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

u trying to wipe out ilx's future users before they even get a chance, dogg?

well what do you call a bad reaction?

seriously. . . i had an adverse reaction to a vaccine and i don't think a dime should be spent on research to figure out why. i don't care. my parents don't care. the benefits to being vaccinated far outweigh the costs.

― Mr. Que

This seems like an example of flipping to far the other way, into some kind of inflexible nutjob position WR2 "vaccinations are GREAT!!!" I mean, if specific genetic factors make one likely to react adversely to vaccines, I think it'd be great to identify that. (Or chemicals used in vaccines or whatever...)

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

I have to go back to this, because if you look at the "green our vaccines" movement, they have moved on to question everything in vaccines as being possibly damaging and therefore reason to not vaccinate.

I'm sympathetic to people's concerns (even if I sound like I'm not upthread), I just think there's a whole lot of bad science and scare tactics being tossed out there. If you read some of the literature the anti-vaccination people publish, some of them seem to believe there is a big conspiracy to hide the connection between autism and vaccines, and that the CDC, NIH, etc. are in on it. I have no idea who they think does have credibility in the world of science at this point.

Also, it just annoys the piss out of me that we keep the focus on vaccines when it seems clear that it's a lot more complicated than that, and we're wasting time looking at something that has not panned out.

This seems like an example of flipping to far the other way, into some kind of inflexible nutjob position WR2 "vaccinations are GREAT!!!" I mean, if specific genetic factors make one likely to react adversely to vaccines, I think it'd be great to identify that. (Or chemicals used in vaccines or whatever...)

vaccinations are great, though. that's not really debatable nor is it a nutjob position.

do you not think vaccinations are great?

I have no idea who they think does have credibility in the world of science at this point.

― Sara R-C

Million dollar question in lots of areas these days.

The people who have credibility in the world of science for them are the people telling them what they want to hear.

is the anti-vaccination position really just a grassroots thing these days? or can I follow the money and find some rich asshole looking to make big cash from this? Because my suspicion regarding the anti-vaccination position is that these sort of "let's challenge science" things generally have some big players looking to make big coin (e.g. global warming denial).

well what do you call a bad reaction?

Fair point. I think a kid that gets sick for a few days with no lasting ill effects is something that any reasonable parent should be able to deal with, and we don't need to throw $$$ at that. It's the "lasting ill effects" that I'm talking about -- neurological damage, massive psychological/behavioral changes, etc. There's zero doubt that at least a handful of kids have those reactions, probably as a result of some weird-ass autoimmune response that's partly genetic. It'd be valuable to know how that happens and how to stop it, because even if you don't give a shit about overprivileged suburban white toddlers, it'd probably shed light on other things too.

And yeah, conspiracy theory talk is pretty much paranoid bullshit. However, you don't need a bunch of people in a dark room to get much the same effect, policy-wise. It's pretty obvious that one of the reasons that the ADA won't budge on amalgam is that they don't want to get the shit sued out of them, but there's no reason why a secret cabal of Illuminati dentists would have to meet on a mountaintop to make that happen. A consensus based on self-interest can do a lot of what people fondly attribute to conspiracy.

xpost you can follow money and find rich assholes looking to make big cash from, like, anything.

i dont know, has anyone been running a "turn dead kids into fuel" empire?

Oh, and of course vaccinations are great. But "i don't think a dime should be spent on research to figure out why" some people might have adverse reactions to them is a questionable (nutty) extension of the (sound) underlying argument.

I mean, I've totally heard that argument used against environmentalism -- that environmentalists are just in it for $$$, control, etc. -- so I'm very wary of it.

xpost

I think a kid that gets sick for a few days with no lasting ill effects is something that any reasonable parent should be able to deal with, and we don't need to throw $$$ at that. It's the "lasting ill effects" that I'm talking about -- neurological damage, massive psychological/behavioral changes, etc.

― Charlie Rose Nylund

These aren't neccessarily different things, though. The process that in one person causes mild symptoms could cripple another.

Yeah, the "follow the money" argument can cut both ways on a lot of key issues. But I want to understand who benefits and how when I listen to someone's political argument. Everyone has an axe to grind, and I want to understand that axe before I decide on the merits of their "evidence".

I think you guys are looking for the manufacturers of Mumps-B-Gone(R) and JiffyQuarantine(TM), pictured below

http://www.hermes-press.com/fat_cat2.gif

proclaiming my moral superiority over a bunch of moms who "loll about in (their) suburban mansions" or whatever, feels like total hubris to me.

― Charlie Rose Nylund, Wednesday, January 14, 2009 12:45 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

actually i was talking about the hiv-aids link denial woman would basically said children who live in urban areas with parents who have to work should have died instead of her child. dont be a dick.

as i was saying upthread, there seems to be a documented - but very rare - link between vaccines and autism

mj2b can u give me ref for this? not asking as a challenge def genuinely curious. i can find a bunch of studies like this which conclude:

We could find no convincing evidence that early exposure to thimerosal had any deleterious effect on neurologic or psychological outcome.

but i take it you are talking about something else? also did/do u go to stanford?

i did, but i didn't study medicine or public health, i studied education and teaching, and i attended just a few lectures on autism (since i see more and more students with asperger's every year), but that was the guy who spoke at the lectures and he very clearly stated that position in his lectures. he also very clearly said that there's no way that even putting together all of the known and suspected environmental factors you'd have enough incidence to account for the "autism epidemic", and he put the "epidemic" down to growing public and medical awareness of a continuum of disorders rather than a real epidemic.

i mean i'm a layman like everyone else and i'm basically just regurgitating what i heard from one very credible source ... still, if anybody's entitled to an informed opinion i think it would be that guy

another thing though is that because of that guy's job he is privy to info from two big unfinished research projects on autism: CATS (california autism twins study) and SEED (study to explore early development) ... i am sure that ten years from now there will be a lot of answered questions about autism thanks to all the recent studies.

xpost

no i'm the same most of what i know about this comes from talking to my mom about the research she does and shes pretty consistently maintained that the autism/vaccine link is bogus.

i do know that the etiology is understood to be v. complex or maybe that the little we know about the mechanics of hetereogeneous disorders make them harder to understand so any position is taken, at least a little bit, in the dark.

when where u at stanford btw

actually i was talking about the hiv-aids link denial woman would basically said children who live in urban areas with parents who have to work should have died instead of her child.

Ah. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I went looking just now to see if I could put that quote in context, but the website (for her daughter) is gone, and the Archive.org copy was blocked by robots.txt. Why in the world would someone robots.txt a memorial page?

ENBB thank you for getting my ire in before I had the chance to do so!

who is worse: creationists or these anti vaccine people

― Mr. Que, Wednesday, January 14, 2009 2:49 AM (20 hours ago)

OH my GOD the antivaccine people are. Creationists are fucked up BUT they're not saying "here kids, get rubella and die because I can't handle the potential idea of my kid being kind of different mentally." Creationists view autistic kids as a special child from God, which is a little condescending but a lot nicer and kinder.

Fucking up everyone's kids vs. fucking up your own kid

^^ The funny part is that if you take the "up"s out of that sentence and wait 18 years, it works the other way around

See actually it is probably difficult to convince everyone about herd immunity (let alone to get everyone to listen). Sure. What really makes me DISTRAUGHT here is the whole eugenicsy bent to it, like the worst fucking thing in the entire world would to be autistic. Mad sympathy here for parents who have kids with autism, don't get me wrong. No sympathy for people who take the risk of killing their kid and other kids after DECADES of use of these vaccines and kind of fucking things up for everyone!

IMO it's totally fine to be anywhere on the autism spectrum tho it is going to complicate your life.

I have a rotten mental illness but whatevs, this is life, right? OTOH I would be tempted to sue my parents or something drastic if me & my sibs were not vaccinated at their behest!

everyone thinks they are special. it isn't true. lol america.

See the thing is you can't claim to be irreplaceable for being unique. They'll just put another unique in your former post.

Plus, you know, the kids aren't really gonna get the autism from vaccinations, and if they've got it already, it probly came from someplace else.

It's not freaking contagious! (I know you know but ANOTHER thing here is people kind of act like it is?)

I suppose I mean: it is not communicable from one person to another.

I know everyone knows this.

I mean did no one read THE VELVETEEN RABBIT? (I know that was Scarlet Fever but still that is the saddest death of a peripheral character ever.)

http://www.blacktriangle.org/blog/?page_id=1701

I found this pretty mind boggling. The original Wakefield paper in the Lancet contains this graph which is, as far as I can tell, deliberately misleading.
From what I remember (just having skim-read it again now) the graph that was "supposed" to show a rise in autism correlating with the start of MMR actually showed just a distribution of birth dates of people in the system (dept of developmental services).

Just one way in which anti-MMRs will do anything to distort the truth.

I may have been reading too much www.badscience.net but I really am beginning to think the media does have to have some responsibility in how it gives time and credibility to these people. There is a culture now of trusting the 'lone voice against the system' and no culture of simply asking 'prove it'.

Does anyone want to hire me to do a show about overlooked glaring truths with funny enactments of peer-reviewed medical journal articles? I could throw in some Olbermann-style bellowing & paper-throwing if anyone wants.

Hey - hope I didn't make you mad posting at the start but I saw this thread and thought immediately of you!

No way I was so glad! I was like "oh man thank god bcz my opinions are STRONG and I wanted them to be noted and E did it for me high fives." :D

My earlier comment was genuine.

I'm 200 posts too late but I already heard/read about her crazy theory. I've yet to encounter someone here who has this mad opinion.

Chickenpox is nasty and way more dangerous if you have it as an adult. Also as a woman (if you want to conceive) it's better to be immune: if you catch it during pregnancy it can be harmful to the foetus. (Ophelia had it when I was pregnant with Elisabeth. Not being entirely sure whether I was immune to it, I did a check-up.)

even if vaccines do cause autism that knowledge won't help parents teach a disabled young person how to negotiate the world

I wonder if she didn't see the signs he was autistic beforehand? Maybe because he grew older and the signs were clearer? DOes that make any sense? I realize autism can be detected early on but sometimes, if it's mild, you can only tell when the kid is older. I hope he is "cured".

You can't cure autism though

Well, science can't, but Jenni McCarthy can

It's probably worth noting also that a lot of people on the autistic spectrum do not consider themselves disabled.

Going back to the whole 'scientific proof' thing, the problem is that to appease the MMR haters, you need to prove a negative, ie. that MMR does not cause autism. This hasn't been done. However, one of my links above was to a study of Japanese children after they stopped using MMR and went for single vaccines there. If there was a link between MMR and autism, you would expect the incidence of autism to fall when this change was made, but in fact it fell.

I do wish all the people on this thread who are paraphrasing something they have read somewhere, or beginning their arguments with "it seems to me" would link to a credible scientific source to back up what they're saying.

Those who are anti-vaccine in general would do well to remember that any medicine has its risks and they are only on the market if the benefits have been judged to outweigh those risks.

you would expect the incidence of autism to fall when this change was made, but in fact it fell rose.

Argh, ffs.

Clearly your typo is a rogue side-effect of the MMR vaccine.

Someone needs to invent a vaccination against autism just to fuck with the anti-vaccine brigade.

lolz