The claim that there is a linkage between vaccines and autism is based upon fraud. The so-called link was ginned up by a doctor who was paid to discover a link between the two. The doctor has been stripped of his medical license because of his fraudulent study.
No surprise here: The now-former doctor emigrated from the UK and set up shop in some foundation of quackery in Texas.
The sad thing is that no matter how well-documented and well-publicized the fakery of of the claim of a link between vaccines and autism happens to be, there will be legions of people out there who will not have their children vaccinated against preventable diseases because of those fraudsters. Not vaccinating a few children has little effect, as there would be little risk of transmission of a disease, given that nearly everyone around those children have been vaccinated. But once enough children are not vaccinated, then the transmission routes open up.
Wakefield is arguably an evil dirtbag of a man; he had the result he wanted in mind and he twisted statistics to falsify and obtain that result so he could reap the rewards from being an expert witness in vaccine cases. Others, though, are sadder cases, in that they have autistic children and they are grabbing onto any suggestion of "that product there is to blame". Blaming vaccines probably gives them some comfort or a target upon which to focus their anger. But because they are doing that, and doing it in public, other people's children are being harmed because those parents are listening to the pseudo-science of the anti-vaxxers and their kids are getting preventable diseases.
All vaccines are bad? Do you want to try telling that to the people who are old enough to remember "polio summers"? Maybe people have forgotten that smallpox once killed millions of people around the world, every year.* Maybe they've forgotten that the last outbreak of smallpox in the U.S., 63 years ago in New York City, was stopped by inoculating virtually every person in the city.
Measles, mumps, chicken pox, German measles (aka rubella) were once common childhood diseases. Pregnant women who contracted rubella often gave birth to babies with neurological deficits** Those childhood diseases are essentially unknown these days because of mass immunizations.
But all that matters not to the anti-vaxxers. Witchcraft and fakery may be beaten back by the forces of science and reason, but there seems that there will always be someone who listens to the quacks.
(H/T)
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* Smallpox was unknown in the Western Hemisphere, it came over with the European explorers/conquerors. The virus raced through the populations; in some places, it killed over 90% of the inhabitants. It could be argued that the European conquest of North America was more of a mopping-up campaign.
** A polite way of saying "retarded".
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3 comments:
Yes, we won't get rid of this mind pollution any more quickly than we got rid of flat-earthism, Christianity, fear of demons, etc.
I know, assuming we make spaceflight common and populate the Solar system, there will still be people that think the moon landings were faked. Even some residents of the Moon.
I quite understand about anguished parents wanting to latch on to vaccines/ environmental toxins/ diet/ being spooked by a black cat while pregnant as the cause of their child's affliction. I am the parent of a child with high-functioning autism and if I hadn't become aware that I also was on the autism spectrum (Asperger's), I might have bought into the vaccine theory, without looking into whether it was proven or not.
My mother and two cousins got polio one summer in about 1938. One cousin died, one was in an iron lung for months and a wheelchair for life. My mother had a withered arm....it was broken and casted that summer, but she was the lucky one.
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