http://www.sciencecodex.com/a_physicians_guide_for_antivaccine_parents-9...
I get a few emails each day from people who don't want to leave a comment on an article, they instead think I am going to personally argue with them over email about what I wrote. Maybe it's a modern Internet entitlement mentality, maybe it is my breezy, inclusive style, but a whole lot of people think I am writing an article to them, and so they write me back.
Most of these are anonymous and want to be that way - they believe their keen insight, chock full of helpful facts like "it's all about the money" is so damaging and edgy to Big "X" (insert your favorite cabal here) that black helicopters will swoop in to get them if they use a real name. When Science 2.0 was under development in 2006, we made the conscious decision not to allow anonymous contributors, even though plenty of anonymous science bloggers were well-known doing just that (1)
But sometimes someone is proud of their work and they want some publicity for it and so they include the details, and I am curious enough to check their site out. A while back I got an email from the host of
"Red's Soup Kitchen Letters to friends" (sic) so I went to the link to see what, leaving aside the email, he had to offer in the way of science.
I quickly realized it was all a pattern I had seen before so I sat down to distill these 5 Warning Signs To Show You Are Wasting Your Time writing someone back.
(1) They make strange, conspiratorial correlations:
Here is the kind of thing I mean.
"The enemy is not Islam. The enemy is the American Corporate Invaders. These homosexual heathens have contaminated our water with FLOURIDES, our food with GMOs, our air, water, and food with mercury, our vaccines with aborted fetal cell DNA + mercury, our drugs and medications with aborted fetal cell DNA + mercury, our cosmetics with aborted fetal cell DNA, our soft drinks Pepsi & Coke with aborted fetal cell DNA, our chewing gum with aborted fetal cell DNA. This has opened Pandora's box of evil ills and 12 epidemics (autism, alzheimer's, Crohn's IBD, Colitis, Cancer, Asthma, ADHD, ADD, APD, PTSD, SBS, SIDS)."
So there you go, homosexuals. Fluoride made you fabulous.
(2) They don't know any actual data:
"Big Pharma is big business. It's at least a $20 Billion dollar a year industry." And "The governments mass vaccination campaign began in 1979. In 1982 Aborted Human Fetal cell lines with fragmented DNA and retroviruses were introduced into all vaccinations."
"On one hand the CDC says that vacines are good for us. On the other hand The Vaccine Injury Compensation program (VICP), and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) are two resourses victims of vaccine injury have at their disposal to sue the government. People get sick, and do in fact die from vaccinations. Since 1989 - exactly 2,893 petitioners have been awarded $2,275,653,198.63 in comensation for injuries directly related to vaccinations."
Aside from all of these things being wrong, it misses the big point - we vaccinate just under 4,000,000 kids per year just in the US. An adverse reaction in .0002 of those means vaccines have incredibly low levels of adverse reactions. 100% of medications have the potential to create an adverse side effect. If actual data were important, he would have looked up stats on how many people per year have an adverse effect from aspirin. It's a lot more than vaccines.
(3) They know the motivations of people they have never met:
"In 1998 Dr. Andrew J. Wakefield made an association between the MMR II vaccine and autism. His mere suggestion recommending not to use the vaccine, threatened GlaxoSmithKline's potential profit margines. They took it as an attack. Chairman of the GMC panel that struck Wakefield off the medical register, Surendra Kumar, failed to disclose that he owns shares in MMR manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline. I think it was his brother, who was the Judge, who denied Wakefield's appeal."
The only people who still buy this Wakefield business are the true fringes, the same people who think Gilles-Eric Seralini is a real GMO researcher or that Tyrone Hayes knows anything about pesticides. It's harmless, they are never going to be convinced, but unfortunately it has turned homeopathy and organic food into a giant business.
Businesses run by the kinds of giant corporations anti-vaccine people claim to distrust.
Even President Obama stopped hinting that vaccines might cause autism in 2008. And we know he hates science.
NOTES:
(1) It was always weird logic. They claimed that they had more 'freedom' to be honest and that their words were so potentially damaging to, of course, Big Corporations, they had to protect themselves. From what, exactly? Were they going to work for the companies they claim are so damaging? That seemed ethically suspect. Was wholesome liberal academia going to keep them from getting tenure on the command of a corporate CEO? No, the reason not to trust them was because some anonymous schlep on the couch does not carry the same credibility as a scientist who puts their name behind their vitriol.
Credit: Not sure, so H/T Calestous Juma until someone on the Internet lets me know.
