jenny mccarthy wants your kid to get measles: autism, vaccines, and stupid idiots

Holy crap, please tell me the US isn't about to go through the same storm of idiocy we've had over here. Here's this morning's UK measles update. Ledge OTM.

Nylund, here's some science to counter your hearsay.

For what it's worth, I think there is actually something going on with autism and vaccination. It's been clouded by hysteria and bandwagon-jumping, but I've been hearing "my kid got fucked up right after s/he got vaccinated" stories for too long to think that there's nothing to it. But I think the number of cases is extremely small, and that the reason may remain elusive for many, many years.

the problem with "my kid got fucked up right after s/he got vaccinated" is that kids get vaccinated at exactly the age where kids are changing the most anyway? and it's the age where parents are likely to be scrutinising their children for any sign of abnormal development whether that's 'oh no my child is 2cm shorter than the mean height for 16 months' or 'okay my child really should have started producing words by now'.

Holy crap, please tell me the US isn't about to go through the same storm of idiocy we've had over here

My thoughts exactly.

there's a credible link between thimerosol (the mercury-containing vaccine preservative that they're blaming) and autism but it only happens to children with a particular genetic condition; that condition is very rare (less than 1% of the population) and so it couldn't possibly account for the number of cases that are blamed on vaccines

Plausible, well argued, non-hysterical, concise and perhaps the best articulation of the argument I've seen.

There's also the fact that the old MMR - the MMR I received - contained a mumps vaccine that's been linked (quite conclusively?) to encephalitis, which is why the Japanese use the MR rather than the MMR vaccine. (There was an outbreak of measles in universities in Japan in 2007, not because of current vaccine refusal but because the national immunisation programme hadn't been in place when those students were children.) So the worry that MMR vaccination could cause other disorders has some basis in previous experience. I'm still sceptical about the mercury-autism-etc link, though.

a professor who does autism research at a major research university explained it to me this way: there's a credible link between thimerosol (the mercury-containing vaccine preservative that they're blaming) and autism

i thought the evidence for this was v. sketchy at best. my mom, who is a developmental pediatrician, had told me that research has basically refuted this. the point is mostly moot since thimerosol has been eliminated from vacciniations for a while now, anyway.

For what it's worth, I think there is actually something going on with autism and vaccination. It's been clouded by hysteria and bandwagon-jumping, but I've been hearing "my kid got fucked up right after s/he got vaccinated" stories for too long to think that there's nothing to it

i have a lot of sympathy for the larger point in your post but this is some bad thinking. part of the problem with buying into this type of faulty caustion is that pressure is put on ppl doing useful, necessary research into autism to debunk these theories.

the point is mostly moot since thimerosol has been eliminated from vacciniations for a while now, anyway

Exactly -- this ties in with the second point MJtB made. However, this could (wild speculation alert) help explain where the panic stemmed from in the first instance: plausible evidence misunderstood and distorted out of all recognition.

JJ, I got stuck a million different needles before i came to the US (standard immigration practice) but I couldnt remember if chicken pox was included so my doc did a quick blood test and found i was immune. one shot and youre set for life, apparently. You should def get it. My sis-in-law got it in her mid-30s and she had them in her mouth, down her throat, up her nose, on her scalp etc etc she ended up getting some kind of plastic surgery to fix the subsequent scars on her face.

xxxxxposts

also this makes me want to slap that HIV denial lady:

"“How come what we offered was not enough to keep her here when children with far less – impatient distracted parents, a small apartment on a busy street, extended day care, Oscar Mayer Lunchables – will happily stay?”"

http://www.generationrescue.org/lets-go-shopping/images/Lets-Go-Shopping-192x177-flip4.jpg

yeah, nylund otm...

the history of vaccination is interesting - pro-vaccinationists had to fight people's mistrust and ignorance for so long to eradicate diseases that they've become paranoid and battle-scarred, so they attack or dismiss people who have doubts and raise questions, which makes doubters *more* suspicious, vicious circle, etc.

the thermisol thing was not handled well at all. initial denial from the medical community, the wingnuts smelled blood and had a field day with it, thermisol was quietly removed from vaccines, wingnuts still having a field day with it.

i mean i feel sick at the thought of anyone losing a child but not all of us have the money and time to loll about in our suburban mansions, thinking up retarded theories while we cook our kids a homemade lunch.

xxpost

btw if/whem I have kids, I'm going to supervaccinate them then wrap them in Saran Wrap because these fucking crazy ppl be making me crazy

HI DERE's Boy in the Bubble

put tin foil hats on them for good measure

I remember there was a segment on this on This American Life, and even though the anti-vaccination parents had caused this huge measles outbreak on the West coast they were still very smug about insisting that vaccinations were eeevil. I hate them like Carlos Mencia.

^^^^I heard this and was yelling at the radio a lot during the most smug parts.

You should REALLY read Bad Science on this:

http://www.badscience.net/2008/08/the-medias-mmr-hoax/#more-772

Before we begin, it’s worth taking a moment to look at vaccine scares around the world, because I’m always struck by how circumscribed these panics are. The MMR and autism scare, for example, is practically non-existent outside Britain. But throughout the 1990s France was in the grip of a scare that hepatitis B vaccine caused multiple sclerosis.

In the US, the major vaccine fear has been around the use of a preservative called thiomersal, although somehow this hasn’t caught on here, even though that same preservative was used in Britain. In the 1970s there was a widespread concern in the UK, driven again by a single doctor, that whooping-cough vaccine was causing neurological damage.

What the diversity of these anti-vaccination panics helps to illustrate is the way in which they reflect local political and social concerns more than a genuine appraisal of the risk data, because if the vaccine for hepatitis B, or MMR, is dangerous in one country, it should be equally dangerous everywhere; and if those concerns were genuinely grounded in the evidence, especially in an age of the rapid propagation of information, you would expect the concerns to be expressed by journalists everywhere. They’re not.

xp It was particularly amazing to me that one of the mothers interviewed based her opposition to vaccination on the fact that she always fed her family organic everything and couldn't *control* whatever substances would be injected into her child. Then when the kid (and a ton of others) got measles and had to be quarantined, she bemoaned having to constantly watch the kid and *control* his/her movements and daily life for several weeks on end.

does someone knowledgeable want to explain to me how the vaccine scare relates to the other big autism story, which is the supposed over-diagnosis and/or rising rates of autism in children? is there credible evidence that more children are, in fact, autistic--or that doctors are (mis-)diagnosing at a higher rate? if it is the case that more children are "actually" autistic, what are some of the suggested causes? if not, whats the deal with the over-diagnosis/mis-diagnoses? or is this all some thing that will taper off the same way weve seen stories about add/adhd/ritalin/prozac taper off recently?

http://www.lessig.org/blog/2008/12/the_only_solution.html

^^ interesting tangential mention of the anti-vaccine mvmt in the middle of lessig's presentation on public trust generally. there's a clip of rfk jr calling vaccine medicine "tobacco science"

The MMR and autism scare, for example, is practically non-existent outside Britain.

Or am I wrong, I thought people were now mostly satisfied there wasn't a link between MRR and autism (in UK) due to more research that debunked the theory?

Yup. It's about 10 years old, this particular scare, and MMR vaccination rates are back up again, but the damage is done, in that there is a huge unvaccinated cohort wandering around.

(lol @ link between Maximum Rock'n'Roll and autism)

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5129671/autism-the-disease-of-the-internet-era

wikipedia has a good entry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_controversy

There was an article on the BBC evening news last week about the possible a measles epidemic which actually outright called the autism link a "discredited scare" (they definitely said "discredited") and urged people who hadn't vaccinated their kids to get it done because it wasn't too late, etc.

I was surprised that the BBC was prepared to be so bold about the wording, not that I disagree, it just seemed uncharacteristic. If it helps any kid get vaccinated who'd been missed out before then great.

You see, this is the problem with the BBC- on the whole they think that being balanced means that they should give equal time to two sides of a story. This might work well in politics, but it doesn't in issues like this. So for years they would put a pro- and anti-MMR voice up against each other, despite the overwhelming balance of evidence against any link. They did the same with climate change.

Fortunately, the penny FINALLY drops, and they no longer do this in either case. Even the Daily Mail (the home of the health scare, for non-UK people) don't think there is a link between MMR and autism, but instead are out to bash Andrew Wakefield (see the Bad Science link for more on this).

OTM re. the BBC and 'balance'. If they represented the argument according to the evidence on each side they'd spend a second on anti-MMR for every hundred hours of pro.

These kind of make me wish I had a baby to put one on. I wuv Ben Goldacre.
http://222610.spreadshirt.net/en/GB/Shop/Article/Index/article/confrontational-baby-bib-4417369

a public health intervention in a bib, spark up friendly conversations with vaccine-phobic parents in public with ease!

I like it!

Is it true that most people who get chickenpox as children grow up to have herpes zoster in old age?

one of the mothers interviewed based her opposition to vaccination on the fact that she always fed her family organic everything and couldn't *control* whatever substances would be injected into her child.

People, especially upscale West Coast Americans, have developed this cult of food & body control, where everything that goes in must be rigidly controlled for nutritional, ethical and even spiritual reasons (often a tangle of the three). The self is validated and protected by the extent to which control is exercised, and is threatened to the extent that it breaks down. In some cases, the pathology is fantastically rigid, and the ingestion of even a tiny particle of meat or non-organic produce can become the most horrendous sort of physical/emotional violation.

These disorders are so common as to have become normalized and integrated into other culturally-acceptable belief systems, notably the profound distrust of Western medicine that persists in certain spiritual communities. Given that we live in an era when "unfit" parents are sought out and judged harshly, with a corresponding rise in parental paranoia and overprotectiveness, it's not surprising that the body-controlling medicine hate cult would seize upon more-or-less forced vaccinations of children as a threat.

challops.

xpost I wouldn't say "most," but yes, you can get shingles secondarily later in life after you've been infected with chicken pox.

btw, I know two people who have had herpes zoster (a.k.a. "shingles") in their twenties and thirties during very stressful times in their lives, so shingles isn't just for the old folks!

My wife got Bell's Palsy a couple of years ago and that's apparently also connected to the chickenpox virus.

There was a guy in my class in high school who got shingles junior year. That really sucked for him; he said the breeze on his face generated by walking down the hall caused excruciating pain.

My mom got shingles a couple of years back. By all accounts it was horrific.

I had a older professor who came down with a shingles-type post-pox issue that paralyzed half her face for a week: she had to go around reassuring people she hadn't had a stroke.

Re: vaccinations this seems key and point-busting for a lot of the worriers: the point is mostly moot since thimerosol has been eliminated from vacciniations for a while now, anyway

Also this -- I've been hearing "my kid got fucked up right after s/he got vaccinated" stories for too long -- doesn't sound necessarily significant to me: surely part of the panic over these things is that a lot of disorders become apparent and get diagnosed right around the time children are supposed to be getting these vaccinations, right? The prevalence of various scares seems like an extension of that -- something is wrong with your child, and the only real medical event available to start worrying about is the fact that they were vaccinated, because other than that there's no big stand-out action or exposure to blame it on.

I find Jenny McCarthy kinda cool and funny, usually, and I'm occasionally impressed that she seems smart and genuine when talking about this vaccination stuff, but she also seems just wrong, and I hate the dynamic that gets set up when she's on TV along with some staid medical professionals, getting all ring-the-alarm "I'm a mother" emotional while two guys sit there looking uncomfortable and saying "we're really sorry, but there's just no medical evidence here" -- it probably makes for good TV and gets people on her side, but that seems like a bad thing, and the whole display just depresses me by being set up like some sort of feel-good mother-against-power movie.

my mom had shingles a couple years ago; it seemed like the most painful event of her entire life

this kind of shit pisses me off in the same way celia farber and her bonkers hiv/aids work (citing the padian study as evidence, etc) pisses me off.

as i was saying upthread, there seems to be a documented - but very rare - link between vaccines and autism, but people are so afraid they assume their kid is automatically going to be in that .01%

Well you said a link involving thimerosol, which is no longer in vaccines.

i'm sorry, but i can't stand for how much credibility this "cause" has garnered for something that sounds, to me, like it was lifted verbatim from the minutes of a John Birch Society chapter meeting.

This could quite easily be entirely due to coincidental correlation - MMR administration and autism diagnosis both generally occur in the 12-48 month age range.

I agree that coincidental correlation is a very strong possibility, and it may be the ultimate answer.

i have a lot of sympathy for the larger point in your post but this is some bad thinking. part of the problem with buying into this type of faulty caustion is that pressure is put on ppl doing useful, necessary research into autism to debunk these theories.

That (pressure) is a shame if so, because I think positive evidence for the causative factors behind autism is what everyone needs (and, hopefully, wants) most. In other words, once we have a strong physical model for the mechanism that causes autism, it's far easier to tell directly whether there's any reasonable means via which vaccines might be implicated, rather than depending on statistical inference.

I will say, though, that one of the points of my post was that anecdotal evidence used to be one of the mainstays of practical medicine, and that we overestimate our resources if we think that we're "past" it, or that everything we need to know (and ought to believe) can be demonstrated through double-blind studies and clinical trials. Hell, we even overestimate ourselves when we think we know how these things work! There are loads of drugs whose mechanism we don't really understand, but we use them anyway. Ninety percent of the decisions that doctors make reflect something far closer to statistical correlation than a true understanding of causation; in most cases, we don't know jack-shit about "how" or "why", really.

So I think that what I'm resisting here is this notion that we're faced with a choice between snake-oil hokum hand-wringing on the one hand, and the crushing mathematical quality of über-reductive, a=b, "that-can't-possibly-be-true" thinking. Yes, anecdote is not the singular form of data, but I also know that there are a shitload of things for which the data aren't in yet, but which are nonetheless of great significance. Medical history is littered with prior examples of this, with which we're all familiar, and there have been times that word-of-mouth and practical experience have been our only bulwark against -- for example -- taking thalidomide when pregnant. (And that's a good example, by the way: they still have no real idea how thalidomide causes birth defects.)

I'll tip my hand here a bit: I have direct experience with a case in which (a) an infant had (what appeared to be) a moderately violent reaction to vaccination, and (b) that infant went on to have major neurological issues. Do I think that (a) translates to (b), or that "vaccines cause autism"? No, but it did put my antennae up, and makes me wary when anyone gets too dismissive on the issue. (Still, I probably made a mistake when I said I thought there was "something going on with autism and vaccination" -- I should have said "autism and neurological problems".)

As I said before, if I had kids, I would vaccinate 'em. But I also think it's a certainty that certain vaccines fuck some kids up, in some way. The question, though, is how many and in what way, and right now I don't see any objective evidence that it's more than a very small number -- certainly not enough to justify the level of hysteria. But slamming that door shut, or proclaiming my moral superiority over a bunch of moms who "loll about in (their) suburban mansions" or whatever, feels like total hubris to me.

This is some black helicopter type shit, imo. No disrespect.

tru

So, basically,

"Vaccines cause autism" = BOO
"Vaccines can't possibly cause autism" = BOO
"Honestly, we don't know what the fuck is going on, but get your damn kids vaccinated anyway" = YAY

xpost

CR Nylund continuing to be on all kinds of TM. Esp. WR2 to the reasonable defense of intuition, anecdotal evidence and uncertainty. At this point, however, "decent science vs. nutjob luddites" seems like the better horse.

""Honestly, we don't know what the fuck is going on, but get your damn kids vaccinated anyway" = YAY

I would change this to "We're injecting people stuff and things may go haywire for a small percentage of the population but you should deal with it, unless you enjoy getting the measles."

and anything else is black helicopter/"let's teach the controversy" bullshit

We pretty much already tell people that irt vaccine reactions, gullaine-barre, etc...