thinking this way and understand that fear than frankly you have less empathy than I.

---

What's my point in this? Well it's simple. It's too easy to dismiss these people as idiots and hate them. But by doing so you are doing them an injustice. They are just frightened parents, like any parent ever. And they have been duped into a lie that sounds just real enough to be true. Something to think about at least.

I come from the opposite side of empathy. I am on the autism spectrum, though a rather mild case.

Though on some level, I wonder if this is loosely related to the same moral problem as the second scenario* of the trolly problem. The idea that inaction is always better than action as it is easier to justify. There is a sense that it is god's fault rather than yours.

* That of pushing a rather fat man onto the tracks rather than diverting it. Perhaps a better version of this is the transplant problem in which it is arguably moral for a doctor to kill one healthy patient to save four that need transplants. Though obviously that would be a horrible system to live in.

[Broomstick]

There is no excuse. None. You want your child to be safe? Remain in good health? Listen to the goddamn doctors (most of them, anyway). Not some has-been Hollywood actress or a discredited quack.

Oh, I am entirely on your side...
... but then I have no children, either. So for me it's a strictly rational exercise.

[Elheru Aran]

There is no excuse. None. You want your child to be safe? Remain in good health? Listen to the goddamn doctors (most of them, anyway). Not some has-been Hollywood actress or a discredited quack.

Oh, I am entirely on your side...
... but then I have no children, either. So for me it's a strictly rational exercise.

I've got a 2-year-old. I've been making sure she gets her shots, but that's not going to help other kids if their parents are fuckwitted enough to not help them out that way.

[Civil War Man]

I don't think its these people being selfish or evil as you describe. I think it's actually fear born out of love. Imagine if you had a child, a beautiful little thing that came from you. And you love it more than anything in the world. Everyone else who has children is going to watch them grow, go to school, college, get jobs, a wife and lead a happy life. They get to watch them become people that they can be proud off. And in the end they can go to their grave happy in the knowledge that their child is on the right path toward a happy life once they are gone. Not you though. You don't get that. Your little child is newer going to become any of those things. Instead you get to watch it live a tortured existence as the worst possible case of autism. Your child is newer going to be self sufficient or get a girlfriend or anything. Nobody but you is going to love him. And once you die it's going to starve to death with nobody to care of it.

That sort of thing is frightening. And if you can't put your self in the mind of a parent thinking this way and understand that fear than frankly you have less empathy than I.

What's my point in this? Well it's simple. It's too easy to dismiss these people as idiots and hate them. But by doing so you are doing them an injustice. They are just frightened parents, like any parent ever. And they have been duped into a lie that sounds just real enough to be true. Something to think about at least.

That's all well and good, but I've encountered enough horrible people to know that what you describe is not universal. The vast majority of parents only want to do right by their kids, but there is a certain breed of parent, typically found in the suburbs, that views parenting as a competition. They are the ones who subscribe to a "second place is first loser" philosophy, and so feel their kid has to come in first in every competition because they feel that it will prove they are a better parent than their neighbors. That kind of parent is less concerned about having an autistic kid out of concern for their child's well-being, and more because they feel that every slightest flaw, or even every perceived imperfection, in their offspring reflects poorly on them.

On another note, I think a reason why even the well-meaning parents who fall for the anti-vaxxer fear-mongering don't get cut a lot of slack is that their ignorance puts other people at risk. That's the part I think needs to be drilled into them. If they choose not to vaccinate their kid out of fear or vanity, without having a legitimate medical reason to opt out, they are exposing everyone who can't have the vaccine for various health reasons to the disease.

It's still not an excuse to swallow the bullshit. Yes, autism or whatever sucks. You know what sucks worse? Putting a small coffin in the ground. Or never having grandchildren because your kid's ovaries got blasted by measles. I've seen too many Third World beggars with various ailments-- blindness, deafness, physical handicaps up to and including having legs bent so far in the wrong direction (from polio) that they have to crawl around with rubber flip-flops on both their hands and knees-- to give a utter shit about anti-vaxer claims. Either vaccinate your child or accept that you are, in essence, responsible for allowing that to happen if it does.

Just a random personal anecdote: If there is one person in my family who has the least tolerance for anti-vaxxers, it's my father, because both he and his sister had polio when they were young (they were both born before Salk's vaccine was developed). Thankfully, both were able to recover without any permanent damage, but they know what kind of havoc these diseases can cause. Even beyond the obvious potential that they could have been killed or paralyzed for life, the town had to quarantine them to prevent the disease from spreading to their neighbors. They and their mother were not allowed to leave the house for the duration, and their father was forced to stay at a hotel because he was not allowed to enter the house.

Which I think may be one driving factor behind the anti-vaxxers. Vaccines are so effective at stopping these diseases that people who haven't witnessed the effects first-hand don't realize just how devastating they can be. Some of the more vocal anti-vaxxers seem to be genuinely ignorant of just how deadly something like the measles can be, for example.

[Simon_Jester]

Fear is no excuse for abandoning reason and logic.

It takes a certain discipline of the spirit to say that and mean it, though. To actually apply it, rigorously, to your own actions. To recognize that it is precisely when the stakes are the highest that you should stop and control your thoughts and watch out for cognitive biases and use every scrap of logical and intellectual power you possess to work out the best course of action.

It's the psychological equivalent of "to stand an' be still to the Birken'ead drill." Some can do it, some can be taught to do it. But it's not a thing all humans possess from infancy.

We don't teach it in this society, and so far as I know no past society has ever done so either.

Some learn it on their own... some don't.

It doesn't help that anti-vaxing often goes hand in hand with a bunch of shitty wacko alternative health stuff like everybody should eat gluten free or drink kombucha or whatever. Makes it even more obvious how much of a lunatic fringe it is.

The eating gluten-free and the drinking kombucha are far more reasonable.

There is such a thing as developing celiac disease as an adult- it's a legitimate concern, and a gluten-free diet also tends to eschew a lot food that is actively shitty and carb-riddled anyway.

Kombucha is at most a useless thing- lightly fermented tea- and it and related foods are enjoying such a big takeoff in part because of the relative poverty of our real knowledge of what is and is not the case about human intestinal flora, I think. If scientific medicine could actually say with more certainty what did and did not work, it would tend to move out of the realm of the hippy-dippy stuff.

About the only thing that's worse out there are the people who think you can treat autism with bleach, or gargle kerosene for your health.

Yeah... there's believing in things that don't work but plausibly could work, and then there's actively laughing in the face of the entire science of biology.

[Zeropoint]

That kind of parent is less concerned about having an autistic kid out of concern for their child's well-being, and more because they feel that every slightest flaw, or even every perceived imperfection, in their offspring reflects poorly on them.

You know what really reflects poorly on someone as a parent? Letting your kids die of something you could have prevented with a cheap and safe treatment.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes- which is why this poisonous attitude only leads to this specific poisonous behavior (not vaccinating children) when combined with ignorance of scientific and medical facts.

[wautd]

And there are so many utterly a-rational people who refuse to even talk about the subject in a statistics-based, fact-based way that as a private individual, there's not much point in even getting involved.

Yeah I'm not going to bother anymore. I proposed to contact an actual doctor in person to get an explanation on how vaccines work and what the medical concensus is and got blamed for being close minded

[wautd]

And so frustrusting that the "might cause autism" always pops up (even in mainstream). The guy who came up with it debunked himself in a later study but I guess it was already a brainbug by then.
According to a recent Danish study there was a strong possibility that child circumcision has a much higher risk to cause autism (not surprising given the traumatic experience) but I don't see this being picked up due to cultural sensitivities

[Elheru Aran]

It doesn't help that anti-vaxing often goes hand in hand with a bunch of shitty wacko alternative health stuff like everybody should eat gluten free or drink kombucha or whatever. Makes it even more obvious how much of a lunatic fringe it is.

The eating gluten-free and the drinking kombucha are far more reasonable.

There is such a thing as developing celiac disease as an adult- it's a legitimate concern, and a gluten-free diet also tends to eschew a lot food that is actively shitty and carb-riddled anyway.

Kombucha is at most a useless thing- lightly fermented tea- and it and related foods are enjoying such a big takeoff in part because of the relative poverty of our real knowledge of what is and is not the case about human intestinal flora, I think. If scientific medicine could actually say with more certainty what did and did not work, it would tend to move out of the realm of the hippy-dippy stuff.

Meh. The hippy-dippy stuff, I'll admit, annoys me more than it should because one of my wife's friends is into all that stuff, and is also an anti-vaxer. I don't think it's necessarily coincidental. IMO, one of the big reasons alternative medicine/health regimens are popular is because of a basic, simple misunderstanding of how medicine works. People see lists of drugs and start thinking 'well now if I just ate better and maybe tried some of my aunt's weird tea that she keeps going on that might help'. It's not based on reason.

Of course, I've been in countries-- I lived in Nigeria for 13 years-- where modern medicine is a dream, where the state of the art of health technology is ~80s-90s at the best hospitals... and 50s-60s elsewhere. My father is a RN; he was working there as a missionary. I have somewhat better experience than most of how dramatically a modern medical treatment can affect a person who's been living without it. I grew up with malaria, heard stories about experiences with yellow fever, cholera and the late black-water stage of malaria, and attended services at a church where the missionary medical workers who first encountered Lassa fever were buried. So perhaps I have a little more faith in modern medicine than the average American middle-class yuppie...

[Esquire]

I think it's a subset of what I can't help thinking of as Wikipedia culture, the idea that just becauseyou can search the web for anything experts aren't necessary anymore. There's a comedian who sums up the issue really brilliantly - Tim Minchin, I think.

"You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine."

[Simon_Jester]

Meh. The hippy-dippy stuff, I'll admit, annoys me more than it should because one of my wife's friends is into all that stuff, and is also an anti-vaxer. I don't think it's necessarily coincidental. IMO, one of the big reasons alternative medicine/health regimens are popular is because of a basic, simple misunderstanding of how medicine works. People see lists of drugs and start thinking 'well now if I just ate better and maybe tried some of my aunt's weird tea that she keeps going on that might help'. It's not based on reason.

True- but it is in some ways based on evidence.

Modern humans in the developed world really do eat bad diets, and the number of artificial substances we ingest without really thinking about it is staggering. Clean living, paying some attention to your diet and relying on your body's natural recuperative powers really is enough for most people to live good lives, at least until they experience some kind of acute injury or sickness.

And, with modern medicine having abolished epidemic disease in the developed world... most of the kinds of acute injury and sickness left are things which modern medicine either doesn't have satisfactory cures for (chronic inflammation comes to mind), or which are treated surgically (which alternative medicine usually doesn't try to dissuade people from seeking).

And if you're getting a nutritious diet, you have a good chance of being unusually healthy in your fifties and sixties thanks to that good diet, so there are always going to be plenty of chipper elderly people swearing by their organic food and mixed placebo-flavored nuttiness.

[Elheru Aran]

True- but it is in some ways based on evidence.

Modern humans in the developed world really do eat bad diets, and the number of artificial substances we ingest without really thinking about it is staggering. Clean living, paying some attention to your diet and relying on your body's natural recuperative powers really is enough for most people to live good lives, at least until they experience some kind of acute injury or sickness.

And, with modern medicine having abolished epidemic disease in the developed world... most of the kinds of acute injury and sickness left are things which modern medicine either doesn't have satisfactory cures for (chronic inflammation comes to mind), or which are treated surgically (which alternative medicine usually doesn't try to dissuade people from seeking).

And if you're getting a nutritious diet, you have a good chance of being unusually healthy in your fifties and sixties thanks to that good diet, so there are always going to be plenty of chipper elderly people swearing by their organic food and mixed placebo-flavored nuttiness.

That I won't argue with. I think it's an issue of presentation. It's all anecdotal and overblown, generally, when one hears about it. It doesn't help that much of it has penetrated the popular consciousness to the degree that popular daytime shows will promote it (Oprah, Dr. Oz).

[Me2005]

The risk of developing autism is more real if the mother is over 30 or in her early teens, or if the father is really old (50+), or if the mother/father are of very different ages than anything vaccines possibly do. Study. Antivaccers probably find "proof" of vaccines causing autism because of these factors more than anything - "Oh, my friend had a baby she had vaccinated and now he's autistic!" should really read "my friend (in her 40's) had a baby (already autistic, just not showing any signs) she had vaccinated!"

Add to that we really don't know that much about the causes of mental disabilities. It could be dietary after birth, it could be degradation of reproductive organs of the parents at conception, it could be environmental radiation, it could be manmade radiation, we don't really know for sure. Of my siblings, one was recommended to be aborted by the doctors because of the high probability of mental disorder and turned out just fine, another was not and has turned out mildly autistic. We were all vaccinated, we all ate basically the same stuff, we all came from the same parents, we lived in the same environment. I think the one who turned out autistic got some kind of disease at an early age; we think either the disease or the treatment could have led to his condition but we just don't know. Had he not gotten the disease, it wouldn't have been a factor at least.

Vaccines work on herd immunity - they ONLY work if the majority of the group is immunized. Parents not immunizing their children endanger not only their own children, but also EVERY OTHER CHILD in the group. Fortunately, anti-vaccers tend to congregate - apparently there's an island north of me where the vaccinated are only like 10% of the community, but as long as I avoid that area my children and I should be safe.

[Joun_Lord]

Some of the more vocal anti-vaxxers seem to be genuinely ignorant of just how deadly something like the measles can be, for example.

Some idiots actually think measles are beneficial. Look up "Melanie's Marvelous Measles", a book that extols the virtues of contracting measles. And apparently its not a troll book as one might expect, a modern day "A Modest Proposal", not its......deadly serious. Even more fucked up considering its title apes the Roald Dahl's book George's Marvellous Medicine, Dahl who was a noted pro-vaccer after his kid died of.........wait for it.....measles. Totally a fucking benign disease.

And the lady who wrote the book apparently isn't alone in her thinking. There is apparently a whole subset of anti-vaccination kooks who believe vaccinations are bad because childhood diseases are good.

I wonder if they think getting shot or stabbed is good and beneficial? Because their kid has just as much chance of dying from measles and shit as it does getting shanked.