Category: Anti-Vax Denialism

In a new apologia for Jenny McCarthy and the mercury militia, Alison Levy, writing for HuffPo, wonders what all the fuss is about.

When I watch Jenny McCarthy on CNN or when I read the blogs (and comments) on autism, I keep wondering: What is this debate about? Yes, the parents of autistic kids are more “emotional” than the aloof doctors before them. But why are they met with anger, rather than compassion? If their concerns are heard, how does that harm other citizens? As a health journalist, and recent newcomer to this issue, I’m trying to understand the passion on the “pro-vaccination” side.

She wonders what the debate is about? After all that reading? How dense is she?

The underlying fear and anger towards these parents suggests that it’s somehow heretical to question any proffering of scientific “proof” even when it squares off with experience–in this case, parents’ tragic and oft repeated experience of watching hundreds of thousands of children immediately deteriorate upon vaccination.

There are several logical fallacies here…
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What if we had a vaccine against cancer? Or even against some cancers? Wouldn’t this be a huge news story, with people everywhere clamoring for the shot? Maybe…

Or maybe, some people could find a way to turn that smile upside down. Gardasil, the new vaccine approved for prevention of certain cancer-causing strains of the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), is the first widely available vaccine aimed directly at preventing cancer. (The Hepatitis B vaccine also helps prevent liver tumors, but that’s another story.) Gardasil can prevent cervical cancer, certain mouth and anal cancers, and perhaps other cancers of the naughty bits. So, who wouldn’t love that?

The Religious Right is who. You see, the infection that leads to these cancers is usually spread by sexual contact. Thats right, sex. SEX!! And sex is a big no-no for the fundies, at least outside of making babies with your opposite-sexed spouse.

But as much as I dislike fundamentalism, most of the “mainstream” fundamentalist groups have taken a more nuanced stand on Gardasil.

For school vaccination requirements, Christianity today favors an “opt-in” policy, while Focus on the Family sets a vaguer, “let the parents decide” policy. Both groups, quite wisely, recognize that the vaccine is valuable and that evangelical children are at risk for HPV. The Family Research Council also has an “opt-in” policy with the additional honesty of explaining why they do not like an “opt-out” policy. All of the groups do seem to over-emphasize potential negative arguments, however. Cost comes up as an issue–as it should with any medication. But if the vaccine prevented, say, ovarian cancer, I don’t think anyone would focus much on the price.

“The wages of sin is death”, and while most Christians do not subscribe to a literal interpretation of this idea, it does infuse the Right’s decision-making, perhaps blinding them to the benefits of this vaccine. In order for the vaccine to be effective, it must be given before the onset of sexual activity (which can even mean touching “down there”). While none of us likes to think about our kids having sex at 14, it may happen, and to punish them with cancer seems, well, excessive.

An “opt-in” policy for vaccinations is not a good approach to public health. Vaccines work by protecting people before they may be exposed, and by creating herd immunity. Everything that can be done to encourage vaccination should be. Opt-in carries an implication that the vaccine is either unimportant or of uncertain utility. Opt-out, while less negative, makes it too easy for people do put off a decision until it is too late.

As with any vaccine, safety and efficacy are important. And, as with any disease, education is an excellent public health measure. Mandatory sex education would go a long way toward preventing sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. I wonder how Focus on the Family feels about that?

As the anti-vaccine mercury militia’s limited credibility shrinks even further, actual scientists are investigating real mercury-based toxins.

Remember how followers of the mercury militia were getting all their old mercury amalgam fillings pulled? It turns out that maybe that’s not the greatest idea.

A group from the U of I found that once you dig out the fillings, under the right conditions, mercury can become exposed to certain bacteria that methylate it, forming toxic methylmercury compounds.

If this pans out, it may change the way mercury fillings are removed and the waste products disposed of.

Look! Science!

University of Illinois at Chicago (2008, March 27). Dental Chair A Possible Source Of Neurotoxic Mercury Waste. ScienceDaily.

It’s amazing that anti-vaccine crankery persists. I went over to Joe Mercola’s woo-palace again, and what should pop up but an article by Dr. Woo himself, Russell Blaylock. Apparently Russ and Joe are “good friends”, which is appropriate, since both are doctors that aren’t welcome in the profession. Blaylock believes that vaccines kill your brain. How does he know?

“A tremendous amount of research has now demonstrated the link between chronic low-level brain inflammation, elevated brain glutamate levels and major depression”

and

“A great number of studies have shown that when you vaccinate an animal, the body’s inflammatory cytokines not only increase dramatically, but so do the brain’s inflammatory chemicals.”

OK. This is a load of bubkes. You can read the article if you’re bored, but let me at least parse out his citations for you. To summarize, his hypothesis is that vaccines somehow make the nervous system all cranky, and local glutamate toxicity in the brain is induced, leading to neuropsychiatric problems. Here’s a few of his supposedly supporting citations:

1) McGeer PL and McGeer EG. Local neuroinflammation and progression of Alzheimer’s disease. J Neurovirology 202; 8: 529-538. This is an article about the role of the innate immune system in brain inflammation from autopsy specimens. The innate immune system is not the arm that is specifically activated by vaccines.

2)Tavares RG, et al. Quinolinic acid stimulates synaptosomal glutamate release and inhibits glutamate uptake into astrocytes. Neurochem Int 2002; 40: 621-627. Interesting basic science about glutamate metabolism. Irrelevant.

11) Anderson T et al. NMDA-receptor antagonist prevents measles virus-induced neurodegeneration. Eur J Neurosci 1991; 3: 66-71. Irrelevant

13) Renault PF, et al. Psychiatric complications of long-term ineterferon-alpha therapy. Arch Internal Medicine 1987; 147: 1577-1580. Irrelevant

Basically, none of his citations support his hypothesis in any way. It’s an interesting hypothesis. It just isn’t supported by his data.

If this is the best “evidence” the uber-cranks can come up with, it’s no wonder they aren’t getting lots of grants and tenured academic positions.

So what are some other strategies employed by the anti-vax cults? How about fear? Lies?

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Once again, I’m migrating more popular posts from the old blog. If this is a repeat for you, sorry. –PalMD
Wow. I mean, wow. I was googling some flu information, and one of the first hits was so fundamentally wrong about all matters medical that I actually felt ill. The dangerous title is “Building a Child’s Immunity the Natural Way“. It’s wasn’t clear to me what this meant, so I had to read the damned thing. It starts out pretty bad:

New Jersey’s Public Health Council gave its citizens a Christmas present that will not please the health-conscious, as it became the first state in the nation to require flu shots for preschoolers.

So, if your “health-conscious”, you are against mandatory vaccination. Hmm…

Vaccines are dangerous for the health of any individual, but when administered to small children in their important developmental years, they are especially damaging. Medical “experts” have not even determined the correct dosages for small children, who in this regard are not just small adults. When we talk about daycare, we are talking about babies as young as a few months of age. Additionally, not only do vaccines usually contain mercury, but many lack effectiveness and can cause problems with the development of the child’s natural immune system (emphasis mine).

Look, I’m not going to address all of the anti-vaccination canards present in this piece, other than refer you to other excellent sources. Two things really get me though: lies, and this “immunity” thing.

Even if the evidence of a relationship between vaccine use and autism is disregarded, there are more debilitating results of vaccine administration to children. Due to the availability of new health information, a growing number of scientists and doctors have realized the problems revealed by recent immunology research and have begun to challenge the foundational tenets of vaccination. Because it seems that vaccines have eradicated many diseases in the last 100 years, many doctors have been reticent to question them. Such claims have mainly been based on epidemic studies rather than on clinical evidence.

For example, Europe never used the polio vaccines, yet it experienced the same rise and fall of polio cases as did the U.S.

That, my dear reader, is a lie. OK, if you are being generous, it is just ignorance, but I find it hard to be generous, given a 3 second stop at google will take you over to the World Health Organization and explain its polio eradication campaign in Europe. After a lie like that, it’s hard to believe anything that follows.

Also, many diseases that were believed to be wiped out have re-appeared under different names. As an example, spinal meningitis and polio have almost the same exact symptoms. There have never been any studies that proved the vaccines actually did cause the eradication of any disease; it has only been assumed by the fact that that the epidemics seemed to have ceased. The CDC uses the concept that a relationship does not prove causality to downplay the autism-thimerosal link, yet ironically, they don’t apply the same standard to the relationship between vaccination usage and the end of an epidemic.

That isn’t just “moving the goalposts“; that’s digging them up, burning them, and scattering the ashes. We all know epidemiologic studies have their limitations, but it’s pretty clear to the scientific community, beyond a reasonable doubt, that vaccines successfully prevent disease. (By the way, “spinal meningitis” and polio are completely unalike, and, believe it or not, we actually have tests to tell us what organism is causing an infection. Welcome to the early 20th century!)

All vaccines depress our immune functions. The chemicals in the vaccines depress our immune system; the virus present depresses immune function; and the foreign DNA/RNA from animal tissues depresses immunity. Studies have found that some metabolic functions were significantly reduced after vaccinations were given and did not return to normal for months. Other indicators of immune system depression included reduced lymphocyte viability, neutrophil hyper-segmentation, and a reduced white cell count. So we are trading a small immune depression for immunity to one disease, our only defense against all known disease for a temporary immunity against one disease, usually an innocuous childhood disease. Vaccines have been linked to AIDS and other immunodeficient disorders as well. The trade-off is not at all fair and not worth the risk.

Wow. This is so damned stupid. And dangerous. First, what does this phrase “immune depression” mean? I don’t know. They do give a hint futher down, throwing around big words like “neutrophil hypersegmentation” but that’s pretty meaningless as an observation, and without references is completely useless. Then the nice scare tactic of vaccines and AIDS. Nice. Really nice. OK, time to explain how vaccines actually work.

Vaccines and the Immune System

This is really cool…much cooler than the cultists would like you to believe. It is teh über-kool. And please forgive the over-simplification.

We need an example: let’s take polio vaccine—you know, the one they never used in Europe when the WHO wiped out polio in Europe. We have two choices, but the one we use the most in N.A. and Europe is the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). Both of the polio vaccines have advantages and disadvantages, but hey, I only have so much time.

To make IPV, polio viruses are grown in the lab, then “inactivated” with a chemical. This renders them non-infectious. Then they are injected under the skin, which is where the fun starts…
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I don’t need to cover this latest nonsense from David Kirby about vaccines and autism as Orac has already done so nicely.

However, I would like to point out a few examples of why anti-vax is a prime example of denialist argument.

For one, Kirby is such a promiscuous goal-post mover, I’m floored. This is the guy that said he’d remove himself from the debate if thimerosal were vindicated. Well, that’s proving more and more impossible, as are his expectations:

Finally, to all those who are going to post comments about the autism rates in California not coming down, following the removal of thimerosal from most vaccines: You are right. The most likely explanation is that thimerosal was not responsible for the autism epidemic. But that does not mean that it never harmed a single child.
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But if thimerosal is vindicated, or shown to be a very minor player, then what about other vaccine ingredients? And what about the rather crowded vaccine schedule we now impose upon families of young children? And what about reports of unvaccinated children in Illinois, California and Oregon who appear to have significantly lower rates of autism? Shouldn’t we throw some research dollars into studying them?

You can answer that, no, we shouldn’t, because the vaccine-autism debate is over.

But I am willing to wager that it has only just begun.

Oh for the love of … you’ve got to be kidding me? You spend the last decade suggesting the entire epidemic is caused by this stuff, but now that the hypothesis has been thoroughly smashed, you’re going to find a dozen other things to blame about vaccines, all similarly based on no science? This guy kills me. He is right though, the debate will never be over. There are fundamental aspects of vaccination that will always make people crazy and paranoid, and lack of any evidence of harm will never stop these people from making false accusations against one of the most effective medical interventions ever developed. The key is learning that this is the usual evidence-free anti-vax nonsense, and making sure it’s ignored for the crankery that it is. We’ll probably never overcome the natural inclination of parents to want to avoid injections in their kids for an abstract benefit (or a benefit that may not be directly for their child). But we should be able to learn what kind of specious arguments will be made against vaccination, and dismiss them out of hand.

Second I’d like to point out what I think is the most idiotic question I’ve seen asked in a while:

Among the “factors” to be studied are family history, events during pregnancy, maternal medications, parental occupation, ambient pollution around the house, and “a child’s vaccination history,” the paper reported.

Oddly, the study will not look at the mercury-based preservative thimerosal. According to the FDA and the Institute of Medicine, the last batches of thimerosal containing vaccines for infants and immune-globulin given to pregnant women expired in late 2003 (except for the flu shot, which is still given to infants and pregnant women).

The new study will only study children born from September 2003 to August, 2005.
But the question remains, and I think it’s legitimate: If an association between vaccines and autism has been completely “ruled out,” then why are we spending taxpayer dollars to study autistic children’s vaccination history?

Maybe because vaccination history is part of a patient history? Maybe because you cranks will cry foul if they don’t? Maybe because they want to continue to accumulate evidence showing that the anti-vax movement is wrong? What a moron. I get what he’s implying. It’s a conspiracy! Secretly we worried about his idiotic hypothesis that has been repeatedly disproven, that’s why scientists will continue to study vaccines. Otherwise why would we bother to study a variable like a patient’s medical history in a study of autism? Sigh.

Two Guardian articles appear today on Andrew Wakefield and his associates. The first is a discussion of his unethical and invasive methods used in his now-debunked study that purported to show a link between autism and the MMR vaccine.
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David Kirby asks us to move the goalposts one more time on the vaccines-cause-autism question.

Epidemiologic studies have shown no link. The Institute of Medicine has looked at the evidence for the link between mercury and autism and found it to be specious. Thimerosal has been removed, to no effect. Throughout the Autism Omnibus proceedings we’ve seen the best case for a link and it’s a joke. The measles PCRs linking gut samples from autistic kids to “chronic measles infection” from the MMR jab were false positives. At every single point when this problem has been studied it’s been found to be a specious link. But are the anti-vax cranks like David Kirby ever satisfied? Of course not. It will always be one more study. And there will always be specious evidence for the anti-vax denialists to grasp desperately to so this issue will never die. They will propose things like “mercury efflux disorder” without any proof of its existence. They will switch from thimerosal, to other parts of the adjuvants like aluminum, to blaming environmental mercury (as Kirby did in his last post). Or they’ll generate more bogus correlations, for instance, Kirby loves this new Survey USA poll:

It certainly wasn’t hard for the respected polling company, Survey USA, to find nearly 1,000 unvaccinated children living in nine counties in California and Oregon. All they had to do was pick up the phone.

Survey USA, commissioned by the anti-thimerosal group Generation Rescue, completed telephone interviews in 11,817 households with one or more children age 4 to 17. Of the 17,674 children inventoried, 991 were described as being completely unvaccinated.

Interestingly, the survey found that, among boys (who have neurodevelopmental disorders at a 4-to-1 ratio over girls) vaccinated children were 155 percent more likely to have a neurological disorder, 224 percent more likely to have ADHD, and 61 percent more likely to have autism. Among boys aged 11-18, the increased autism risk was 112 percent.

Is that so? I wonder what would happen if someone actually took a close look at the survey results…

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RFK Jr. writes the standard crank screed in Huffpo, and it’s like a mirror reflection of the CBS news crankery that Orac takes on.

Let’s see, it’s a crank screed so it at a very minimum has to have four elements. The wacky idea, a bunch of inflated non-evidence, conspiracy theories to deflect criticism, and finally, notions of persecution. Let’s see how RFK Jr. does.
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David Kirby seems to be planning his escape from the autism debate. At Huffington post, he demands that science perform epidemiological studies that compare the healthiness or autism rates of unvaccinated versus vaccinated children.

Most people (save for a handful of fringe parents who believe that autism is some altered state of being, worthy of celebration) are probably just plain tired of autism and the fight over its cause. They really want to settle this debate and move on.

I know I do.

The irony is that the multi-million-dollar court battles, the melodramatic headlines and the alarm over parents retreating from vaccinations are all so terribly unnecessary.

All we need do is conduct a thorough study of vaccinated and unvaccinated children, and see if there is any difference in their rates of autism spectrum disorders.

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Critics of the study idea, who insist that vaccines have been 100 percent exonerated, ridicule the Maloney bill as a redundant, monumental waste of time and money.

Even so, their position is a bit hard to understand. No matter what happens in Vaccine Court, (which many say is the wrong venue for such a fight, anyway), this tired old debate will drag on for years, God help us.

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If the results showed that vaccinated children were, all around, more healthy and robust than unvaccinated kids — that would pretty much kill all lawsuits right there, send waves of reassurance to billions of parents around the world, and make people like me shut up and go away.

I would, blissfully, not write about autism and vaccines again. (I have a new book deal to occupy me, about corporate vs. environmental health, which my publisher St. Martin’s Press will announce shortly. I am not an autism activist, and this is not my crusade).

Wow, that offer of Kirby going away would almost make it worth it. However, it’s interesting that the denialists will assert that mercury is the culprit despite no credible evidence for this hypothesis, and then demand that more studies be performed.

While I wouldn’t object to the idea of more study on principle, I really don’t think that this would actually make people like Kirby and the anti-vax denialists go away. After all, they don’t believe the existing science exonerates thimerosal, they have moved the goalposts again now that thimerosal has been removed from vaccines. Why should we believe any more studies will satisfy them?

People like Kirby have no credibility here. They’ve never accepted scientific findings, they have rejected them in the past as conspiracies and cover-ups of the truth. You have to pry their discredited findings they’ve cherry-picked from their cold dead hands. Why should we think such a study won’t lead to another move of the goalposts?

Anti-vaccination sentiments have existed for hundreds of years. They’re not going to go away with just one more study. They’re not the type of people that are convinced by science, if they were, Kirby would have shut up and gone away long ago.

By all means, do the study, but don’t expect an end to the anti-vax denialism. Just expect another goalpost-move.