She found some interesting historical facts.

The World Health Organization, the FDA, and a number of other health agencies determined that highly refined peanut oil (even though it still has a trace amount of peanut protein in it) is “generally recognized as safe” and does not have to be listed as an ingredient on the package insert of vaccines, vitamins, and other pharmaceuticals.

Doctors, patients, and parents do not have the right to know which vaccines or pharmaceutical products contain peanut oil because it is a protected trade secret.

There is a peanut allergy epidemic among our vaccinated children. 1 in 125 children now have a possibly fatal peanut allergy.

More importantly, the real causes of autism are still unknown. Makes you wonder what the hell is going on when one in 110 kids is autistic, yet there appears to be little urgency in solving the problem. To me, the answer is probably to be found when you follow the money. Big pharma and big chemicals may well be the culprits, and if a connection was found, they would go broke.

Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey’s repudiation of the repudiation of Andrew Wakefield. They say “The retraction from The Lancet was a response to a ruling from England’s General Medical Council, a kangaroo court where public health officials in the pocket of vaccine makers served as judge and jury. Dr. Wakefield strenuously denies all the findings of the GMC and plans a vigorous appeal.”

Thanks so much for your comments.

As for getting the people in a room together – I am an ardent abortion rights activist. Do you think getting me in a room with people who are anti abortion rights would work. Please, don’t waste my time. And I would not go under any circumstance.

I experience the comments here so applauding of the Western medical model, the allopaths, that I could barely read them.

I too have never heard of Wakefield until this article.

The figures for autism or so scary, what are they now, 1 in 110 children, that I don’t understand how people cannot be worried about this. And it is certainly not because we can now detect the condition better. Please.

I do not understand how people can think that is is all right to give a tiny baby all those vaccinations, and usually at one time also, or is it two? The western docs have really done their work. So many people do not even question the sanity of this. I am so glad people have brought it up here.

Try being a parent of a child with autism and see how you feel. Amy Lanky had a child with autism who was cured by homeopathy. Her book, The Impossible Cure is a must read.

Are any of you touting the vaccinations aware of how many people die by taking their western meds correctly.

I find it amazing that so many people who are progressives in many areas are true believers when it comes to western medicine.

I do not want big Pharma telling me what to do with my body. I do not want any doctor telling me what to do with m y body. I do not want anyone wedded to the rational western medical model telling me what to do with my body.

The attacks here on people who are heartbroken and living lives with children whose lives have been broken by autism are beyond arrogant. Beyond the beyond.

What makes you think you have the Truth for all of us.

Because the rational western scientific mind tells you so.

i wept as I read most of these posts.

After all, I am a feminist, abortion rights, emotional woman.

As with all these issues – vaccines, swine flu, 9/11 etc. – an attitude which assumes a priori that challengers to the orthodoxy/current consensus/official view are stupid or worse betrays a closed mind.

The only thing that counts – in all cases – are the facts: not the assumptions, or the orthodox dogma. The facts say that the official story of 9/11 is a lie – unless you are prepared to believe that ‘al-Qaeda’ has the power to suspend the laws of physics multiple times on the same day (two completely disappearing, ‘vaporizing’, planes from which DNA is alleged to have nonetheless been recovered; three steel-framed buildings allegedly brought down by fire – the first and only such buildings ever to have collapsed from any cause – and falling neatly into their own footprints at close to freefall speed; cellphone calls which could not have been made; the list goes on and on).

The evidence for a massive ‘swine flu’ scam is near-conclusive: thanks to a couple of German doctors and other members of the health sub-committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the scam by the WHO and the vaccine makers is now being properly investigated – but will the estimated $18 billion in revenue from sales of the unnecessary and worthless vaccine be repaid?

Unlike those who place their uninformed trust in any kind of vaccine (uninformed because they haven’t checked the evidence), Dr. Russ Null personally reviewed some 20,000 scientific papers relating to vaccine use and states unequivocally that there is no scientific evidence as to either their safety or their effectiveness.

Another area of pseudo-science is the unsafe and unreliable testing of all manner of pharmaceuticals on animals – on the faulty assumption that we’re just another kind of animal and so the effects can be assumed to be the same. Remember Thalidomide? Declared safe after animal testing ….

The root problem is so-called scientific materialism – the materialism is genuine, but it sure isn’t scientific. This age will be remembered as the age of ignorance – and arrogance.

A small footnote: hundreds of thousands of people (it could be as much as a million) are killed every year in the USA by prescription drugs. For each death one can assume four or five people who survive with seriously disabling side-effects. This is scientific medicine? And the ‘rationalists’ dare to call for homeopathy to be banned!

Susan, thank you for being a voice of sanity. I have a good friend who is a doctor. Her son is severely autistic. She feels certain it is due to vaccines. She was valedictorian of her class. No idiot. she had a hard time believing it, but her research made her. She’s not anti-vaccine, per se. But she is against the excessive (large increases) vaccination. And she, like the German Health minister, claims the swine flu vaccine is a useless, possibly harmful, sham to make money for Tamiflu.

Most of the people on this blog can only talk about this Andrew Wakefield guy. Well, I’ve never heard of him, but I have heard of Dr. Mercola, and he says vaccines are linked to autism. Maybe we should really listen to more of the debate, rather than less. Maybe we should trace the funding behind the studies that ‘disprove’ any link between autism and vaccination.

Like I said, the modern science has no credibility. Zero. Fraud after fraud after fraud. From Ptolemy fabricating the measurements used to claim a geocentric universe to the modern global warming movement.

It’s amazing how some people will keep on demonstrating their ignorance. Anthropogenic global warming is well documented, and except for a few cranks, universally accepted by people in the relevant fields.

Don’t confuse engineering with science. Engineering develops things through trial and error. Science can’t even completely explain an internal combustion engine. Engineers have to build it, then get it right through trial and error. Then it somehow gets credited to science? I don’t think so. Science claims understanding, but never actually has it.

Things like the internet is created through the scientific process – e.g. by development of algorithms. Yes, at a certain stage engineers become involved, but they build upon the science, not in spite of the science.

Scientists blabber on using concepts like mass, energy, time, space, but when it comes down to it, they can’t even explain what these things are. They have a pattern of assumptions in their head instead. It undermines every aspect of what they say. They don’t know what they think they know and are to egocentric to realize and admit it.

Your lack of understanding of basic concepts is not a fault of scientists. Also, this is probably one of the worst cases of projection I’ve ever seen.

[snip a lot of conspiracy nonsense]

There are hundreds of studies showing links between vaccines and neurological disorders, not just one.

Then I am sure you won’t have any problem giving us a reference to, say, ten peer-reviewed studies demonstrating such a link.

[snip more nonsense]

This is the sort of people Chris Mooney think we can build bridges to – people who disregard the entire scientific process, modern medicine, and entire fields of knowledge. How is it possible to, in any meaningful way, bridge such a gap – the wast abyss of ignorance cannot be crossed without an effort from the people affected by it, and yet the exact same ignorance keep them from attempting to gain the knowledge necessary to cross it.

Don’t confuse engineering with science. Engineering develops things through trial and error. Science can’t even completely explain an internal combustion engine. Engineers have to build it, then get it right through trial and error. Then it somehow gets credited to science? I don’t think so. Science claims understanding, but never actually has it.

Scientists blabber on using concepts like mass, energy, time, space, but when it comes down to it, they can’t even explain what these things are. They have a pattern of assumptions in their head instead. It undermines every aspect of what they say. They don’t know what they think they know and are to egocentric to realize and admit it.

Modern medical science solutions get established as facts because of interlocking self-interests and don’t require conspiracies.

Governments and medical interest (pharmaceutical companies) seek to expand their authority and importance in people’s lives to perpetuate themselves and grow. Taking command-control of people’s health is a good way to do that.

Researchers then see money is available if results can expand the roles of those providing money. They gather around the money source to mine it and produce studies with desired results.

Activists seek influence and moral authority so cluster around the scientists and government.

Voila. You are a loon if you don’t do what they say, no matter how obviously idiotic it is.

There are hundreds of studies showing links between vaccines and neurological disorders, not just one.

As with all medical studies, I look forward to 5 years from now when another study is published to find the current study was totally wrong and there is a link with autism and vaccines after all.

Medical science is fundamentally flawed to the extent it isn’t even a science. Researchers take a complex system and isolate parts to simplify, then make pronouncements about the entire system based on the subset, having ignored details and interactions they typically don’t even know exist.

The reality, is I know more and care more about my child than you, any pharmaceutical company, or government office possibly could.

You have no credibility. Medical researchers have no credibility. The government doesn’t. ZERO.

They have been wrong too many times, always in the direction of psychopathy, increasing their power and finances.

Come at me or my child with a syringe it’s the same as coming at us with a gun as far as I’m concerned.

So the story now is that not only was Wakefield wrong about autism, but he was unethical. Both determinations were made simultaneously in time for a unified press release.

No, we have know for a long time that Wakefield was wrong about autism – all later studies clearly shows this.

What has come to light since then has shown him to be unethical as well, but the two issues are unrelated – the GMC didn’t look into whether Wakefield was right or not, but only into the behavior of him and his two co-authors (the only two of the original co-authors who didn’t have their names retracted as authors of the paper). Looking at the behavior, and only the behavior, the GMC found numerous breaches of proper, ethical behavior.

Sounds like someone really wants to get rid of him in the worst way. And those people stand to make fistful after fistful of money from government mandated contracts . The only reason for their existence is to make money.

Yes, we want to get rid of Wakefield. Unethical researchers are harming us all – especially when dealing with such important subjects as childhood vaccinations. The decline in vaccinations have resulted in deaths – what moral person would not want to get rid of someone causing the death of children through his outright deceit?

If one was to follow the money, it would be better to look at how Wakefield and his irk are milking the parents of autistic children. Among Wakefield’s ethical lapses were several related to financial issues.

Yes, medical companies make money, but the MMR vaccinations are not really money-makers, unlike what the anti-vaccination crowd think. There are plenty of other products which generate much more money – products which are frequently relevant when dealing with childhood diseases.

The reality is modern science has no credibility. Zero. It is fraud after fraud after fraud, each rising to the level of a “universally accepted fact only loons would doubt” as interlocking self-interests (government, industry, academia, activists) determine what story/science is most beneficial to them.

It’s ironic that you promote your ignorant stance through a medium created by modern science.

There are mistakes made in science, and even outright fraud and deceit, as in the case of Wakefield, but the scientific process is actually self-correcting in regard to these things. When a mistaken conclusion has been reached in a study, either through a honest mistake or through deceit, later studies will demonstrate this – this was the case with the possibility of an autism-MMR vaccination link, which Wakefield claimed, and which later studies proved wrong.

When it was demonstrated that Wakefield didn’t come honestly to his mistakes, but came to them through unethical behavior, the self-correcting process of science stepped in again, and The Lancet retracted the paper.

Contrast this with Wakefield’s supporters, who have no self-correcting methods, but instead disregard any new findings which doesn’t suit their selected conclusions.

It is much more rational to believe pumping 16 vaccines into a newborns immune system causes problem than it is to believe the people making 10s of billions of dollars off it have the least concern about the newborn’s health.

Is it more rational to believe in the medical establishments around the world, or is it more rational to believe in a conspiracy theory which would not only include a worldwide conspiracy between all medical companies, but also a conspiracy between them and the governments, the medical sector, and all researchers working on this and related issues.

Personally, I tend to go with the sane assumption that the medical establishment actually, on the whole, tries to help people.

Mind your own business. It’s not your body. Whatever happened to freedom of choice?

Neither is it your body.

P.S. I’d never heard of Wakefield before, but do know people whose healthy child became sickly and developed systemic problems after vaccines.

Sure, we believe you – of course you never heard about Wakefield before. That’s why you wrote several paragraphs straight out of the anti-vaccination crowd’s handbook.

Sounds like someone really wants to get rid of him in the worst way. And those people stand to make fistful after fistful of money from government mandated contracts . The only reason for their existence is to make money.

The reality is modern science has no credibility. Zero. It is fraud after fraud after fraud, each rising to the level of a “universally accepted fact only loons would doubt” as interlocking self-interests (government, industry, academia, activists) determine what story/science is most beneficial to them.

It is much more rational to believe pumping 16 vaccines into a newborns immune system causes problem than it is to believe the people making 10s of billions of dollars off it have the least concern about the newborn’s health.

Mind your own business. It’s not your body. Whatever happened to freedom of choice?

P.S. I’d never heard of Wakefield before, but do know people whose healthy child became sickly and developed systemic problems after vaccines.

1. People who distrust modern medicine entirely.

2. The more rabid members of the Autism lobby. The (presumably paid) leaders of non profit groups, one of the things that they may be after is their own self promotion.

3. Desperate parents of autistic children. They will latch on to anything that gives them hope. Because they are a generally middle class and educated group they make excellent troupers for people in category #2.

4. Average folks, the sort of people who are a bit uneasy about vaccines.

Category 4 includes:

Some may be persuaded by alternative medical providers.

Some may be swayed by the rabid anti-vaccine people above.

Some really, really hate getting shots.

Some of these people are questioning whether or not it makes sense to have a given vaccine.

Some people may have specific medical concerns about specific shots or series of shots and want a physician who will address their concerns by treating their families as individuals.

Some have read actual scientific studies questioning certain shots or are aware that standards in other medically advanced countries are different.

Some may take a wait and see attitude and don’t want to be first in line.

Some may figure, if they are in a low risk category, it would be better to just get the disease.

Some may belong to health organizations that won’t let people in their category get the vaccine at some point anyway, or have been told that due to a vaccine shortage their medical group is just not vaccinating people for a given disease at a given time. This makes it harder to see any urgency in doing it on their own later.

Some may have mainstream medical providers who tell them to avoid certain vaccines.

Some may just be lazy, and in the absence of a well organized public campaign such as that organized when I was a kid for polio, they just haven’t gotten in gear.

Some may be looking for reasons to justify their inaction because they aren’t covered by health insurance.

Category 4 people can be swayed by good science and a public commitment to excellent medical care. A blanket vaccine good/anti-vaccine bad stance turns these people off.

Isolate the rabid would be leaders by ignoring them.

Are you even trying anymore, Mooney? This is incoherent and silly.

Not everyone is mollified by bridge building. You’d think after writing a book about Republicans declaring War on Science, and seeing them spend a year taking any attempts at bridge building simply as opportunities to shift the “moderate” position even further their way, you’d recognize what the bridge building approach gets you when you have people that oppose something on an ideological basis instead of a factual basis.

He’s wrong. Moderation is useful in some circumstances, but counterproductive in others. When dealing with irrational, bullying liars like the leaders of the anti-vax movement, “bridge-building” would just give them another platform to shout their nonsense from. They will not compromise, and will exploit your kindness to further their own cause. They need to be marginalized and shown for what they actually are.

“Hours and hours were spent in the IACC meetings wordsmithing the vaccine language. To groups like SafeMinds and people like Lyn Redwood, the Strategic Plan was a political document.”

Surely it’s a mistake to endorse that view by resorting to political language about moderation and polarization. This isn’t a job for James Carville, or even for Rahm Emmanuel.

How? How is it possible to do that when, as you say yourself, “we’re really dealing with something very irrational here”? What does it mean to “encourage moderation” when one side won’t take any notice of evidence or argument? What does it mean to talk of a “polarized situation” as if the issue were fundamentally political rather than empirical? What use is it to import the language of political discussion and compromise into a pseudo-controversy over medical evidence? What reason is there to think that absolutely everything can be translated into the language of politics and “framing” and manipulation?

It’s fine for people to decide for themselves whether to eat nothing but Ho-Hos, chew tobacco, or what-have-you, but vaccination is NOT just a personal decision. The unvaccinated pose a risk to babies too young to be vaccinated, as well as anyone with a legitimate medical contraindication or anyone in the small percentage who don’t become immune after vaccination.

You’re kind of missing the point to all of this. Many people avoided vaccinations due in part to Wakefield’s now discredited study and the wave of un-informed acolytes (Age of Autism, Bill Maher, Jenny McCarthy, etc.) pushing his crap as loudly as they can.

The issues is not forcing people to get vaccinations, it’s drowning out the fradulent nonsense that Wakefield has started and letting people know that for the most part vaccines are safe and don’t cause autism.

since then, there’s not been really the kinds of studies done that really listen to what these parents have observed. maybe there is a link, but it’s nothing to do with mercury, and instead has to do with the child being too young for the dose.

either way, it would be interesting to note that people just don’t like getting vaccines anyways. take the latest swine flu vaccine. the only people who took the vaccine were people who normally take the yearly flu vaccine–about one third of the population? the only extra push went to pregnant mothers whom were more likely to have taken the swine flu vaccine, due i guess to the extra risk.

the people who took the swine flu vaccine the least? doctors, nurses, and other hospital workers. maybe this has more to do with people’s feelings about the effectiveness.

the swine flu vaccine shots did contain the mercury, according to the nurse who spoke about it on the news at the time. she assured everyone it was not a problem. so they are still using it in our vaccines. at school my son received the swine flu with this nasal thing. he never did get the booster, so i’m not sure why they bothered.

either way, all people can reserve the right to decide if they want a vaccine or if one should be given to their child.

I came by your post via Orac’s site. I have to agree with him, Stanton, lara, and similar responses. Enough is enough. Being nice and diplomatic is only going to result in less vaccinations and more dead people.

The Lancet retraction needs to be hammered home until it’s the only thing Wakefiled is remembered for. The evidence is in. These “experts” have had their day in the sun. It’s the truth’s turn now.

Better luck negotiating with Al-Quaeda?

http://age-of-ignorance.blogspot.com/2010/01/al-qaeda-of-autism.html

Chris, you wrote:

Vaccine skepticism is turning into one of the largest and most threatening anti-science movements of modern times.

It’s really spreading, not from the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement, but from parent to parent.

The parents who have particular clout in this…I won’t call it a debate, as that implies equal validity to either view. The parents who have particular clout in the “vaccines do not cause autism and are a boon to public health” arena are parents whose children have autism and who not only support vaccination, but advocate for it.

Parents like Shannon des Rochas Rosa, who wrote My Child Has Autism and I Vaccinate. Judging by the responses to her post, there are a lot of parents who agree with her.

A number of points stand out for me with regard to the autism-vaccine scare.

First – it began with an autism scare; an ill-founded campaign to persuade politicians and the public that an autism epidemic was creating a public health crisis. The basis for this scare is as dubious as the vaccine scare but it was allowed to dominate the media.

Second – anti vaccine campaigners were quick to latch on to this campaign and offer vaccines as the cause of the alleged epidemic. Parents of autistic children looking for answers became footsoldiers in their campaigns.

Third – the campaigners had the advantage of being able to tell a compelling story which was lapped up by the media. By comparison the dry rebuttals of the medical and research community were always going to be ignored. You cannot use reason and logic to refute a belief based on emotion.

Fourth – there remains a lot of money at stake. Personal injury lawyers and medical quacks have made a fortune out of this and will continue to do so for as long as they can persuade parents that they are victims of an uncaring government in alliance with profit hungry drug companies.

Instead of building bridges we should be building a cordon sanitaire to keep these predators at bay. We have our own compelling stories to tell. What about the childhood cancer victims who cannot be vaccinated and cannot attend day care for fear of a lethal encounter with the unvaccinated offspring of the worried well? What about the excellent journalism of of people like Trine Tsouderos at the Chicago Tribune, exposing the money grubbing quacks who feast on parental fears offering false hopes at a premium price? Or the vaccine success story in Africa where Measles deaths fell by 91% between 2000 and 2006, from an estimated 396,000 to 36,000 thanks to a mass vaccination campaign?

We will never persuade the die-hards. Our best tactic is to act to prevent them from persuading anyone else.

LK Woodruff said: “Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that getting multiple vaccines so close together, in immature bodies with undeveloped immune systems, is not a concern.”

Sadly, you do not understand them. The anti-vaxxers who infest the autism community will always raise doubt. Even if the cause is found to be vaccine, which is highly unlikely, they will find more ways to raise doubt. They need to be victims, preferably of a conspiracy, to justify their miserable lives where rejecting their child for who they are is their only standard.

Past examples would include bridge-building efforts by evolutionary biologists toward creationists. Or by B’nai Brith to mend fences with the Nazis. I’m sure those meetings went well.

/snark

If you want to end the shouting, we need to look at what started this manufactured controversy. Sure, Wakefield had a lot of do with it, but to turn his nifty idea into full fledged panic he needed a little help from his friends in the press. You might even say that Wakers loaded the gun, but media pulled the trigger.

The anti-vaccine movement thrives on media exposure. It’s like oxygen to people who, deprived of a big megaphone, would be banished to the dark corners of the internet to talk amongst themselves. Without a public platform, the movement would lose an important recruiting tool. As vaccine rejectionists come to their senses and leave the movement, or succumb to pertussis, their numbers will, in theory, decline. Wakefield’s fever swamp will eventually dry up and Oprah will have to talk about something else.

Forget about kumbaya. It’s been tried already. The key is to change the public narrative from “vaccines might cause autism” to “vaccine rejectionists are barking loons, and they endanger us all.” And for that, editors and reporters need to be held accountable for how the story is reported. We’ve already seen some remarkably progressive reporting, where writers resisted their reflexive urge to balance, and instead told us what the best available science has to say. Ignoring the other side is not unheard of in journalism. No respectable editor would would “balance” a Martin Luther King Day celebration with a quote from the local Grand Wizard. When creationists, 9/11 Truthers, holocaust deniers and similar malcontents are quoted, it’s usually to illustrate how delusional these folks are, rather than to say “on the other hand…”

Instead, I believe we need some real attempts at bridge-building between medical institutions—which, let’s admit it, can often seem remote and haughty—and the leaders of the anti-vaccination movement. We need to get people in a room and try to get them to agree about something—anything. We need to encourage moderation, and break down a polarized situation in which the anti-vaccine crowd essentially rejects modern medical research based on the equivalent of conspiracy theory thinking, even as mainstream doctors just shake their heads at these advocates’ scientific cluelessness.

What makes you think scientists and physicians haven’t tried to build bridges? They have, on numerous occasions. For instance, they allowed Sallie Bernard to have major input on a study from 2007 looking at thimerosal containing vaccines and neurodevelopmental outcomes. When the study found no link (rather, it found a random bit of noise where vaccines appeared to decrease some measures and increase others, all at a frequency expected by random chance), Sallie Bernard withdrew her name from the paper and attacked it after its publication. The government has even placed prominent anti-vaccine activists Lynn Redwood (of SafeMinds) and Lee Grossman (of NAA) on the panel, and they have done nothing but try to coopt the committee to support their antivaccine agenda. Mark Blaxill also attends the meetings and has done the same thing. I can list numerous other examples of attempts to “build bridges” with antivaxers that have ended in abject failure because antivaxers won’t budge.

So, “building bridges” is all well and nice, but how–specifically do you propose to do it in a way different than what has already been tried and failed miserably on multiple prior occasions?

Gathering both sides and talking–all by itself–will probably not prove helpful.

Doing much larger and longer term studies on well-defined patient groups might prove helpful, Especially:

- Studies on why a majority of the 12 initially studied babies showed stomach inflammation. Did they show inflammation elsewhere, as well? If so, what caused it, etc?

- Studies on patients who’ve received what is now an average of 16 vaccines in the USA, within the first 2 years of life.

- Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that getting multiple vaccines so close together, in immature bodies with undeveloped immune systems, is not a concern. (This will be difficult to do, since Gulf War studies showed adverse reactions and effects in many soliders after they rec’d multiple vaccines prior to deployment!)

Knowing that these babies–who WERE HEALTHY–suddenly started demonstrating autistic symptoms and tendencies, and that their numbers are increasing rapidly and will be a huge financial drain on both the medical system and on these kids’ families and caregivers, and that they may or may not improve back to some developmental level lost, should be a huge concern to all of us!!!

I just fail to see how ‘talking about it’ will help overly much.

Some true investigative science, done with rigid controls and protocols, is what is most needed. That little to nothing has been done scientifically in all of these years, while this situation just grows and grows exponentially, strikes me as both untenable and unconscionable.

Perhaps that is what drives the near hysteria, or the mass movement?

–>Little evidence of any corrective actions.