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

to be clear

I walked out of rehearsal tonight to see a van, with a "Choose Life" license plate idling, with the quote "The greatest deception was telling the world vaccinations are harmless" and "www.v4ccinel1beration4rmy.com" plastered on the back window (cos who needs to actually see out of it, right)?

the fuck do they do, kidnap Patty Hearst and destroy syringe factories? Jesus God it was the most infuriating thing.

can a mod googleproof that website so these clowns don't come here. shoulda done it myself.

Not fucking helping at all, esp when dude is straight lying to people:

http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article17814440.html

With lawmakers preparing to vote on a bill blocking parents from skipping vaccinations for their children, prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arrived at the Sacramento screening of a film linking autism to the vaccine preservative thimerosal and warned that public health officials cannot be trusted.

“They can put anything they want in that vaccine and they have no accountability for it,” said Kennedy, who walked onto and left a Crest Theater stage to standing ovations, of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

also, have we mentioned the FoodBabe backlash in a thread yet?

Was there ever a front lash?

seriously

Not fucking helping at all, esp when dude is straight lying to people:

http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article17814440.html

With lawmakers preparing to vote on a bill blocking parents from skipping vaccinations for their children, prominent vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. arrived at the Sacramento screening of a film linking autism to the vaccine preservative thimerosal and warned that public health officials cannot be trusted.
“They can put anything they want in that vaccine and they have no accountability for it,” said Kennedy, who walked onto and left a Crest Theater stage to standing ovations, of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

― Doktor Van Peebles (kingfish), Friday, April 10, 2015 5:13 PM

“They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone,” Kennedy said. “This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

So it makes them hot blooded?

Well, you have to check it and see.

*lay-up*

christ that fucking Robert F Kennedy quote is like out of a Charlton Heston movie, fuck him

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/04/anti-vaxx-mom-abandons-movement-after-all-seven-her-of-her-kids-get-whooping-cough/

That's amazing. Also, on CSPAN-3's weekend History TV, I just saw a presentation by Tony Williams, author of The Pox and the Covenant: Mather, Franklin, and the Epidemic that Changed America’s Destiny It's 1721, and Boston (pop.1111) sees all the signs of another generational smallpox epidemic coming on Suddenly, the radical doctrine of inoculation is being preached by Cotton Mather. He's known for advocating far-out scientific notions from the pulpit, even has a handle on germ theory, but this time he's gone too far. Good description in this review:http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/pox-and-covenant-mather-franklin-and-epidemic-changed-america%E2%80%99s-destiny"> http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/pox-and-covenant-mather-franklin-and-epidemic-changed-america%E2%80%99s-destiny
Here's the author on History TV (who have the book description ass-backwards in the caption; really good viewing though)
http://www.c-span.org/video/?293341-1/book-discussion-pox-covenant

Also, from this weekend's WSJ Spring Books section:

Review: 'Bad Faith' by Paul A. Offit
By William Bynum
April 10, 2015 1:46 p.m. ET
1 COMMENTS

The Victorian polymath Francis Galton (1822-1911) loved measuring things. He examined weather patterns, looked at the relationships between the physical characteristics of parents and their offspring, and worked out the unique patterns in fingerprints. He also wondered if prayer could lead to long life. He reasoned that clergymen pray more than other people and that one of the things they pray for is health and longevity. Consequently, if prayer is answered, clergymen ought to live longer. But when he compared the mortality statistics of clergymen with those of doctors, lawyers and others in similar socioeconomic circumstances, he found no difference.

Paul Offit doesn’t mention Galton’s tongue-in-cheek experiment in “Bad Faith,” but he forcefully demonstrates that the children of people in faith-healing groups have higher mortality rates than those whose parents have their children vaccinated and seek medical help when they fall ill. Dr. Offit, a pediatrician at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, is primarily concerned with the health of children who are the victims of their parents’ misplaced faith.
Bad Faith

By Paul A. Offit
Basic, 253 pages, $27.99

Dr. Offit has no problem with religion: Indeed, he insists that it is also the hero of his tale of neglect and premature, unnecessary death. He knows his Scripture, his Jewish doctrine and his theology. Good faith is good, bad faith is bad. And, to his medical eyes, the bad faiths are those that either deny the existence of disease (Christian Scientists) or believe that when disease strikes it is a sign of sin or failing and therefore properly “cured” by prayer and repentance. His volume is a catalog of tragedies, some from his own practice, most from the public record, that need not have happened. For him, the old Puritan mantra of praising the Lord but keeping your powder dry is the sensible way.

Most of Dr. Offit’s analysis is devoted to Christian sects, of which Christian Science is merely one. Thus the Faith Tabernacle Congregation in Philadelphia, the Faith Temple Church of Apostolic Faith in Milwaukee and other individual congregations, as well as larger groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists, all receive Dr. Offit’s attention. The stories are depressing: children with diabetes who are required to abandon their insulin for prayer, children with bacterial meningitis prayed for but not sent to the hospital for antibiotics, hemophiliacs not receiving their blood transfusions, children exposed to lethal measles because they are unvaccinated. Sometimes the “therapy” is more aggressive: Terrance Cottrell Jr., an 8-year-old boy with autism, died of asphyxiation in August 2003 while being exorcised for his condition by the pastor of the Faith Temple Church.

Although fundamentalist Protestant groups get the most attention, Dr. Offit does not confine himself to them. He recounts a horrifying story from 2009 of a 27-year-old mother of four, 11 weeks pregnant with a failing heart exacerbated by her pregnancy. Sister Margaret Mary McBride, director of the ethics board in a Roman Catholic hospital in Phoenix, allowed the woman to have her pregnancy terminated. To withhold consent would have been to orphan four living children, and the pregnancy would not have resulted in a live birth had the mother survived. For her decision, Sister McBride was excommunicated (though she was later reinstated), and the hospital chapel denied the right to celebrate Mass.

On a lighter note, Dr. Offit doubts the reality of faith healing at Lourdes, but he accepts that pilgrims generally come away feeling better. The shrine is also good for the local economy in southwest France.

Most medical evidence suggests that circumcision has positive benefits, both for the male and for his sexual partners. A Jewish ritual, metzitzah b’peh, dictates that the officiating rabbi suck the blood from the infant’s wound with his mouth. The procedure can and has spread syphilis and, more commonly, herpes to the infant. The ritual is practiced about 3,600 times each year in New York City. Because in this context it is a religious ritual, not a medical procedure, some Jewish doctors nevertheless defend it, despite its risks.

Given this catalog of wastage, what is to be done? Dr. Offit has far too much respect for religious belief and practice to suggest, like some aggressive atheists, that the world would be better off without its religions. Freedom of religion is of fundamental importance to the fabric of American life. Consequently, he sees hope in the law. Parents should not be able legally to deny their children proper medical care. Much of the last part of “Bad Faith” is about this issue. Richard Nixon’s Watergate henchmen Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman (both Christian Scientists) managed to smuggle a religious-belief exemption into child-protection legislation in the 1970s, Dr. Offit recounts, and the consequences continue to surface. The pediatrician in Dr. Offit simply wants better legal protection for his patients.

A second way forward is for individual changes of heart. The heroine of this powerful book is Rita Swan, a former Christian Scientist who watched her son sicken with a bacterial meningitis as she, her husband and fellow Christian Scientists prayed. She had already fallen afoul of her church for having an emergency gynecological operation, which saved her life, and when her son Matthew was at death’s door, she again broke ranks and took him, too late, to a hospital. Five years after Matthew’s death in 1977, she and her husband founded a child protection organization (Child Healthcare Is a Legal Duty) that has continued to work toward protecting children from religiously motivated medical neglect. Like many contentious issues, and any that involve the courts, this one is unlikely to disappear in the near future and certainly not before many more children will needlessly die.

—Mr. Bynum is the author, with Helen Bynum, of “Remarkable Plants That Shape Our World.”

I should have noticed that the link of the xpost Williams review posted twice; the second link works.

aaaarrggghhh: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bill-to-force-parents-to-vaccinate-school-6202345.php

We're having similar issues here - govt have proposed "no jab, no child welfare" bill though, which is needlessly punitive because I suspect for the most part its wealthier people being anti vax, and this is just going to engeder paranoia/persecution complex.

That said, how the fuck do we resolve this? Education clearly doesnt work: as an example my partner had a big argument with his ex/kids mother as she was refusing vaxes, cited Wakefield and NaturalNews and all that shit. He proved her wrong with study after study and she just replied with "its all BS, its lies". Gah.

(NB: the kids got vaccinated. He just went against her wishes).

unfortunately no one knows the best way to convince parents, even on an individual level. from a public health perspective the best policy is to require them without exception (other than medical contraindication) for school attendance, like california is trying to do

We may get to the point where they can just vax the mother while pregnant - theyre already looking at it for pertussis I think.

my friend's older sister is constantly posting woo-woo shit and anti-vax links, here's the latest:

http://cdn2.collective-evolution.com/assets/uploads/2015/04/forcedvaxx.png

Just when I think I couldn't get any angrier about this.

oh my fucking god

"Report Post" worthy for sure...

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT THE FUCK

this is the meme

see this is why anti-vaxxers are scum. it's not a 'difference of opinion'. it's that these are assholes compromising public health and stoop to using rape metaphors to get their point across.

fuck them.

they are now approaching "pro-lifers sharing pics of aborted fetuses on a billboard" levels of awful

Oh yeah the "needles are rape" one isnt even new. You should look up Meryl D0rey. Shes a fucking piece of work.

Bill Maher agrees with guest RFK Jr? Was Jon Stewart really that accommodating?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/24/bill-maher-anti-vaxxer-the-real-time-host-sides-with-robert-f-kennedy-jr-during-bizarre-interview.html

“And I resisted for a long time but I started reading the science after a while, and I’m very comfortable reading science,” continued Kennedy. “I’ve brought hundreds and hundreds of successful lawsuits, and most of them have involved scientific controversies. I’m comfortable reading science and dissecting it, and discerning the difference between junk science and real science.

telling omission of the word 'understanding' anywhere in there

a mandatory and public math aptitude test should be required of anyone that says "...but I started reading the science, and I'm very comfortable reading science"

VICTORY: http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Controversial-vaccination-bill-approved-by-6263698.php

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/vermont-says-no-to-the-anti-vaccine-movement

surprisingly proud of VT for this one

i guess we already "knew" this

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/06/04/antivaccine-parents-overwhelmingly-affluent-white-and-suburban/

Levin is part of a growing group of people who are paying more attention to diet — organic, gluten- and casein-free among them — as a way to treat the symptoms of autism and other disorders. So strongly does she believe in the healing possibilities of food that she’s now a family wellness coach working exclusively with families of autistic children.

http://nypost.com/2015/06/17/is-diet-the-key-to-curing-autism/

There's a ton of research on elimination diets for autism. A 2010 review found all of them to either be methodologically flawed or demonstrate negligible effects, the 2014 review about the same.

A lot of kids may benefit from casein-free diets for reasons that have little to due with ASD (mostly constipation, phlegm excess, possibly T1 diabetes risk), and some celiacs disease go undiagnosed for a while in childhood. But the I suspect the autism epidemic is probably due to a mix of changed diagnostic criteria, advancing paternal age, damaged microbiota from antibiotic abuse and processed diets, and maybe some persistant polutants that have yet to be identified.

Cure has always been the wrong answer, these fuckers that offer "cures" are fucking worthless hucksters that need shutting down. A lot of good can come from dietary advice but one of the best "cures" for ASC people is acceptance and tolerance of them and encouraging their potential for independence and productivity rather trying to "cure" them or discriminating against them.

Well Jim Carrey's on a roll tonight

https://twitter.com/JimCarrey/status/616049450243338240

Why do people persist with the mercury BS, when it was removed from vaccines in the 90s? GAHHHH.

major kudos to california

"Corporate fascism" cries the star of "Bruce Almighty".

A clip from Tom Shadyac's only movie after the Almighty duology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8EGwlnygOc

I'll buy this report of adverse effects: 2009-10 European H1N1 flu vaccine mimicked protein responsible for narcolepsy

Special screenings of Trace Amounts have the desired affect, alas (at least on some targets---wonder if any saw it, and said "Thanks, but---"? Looks like film pubs picked pretty well):
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/trace-amounts-jim-carrey-targeted-806435

well the anti-vaxxers finally killed somebody:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/07/02/measles-death-washington-state/29624385/

First US measles death since 2003 was an immunocompromised woman who shared a waiting room with someone who was contagious: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/undetected-measles-led-to-womans-death/?utm_content=bufferc5595&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=owned_buffer

jinx!

and tbf, people die every year from antivaxxer nonsense