cpbotha.net » Commentary

You must vaccinate

cpbotha — Thu, 21 May 2009 09:02:02 +0000

Image courtesy of dbtechno.com.

I was mistakenly under the impression that, at least in my social circles, the whole vaccination issue had been put completely to rest, but based on the number of serious questions that I’ve been asked recently, this unfortunately does not seem to be the case.

For those of you who don’t have time, I’ll cut to the chase immediately:

Yes, you simply must vaccinate your children. This is the best and safest choice, for both your child and your fellow humans.

No, there is no link between vaccination and autism. No, spreading out the (MMR) vaccinations is not safer, it is in fact more dangerous. Also, the “vaccine overload” hypothesis is flawed.

For those of you with a bit more time or those of you who are not willing to take me on my word, I’ll go into some more detail on each of the points mentioned above. Most of what I write here is based on articles in the Wikipedia. I’ve deliberately done this, because these articles are accessible and readable to everyone, and they do link to the original scientific articles that they are based on. Feel free to jump to any section. Also, each section ends with a short summary of its contents to make it easier for you to skip.

Recent history

This section is based on the Wikipedia article on the MMR vaccine controversy.

In 1998, Andre Wakefield and co-authors published a paper in the Lancet where, based on 12 case reports, they speculated on a possible link between the MMR vaccination and autism, and also speculated that it might be better to space out the vaccinations. Of course the press and media picked this up and went completely wild, causing a health scare in the UK. It is important to note that both of these claims were highly speculative.

It later turned out that Wakefield had received 55000 (fifty-five thousand) UK pounds from Legal Aid Board solicitors who were gathering evidence to use in a case against vaccine manufacturers, and that a number of parents of the children taking part in Wakefield’s study were directly involved in the law-suit. Wakefield did not mention any of this at the time of publication. Ten of his 12 co-authors have since completely retracted their interpretation of the paper.

In short, the author of the paper that started most of the modern vaccination-autism scare was completely corrupt, and his corruption directly affected this specific research.

He did manage to cause such a scare in the UK, that measles (one of the diseases that MMR vaccinates against) is for the first time in decades at almost epidemic levels. Since then, there have been cases of measles killing children, something which would most probably not have happened had the vaccination compliance not been at an all-time low. Isn’t that absolutely crazy when one considers that measles was all but eradicated?

In the years between 1998 and the present, there have been numerous extremely well-designed and large studies, none of which have been able to find any kind of link between vaccination and autism.

To summarise this section: The research that the vaccination scare is based on, was deeply flawed and based on corruption, not science.

Spreading out of vaccines

This section is based on the Wikipedia article on the general Vaccine Controversy.

In some cases, parents opt for spreading out the vaccinations, because they mistakenly think that this is safer than not doing so. The flawed idea that administering all these vaccines together could be dangerous is called the “vaccine overload hypothesis”. It is flawed for the reasons:

Common childhood ilnesses represent a much heavier load on the infant immune system.
The vaccination cocktail given currently represents less than 10% of the immunological load of the vaccinations given to children in the 80s.
Numerous studies have shown that the combination of vaccinations does NOT damage the infant immune system.

Importantly, if you spread out vaccines, you increase the time during which your child is susceptible to the diseases that are being vaccinated again, thus greatly increasing the health risk to your child and all other children it comes into contact with. You are a bad parent if you do this.

To summarise this section: Administering the vaccinations together does not damage your child’s immune system. Spreading out vaccines is dangerous for both your child and all children it comes into contact with.

Celebrities campaigning against vaccination

Recently, a number of celebrities, most prominent of which Jenny McCarthy and her partner Jim Carrey, supported by Oprah, have been campaigning against vaccination. You have to remember that these are actors and entertainers, with almost ZERO medical or scientific background or training. McCarthy dropped out of nursing school to become a Playboy Bunny: There’s nothing wrong with that, but you really cannot base important medical decisions, concerning the health and survival of your child (!!), on the opinions of an erstwhile nude model!

To summarise: Think carefully about the scientific and medical backgrounds of actors telling you how to care for the health and well-being of your child, even more so when it concerns life and death issues such as vaccination.

The logical conclusion

To the best of our scientific knowledge, vaccinations as they are administered today are safe and do not cause autism. In spite of this, research continues day and night to make sure of this observation.

On the other hand, if you don’t vaccinate, the risk of your child getting ill and dying is significantly higher. If a large enough number of you don’t vaccinate, we lose our herd immunity and then there is a very real risk that many more of our children will get ill and die due to your inaction. Do you seriously want to take this very real risk with your and my children’s lives?

Post scriptum

I hope that this has helped. If there are any issues that are not clear, or missing, or you are not convinced, please let me know so that we can discuss and so that I can improve this article.

Extra resources

Brilliant comic explaining how the corrupt Andrew Wakefield managed to cause this whole debacle.
Article in Slate criticising Oprah’s support of Jenny McCarthy.
Popular article in the Guardian’s Observer about spreading out vaccines.
Clear statement by the NHS on why there is no reason to offer MMR vaccine in a spaced / spread out fashion, and that spreading out is in fact dangerous.

No related posts.

Outraged

cpbotha — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:56:06 +0000

The year is 2008.

A young Iraqi woman falls in love with a British soldier.
Her father hears of this and subsequently, assisted by his two sons, stamps on, suffocates and stabs to death his own daughter. He is outraged that she has shamed his family in this way. Furthermore, he claims that she deserved this, as what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion.
The father is not prosecuted for his barbaric behaviour. It is apparently on honour killing, and therefore tolerated. In this case, the police apparently congratulated him.

Read the full story here.

Dr Werner, you are a singularity of stupid

cpbotha — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 08:18:14 +0000

We all know that homeopathy is really stupid, just like most alternative medicine. However, when I saw this “lecture” by Dr Charlene Werner, I was astounded by the depths of stupidity that she is able to attain. It’s almost like she’s a kind of Superheroine of Stupidity, with the special power of creating a singularity of stupid. This is of course stupidity that’s so extreme that it tends towards infinity and temporarily makes all reason disappear into a black-hole of scientific incompetence. Wow.

Bottom-line: if you have a brain-cell or two and you care about it, stay very far away from homeopathy. It will make you stupid too.

Update

They pulled that specific video from youtube, probably because they were concerned about Dr. Werner’s reputation going even more to the dogs than it already has (but not as much as it deserves). Fortunately, the video has been mirrored:

Alternative medicine, you suck

cpbotha — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:04:19 +0000

My blood has cooled down enough for me to write this now, it was positively boiling an hour or two ago. Tonight Netwerk, a documentary on one of the Dutch national channels, reported on the AIDS vs sangoma situation back in South Africa.

Those of you who understand Dutch can read this compact summary.

In short, sangomas (witch doctors) have a huge amount of sway with the local population. So when someone is infected with HIV and it manifests as AIDS, they go to the sangoma, who then coolly explains that they’re sick due to the interference of the spirits of their forefathers and claims that they know exactly how to remedy the problem (usually with some typically ineffective mystical ritual, also involving giving the patient lots of laxatives, thereby exacerbating the symptoms). The sangomas often actively discourage AIDS sufferers from going to the clinics where they would be treated with proven AIDS retardant drugs such as AZT.

The clinics do their best to educate sufferers, but the sangomas have a great amount of status in the local communities and are very afraid of admitting that they really cannot successfully treat AIDS, as this will put their position in danger. Let me rephrase that: they’re selfish idiots and they’re killing people. They should be prosecuted for obstructing conventional medicine.

To put this in context: a quarter of the South African population is HIV positive. Our minister of health, Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, believes that AIDS can be cured by eating garlic and beetroot. To add insult to injury, she has pulled strings to jump to the start of the liver transplant queue because she screwed up her own with alcohol abuse.

Remember kids, if a treatment is not backed by evidence-based research, it’s probably bad for you, either directly, or due to effective inaction. The sangomas might be an extreme case, but in general, alternative medicine is to be handled with the greatest of suspicion.

Bush knew that Saddam had no WMDs

cpbotha — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 07:08:09 +0000

With this I’m doing my bit to spread this news in my part of the blogosphere (*cough* I’m not supposed to use that word, EVAR).

It turns out that Bush knew all along that Saddam had absolutely no WMDs, but that the decision had already been made to invade Iraq, and that the intelligence was simply twisted to fit this policy. Read all the nasty details in this Salon article. Here’s a choice excerpt:

On April 23, 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. “We continued to validate him the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller’s account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri’s intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

This was brought under my attention by Pharyngula, a brilliant science-blog that you should definitely add to your aggregator. Oh by the way, it has an ever-so-slight militantly atheistic tone, but that only makes it better.

Egyptian blogger jailed for “inciting hatred of Islam”

cpbotha — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 10:29:55 +0000

See this Boing Boing post.

This is too primitive for words. Get a grip people. Religion is passÃ©, getting all up in arms about your particular backwater religious flavour or icon is just barbaric.

The idiotic South African AIDS policy

cpbotha — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 18:07:51 +0000

Reading the NRC Handelsblad of yesterday, I come across this article. For those of you who don’t read Dutch, here is the BBC’s version of more or less the same issues.

In short, the South African government, and specifically the intellectually (greatly) challenged minister of health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, believe that AIDS and HIV should be treated with cutting-edge medication such as garlic, lemons and beetroots. To add insult to injury, at the South African stall at the international AIDS conference in Toronto, representatives were demonstrating said garlic, lemons and beetroots.

I agree heartily with the strong criticism of Stephen Lewis (UN special envoy for AIDS in Africa) and of the protesters demanding that Tshabala-Msimang be arrested for her crimes against the South African people. It’s bad enough that Mbeki (the president) denied the link between HIV and AIDS for years, and that Zuma (yet another idiot member of the SA government) recently claimed that showering after unprotected sex decreases the chance of infection.

Remember: Every day, 800 South Africans die of AIDS.