Unless you have a problem with the vaccine itself, not vaccinating is just dangerous.

See, this is why people get frustrated, going over the same silly arguments over and over. And your argument is really silly, I’m sorry.

So if anyone wonders why the derisive tone, we get frustrated when arguing with the anti-science crowd, going over the same dumb things. It’s like arguing about evolution.

In fact I think I have an apt analogy for this kind of thing:

The anti-science crowd on the left is like the fundamentalist christians on the right.

She was deathly ill, on top of already being deathly ill. Her doctor had never seen a case of adult measles and it took days to diagnose. The decision to immunize or not rests with the parents, but here’s an example of what happens to other people when un-immunized children infect others. If a parent chooses to not immunize, then they must quarantine their children immediately if they suspect measles.

utahgirl

Of course, RFK Jr. presents no evidence whatsoever that the CDC was or is trying to derail any vaccine studies in any population. (I guess we just have to take his word for it.) Indeed, his assertion that there are lower rates of autism and neurological disorders in these children is also flawed. In reality there is no credible evidence to support this contention, which has been popularized by UPI reporter Dan Olmstead. I addressed one such bit of credulity towards unsupported claims about unvaccinated patients in the suburbs of Chicago, and pointed out how this supposed finding was based solely on the undocumented and unsubstantiated recollection of a single practice of altie doctors. (Can you say confirmation bias? Sure, I knew your could.) Prometheus ably took on the claim that the Amish have a lower incidence of autism, pointing out that, even if that were the case, there are so many other factors, genetic and environmental, that could be just as plausible an explanation for such a difference that it is curious that antivaccination advocates would automatically zero in on vaccines without even acknowledging these other possibilities.

The bottom line is that at present there is no compelling epidemiological, scientific, or clinical trial evidence that mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism, RFK Jr.’s conspiracy-mongering notwithstanding. Indeed, now that thimerosal has been removed from all routine pediatric vaccines except the flu vaccine since 2003, there is as yet no evidence of a decrease in the rate of autism. In other nations, such as Denmark, there has been no evidence of a decrease in the rate of new diagnoses of autism even 13 years after thimerosal was removed from vaccines. This is pretty strong epidemiological evidence that there is no link between the two. At best, one can postulate that a very small percentage of the population might be susceptible to mercury, a population that is such a small percentage of the overall population that it wasn’t detected, but that’s a far cry from the dogmatic statements of groups like Generation Rescue that “autism is a misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning.” In addition, there isn’t really any good evidence that such a population exists or that mercury causes autism in it. In fact, the symptoms of autism don’t even resemble the symptoms of mercury poisoning. (Look up Pink Disease, if you don’t believe me, particularly the skin changes associated with mercury poisoning in children.)

So why does this pseudoscience persist? Certainly it’s not because of good science. The available evidence does not support a link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism, and the articles published by those claiming a link is usually published in journals that are either ideologically biased or not peer-reviewed. Articles in better journals that are touted as showing a link almost always, upon closer examination (such as reading the entire article rather than just the abstract) do not support a link or are very weak evidence at best. Kathleen Seidel correctly points out one reason:

It’s time for RFK Jr. to come clean about the fact that he represents the interests of private litigants seeking compensation for supposed vaccine injury when in fact many of those litigants have no evidence that such injury occurred. Many never even suspected that their children were “damaged” until they were convinced after the fact that vaccines offered the only possible explanation for their children’s autism. The sense of entitlement and certainty expressed by many autism=poisoning crusaders is not always based on a careful review of a wide range of information. The numerous studies exonerating vaccines as a cause of autism are often dismissed out of hand, simply because they do not support litigants’ preconceptions.

I agree. For what they no doubt consider to be noble motives, people like RFK Jr. and David Kirby have foolishly hitched their names to a cause that is primarily at its heart not about finding the cause of or better treatments for autism, but rather about trial lawyers seeking to sue the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VCIP). Indeed, as I wrote about recently, this litigation has tainted a major vaccine adverse events reporting database. Perhaps the chief driving force behind this movement are the father-and-son tag team of autism quacks and providers of “expert testimony” and legal services to parents seeking to sue the VCIP, Mark and David Geier. They publish highly speculative papers in non-peer-reviewed journals like Medical Hypotheses (which is dedicated to “radical ideas outside the mainstream) or poor quality articles in which they dumpster-dive this tainted database in really crappy woo-filled journals like The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, and then use these papers to support their litigation.

You clearly have no experience dealing with autism, or dealing with the current vaccine schedule that adds up to about 42 doses of vaccines before the age of 5. I do. Twice over. And now I am working to recover two children from autism and motor coordination and speech problems. I know for a fact that the vaccines are what did it. My daughter’s stutter began immediately after her DTaP and Varicella shots last summer, at age 4. Both my children have tested off the charts for mercury and measles virus.

In addition to the case above, there are more test cases happening right now in Washington, and things don’t look to be going the government’s way. There are also cases against vaccine manufacturers pending in France and in Japan, specifically with regard to the HepB shot.
http://www.reuters.com/article…..7120080201
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/S…..uits/6883/

Several girls and young women have died from the fantabulous new Gardasil shot.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pag…..&ct=5
http://www.ageofautism.com/200……html#more

Vaccines contain not only mercury but aluminum, another powerful neurotoxin, and formaldehyde, and antifreeze, and on and on. Not to mention that the gajillions of shots have never been tested in combination with one another for how those viruses might interact. And nobody has been able to explain to me how it is safe to give an infant a vaccine that is NOT to be given to people with serious egg allergies before the age at which they would have tried solid food so one could know about the allergy in the first place.

So we parents would appreciate not being treated like morons. Most of us could probably get a biochemistry degree with what we’ve unfortunately had to learn. Next up we will be working on a law degree to send the Pharma-sponsored mofos at the CDC to jail, where they belong.