My Commentary:

I have long advocated that the so called ’science’ behind ‘herd immunity’ is as big of a fraud as, well, now Climategate.

Below, is Dr, Blaylock’s report on this ‘herd Immunity; fraud. Dr, Blaylock is certainly MORE than qualified to give an ‘expert’ and ‘Scientific’ analysis and breakdown of this scam to push forced mass vaccinations in the name of eugenics. Full article linked to below.

-Forced Vaccinations, Government, and the Public Interest-

By Dr. Russell Blaylock, M.D.
December 2009

Those who are observant have noticed a dangerous trend in the United States, as well as worldwide, and that is the resorting of various governments at different levels to mandating forced vaccination upon the public at large. My State of Mississippi has one of the most-restrictive vaccine-exemption laws in the United States, where exemptions are allowed only upon medical recommendation. Ironically, this is only on paper, as many have had as many as three physicians, some experts in neurological damage caused by vaccines, provide written calls for exemption, only to be turned down by the State’s public-health officer.

Worse are the States, such as Massachusetts, New Jersey and Maryland, where forced vaccinations have either been mandated by the courts, the state legislature, or have such legislation pending. All of such policies strongly resemble those policies found in National Socialist empires, Stalinist countries, or Communist China.

When public-health officers are asked for the legal justification for such draconian measures as forcing people to accept vaccines that they deem either a clear and present danger to themselves and their loved ones or have had personal experience with serious adverse reactions to such vaccines, they usually resort to the need to protect the public.

One quickly concludes that if the vaccines are as effective as being touted by the public-health officials, then why should one fear the unvaccinated? Obviously the vaccinated would have at least 95% protection. This question puts them in a very difficult position. Their usual response is that a “small” percentage of the vaccinated will not have sufficient protection and would still be at risk. Now, if they admit what the literature shows, that vaccine failure rates are much higher than the 5% they claim, they must face the next obvious question – then why should anyone take the vaccine if there is a significant chance it will not protect?

When pressed further, they then resort to their favorite justification, the Holy Grail of the vaccine proponents – herd immunity. This concept is based upon the idea that 95% (and some now say 100%) of the population must be vaccinated to prevent an epidemic. The percentages needing vaccination grows progressively. I pondered this question for some time before the answer hit me. Herd immunity is mostly a myth and applies only to natural immunity – that is, contracting the infection itself.

Is Herd Immunity Real?

In the original description of herd immunity, the protection to the population at large occurred only if people contracted the infections naturally. The reason for this is that naturally-acquired immunity lasts for a lifetime. The vaccine proponents quickly latched onto this concept and applied it to vaccine-induced immunity. But, there was one major problem – vaccine-induced immunity lasted for only a relatively short period, from 2 to 10 years at most, and then this applies only to humoral immunity. This is why they began, silently, to suggest boosters for most vaccines, even the common childhood infections such as chickenpox, measles, mumps, and rubella.

Then they discovered an even greater problem, the boosters were lasting for only 2 years or less. This is why we are now seeing mandates that youth entering colleges have multiple vaccines, even those which they insisted gave lifelong immunity, such as the MMR. The same is being suggested for full-grown adults. Ironically, no one in the media or medical field is asking what is going on. They just accept that it must be done.

That vaccine-induced herd immunity is mostly myth can be proven quite simply. When I was in medical school, we were taught that all of the childhood vaccines lasted a lifetime. This thinking existed for over 70 years. It was not until relatively recently that it was discovered that most of these vaccines lost their effectiveness 2 to 10 years after being given. What this means is that at least half the population, that is the baby boomers, have had no vaccine-induced immunity against any of these diseases for which they had been vaccinated very early in life. In essence, at least 50% or more of the population was unprotected for decades.

If we listen to present-day wisdom, we are all at risk of resurgent massive epidemics should the vaccination rate fall below 95%. Yet, we have all lived for at least 30 to 40 years with 50% or less of the population having vaccine protection. That is, herd immunity has not existed in this country for many decades and no resurgent epidemics have occurred. Vaccine-induced herd immunity is a lie used to frighten doctors, public-health officials, other medical personnel, and the public into accepting vaccinations.

When we examine the scientific literature, we find that for many of the vaccines protective immunity was 30 to 40%, meaning that 70% to 60% of the public has been without vaccine protection. Again, this would mean that with a 30% to 40% vaccine-effectiveness rate combined with the fact that most people lost their immune protection within 2 to 10 year of being vaccinated, most of us were without the magical 95% number needed for herd immunity. This is why vaccine defenders insist the vaccines have 95% effectiveness rates.

Without the mantra of herd immunity, these public-health officials would not be able to justify forced mass vaccinations. I usually give the physicians who question my statement that herd immunity is a myth a simple example. When I was a medical student almost 40 years ago, it was taught that the tetanus vaccine would last a lifetime. Then 30 years after it had been mandated, we discovered that its protection lasted no more than 10 years. Then, I ask my doubting physician if he or she has ever seen a case of tetanus? Most have not. I then tell them to look at the yearly data on tetanus infections – one sees no rise in tetanus cases. The same can be said for measles, mumps, and other childhood infections. It was, and still is, all a myth.

The entire case for forced mass vaccination rest upon this myth and it is important that we demonstrate the falsity of this idea. Neil Z. Miller, in his latest book The Vaccine Information Manual, provides compelling evidence that herd immunity is a myth.

The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions

Those pushing mandatory vaccination for an ever-growing list of diseases are a mixed bag. Some are quite sincere and truly want to improve the health of the United States. They believe the vaccine-induced herd immunity myth and likewise believe that vaccines are basically effective and safe. These are not the evil people.

A growing number are made of those with a collectivist worldview and see themselves as a core of elite wise men and women who should tell the rest of us what we should do in all aspects of our lives. They see us as ignorant cattle, who are unable to understand the virtues of their plan for America and the World. Like children, we must be made to take our medicine – since, in their view, we have no concept of the true benefit of the bad-tasting medicine we are to be fed.

I have also found that a small number of people in the regulatory agencies and public health departments would like to speak out but are so intimidated and threatened with dismissal or destruction of their careers, that they remain silent. As for the media, they are absolutely clueless.

I have found that “reporters” (we have few real journalists these days) rarely understand what they are reporting on and always trust and rely upon people in positions of official power, even if those people are unqualified to speak on the subject. Most of the time they run to the Centers for Disease Control or medical university to seek answers. I cannot count the number of times I have seen university department heads interviewed when it was obvious they had no clue as to the subject being discussed. Few such professors will pass up an opportunity to appear on camera or be quoted in a newspaper.

One must also appreciate that such reporters and editors are under an enormous economic strain, as vaccine manufacturers are major advertisers in all media outlets and for an obvious reason – it controls content. A number of excellent stories on such medical subjects are spiked every day. That means we will always be relegated to the “fringe media” as our media outlets are called. Despite the high quality of the journalism in many of the “fringe” outlets, they have a much smaller audience. And despite this we are having an enormous effect on the debate.

As the Public Awakens, the Collectivist Becomes Desperate

John Jewkes, in his book Ordeal by Planning, observed that as the British collectivists began to see opposition rise to their grandiose plans, they became more desperate and aggressive in their reaction. They then initiated a campaign of smearing their opponents and blaming every failure on the unwillingness of the people to accept the planner’s dictates without question. We certainly have seen this in this debate –opponents to forced vaccinations are referred to as fringe scientists, kooks, uneducated, confused, and enemies of public safety – reminiscent of Stalin’s favorite phrase, “enemy of the people.”

This desperation is based upon their fear that the public might soon catch on to the fact that the entire vaccine program is based upon nonsense, fear, and concocted fairy tales. One special fear of theirs is that the public might discover the fact that most vaccines are contaminated with a number of known and yet-to-be discovered viruses, bacteria, viral fragments, and DNA/RNA fragments. And, further, that our science demonstrates that these contaminants could lead to a number of slowly-developing degenerative diseases, including degenerative diseases of the brain. This is rarely discussed but is of major importance in this debate.

The idea that adults and their children would be forced to submit to being injected with dozens of these organisms and organic fragments is terrifying. No regulatory agency is tracking to see if chronic diseases are rising in the vaccinated, yet we have compelling evidence of a massive rise in all autoimmune diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, and certain cancers since the advent of a dramatic increase in the number of vaccines being mandated.

Of special concern is the finding that many of the contaminant organisms can pass from generation to generation. For example, new studies have found that SV-40, a major contaminant of the polio vaccine until 1963, not only existed as a latent virus for the lifetime of those exposed to the vaccine but was being passed on to the next generation, primarily by way of sperm, something called vertical transmission. This means that every generation from now on will be infected with this known carcinogenic virus. There is also compelling evidence that some polio vaccines manufactured after 1963 may contain SV-40 virus.

What makes the SV-40 contamination disaster of such concern is its association with so many cancers – including mesothelioma, medulloblastoma, ependymoma, meningioma, astrocytoma, oligodendroglioma, pituitary adenoma, glioblastoma, osteosarcomas, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, papillary thyroid carcinomas, and anaplastic thyroid carcinomas.

The Federal government has gone to enormous links to cover up this association, despite the powerful scientific evidence that this vaccine infected at least a hundred million people worldwide with this carcinogenic virus. And, it took over 40 years just to get this far. Linking vaccine contaminations and immunoexcitotoxicity to the drastic rise in neurodegenerative diseases will probably take even longer because of the widespread growth of entrenched powers high in government and their control of the media, which is equally extensive. The fact that powerful, enormously wealthy foundations, such as the Ford Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Rockefeller series of foundations, are supporting forced vaccination greatly enhances the power of governments all over the World.

These foundations operate in the shadows, influencing legislation and government actions through the World Health Organization and individual governmental bodies. Behind every call for forced vaccinations, mandated quarantines, and home invasions, one can find one of these foundations providing the money as well as experts. Remember, the largest of the pharmaceutical-vaccine manufacturers are also providing much of the money for the foundations and serving on the boards of these foundations. The Rockefellers either owned outright or had controlling interest in all of the major pharmaceutical companies. This has given them absolute and extremely powerful access to the reins of power at all levels. Yet, they can be defeated by the truth.

Dr. Blaylock is a board-certified neurosurgeon, author and lecturer. He attended the LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana and completed his internship and neurosurgical residency at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, South Carolina. For the past 24 years he has practiced neurosurgery in addition to having a nutritional practice for 2 years. Retiring from his neurosurgical practice to devote full time to nutritional studies and research, Dr. Blaylock has written and illustrated three books (Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills, Health and Nutrition Secrets That Can Save Your Life, and Natural Strategies for The Cancer Patient). In addition, he has written and illustrated three chapters in medical textbooks, written a booklet on nutritional protection against biological terrorism, has an e-booklet on radioprotection (Nuclear Sunrise), written and illustrated a booklet on multiple sclerosis, and written over 30 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals.

Other credits include Dr. Blaylock’s DVD Nutrition & Behavior, a CD-ROM on the Truth About Aspartame, and, for the past five years, a health newsletter The Blaylock Wellness Report, published by NewsMax. Since the publication of his first book, he has been a guest on over 100 syndicated radio and television programs and appeared on the 700 Club seven times. He lectures widely to both lay and professional medical audiences on a variety of nutritional subjects.

Dr. Blaylock is a visiting professor of biology at Belhaven College and serves on the editorial staff of the Journal of the American Nutraceutical Association, the editorial staff of the Fluoride Journal and is on the editorial staff of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, official journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. He is also a regular lecturer for the Fellowship for Anti-aging and Regenerative Medicine.

Original Article

Hysteria has hit the nation this season with the threat of the Swine Flu and people are looking for immunity.  But who needs to get the H1N1 vaccine and who doesn’t?

You may think that the elderly or others with a week immune system are the people who need vaccinated, but that’s not true according to Herd Immunity.  The theory proposes that “the higher proportion of individuals who are immune, the lower the likelihood that a susceptible person will come into contact with an infected individual.”

In simple terms, to prevent the spread of H1N1 those who work in high-traffic areas (think hospital and school workers) are the ones that should be vaccinated. 

The vaccine therefore acts like a firewall, preventing further transmission of the disease to the rest of the population.  The goal is to vaccinate the “spreaders” – those likely to give the Swine Flu to others – rather than grandma and grandpa who hardly leave the house.  In doing so, when grandma and grandpa decide to leave their house, the grocery store bag boy isn’t giving them H1N1 because he was vaccinated.

Get it?

Kids with cancer. At 19 months, my daughter was diagnosed with leukemia and endured a 2-1/2 year chemotherapy treatment during which we constantly worried about chicken pox exposure, unwashed classmates’ hands after handling her preschool’s turtle, parents who sent their kids to preschool with runny noses and coughs spewing god-knows-what viruses and bacteria.

Here’s Stephanie Tatel writing on Slate about her inability to get child care at all for her 2-1/2-year-old son with leukemia thanks to unvaccinated but perfectly eligible for immunization kids:

While the purpose of chemotherapy is to kill the cancer, it also kills the good cells—most notably the infection-fighting white blood cells. That means my son has limited ability to fight off anything. A single unimmunized child in an ordinary child care setting is the equivalent of a toddler time bomb to him. …

According to Paul Offit, the chief of the infectious diseases division at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and author of Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, the danger that nonvaccinated children pose to immunocompromised children couldn’t be clearer. Those who cannot be vaccinated, including young babies, transplant, and cancer patients, depend on the immunity of the herd to protect them. In recent years, in communities where many parents opt out of vaccinating their children, the herd has diminished. As a result, unvaccinated children have died from totally preventable infectious diseases such as measles, meningitis, and pertussis.

It’s why the pseudo-science-based fear-mongering about vaccines being conducted by “authorities” like Bill Maher, Jenny McCarthy, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and others is so dangerous. And so selfish.

Bill Maher is risking his credentials as critical thinker with his continuing rants against vaccines — he’s questioned the safety of vaccines on two episodes in a row. Worse, he’s risking the health of those who listen to him — and even worse still, the health of those they infect by not getting vaccines.

How’s that? Well, folks with compromised immune systems cannot get vaccines; they must rely on herd immunity to protect them from dangerous but easily preventable diseases. For example, my toddler  daughter was in this situation when we had to temporarily suspend her vaccinations during her 2-1/2-year course of chemotherapy to treat leukemia. If she had been exposed to some disease like measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria or pertussis by some unvaccinated kid whose parents were misinformed that the vaccines cause autism, she would have gotten very sick or even died in her compromised state. We completed our daughter’s vaccination program as soon as her immune system recovered enough to allow it.

On this week’s episode of Real Time, Maher even went so far as to say vaccinations are not “settled” science. He’s completely and totally wrong. Michael Shermer explains why in an open letter to Maher (emphasis mine):

Vaccinations are not 100% effective, nor are they risk free. But the benefits far outweigh the risks, and when communities in the U.S. and the U.K. in recent years have foregone vaccinations in large numbers, herd immunity is lost and communicable diseases have come roaring back. This is yet another example of evolution at work, but in this case it is working against us. (See www.sciencebasedmedicine.org for numerous articles answering every one of the objections to vaccinations.)

Vaccination is one of science’s greatest discoveries. It is with considerable irony, then, that as a full-throated opponent of the nonsense that calls itself Intelligent Design, your anti-vaccination stance makes you something of an anti-evolutionist. Since you have been so vocal in your defense of the theory of evolution, I implore you to be consistent in your support of the theory across all domains and to please reconsider your position on vaccinations. It was not unreasonable to be a vaccination skeptic in the 1880s, which the co-discovered of natural selection—Alfred Russel Wallace—was, but we’ve learned a lot over the past century. Evolution explains why vaccinations work. Please stop denying evolution in this special case.

It’s really a simple risk-benefit analysis. Vaccines have saved millions of lives, with small risk (and developing autism is not one of those risks).

All medical treatments carry risks — my daughter’s chemotherapy treatment carried risks for her, but the cost-benefit analysis showed that the risk of problems from chemotherapy was far outweighed by the risk to her life from letting her leukemia go unchecked. Similarly, the tiny risk of allergic reactions to vaccines for a tiny percentage of those who get them is far outweighed by the risk of contracting easily preventable but deadly diseases oneself and of spreading those diseases to others.

As a long-time Maher fan — and one who sometimes disagrees with him — I hope he will change his hypocritical position on vaccines very soon and very publicly before more damage is done on this key public-health front. And before he becomes a wingnut like those he’s made a career of exposing.

New York and a few other cities that were filled with H1N1 in the spring are detecting very little evidence of a second wave this fall – its appears to be quiet on the home front in those towns!  There is widespread flu in 37 states in the US – which is very unusual for this time of year, but public health officials say there appears to be a pattern developing that areas that had big outbreaks in the spring, like New York, Boston and Philadelphia are seeing less swine flu now.

New York City health officials now believe that while only 10 percent to 20 percent of New Yorkers were reported ill with flu last spring, as many as 20 percent to 40 percent may have been exposed to the disease and developed immunity that has prevented it from spreading.

Although it is too early to be sure, they said, the high level of what is often called “herd immunity” may mean that the second wave of swine flu infection ends up being far less extensive than expected.

This “herd immunity” theory has gained enough credence that Dr. Thomas A. Farley, New York City’s health commissioner, put it forward at a conference on the national preparations for H1N1 last Friday in New York, organized by HHS and CDC.

“We’re not seeing illness in the city right now,” Dr. Farley said at one session. “We’re seeing essentially no disease transmitted in the city. We had 750,000 to one million sick people last spring. We were the hardest-hit city then. So we have a lot of immune people right now.” Officials say the conflicting data show the delicate balance public health officials are walking with swine flu. So far it has turned out to be less deadly than it seemed when a pattern of deaths was reported in Mexico last spring.

This graph compares cities impacted with flu in the spring vs those who are now feeling the flu in the fall . (source NY Times, October 8, 2009)

At the same time, officials fear that it could take a turn for the worse, and they want to maintain a high level of alertness without crying wolf too many times. Dr. Martin S. Cetron, a flu expert at the disease control agency and the co-author of a 2007 study of how the 1918 flu hit 43 American cities, called the idea that flu is not big now because it was big in the spring “an interesting hypothesis, with biological plausibility,” but said that only the rest of the winter would tell.  “To say, Oh, all of us in New York are immune, we won’t have any more disease and we don’t need to take vaccine, is a dangerous conclusion to draw,” Dr. Cetron said.

Comparing flu to other highly infectious diseases, like measles, it is generally accepted that 90 percent to 95 percent of the population has to be immunized to prevent a measles outbreak. For flu, a virus that is constantly changing year to year, it is less clear what the herd immunity has to be to prevent a further outbreak, but it may be as little as half, and New York may be very close to that.

Since September, only about 150 to 250 people a day have been going to New York City emergency rooms complaining of flu-like symptoms, officials said. The presumption in New York and elsewhere is that most flu cases this time of year are swine flu, because it is still early in the year for so-called garden-variety flu.

Attendance in the New York City’s public school system, with just over a million students, was 91 percent Wednesday. Last spring, when the virus was rampant, nearly 60 schools were closed and about 18 percent of students were absent.

In Boston, where an estimated 11 percent of adolescents got swine flu in the spring, public schools and college health services have reported very little flu activity this fall, Dr. Anita Barry, director of the infectious disease bureau of the Boston Public Health Commission, said Wednesday.

Some states, including Georgia, Indiana and North Carolina, had “false waves” of swine flu in the spring, Mr. Olson said, which seemed to have been caused by the “worried well” flocking to hospitals. Georgia in particular took off when schools reopened in August. In the last week of September, there were 81 hospitalizations and eight deaths from H1N1 in the state, according to the Georgia Department of Community Health, compared with 44 hospitalizations and one death in the three-months from late April through late July.

As of Monday, seven pregnant women were on respirators in Arkansas hospitals, officials said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/health/08flu.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Areas%20Hit%20Hard%20by%20Flu%20in%20Spring%20See%20Little%20Now%20&st=cse

Amazon’s electronic reading device known as Kindle is not exactly as “Green” as it is cracked up to be, but now we have another reason to reconsider the merits of paper-based reading: Censorship.

Kindle users may not have anticipated it, but Amazon can recall an e-book purchase at the push of a virtual button. Need those annotations for a book report? If your digital reading material is recalled, Amazon removes those too.

Tough luck.

Amazon claims they are working to amend a hasty retraction process that resulted when an allegedly unauthorized source made available a number of e-books to which the lawful copyright holder objected, reports the New York Times in “Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Devices“. Refunds for the illicitly encoded material are on the way, but the questions have only begun. And well they should.

In an ongoing series on the transformative impact of high tech, the Social Critic aims to explore the lesser known consequences of the virtual world. In this instance, we find a stark reminder that in the digital universe the price of “virtual” amounts to easy come, easy go. You can’t share an e-book. You can’t recycle an e-book reader — at least not in the Green manner one might have hoped [see "GreenSmart vs. GreenDumb"]. And you can’t take for granted that you “own” anything in the virtual realm in the same physical manner it is possible to own DVDs, books, magazines, newspapers and the like.

What this article doesn’t touch upon is disturbing in its own right: The questionable health effects, particularly on the eyes and brain, of exchanging the tangible for an imperceptibly flickering digital view screen. Over time, exposure may blunt brain development in children, promote sleep and attention disorders, lead to career-limiting repetitive strain injuries to the spine, elbows, wrists or fingers — or more commonly still, eyestrain and headaches — all while aiming electromagnetic radiation at our craniums (of which cell phones and CRT monitors are among the worst EMF offenders). None of this, however, takes into account the fastest growing concern of all: the controversial notion of Internet addiction. Until recently, in fact, China took a very heavy-handed approach to digital addicts: electroshock therapy.

Library systems, in a sign of the times, are taxed, meanwhile, not by people who wish to check out books but by the number of people who wish to access the Internet. As discussed in the aforementioned post, the billions of computer users plugged into electric grids around the world, connected, in turn, by scores of Internet data centers, come at a profound environmental cost that most of us fail to appreciate. In the US, these electrical requirements translate into burning more coal, a process that for all the talk of “clean“, is anything but.

In the irony of all ironies, this Digital New Age appears to have brought us full circle: From transnational trains at the turn of the last Century belching out billowing clouds of coal-black ash to power plant smokestacks “sequestering“, at best, billions of short tons of the same in the opening decades of the 21st Century. Much of this progress arrives under the trendy guise of going Green — paying our bills online, killing time on Facebook and surfing for free media content on the web even as news and content providers go broke for their efforts. Talk about unsustainable — in more ways than one!

In exchange for the privilege of conducting increasing amounts of our business and personal lives virtually, we pursue nifty new interfaces — costly electronic devices, cell phones and seemingly essential hardware and software packages, which we have been conditioned to frequently upgrade as a result of wear, tear and obsolescence. All of this lends itself quietly but effectively to privacy-intruding remote processes most of us fail to comprehend. Ours is an inverse relationship with technology: As the devices of our supposed need or pleasure become exponentially complex, our appreciation for how little we control, own and regard as personal and private diminishes.

Are our ownership claims even worth the virtual paper they are printed on?

Probably not.

Have you read any virtual fine print, for that matter, lately?

Who does?

Arguably, it causes more eyestrain — a greater headache literally and figuratively — to read a large body of typewritten material on a bright, brazen, backlit surface largely devoid of eye-resting “white space”, much of it jam-packed instead with ad-based imagery begging for attention. So what’s a person without an entire day to spend sifting through this chaotic “information soup” to do? Answer: Go in search of the news, information, social contact and entertainment we want — not necessarily that which we need.

In spite of our collective fascination, electronic interfaces are simply too fatiguing for many users to devote a great deal of voluntary attention to any single task. Real-world books, newspapers, magazines, DVDs and music albums are carefully crafted, edited, designed and packaged, whereas in the virtual world we are often gatekeepers and content generators — empowering, to be sure, but demanding nonetheless. For instance, few of us went to the time and expense to crop, retouch and “develop” our own photos years ago, but nowadays the time, expense and effort of digital photography — the self-service we euphemistically refer to as “creative control” — is a common undertaking by many a digital camera owner. But what happens when time, attention spans and the digital format itself are limiting factors?

It stands to reason that as the novelty of this digital medium wears off, we will increasingly reserve our limited energies for learning a whole lot more about a whole lot less, particularly in comparison to our analog-based predecessors. The information at our fingertips may be limitless but our patience is not. More disturbing, the digital landscape may not be as boundless as we would like to believe. Not only does the virtual printing press make it a lot easier to remove unflattering stories from the electronic record, it’s also a lot easier to let the news we can use fade into a backdrop of dizzying digital distractions, the search result that never appears, the umpteenth page we never click.

For all his technological high hopes, would the late, great newsman, Walter Cronkite, be impressed?

When a resource is rare, even something so amorphous as “the news”, it is perceived as valuable and desirable. When it’s easy, cheap and pervasive, we take for granted that it will always be there, and that nothing will escape us even if we opt out entirely. If an asteroid were headed our way, many of us would learn of it from a coworker or a friend on MySpace — the proverbial grapevine now stronger than ever, the “herd immunity” theory, if you will, applied to social awareness.

Witness the phenomena of college-educated individuals passing along hoaxes, chain letters and urban legends via email without so much as a 30-second effort to verify the claim. Technology may make it easier to avoid making fools of ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we’re making the best use of it. The Digital Age, in this respect, presents a curious duality: People who are inclined to believe almost anything they see and read in an email or on YouTube, and those who become so wary of sloppy citizen journalism and anonymous email assertions that eventually mainstream media sources are lumped in the same suspect category. Such is life in the disposable e-universe: The democratization of information on the one hand, the responsibilities of liberty diminished on the other.

As much as technology connects us, a prevailing counterforce threatens our capacity for common experience, shared culture and community values. In the virtual world we lose, most notably, what art, literature and history buffs refer to as a “sense of place“. As our digital future progresses, we are certain to experience less and less of the hallowed, snapshot-in-time sensation of looking back on an old photo, magazine, newspaper, yearbook or, for that matter, the tactile experience of turning the pages of a letter or book sans mouse and keyboard.

There’s something we’re sacrificing in this brave new world, and it’s more than the paper it is written on.

Welcome to the here and now. It’s great for contract attorneys and high-tech moneymakers — a deceptive deal for the environment, news providers, and consumers alike. Still, we’re eating it up, one “IT” gadget off the production line at a time. Pay off that home or car loan early? Save money for the kids’ college tuition or your retirement fund? Embark on a once-in-a-lifetime road trip from coast to coast? Naw. We have more pressing pastimes to spend our digital dinero on. And they’re lovin’ it.

Psst! I hear Sony makes a pretty cool e-book reader, too. Circuit City, anyone? Their virtual doors are open for business!

###

Resources:

Printed Copies of Orwell Books Pulled from Kindle | Yahoo News

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others | David Pogue/NYT

Internet Use Burns Coal, Report Says

Better Technology Needed if Carbon Sequestration is to be Viable | TSAugust

The Internet Begins with Coal

The Internet is Big and has a Carbon Footprint to Match

Data Center Overload | NYT Magazine

User Demand for the Internet Could Outpace Network Capacity by 2010

The Sustainability Challenge: Can the Internet Help?

The Illusion of Being Well Informed | The New Ledger

When Computers Attack: Protect Yourself from Computer-Related Health Problems

Ergonomists: Kids too are at Risk from Repetitive Strain Injuries | Science Daily

Nighttime Computer Users May Lose Sleep

Look What They’ve Done to My Brain, Ma

Brain & Behavior: Blame it on the Box

Mind Control by Cell Phone | Scientific American

Is Google Making Us Stupid? | The Atlantic

Is Google Making Us Smarter? | Seed Magazine

Men as Internet Victims

Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?

Pittsburgh Cancer Institute Issues Warning on Cell Phone Risks

Teens Risk Health with Night Texting, Talking

Social Networks: Primates on Facebook | The Economist

Who Really Owns Your Phone?

Did You Hear About Censorship?

Internet Censorship in the US? Or Just Law Enforcement?

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009 | Project Censored

Is Professional Blogging a Sustainable Business Model?

The Economy of Free is Stupid | Social Media Explorer

Free is Not a Business Model

Are the Days of Free Internet News Coming to an End?

Internet Companies: The End of the Free Lunch — Again

Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web

Thoughts on the Costs of Digital vs. Paper

The Future of Reading — Digital vs. Print | Seattle Times

Here is a really good article from NEWSWEEK calling out Oprah Winfrey and her parade of pseudoscientific guests for promoting quackery. The article doesn’t go too deeply into the science of things, so I just want to make a few comments.

The first one is brief. Regarding the woman who adopted the strategy of “The Secret” (I can hardly type that without gagging) and rid herself of breast cancer: There is such a thing as spontaneous remission. It is rare (estimates range from 1 in 60,000 to 1 in 100,000), but it is medically documented and happens often enough considering cancer rates. For more on spontaneous remission, read this.

Now, a more lengthy comment on vaccinations and the anti-vaccination movement. There are no discernible links between autism and vaccinations. Nearly 20 scientific, reproducible studies have been conducted throughout the world to date, and the indisputable conclusion is that there is no association between autism and vaccines. Study after study after study, including the U.S. Autism Omnibus proceedings, prove that there is no link between vaccines and autism.

The major battle cry of anti-vaccinationists was that thimerosal (the preservative used to prolong the shelf life of vaccines) was the cause of autism. In 1999, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigated thimerosal in vaccines and found no evidence that it causes any harm. However, they ordered the removal of thimerosal from childhood vaccines as a precautionary measure (in essence to placate the hysterical). Ten years after thimerosal was removed from vaccines, autism rates have continued to rise.

One “study” and the “doctor” who conducted it, Dr. Wakefield, connected the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine with autism. Despite not one scientist being able to replicate the results of this study for years, the anti-vaccinationists have clung to it as all the proof they needed.

Except that Dr. Wakefield’s findings have now been shown to be completely bogus:

“…there has emerged potential explanations of how Wakefield was able to obtain the results he did. This evidence, combined with unprecedented access to medical records, a mass of confidential documents and cooperation from parents during an investigation by this newspaper, has shown the selective reporting and changes to findings that allowed a link between MMR and autism to be asserted.”

One study—a fabricated study—has caused people to hysterically decry vaccinations, many refusing to have their children vaccinated. The result? No more herd immunity, for one. Herd immunity occurs when enough of the population is vaccinated that protection is afforded to the unprotected (and in some cases especially susceptible, perhaps because of illness or poor immune systems). The mechanism is simple—infection can’t easily pass from person to person when the majority of the population is protected. The chain is broken. Now in the UK vaccination rates have sunk so low that herd immunity is not maintained. And in North America, we’re getting close to that.

The result is that children will die needlessly of measles, mumps, and rubella. We think of these diseases as antiquated, but that’s only because in the past immunizations and herd immunity has protected children from them. Now that some parents are listening to the anti-vaccinationist wackos and refusing to vaccinate their children, these diseases are on the rise. And they can be deadly.

It is true that autism rates have been rising, but the cause of this rise is a controversial subject. Either true autism rates are rising, or increased surveillance and a wider definition of “autism” has made it appear as though the rates are rising. The second hypothesis is more strongly supported by available evidence. Simply, it is that more cases are being diagnosed, not that more cases are occurring.

So Jenny McCarthy, the head cheerleader of the anti-vaccination movement (who has recently recruited her boyfriend Jim Carrey to the battle), and all of the other credulous folks who believe the propaganda and pseudoscience, are actually endangering your children by not having theirs vaccinated.

One wonders why they aren’t concerned with the real causes of autism, focusing their energy, time, and money on scientific research that may one day provide an answer.

In keeping with Carl Sagan’s adage that it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness, I want to pass along something which I think does just that.  I recently blogged about Oprah Winfrey’s ill-conceived decision to give anti-vaccinationist Jenny McCarthy her own show.

Personally, I have been at a loss as to how to respond – but fortunately, Shirley at the “I was lost but now I live here” blog has a great response, and I wanted to share it with you here.  Please consider passing it along, so that perhaps we can get Oprah to rethink her decision…

An Open Letter to Oprah

Dear Oprah,

I have to confess, I have never watched more than a few minutes of your show. Probably not the best way to start a letter to you, but I want to be honest. And the truth is, I think you’re making a terrible mistake.

Last weekend, I spent more time listening to and watching you than in the rest of my life combined. My family and I were sitting in the Duke stadium, looking down on the thousands of giddy graduates (including my older brother), the esteemed faculty in their rainbow regalia, and the charming, if a bit over the top, fake castle festooned with flags representing the different academic schools. I had no idea you were the commencement speaker until the student speaker, Robert Paul Jones, pretended to get a cell phone call from Parking & Transportation services about your limo double-parked in front of the chapel.

Having only seen you in short commercial clips and on the cover of your magazine, I wasn’t sure what to expect from your speech. I was pleasantly surprised. You were warm and funny, your voice clear and yet dressed with feeling, and I am sure you meant every word. Over the course of those 20 or 30 minutes, I developed a great respect for you as a talented speaker.

But I couldn’t leave the stadium wholly inspired by you, as I’m sure many others did. To me, it is clear that a significant number of people look up to you, and trust your advice and judgment. That is why it is such a huge mistake for you to endorse Jenny McCarthy with her own show on your network.

Surely you must realize that McCarthy is neither a medical professional nor a scientist. And yet she acts as a spokesperson for the anti-vaccination movement, a movement that directly impacts people’s health. Claims that vaccines are unsafe and cause autism have been refuted time after time, but their allure persists in part because of high-profile champions for ignorance like McCarthy. In fact, ten of the thirteen authors of the paper that sparked the modern anti-vaccination movement retracted the explosive conclusions they made due to insufficient evidence. Furthermore, it is now clear that the study’s main author, Andrew Wakefield, falsified data to support these shaky conclusions.

We have come close to eradicating life-threatening and crippling illnesses because of vaccines, but are now struggling to prevent outbreaks because of parents’ philosophical beliefs that vaccines are harmful. Realize this: when someone chooses not to vaccinate their child, they aren’t just putting their own child at risk, they are putting everyone else around them at risk. Diseases with vaccines should normally be of little concern even to unprotected individuals due to herd immunity – with the majority of the population immune, unprotected individuals are less likely to come into contact with the pathogen. Unfortunately, herd immunity disintegrates as fewer people are vaccinated, putting everyone who hasn’t yet been vaccinated at greater risk for infection. Now, the rates of infection by diseases for which we have safe and effective vaccines are climbing, thanks to anti-vaccination activists like Jenny McCarthy.

You reach millions of people everyday and your words and endorsements carry an incredible amount of weight. If you say to buy a certain book, people will buy it. If you do a segment on a certain charity, people will contribute. And if you say that what Jenny McCarthy is saying has merit, people will believe you.

As your speech drew to a close on Sunday, you mentioned that you still make difficult decisions from time to time. You told us about a show where you had the exclusive first interview with the author of a prominent book on the Columbine tragedy. Despite days of promos and confirmed broadcast schedules, you decided to cancel the show at the last minute because it had a negative energy, and you didn’t want to be responsible for sending that dark energy out into the world. You didn’t want to be responsible for someone seeing that show, feeling that dark energy, and going out to commit another Columbine. You said that you followed your gut to make the right decision.

Maybe your gut is being silent on this one, so let me speak up on its behalf. You have another decision to make. Pull your support from Jenny McCarthy and her platform of anti-vaccination. Because while the Columbine segment raised the specter of potential future tragedy, anti-vaccination propaganda is causing more and more people – mostly children – to fall sick and die from preventable illness as I write this. Jenny McCarthy could be considered responsible for a significant number of these; you can imagine what might happen if you give her influence over your audience of millions.

So Oprah, I hope you take my letter, and the well-intentioned if sometimes harsh criticisms from many others in the blogosphere, to heart. Because even though I still don’t watch your show, others do, and they listen to you. Probably not the best way to end a letter to you, but I want to be honest.

Yours turly,

Shirley

P.S. My dad – for whom English is his second language – calls you “Op-er-a.” Isn’t that cute?

Oh boy, this is not good news.  It seems that media mogul and daytime diva Oprah Winfrey has given a platform to the face of the anti-vaccination movement, Jenny McCarthy, by giving McCarthy her own show.  I cannot even begin to express how colossally stupid this is…

Jenny McCarthy inks deal with Winfrey’s Harpo

McCarthy has inked a multi-year deal with Winfrey’s Harpo Prods. to develop projects on different platforms, including a syndicated talk show that the actress/author would host.

The first collaboration under the pact is a blog by McCarthy on Oprah.com, which launched Friday. Like other Winfrey proteges-turned-TV moguls, among them Rachael Ray and Dr. Phil, McCarthy has been a frequent guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

McCarthy talked to the chat queen about her struggles with her son’s autism in conjunction with the publication of her best-selling books “Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism” and “Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds.” McCarthy also has participated twice in Winfrey’s Friday Live panels, most recently this past Friday.

This will likely result in McCarthy spreading even more broadly her ill-informed message that childhood vaccines cause autism (the don’t – and this Skeptical Inquirer article explains why not) and that the medical & scientific community is clueless about both issues.  What people really need to know is the anti-vaccination movement has spread a great deal of misinformation about medicine and because people are believing it, there are dire consequences.

For some examples of the problems with giving nutjobs like McCarthy an even bigger mouthpiece, take a look at the following articles & websites…

Jenny McCarthy Body Count – outlines the number of documented cases of preventable illness and/or death since the summer of 2007.  The site continues…

In May 2007 Jenny McCarthy announced that Evan was not a “Crystal Child” after all, but had been diagnosed with autism (there is a possibility that he may have been misdiagnosed).  She holds on to the mistaken belief that Evan’s alleged autism was caused by his receiving childhood vaccines.  Most anti-vaccination believers claim that the compound thimerosal led to an increase in autism cases.  The Measles/Mumps/Rubella vaccine is their usual target.  However, thimerosal was never used as a preservative in the Measles/Mumps/Rubella vaccine.  All vaccines licensed since 1999, with the exception of a few multidose container vaccines (such as some HIB and Influenza vaccines), have not contained thimerosal as a preservative.  Autism has not declined since 1999, thereby scientifically disproving this connection.  In addition, Jenny McCarthy’s child, Evan, was not born until 2002, well after thimerosal had been removed from most childhood vaccines.

In June 2007 Jenny McCarthy began promoting anti-vaccination rhetoric.  Because of her celebrity status she has appeared on several television shows and has published multiple books advising parents not to vaccinate their children.  This has led to a dramatic increase in the number of vaccine preventable illnesses as well as an increase in the number of vaccine preventable deaths.

Some examples in the news of how the anti-vaxxers are detrimentally affecting the health of innocent people…

Vaccine refusals fuel jump in measles outbreaks
Immunization Could Have Prevented Fatal Measles Outbreak In Germany
Lack Of Vaccination Linked to Higher Measles Outbreak
The Australian antivax movement takes its toll

And this is perhaps the most heart-breaking story of all: a young Australian couple lost their daughter, who was four weeks old when she died. Too young to get vaccinated herself, she contracted whooping cough because vaccination rates in that part of Australia are too low to provide herd immunity.

Sceptic’s Book of Pooh-Pooh – A Guest Post from David McCaffery

If we are to avoid similar tragedies to these in the future, the nonsense spouted by the anti-vax crowd must be countered… now. For Oprah Winfrey to give a platform to this woman and the movement for which she speaks is to do a grave disservice to us all.  It’s time we took the gloves off with these clowns, because their pseudoscience is getting people killed.

When a population has a level of lifelong immunity to a certain disease such that an epidemic of that disease cannot occur, the population is said to have herd immunity.

I am still very new at this, so I might be missing something glaringly obvious from people more experienced with epidemiology.

What stood out for me from the part that I inserted into my post is the life long immunity that is required for herd immunity to work. Each disease has a different herd immunity threshold. Measles is a disease that is often spokeמ about. So, the herd immunity threshold for measles is 83 – 94% immunity. I am interpreting this to mean that 83 – 94 percent of the population (from birth through to old age) is recquired to be immune – not just 83 – 94% of children are required to be vaccinated.

Why? In this article, I found it interesting that in the absense of circulating disease, immunity only last for 25 years. By having the disease circulating within the population, the population is exposed to regular ‘boosters’. Remove the disease, and the whole population is left at risk, unless they are kept up to date with vaccines.

What is potentially dangerous with this effect of waning immunity in adults is that adults can have much more serious complications from diseases like measles, mumps, and chickenpox. Essentially a large part of the population could potentially be at risk if they are relying on vaccine induced immunity for their immunity, and not up to date with boosters.

Another piece of the puzzle is that mothers pass on passive immunity to their infants through the placenta (I have read conflicting articles about whether breastmilk also confers passive immunity or not). And babies are protected from the disease of measles with this passive immunity. Again, from what I am understanding, passive immunity is not conferred when the mother relies on vaccine immunity, only if she herself contracted measles is the immunity passed to her infant. Which, theoretically could leave infants more at risk with most new mothers today not having had wild measles.

It is all theoretical. I have not heard of infants or adults coming down with measles.

I just am really struggling to get my head around these issues. I do not know if the scientists are factoring in waning immunity when they calculate the threshold herd immunity, but I am guessing they are not. I am guessing that it is assumed that the vaccine is fulfilling it’s potential to rid the human population of measles.

‘No Bias. No Bull’ — CNN’s Campbell Brown encourages parents to get their kids vaccinated after a court said they’re not to blame for autism. See her video here: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/02/12/campbell.brown.vaccine/index.html#cnnSTCVideo

The story

What I am about to say, I know, is controversial. And I know that a lot of people are going to disagree with me. But as a mother, with a second child on the way, I believe this is vital to the safety of our children and must be said.

The verdict is in. There is no connection between vaccines and autism. And it is time that all of us get our children vaccinated.

In 2008, the United States had the highest measles rate in 10 years. An increasing number of parents have been refusing to vaccinate their children against measles because of this fear of a connection.

It is not grounded in science. There is no evidence to support it.

Major medical groups and government research are unanimous: the measles vaccine is safe, and you must get your children vaccinated; because if you don’t, you are endangering my children. You are endangering your neighbor’s children. You are endangering all of our children. Watch Campbell Brown’s plea to parents »

A baby needs to be 12 months to get the measles vaccine. That means that infants are protected from the measles only because everyone they come in contact with, we hope, has already been vaccinated. Infants hide in the herd of other vaccinated people.

As adults increasingly refuse to vaccinate their children, we will continue to see a rise in measles outbreaks. This is serious stuff. Measles can be deadly.

I do feel for the parents of autistic children. I can only imagine the pain and frustration they must feel — the desperation to find a cause for your child’s illness. But parents, please don’t endanger all of our children based on a myth.

Medical science has proved there is no link.

Let’s all move on together and focus on finding the real cause of autism and at the same time protect all of our children from deadly diseases like measles that we know how to prevent.

Language in science is a challenge. Science comes with gray areas that both intrigue and confuse.  Getting it right every time is unlikely, making science a perfect example of ongoing thought evolution. However, few things make me more angry than when science is twisted to suit agendas. Consider the case of Dr. Andrew Wakefield:

The doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found. (link)

One thing in particular caught my eye a little later in the article:

Despite involving just a dozen children, the 1998 paper’s impact was extraordinary. After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated.

Herd immunity brought to mind Mark Earls and his insights into why humans do what they do. I was pleasantly surprised to see him post today on this very issue:

As I’ve noted before, vaccination is a HERD thing: its real power works at a population level. If that falls below a certain level, then diseases that used to cause significant damage can become prevalent again. Fuelling the conversation that suggests that there are risks or any evidence of risks leads to the lower level of compliance with the vaccination programme and creates the opportunity for the resurgance of once almost unknown childhood diseases. Particularly when the science is so damn clear. (link)

I will never understand why scientists elect to promote ideas that aren’t backed up by real research. It seems like these pretenders are discovered with relative ease once someone elects to take a hard look at the data. Very little seems to be gained while a huge amount is put at risk.

Scientific language becomes even more important when we’re talking about things that impact lives directly. Parents want to know what they can do to best protect their children. Inaccurate information only makes this harder to do.

As a layperson, I can think of few positions that come with greater social responsibility than that of scientist. This responsibility includes choosing one’s words with care. Each individual has a right to his or her opinion, but once it’s expressed publicly, the individual must accept the consequences.

Image via Flickr by ms_cwang.

The flurry of activity in the bad science blogosphere in the past few days, coupled with the overwhelming support for Dr Ben Goldacre, from bloggers, mainstream newspapers, as well as celebrity in the form of Stephen Fry, against the legal garbage LBC has thrown at him was nothing short of amazing. It goes to show that even with mighty legal muscle, you can’t cover up bollocks from ignorant fools. The pressure built up in the blogosphere these few days has led Jeni Barnett to buckle under the pressure and subsequently delete all offending posts (along with their comments) from her blog.

Big mistake and I am sure the eggs will be dripping for a long time to come.

So what now? What is the next step from here? This whole fiasco has kicked up a little bit of a storm that it may well be wrong to not milk it for all it’s worth. I have come across chatter in some forums that we should continue to hound Jeni Barnett and her whole series of cock-ups (ignorant and ill-informed views, defiant blogposts, censorship of comments, and ultimately, making them magically disappear and pretend nothing’s happened).

Hounding Jeni Barnett will, at best, only make her life a little bit more uncomfortable. Justified it may seem but in the grand scheme of matters, it won’t do much other than a small win for sensible reasoning and common sense. It will quickly be forgotten. I think the developments in the past few days should be milked to reinforce the idea that the MMR vaccine is safe to the general public, as well as launching a general condemnation to the anti-vaccination camp. The ultimate goal should still be acquiring herd immunity for measles, thus kicking measles out of the country, such that we can pick up from where we left off – the 90s. The momentum is certainly there, on the back of the Barnett fiasco, David Aaronovitch’s intervention in the Times, Stephen Fry’s support, as well as the Brian Deer revelation regarding fabrications in Andrew Wakefield’s Lancet paper, which provided the first (and only) indications of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

In fact, I think Andrew Wakefield is a very lucky man. Brian Deer’s article was published on Sunday (08 February 2009), right in the middle of the Jeni Barnett and LBC storm. In fact I think they have taken most of the flak for Andrew Wakefield.

It would be great if Brian Deer would produce some sort of response regarding Wakefield’s rebuttals to his accusations. This would put the “head” of the anti-vaccination camp back into the spotlight, which I think is important. He has been riding on the waves of the 1998 Lancet paper for a little bit too long now, in my opinion. Usually in the space of 11 years, I would expect a piece of dubious research to have come up with new, as well as more convincing evidence. Otherwise, it is time for it to be put to rest – for good.

Now would also be a good time for the NHS to put out a better campaign for the MMR vaccine. The current one has no bite to it, as Dr Aust has talked about.

This really is a good opportunity to quash anti-vaccination talk. It burns my brain to even think about how such talk could exist.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A routine childhood vaccine used to prevent several common types of infections has helped cut the rate of a deadly form of meningitis by 30 percent in children and adults, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday, suggesting even the unvaccinated are benefiting from the shot.

They said the vaccine Prevnar made by Wyeth significantly reduced cases of meningitis caused by pneumococcal bacteria strains covered by the vaccine.

But they also noted a worrisome increase of pneumococcal meningitis in strains not covered by the vaccine and those that resist antibiotics.

“When you immunize children, they are much less likely to carry pneumococcal strains covered by the vaccine in the back of the throat,” Dr. Lee Harrison of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, whose study appears in the New England Journal of Medicine, said in a statement.

“When vaccinated children don’t carry these virulent strains, they don’t end up transmitting them to other children, their parents and grandparents.”

Harrison said the study clearly shows adults not covered by the vaccine benefit, suggesting it conveys so-called “herd immunity” to people who have not been vaccinated. Previous studies showed it protected elderly people against deadly pneumonia strains, even when they were not given an adult vaccine.

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE AT “YAHOO NEWS”

I doubt it’ll be much longer before I run into something that sets me off on a rant about antivaxxers, so I think I figured I’d post something about what I think of them beforehand.

It goes without saying that I’m pro vaccination. The science is solidly behind vaccination, and antivaxxers can’t present any quality evidence for their claims whatsoever. They move the goalpost to something new each time scientists refute their claims, and try to always have something new that scientists haven’t had a chance to refute yet. It’s like a long, drawn out Gish Gallop.

So, with that said, antivaxxers are some of the worst and most disgusting pseudoscientists, quacks, and cranks that exist. There are more absurd ones, but few are as dangerous or as damaging to others.

They put their children at grave risk for contracting deadly illnesses that are very easily prevented. These are illnesses that can and do kill even when you receive the best treatment available. They are among the most deadly illnesses ever to infect the human race, and with a vaccine, you are almost certain never to be infected by it. We’re talking about a risk to children here. It’s not just a matter of harming themselves, they also hurt their children.

And it doesn’t stop there, either. They put others at risk as well. Vaccines create what is called herd immunity. This means that there are enough people immune to the disease that it cannot sustain an outbreak. One of the great triumphs of medicine in America has been an almost completely successful campaign to vaccinate everyone who can safely receive a vaccine. It prevents people who cannot get vaccines from getting infected. That means it’s protecting people who are immunocompromised, babies who are too young to receive all of their vaccines, and…yep, the parasitic scum who refuse to vaccinate their children.

But herd immunity only works when enough of the population is vaccinated. As you reach a certain critical mass of unvaccinated, outbreaks can sustain themselves. The diseases start spreading again, and you have a health crisis on your hands. People who are immunocompromised are infected because they can’t get vaccines to protect them, and they are now exposed to the diseases. And even people who are vaccinated can get infected. Vaccines are very effective, but they are not 100% effective. Even those who do everything right are put at risk by antivaxxers. If you’re a parent and aren’t worried about what others do with their children, or at least not enough to actively fight the antivax movement, consider this fact: they put your kids at risk too.

And in some places, herd immunity is getting shaky. In the UK, the rate of new measles vaccinations is, according to some estimates, below the % threshold at which herd immunity collapses. It would take years before this unvaccinated segment made up a large enough portion of the population to collapse herd immunity, but it could happen. If antivaccinationist claims aren’t countered at every turn, it damn well might happen.

I won’t go into a detailed description of what happens if herd immunity breaks, because I really don’t feel like depressing myself right now. Antivaccinationism is about as close to evil as mere ignorance gets, and it has the consequences to match. I’ll stop here, bceause just writing about this leaves me really just wanting to swear about and insult antivaxxers.

People seem to have this opinion that chiropractors are opposed to vaccination.  And while most of us don’t get vaccinated or have that done to our children, it’s mandatory mass vaccination that we oppose.

From my perspective, mass vaccination programs are unspecific, unscientific and unsafe.  I know.  I’ve heard all the stuff about herd immunity.  And honestly, I just don’t buy it.  If the rest of the “herd” is vaccinated, why should they worry if I or my kids are NOT?  Has the vaccination not made them immune to whatever I could catch or bring their way?

Another problem I have with vaccinations is that they never provide permanent immunity.  So instead of providing immunity from certain diseases, vaccination programs give people a false sense of security.  And if you’re only going to provide limited protection from disease, why go through with the program in the first place?  Is one answer that drug companies invest billions into vaccination programs and it’s a steady source of predictable income?  Oh yeah, if the “herd” doesn’t have permanent immunity, what happens if something happens to expose the herd to a given pathogen at some time in the future?  Would that wipe out the herd?

It doesn’t make sense to me that you would inject your child with the number of vaccines at a time when their immune system hasn’t developed to the point where it can even respond to the vaccine.  And, do you REALLY know what is in that vile?  And, has your doctor given you ALL the information on potential dangers related to the vaccine?

And, how about that flu vaccine?  Did you know that the flu vaccine you’re getting this year was developed LAST year?  The influenza virus is a single cell creature that adapts very rapidly to its environment and is probably different than the one for which this year’s vaccine was developed.  And, if the vaccine is not perfectly designed for this year’s flu virus, it simply won’t work.  Oh yeah, the flu vaccine still contains mercury.

Finally, exposure to many childhood diseases help build permanent immunity against stronger pathogens down the road.  By allowing children’s immune systems to develop slowly, they’re better able to fight off sickness and disease later in life.

In the final analysis, I have decided that I trust the design of the body to be healthy more than I trust those with a profit motive to tell me I need to inject some unknown substance into my or my kids’ body.  I’m concerned about the public health risk of dumbing down the “herd” immune response to a “super bug” that WILL appear at some time in the future.  And, I also wonder if the proliferation of autoimmune diseases aren’t partially the result of mass vaccination programs.

I’m open to your comments and thoughts on the subject.  Just keep it clean and respectful.

Re-emergence of diseases like measles and mumps amongst Canadian communities (see Respectful Insolence) is starting to show what the totally unfounded (see The Stats Blog)  fear surrounding the MMR and other children’s vaccines has the propensity to cause.

I also had a link to similar outbreaks emerging in the UK. Outbreaks in other parts of the world are also likely to happen.

Part of reading this stories has helped me learn another horrible fact about the ramifications of less children being vaccinated. It does not just affect children who aren’t being vaccinated. Vaccination relies upon a concept called “herd immunity”.

We all have heard how vaccines aren’t 100% effective in the first place. This is an anti-vaccinationists selling point. Every time you are exposed to the contagion there is a chance of your vaccine failing. Think of it like brakes on your car, you can only be in so many “near-miss” situations before you bang something.

The idea of mass vaccination is to reduce the number of gambles. If every child is vaccinated, there is virtually no entry point for the contagion to enter your community. Every unvaccinated child is a bad driver on the road with no brakes. Not only are they relying on the brakes on your car to reduce danger to their children, they are an additional risk that your children need to avoid.

Some savvy parents are taking this into mind. Daycares that allow unvaccinated children (or do not have data on enrolment vaccines) are seeing health informed parents remove their children to other institutions that provide. The link I lost had a story of a mother who found out one of her children’s friends mothers had bought into the anti-vaccinist screed – and promptly stopped their children playing. A similar incident is found on MSNBC:

Karey Williams [47, Chicago] never thought a parenting decision would come between her and a good friend. The two had known one another for a decade, supported each other through infertility treatment and had their first babies around the same time. But when she told the friend that she had stopped vaccinating her daughter at age 1, the relationship abruptly ended. “She said, ‘Well then, your child can’t come into my house,’”

You might think this is harsh. But these are serious deadly diseases, no parent should be reprimanded for ensuring the health of their children. Lifelong complications (such as deafness) are very very common amongst victims of these diseases.

The positive impact of mass vaccination has a very clear and positive record. Science-Based Medicine has put up the stats for major vaccines. All of them have efficacy rates of over 80%, and save thousands of lives every year (if not more). And none of them have autism as a proven side effect. Science-Based Medicine’s author, Mark Crislip also points out that if GP/Big Pharma was really some sort of evil diabolical institution, they’d be joining the anti-vaccinists. More vaccines, means less disease. Less disease, means less business.

“I am an Infectious Disease doctor. I make a living from treating diagnosing and treating infections. I don’t make dime one if people do not get infected, so I am against any and all vaccines as they cut into my bottom line” – Mark Crislip, Science-Based Medicine weblog

Mandatory safety measures such as bicycle helmets, seat belts, standardised testing of car breaks are important for road safety. Shouldn’t similar safety measures be mandated for children’s health and safety.