A few resources regarding the anti-vaccine 'movement'

[MineralMan]

Here are a few links worth visiting to examine the motivations and background of the anti-vaccine movement. It's a really old phenomenon, and most of the motivations are the same now as they were in Edward Jenner's time. If you're wondering what's behind the anti-vaxxers or are interested in factual information about vaccination, check these links out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_controversy

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=308

http://www.skepdic.com/antivaccination.html

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/health/policy/28vaccine.html

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=370

http://stanford.wellsphere.com/autism-autism-spectrum-article/who-is-antivaccine/631585

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/

[Ian David]

1. I'm going to distribute anti-vaccination literature at right-wing rallies.

I'm hoping we can gain some votes by attrition that way.

[ShortnFiery]

2. ...

:spray:

[MineralMan]

4. No need. There are plenty of right-wingers in the Anti-vaxx

group. They're already distributing the literature. Anti-science people come from all political persuasions.

[Ian David]

6. I think most of the people posting anti-vax shit here on DU are right-wingers trying to kill us.

Like the assholes hitting the "unrec" button.

Hey, Anti-vaxers... fuck you.

[MineralMan]

7. Not necessarily right-wingers.

Some extreme greenies are anti-vax. Some new-agers are anti-vax. Some easily-influenced, naive people are anti-vax.

Anti-vax sentiments cross political boundaries...but all are anti-science and anti-logic, it seems. Based on the posts here, some folks will accept information from any source that appears to reinforce their pre-existing beliefs. My list is here to give them another set of sources.

[Ian David]

8. Which they have un-recced because they're willfully ignorant douchebags. n/t

[MineralMan]

13. I don't care about recs/unrecs. They're irrelevant, since

they do not affect my OP. It remains here and can be read and commented on. I never look at the Greatest Page, and I suspect most DUers rarely do.

So, they're welcome to rec or unrec as they please. My words stand.

[slackmaster]

14. I know a man who became anti-vaccine after his daughter had a bad reaction to a Hepatitis B vaccine

Some kind of allergic/autoimmune thing that resulted in permanent neurological damage.

It had nothing to do with the problems alleged by most anti-vaxers.

[MineralMan]

16. Like all medications, including herbal medications,

a tiny minority of people will have unwanted side effects. There's just no way around it. Even common foods can cause illness and even death for some people.

Life's full of unwanted stuff. Smallpox was a side-effect of not getting vaccinated. There it is, I'm afraid.

I believe that people should be able to opt out of immunizations for ethical and religious reasons. Enough people will get immunized to create herd resistance to whatever illness the immunization is designed to combat.

However, the fear-mongering of the anti-vaxxers is quite something else than insisting that people be able to opt out. It's an evangelical movement to convince people of what is not true, in order to make immunization less widespread. It's an ideological movement that has nothing to do with health. Obviously, keeping diphtheria at bay through immunization is a societal good. Tetanus is another example, as is smallpox, polio, etc. There's no arguing with the success of those immunization programs on the general health of the population. Literally thousands of kids don't die each year because immunization protects them from diseases that can be killers. Anyone who's seen a kid struggling for breath from pertussis understands the benefits of preventing that potentially deadly disease.

No, the anti-vaxxers aren't interested in health. They're interested in something else, and it varies from person to person.

[slackmaster]

17. I've heard enough stories from pre-vaccine times to know they are a very good thing

My mom almost died of pertussis when she was four years old.

[MineralMan]

18. Oh, yes. You don't hear anti-vax propaganda from folks

who grew up or had children in the pre-immunization days. They remember. I was born in 1945, and had every one of the childhood illnesses except polio. I survived, but I also remember kids who never came back to school.

The anti-vaxxers are young enough, for the most part, not to remember those days. Their experience is that kids don't get sick from those diseases. So, they don't understand, on a visceral level, what a boon mass immunization has been.

Then there are those who do know, but don't give a good damn. On the absolute extreme edge of this "movement" are people who think the planet is overpopulated and wouldn't miss a few million or billion people. Those folks have my utter contempt, and they're thankfully a very small group, but very vocal.

[slackmaster]

31. I recently met two people just a few years older than I am, who had polio as children

One is confined to a wheelchair. The other walks with a strained gait. I'm 51, they are 54 and 56.

I had never thought of polio as something that overlapped with my lifetime. Meeting those two people brought it a lot closer to home.

[MineralMan]

35. Yes, it hasn't been that long.

In my small-town grammar school, there were at least 10 kids who contracted polio, back in the 1950s. All but two survived with little after-effects. Two died. A friend from 6th grade died of encephalitis from the chickenpox. Another died of whooping cough.

It's real to me, as it is to most people my age or older. My mom tells me about diphtheria running through her town in Arizona when she was a child...pre-antibiotics. Several kids she knew died, and there was really no treatment. You lived or you died.

We rarely think about how lucky we are to live in a time when such diseases can be prevented.

[Name removed]

9. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Ian David]

10. If you meet a Republican who has the flu, offer to drive him to a Republican Town Hall meeting. n/t

[Soylent Brice]

12. and tell them washing your hands is a conspiracy to get you to buy more soap.

it's all a KINSPEERASEE!!! seriesly!1!!1!!1!1!

they want yer freedumbs!!!

[damntexdem]

24. Funny, but ... epidemics don't respect political lines.

Rightwing nutcases can spread disease to the rest of us with the best of them.

[BolivarianHero]

3. Idiots...

A bunch of depressed celebrities and paranoid right-wing blowhards...To compare their opinions to scientists is to compare Bush to Hawking.

[xchrom]

5. kick

[Javaman]

11. ...

:popcorn:

[Ian David]

15. The price of anti-vaccine fanaticism: Case histories

Sep 28 2009
The price of anti-vaccine fanaticism: Case histories

One of the major themes of SBM has been to combat one flavor of anti-SBM movement that believes, despite all the evidence otherwise, that vaccines cause autism and that autism can be reversed with all sorts of “biomedical” quackery. Many (but by no means all) of these so-called “biomedical” treatments are based on the false view that vaccines somehow caused autism. I and my fellow SBM bloggers have expended huge quantities of verbiage refuting the pseudoscience, misinformation, and outright lies regularly spread by various anti-vaccine groups and two celebrities in particular, namely Jenny McCarthy and her boyfriend Jim Carrey. Most of the time, we discuss these issues in terms of the harm to public health that is done by falling vaccination rates due to the fear engendered by the message of the anti-vaccine movement and the threat of the return of vaccine-preventable diseases that once wreaked havoc among children.

There is another price, however. There is a price that is paid by autistic children themselves and their parents. It is a price paid in money and lost time. It is a price paid in being subjected to treatments that are highly implausible from a scientific standpoint and for which there is no good scientific evidence. It is a price that can result in bankruptcy, suffering, and, yes, even death.

More:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=510

[pnwmom]

30. According to Dr. Martha Herbert of Harvard, newer research on autism

is changing the medical model of the disorder. She no longer believes that it is hard-wired before birth, rather that autism may be a chronic disease process that affects the brain. If that is true, then it may well be treatable -- or avoidable.

http://www.alternative-therapies.com/at/web_pdfs/herbert_long.pdf

Martha Herbert, MD, is an assistant professor of Neurology at
Harvard Medical School, a pediatric neurologist at Massachusetts
General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, a member of the MGH Center
for Morphometric Analysis, and an affi liate of the Harvard-MIT-
MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. She is director of the
Treatment Research and Neuroscience Evaluation of
Neurodevelopmental Disorders (TRANSCEND) Research Program.
Dr Herbert earned her medical degree at the Columbia University
College of Physicians and Surgeons. She holds a doctoral degree from
the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studied evolution
and development of learning processes in biology and culture in the
History of Consciousness program and then did postdoctoral work in
the philosophy and history of science. She trained in pediatrics at
Cornell University Medical Center and in neurology and child neurol-
ogy at MGH. For her neuroimaging research and its implications, she
received the fi rst Cure Autism Now Innovator Award. She is co-chair
of the Environmental Health Advisory Board of the Autism Society of
America (ASA) and directs ASA’s Treatment Guided Research
Initiative (TGRI). Some of her papers are available on her website,
www.marthaherbert.com.





SNIP

"But my work over the years has led me to question the strongly held assumption that autism is a neuro-developmental disorder that is wired in before you’re born, a “static encephalopathy.” The “static encephalopathy,” hard-wired assumption is certainly entrancing. It sort of makes sense because after all, autism does start early, and it sure seems like a life sentence. Even so, I began to realize that there are alternatives to the ways some of the findings being used to support this idea are being interpreted. For example, some brain studies looked at tissue in people who died and saw cellular changes that looked like they probably happened before the individual was born. But this was an interpretation of the arrangement of cells. One example is tightly packed cells in the limbic system; another example is changes in the brain stem. These brain tissue changes were found in less than a dozen brains each. So on the basis of a small number of brains, global inferences were made that this must have all happened in the third to fourth week of gestation or the 30th week of gestation. This interpretation became a “fact” that actively blocked funding of postnatal processes in autism—I have watched this blocking occur in grant review processes.

SNIP

More recently my group’s finding regarding the distribution of white matter enlargement has been pursued by my colleague Carlos Pardo, a neurologist and neuropathologist at Johns Hopkins, who had already demonstrated activated microglia and activated astroglia in brain tissue from autistic individuals—these are signs of innate immune activation. After reading my paper localizing white matter enlargement, he went back and stained tissue in the same distribution as the areas I’d measured, and he detected cellular changes consistent with immune activation in the same parts of white matter where I had detected volumetric enlargement. This suggests that this white matter enlargement may be related to immune activation, which may be driving brain enlargement and impairing brain function.

Dr Pardo’s findings of brain immune activation completely change the playing field of what is relevant to how autism works. In other words, if that’s going on, then you have an ongoing chronic- disease process. There may or may not be early wiring changes, but you have an ongoing chronic-disease process. And that’s a totally different ball game from what we’ve been thinking about autism— it adds a whole extra axis to the dimensions in which we need to characterize the condition. To flesh out the implications of these chronic changes in autism, I wrote a paper called “Autism: A Brain Disorder or a Disorder That Affects the Brain?” More recently I coauthored an article with my neurobiologist and neuropathologist colleague, Matt Anderson, about this called, “An Expanding Spectrum of Autism Models: From Fixed Developmental Defects to Reversible
Functional Impairments,” that will come out next spring in a volume edited by Andrew Zimmerman, a close colleague of Carlos Pardo’s and an important pioneer in immune system research in autism. It’s premature to say that the earlier model of fixed wiring deficits is wrong. But it is not premature to say that there are things going on later that could actively influence the level and type of functioning of the brain—all kinds of cellular changes that would affect the synapses and the blood fl ow and other things that can manifest as problem behaviors, either in addition to or even instead of early wiring diagram alterations.

SNIP

[Maru Kitteh]

19. K and R

[MineralMan]

20. Thanks. The unrecs will probably win on this one, but

no matter. The post will stand.

[Maru Kitteh]

23. I did what I could. For some people, conspiracies are their substitute religion.

They have absolute faith - reason and evidence matter not. Logic matters not. The FAITH in the dark conspiracy must be maintained.

[pnwmom]

21. Unfortunately, DUers with legitimate concerns about specific vaccines

(who otherwise have nothing against vaccination) are often dismissed here as "anti-vaxers."

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

22. Bullshit.

[LeftishBrit]

25. This sometimes does happen,

I have read enough of your posts to know that you are not an 'anti-vaxer'.

However, there are a number of people who are not only anti-vaxers (and say so themselves) but are against most forms of modern medicine and/or are prepared to quote and link to extreme RW sites in justification of their views. Some consider that the *only* reason why anyone would support vaccines or modern medicines is because we are 'shills' for pharma or are under the influnce of such. This is distressing to those of us who depend on modern medicine for the lives of ourselves and our families, and/or who are desperately politically concerned about the ways in which poor people are denied access to modern medicine. Also, the linked sites often spread right-libertarianism (itself a deadly disease IMO) or even racist views. I consider any collaboration between progressives and the far right to be very dangerous! These issues, even apart from my concerns about access to vaccinations as such, are what worry me.

[KoKo]

26. True. Vaccines shouldn't be rushed out without extensive testing just because

of Pandemic mania. It's more of the control by our Pharma industry. Rushing drugs and vaccines out without proper, lengthy testing for a one time "hit" on the stock price has dangerous consequences.

Yelling Pandemic in a room filled with Pharma CEO's leads to a stampede.

[MineralMan]

28. The thing about pandemics is that they spread with

alarming speed. Testing has been done on the H1N1 vaccine. Flu vaccines are based on technology that has been tested for a long time. The only problem likely to occur with this H1N1 vaccine would be that it could be ineffective. The technology that produced it is proven.

The risks are the same as the seasonal flu vaccine, meaning that they are very, very small. The same manufacturers who produce the seasonal vaccine are producing the H1N1 vaccine, using the same technology. It's not something new.

The questionnaire you get when you go to get vaccinated covers the most common risks. Read it. Answer the questions accurately. If you have not had a bad reaction from a seasonal flu vaccine, you will not have a bad reaction from this one, either. Same technology...same ingredients.

If you're allergic to eggs, you shouldn't take it. If you have a fever, you shouldn't take it. If you answer yes to any of the other questions, you may be advised not to take it. Otherwise, it could keep you from a nasty case of the flu. If you have other problems, like lung or heart problems, it could save your life.

If you're a normal, healthy person between say 20 and 60 years of age, you probably won't die if you get the H1N1 flu, but you'll feel like crap for a week. It's up to you.

[KoKo]

46. What was the last Pandemic you lived through?

:shrug:

[HuckleB]

53. What does that question have to do with anything?

[MineralMan]

27. Not at all. Only those who depend on and promulgate

misinformation on vaccines are anti-vaxxers. If you have concerns about a particular vaccine, there is a wealth of reliable resources on the web to investigate those concerns. Anti-vaccination websites, random blogs, and alternative medicine sites are not reliable resources for such investigations.

Medicine is a science. If you have questions about science or medicine, consult sites that represent a majority of scientific opinion. Consulting anti-anything sites will not give you good information, since they operate to promote their particular point of view.

A good site will take neither side, but will simply present verifiable information. Verifiable means that the information comes from a respectable source, and there will be links to help you get more information.

The information is available, and not hard to find.

[pnwmom]

29. I have been accused here numerous times of being an "anti-vaxer"

because of specific concerns I have had, for example, the way the Gardasil promotion was rolled out, with an attempt to make it mandatory so as to beat the competing vaccine in the marketplace.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

33. Yes, you have. Because you post bullshit about vaccines.

" the Gardasil promotion was rolled out, with an attempt to make it mandatory so as to beat the competing vaccine in the marketplace."

This is a perfect example. There is no competing vaccine for HPV.

[infojunkie]

57. wrong

HiFructosePronSyrup wrote "This is a perfect example. There is no competing vaccine for HPV."

Snotty AND wrong, wrong, wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cervarix

[mzmolly]

48. Yes indeed. As David Kirby said, it's downright "Rovian!"

:hi:

[BuddhaGirl]

51. +1

n/t

[lumberjack_jeff]

32. You are doing public health a disservice.

It is clear that environmental insults are causing a wide range of neurological and autoimmune diseases. No one knows what those insults are specifically, because a large portion of medical research is invested in protecting sacred cows.

Everyone who points this out becomes the target of your "anti-vaxxer" jihad.

Are vaccines responsible? clearly not entirely responsible... But until we know what the causes are, we won't know what they aren't.

[MineralMan]

36. Most diseases are environmentally caused.

Bacteria and viruses cause many of them. We have means to prevent many of those, and we do. We immunize against a wide range of diseases that once killed so many. Immunization is a long-proven means of eliminating or seriously limiting the toll such illnesses take.

Studies are, and have been, done on whether vaccines and other immunizations cause illness. We are aware of some rare things that can be sequelae of immunization. We know about some allergic reactions to vaccines, as well. We learn more all the time.

In the meantime, millions of people are kept from suffering a large group of diseases that were once endemic in the population. Children no longer get the childhood illnesses. Women no longer have babies with birth defects from rubella. Smallpox is no longer even a threat. Polio soon will join it.

The anti-vaxxers would end all of that if they could. That would be the disservice, not my debunking of the misinformation they promulgate.

Every medication on this planet has side effects. Some small to tiny percentage of people suffer those side effects. Compared to the massive losses caused by illnesses we can now prevent or treat, however, it's a good deal.

For every vaccination, there is a way to opt out. If you fear immunization, opt out. That's my suggestion to anyone who is opposed to immunization. Just opt out. Don't spread misinformation as if it were true. Just opt out.

[lumberjack_jeff]

37. The autism epidemic, which is real, is most likely due to modern environmental toxin(s).

http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/autism-and-environment

Dozens of chemicals in the environment are neurodevelopmental toxins, which means they alter how the brain grows. Mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, lead, brominated flame retardants and pesticides are examples.
While exposure to some--such as PCBs--has declined in recent decades, others--including flame retardants used in furniture and electronics, and pyrethroid insecticides--have increased.
Mothers of autistic children were twice as likely to use pet flea shampoos, which contain organophosphates or pyrethroids, according to one study that has not yet been published. Another new study has found a link between autism and phthalates, which are compounds used in vinyl and cosmetics. Other household products such as antibacterial soaps also could have ingredients that harm the brain by changing immune systems, Hertz-Picciotto said.
In addition, fetuses and infants might be exposed to a fairly new infectious microbe, such as a virus or bacterium, that could be altering the immune system or brain structure. In the 1970s, autism rates increased due to the rubella virus.
The culprits, Hertz-Picciotto said, could be "in the microbial world and in the chemical world."
“I don’t think there’s going to be one smoking gun in this autism problem,” she said. “It’s such a big world out there and we know so little at this point.”
But she added, scientists expect to develop “quite a few leads in a year or so.”
The UC Davis researchers have been studying autistic children's exposure to flame retardants and pesticides to see if there is a connection. The results have not yet been published.
“If we’re going to stop the rise in autism in California, we need to keep these studies going and expand them to the extent possible,” Hertz-Picciotto said.
Funding for studying genetic causes of autism is 10 to 20 times higher than funding for environmental causes, she said. “It’s very off-balance,” she said.
Weiss agreed, saying that "excessive emphasis has been placed on genetics as a cause."
"The advances in molecular genetics have tended to obscure the principle that genes are always acting in and on a particular environment. This article, I think, will restore some balance to our thinking," he said.

[MineralMan]

38. That's possible, although there's some new info

that may shed a different light on autism. Someone posted a story this morning here, but I don't have the link.

In any case, there's no direct, conclusive evidence that it's from immunizations. That's been studied pretty darned closely. It could be a lot of things. That's no reason not to immunize children against dangerous diseases. Concrete data would be needed before that would make sense, and there isn't any.

In this case, the benefits of childhood immunizations far outweigh the unsupported worries about autism being caused by a factor in the immunizations. Until there is evidence about causes, it's irresponsible to attack something that might possibly be a factor. Lots of ongoing research, and still no concrete evidence.

Once the cause is found and, if it's environmental, then it can be eliminated. First find the cause, then eliminate that from the environment. Way too many variables at this point.

[Odin2005]

40. There is no epidemic.

Unless you think greater awareness leading to more diagnoses is an "epidemic". I ran into a book once by an anthropologist with an autistic daughter and he argued convincingly that is just more diagnoses from greater awareness. The "epidemic" is mass hysteria.

[lumberjack_jeff]

41. Read the link.

Everyone's entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.

[LeftishBrit]

42. There does not appear to be a new 'epidemic'.

A recent study of adults in the UK found the prevalence of autistic spectrum disorders in adults to be about 1 in 100 by current diagnostic criteria: the same, if not slightly higher, than the findings for children. In the past, autistic individuals were often diagnosed simply as 'mentally handicapped', 'disturbed' or 'psychotic'.

I would not be surprised, however, if prenatal exposure to pollutants (which is not something new) does increase the risk, and certainly it needs more study.

[lumberjack_jeff]

43. If people were diagnosed with something else 30 years ago

... you'd see a remarkable and obvious corresponding decrease in the prevalence of "something else".

That is not the case.

Awareness plays some role, but it can't explain even half of the 7x increase in California in the '90s

[LeftishBrit]

44. There is certainly a huge decline in children diagnosed as 'psychotic' or 'schizophrenic'

This was a diagnosis not uncommon in the past, but now almost unknown with regard to children under 12 or so.

[Odin2005]

47. Autistics wee labeled as "retarded" or "childhood schizophrenic" in the past.

[HuckleB]

54. Say what?

[SidDithers]

34. Happy to rec...nt

Sid

[Ezlivin]

39. I get my yearly vaccination at the VA in Dallas

The only thing I have concern about is the other ingredients in the vaccine, in particular formaldehyde.

I've never had a bad reaction nor have I caught the flu.

[mzmolly]

50. According to a toxicologist I've communicated with, this is a legitimate

concern.

My question to the scientist was as follows ~

Q - What is your opinion on the assertion "our bodies make formaldehyde naturally" so we needn't worry about it being in vaccines?

A - The formaldehyde that our body makes is during metabolism and therefor is bound to enzymes and is not free. The actual free amount of formaldehyde in organs, blood etc is in the picogram range or less.

Yes, we need to be concerned about the formaldehyde used in vaccines.

[trotsky]

55. Your very own body makes formaldehyde as a waste product.

In quantities far greater than you will ever get in a vaccine.

Interesting, hmm? There are a lot of anti-vaccination lies out there.

[nadinbrzezinski]

45. Happy to recommend

seen this in thesis writing, alas with Jenner.

I SHOULD go to State to get all that paperwork again and write a good article to send in for publication. I sweat the parallels to 1810 are way too eerie

[mzmolly]

49. As others have pointed out, there are legitimate concerns

about vaccination. Those who wish to make vaccines safer, should not be dismissed as "anti-vaccine nutters" out of hand.

[LeftishBrit]

52. No - but those who link to right-wing conspiracy sites to justify their concerns can be dismissed

as "anti-vaccine nutters", if not something worse.

You have not done so yourself; but unfortunately it is something that happens at regular intervals.

[Confusious]

58. How would you go about making vaccines safer

If you have more of a chance of being hit by lightning, or dying in a car accident. Wouldn't time and energy be better spent on THAT then trying to chase ghosts?

[Why Syzygy]

56. I'm taking notes.

Not. :rofl: