Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Vaccines!

In a bit of good news, it seems the SCOTUS has produced a pretty strong science & reason-based ruling on the issue of vaccinations and lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.  This is also, indirectly yet very importantly, a big blow to the anti-vaccination movement…

Supreme Court rules for vaccine makers on lawsuits

The Supreme Court ruled that federal law shields vaccine makers from product-liability lawsuits in state court seeking damages for a child’s injuries or death from a vaccine’s side effects.

The high court on Tuesday ruled for Wyeth, which is now owned by Pfizer Inc, in a lawsuit brought by the parents of Hannah Bruesewitz, who suffered seizures as an infant after her third dose of a diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine in 1992.

Pfizer and other vaccine makers had argued that a Supreme Court ruling for the plaintiffs could open the door to a flood of lawsuits — many by families who believe vaccines cause autism — and threaten the supply of childhood vaccines. … [emphasis added]

That last point is a major win for the pro-vaccine team, folks.  That’s because if the SCOTUS had ruled differently, you can bet your bottom dollar that Jenny McCarthy, Andrew Wakefield, and their legions of true-believing followers within the anti-vax movement would have been clogging up the courts for years (or decades, even) with frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit lamenting about how “vaccines caused my kid’s autism” or “the jabs took my little Johnny’s soul away” or similar garbage (because, yes, some people actually believe that crap).  And since I am on the topic of mentioning frivolous lawsuits, allow me to reference the SCOTUS ruling on that point…

“Vaccine manufacturers fund from their sales an informal, efficient compensation program for vaccine injuries; in exchange they avoid costly tort litigation and the occasional disproportionate jury verdict. Congress enacted this deal to coax manufacturers back into the vaccine market,” [Justice] Scalia said.

In short, if the vaccine manufacturers didn’t have at least some kind of protection against lawsuits, they would get out of the (not-very-profitable) vaccine business altogether, with the resulting loss of widespread vaccination & herd immunity being highly detrimental to society.  Of course, one reason why the anti-vaxxers would have liked to have seen this SCOTUS ruling go the other way is because then it would have opened the door to a tsunami of frivolous lawsuits, which then would have led to many vaccine manufacturers giving up the business, which would lead to lower vaccination rates…

… which would kill a lot of people. But hey, the anti-vax goons would feel pretty good about that, wouldn’t they, because then at least those “evil vaccines” weren’t around any more, right?

Of course, the response from the anti-vax loons is all-too-predictable.  I’m going to use my “amazing psychic powers” and guess that it’s going to be something along these lines:

It Bears Repeating: Yet MORE Evidence That Vaccines DON’T Cause Autism!

Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but… hell with it, let’s beat the dead horse once more: here is YET MORE evidence that vaccines DON’T cause autism!

No link found between vaccine mercury and autism

By Frederik Joelving Frederik Joelving – Mon Sep 13, 3:38 am ET

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A new government study adds to the evidence that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative until recently found in many vaccines, does not increase children’s risk of autism.

It shows kids who had been exposed as babies to high levels of the preservative — through vaccines they received or their mothers received while pregnant — were no more likely to develop autism, including two distinct subtypes of the condition.

“This study should reassure parents about following the recommended immunization schedule,” said Dr. Frank Destefano, director of the Immunization Safety Office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, and the study’s senior author.

Concerns about a link between vaccines and autism were first raised more than a decade ago by British physician Andrew Wakefield.

His report, based on 12 children, has since been discredited and was retracted earlier this year by the journal that published it. In the meantime, it sparked a fierce worldwide debate among scientists and a health scare that caused many parents to shy away from recommended vaccines like the one against measles, mumps and rubella.

Outbreaks of all three diseases followed.

One widespread worry has been that thimerosal might play a role in the development of autism, a condition that affects as many as one in 110 U.S. children, according to the CDC.

Most scientists consider autism a developmental disorder, likely influenced by genes.

Autism spectrum disorders range from mild Asperger’s Syndrome to severe mental retardation and social disability, and there is no cure or good treatment.

The CDC researchers used data for U.S. children born between 1994 and 1999, who were enrolled in one of three managed care organizations.

They found 256 children with an autism spectrum disorder and compared them with 752 children who did not have the condition, but were matched for age and sex.

No matter when a child had been exposed to thimerosal — before birth when the mother had a shot, or when the child itself was vaccinated as a baby or toddler — there was no increase in the risk of any type of autism spectrum disorder.

In fact, those kids who were exposed to the preservative between birth and 20 months of age had slightly lower odds of developing the condition, although the researchers could not explain that result.

“This is a very reassuring study,” said Dr. Michael J. Smith, a pediatrician at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky who was not involved in the research.

“These data show that you could receive a thimerosal vaccine and not be concerned about it.”

Smith, who said he has a fully vaccinated two-month-old at home, noted that autism rates have continued to rise, although thimerosal has been removed from all routine childhood vaccines, except flu shots.

For parents who remain concerned about thimerosal in the flu shots, he said there are alternatives without the preservative, such as FluMist, a nasal spray that can be used in children aged two and older.

Some parents have also worried that giving too many shots at once, or in children who are too young, could cause mental problems. Smith said studies had dispelled those concerns one by one.

“There is no credible evidence” for a link between vaccines and autism, he told Reuters Health.

SOURCE: http://link.reuters.com/gas77m Pediatrics, online September 13, 2010.

These sorts of things, sadly, need to be repeated over and over again because, in my experience, when those on the pro-science & reason side go silent, that is precisely when the pseudoscientific nuts will come crawling out of whatever rock they’ve crawled under.  And you need to look no further than the comment section on this article to see what sort of entrenched, conspiracy-mongering mentality we are dealing with from those in the anti-vaccination movement: they immediately dismiss one of the most comprehensive studies on the matter by making insinuations that the government is in league with Big Pharma or whomever to do… something.  I’ve rarely been told be the anti-vax conspiracy theorists what this “something” is supposed to be, but we can all be assured that it’s definitely something sinister…

In short: against such dangerous nonsense & irrationality, we must be ever vigilant, folks.  Ever vigilant – because if we are silent, these loons win the argument by default.

Have Fun PWNing Anti-Vax Nut Wakefield: Add Your Own Caption!

As if the whole debacle of anti-vaccination guru Andrew Wakefield’s pathetic attendance at his rally (only about 100 people showed up – some “rally”) wasn’t hilarious enough, the following photo was acquired from the Age of Autism website…

It seems that the Countering Age of Autism blog has a “fill in the caption” contest underway to see who can come up with the most snarky caption making fun of Wakefield.  Have at it! 🙂

The Skeptical PWNage of Darth Wakefield & His Anti-Vax Woosters Continues

I just want to provide a quick follow up to yesterday’s post about how the Women Thinking Free Foundation’s (WTFF) crew from the nascent Hug Me! campaign skeptically ninjaed the anti-vaccination rally hosting uber-douchebag Andrew Wakefield. It seems that since I blogged about it, the story has exploded all over the skeptical blogosphere, with the famous photo of Wakefield getting skeptically pwned making many appearances 🙂

The two skeptical ninjas shown here on either side of Andrew “Douchebag” Wakefield are Jamie Bernstein and Bruce Critelli.  In the words of another of my skeptical colleagues, these two “are the mayors of Balls City!”  Indeed 😀

Jamie recounts her experience of the rally over at The Friendly Atheist – feel free to follow Jamie via Twitter .@UAJamie

and

Bruce shares some really interesting video he shot at the rally

Of Bruce’s video, the most unnerving part was, to me, a story that Wakefield told the “crowd” (less than 100 people is hardly a crowd) with one woman who was talking about her son…

About 15 years ago a mother from London approached him and said “Do not judge me too harshly Dr. Wakefield, but when I die I am taking my son with me. You see, I’m all he has. I’m the only one who loves him.”

“I didn’t judge,” said Wakefield. “I was moved by the love that a mother must have for her child that she would take his life rather than have him fall upon a society that really didn’t give a damn.”

Skeptics PWN Anti-Vax Scumbag Wakefield at His Own Rally

**Update: Check out my follow-up post for more news, photos, and video of this event.

============

Well, congratulate me folks – I’m now officially part of a squad of skeptical ninjas 🙂

Today, there was an anti-vaccination rally in Chicago, and the king of anti-vax woo & nonsense – Andrew Wakefield himself – showed up.  I suppose he decided to hang with his anti-vax homies here in the U.S. seeing as how he’s essentially lost his license to practice medicine in the United Kingdom because of his fraudulent work there.

Anyway, the new skeptical group I’m part of, the Women Thinking Free Foundation (WTFF), caught wind of this wave of woo headed our way (we’re based in Chicago) and we decided, with two days notice, to mobilize and counter protest… and we did!  I did not personally attend the counter protest, as I had to teach today, but I and many others were working behind the scenes to help organize it.

The word went out like wildfire across the Internet – via email, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and message boards – and we were able to gather a group of about 10 people there.  In addition, our WTFF ninjas were able to hand out plenty of pro-vaccine literature to passers-by who might have otherwise thought that Wakefield and his ilk weren’t batcrap crazy.  Here are some examples of our handouts we whipped up as part of WTFF’s new “Hug Me, I’m Vaccinated!” campaign…

Jenny McCarthy: When Ignorance Kills

When it comes to woo & pseudoscientific nonsense, there are times when it is just an annoyance. And then there are times when such ignorance can literally kill. Such is the case with the anti-vaccination movement (AVM).

The anti-vaxxers have found a celebrity spokesperson in Jenny McCarthy, former Playboy playmate and squeeze of actor Jim Carrey. Jenny’s son, Evan, was diagnosed with autism and she has since blamed his being vaccinated as the cause of his autism. Never mind that there is no evidence whatsoever that vaccines cause autism or the other horrible things espoused by the AVM, Jenny continues her anti-vax crusade, appearing on talk shows and in other venues spouting her nonsense.

**Aside: Keep a watchful eye out for an organization which McCarthy promotes – Generation Rescue – because this group is essentially a front for the AVM and other dangerous medical woo-woo.

Well, this is really bad, because the ignorance that Jenny McCarthy and the AVM spreads can be lethal. As an illustration of this fact, there is a new website online called Jenny McCarthy Body Count.

While this site does not blame her directly for the deaths accounted for there, it does state (and I think correctly) that her actions as the public face of the AVM has contributed to the hysteria against vaccinations and hence the spread of diseases which would otherwise be kept in check.

As the website states on its front page…

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.

Jenny McCarthy has a body count attached to her name. This website will publish the total number of vaccine preventable illnesses and vaccine preventable deaths that have happened since June 2007 when she began publicly speaking out against vaccines.

Is Jenny McCarthy directly responsible for every vaccine preventable illness and every vaccine preventable death listed here? No. However, as the unofficial spokesperson for the United States anti-vaccination movement she may be indirectly responsible for at least some of these illnesses and deaths and even one vaccine preventable illness or vaccine preventable death is too many.

Since June of 2007 and as of this writing, the website documents the following numbers – verified through the Centers for Disease Control…

Number of Preventable Cases: 720
Number of Preventable Deaths: 142

Fortunately, not everyone in Hollywood is as ignorant & dangerous as Jenny McCarthy in their promotion of woo – there are those who are willing to take her and her AVM ilk head on and call them out on their deadly nonsense. I’m speaking specifically of actress Amanda Peet, who in an article last year publicly took the AVM to task…

Peet’s analytical urges are comical when she’s talking about kids’ gear, but not when she’s discussing a subject she feels is among today’s most pressing public-health issues: infant vaccinations. “As soon as I was pregnant, the neuroses kicked in,” says Peet, 36, who is married to screenwriter David Benioff. She began calling her older sister’s husband, a Philadelphia pediatrician, “every five minutes” with all kinds of questions, especially about shots. “I asked him, ‘Why are all of these necessary? Why are some people staggering them?’?” Eventually her brother-in-law arranged a series of phone calls between Peet and his own mentor, Paul Offit, M.D., who is chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, and a board member of Every Child by Two, a pro-vaccine organization cofounded in 1991 by former first lady Rosalynn Carter.

“Once we had spoken, I was shocked at the amount of misinformation floating around, particularly in Hollywood,” says Peet, who quickly boned up on the hot-button controversies surrounding the topic, including the unproven link between certain vaccines and autism; the safety of preservatives like mercury-based thimerosal; and the fear that the relatively high number of shots kids receive today can overwhelm young immune systems. Her conclusion? Well, not only is Frankie up-to-date on her vaccines (with no staggering), but her mom will soon appear in public-service announcements for Every Child by Two. “I buy 99 percent organic food for Frankie, and I don’t like to give her medicine or put sunscreen on her,” says Peet. “But now that I’ve done my research, vaccines do not concern me.” What does concern her is the growing number of unvaccinated children who are benefiting from the “shield” created by the inoculated—we are protected from viruses only if everyone, or most everyone, is immunized: “Frankly, I feel that parents who don’t vaccinate their children are parasites.”

Incidentally, here are two great websites out there on this whole vaccination issue – one is called Stop Jenny McCarthy, and it has more info about the AVM & autism specifically, and the other is Every Child by Two, a pro-vaccination group which Amanda Peet supports and promotes. If you are at all interested in getting more informed about the AVM and how to tackle its bogus & dangerous woo, I suggest you check them out.

More Media Fail: TV Causes Asthma!

Every day, when I get a break from teaching, I like to sit down at the computer in my room and read through some news. Today, I saw a headline that made me roll my eyes: “Too much TV linked to higher asthma risk”

The problem that I have with this article is mostly with the title, because due to the way in which it is set up, it gives the impression to the uninformed reader that TV causes asthma or if you allow your kid to watch TV they could develop asthma. In fact, the article states in its opening paragraph…

Children who watch television for more than two hours a day have twice the risk of developing asthma, British researchers reported Tuesday.

Now, to be fair, later in the article – right at the end – was further clarification on the research…

“The findings add to a wealth of evidence linking a lack of exercise and being overweight with an increased risk of asthma,” Elaine Vickers of Asthma UK, who was not involved in the study, said in a statement.

“But this study is the first to directly link sedentary behavior at a very young age to a higher risk of asthma later in childhood.”

Aha! So it isn’t watching television that actually causes kids to get asthma, but it is a sedentary lifestyle (due in part to a lack of exercise & being overweight) that leads to an increased risk of kids developing asthma. But the trouble is that you have to dig all the way to the bottom of the article in order to get that information, and in the meantime many people will come away from this report with the misconception that TV causes asthma in children.

This is a classic example of the media getting hold of a medical or health related story and doing a sloppy job of reporting it. In reality, what the research found is a correlation between the amount of TV watched by kids and them developing asthma. But, as skeptics are often heard to say: correlation does not necessarily imply causation!

Just because there seems to be a relationship between two variables – in this case the amount of TV watched versus the likelihood of a child developing asthma – doesn’t mean that one causes the other! There could be other relevant variables, and often there are other variables, that flesh out the picture in more detail. In the specific case here, that is the connection of a sedentary lifestyle. But does this mean that if you have a kid who both leads an active lifestyle (lots of exercise) and watches a lot of TV that they’ll still get asthma, just by watching the TV? I think you see my point.

I’m making such a big stink about this particular point because this is something the media screws up all the time. They take a bit of news about some health-related research and present it completely out of context with some headline that gives an incorrect view of the science involved. And since most people don’t go around reading medical journals for their health news, they have to rely on the media to get the story right. But if the media doesn’t get the story right, as is too often the case, then people start to make poor decisions regarding their health.

Now, if you don’t think this is a serious issue, consider how sloppy reporting has affected health issues in the past – a perfect example is the piss-poor job the media did reporting the results of Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s bogus research supposedly linking childhood vaccines with the incidence of autism. At best, Wakefield discovered a correlation between the two (actually he didn’t even discover that because it’s been revealed he faked the research), but due to the rotten job done by most media outlets in getting the story out many people were left with the false impression that vaccines for kids cause childhood autism! And now, we are having to deal with all manner of problems due to the subsequent anti-vaccination movement that has popped up, which is convincing scared parents not to vaccinate their kids. Some of the results of this combination of an irresponsible media and opportunistic pseudoscientists & conspiracy theorists are not pretty.

So there are real-world, tangible consequences for the media not doing a proper job of reporting science & medical information. Not that I’m worried that there is going to be an “anti-TV-death-ray” movement popping up anytime soon due to the crummy job of reporting this story or anything stupid like that…

… but then, again due in part to improper reporting by the media, there is a movement in the United States of people who refuse to allow construction of vital infrastructure projects like power lines because they think electromagnetic emissions from power lines cause cancer! This, of course, is dead wrong – that whole “correlation is not causation” thing again – but the media messed it up way back when, and now we’re stuck dealing with the situation.

It would be nice if the media could do a better job of reporting on such topics in the beginning, so that pseudoscientists and fear-mongers wouldn’t be able to so easily manipulate & distort science to suit their own agendas.

But these days, when many in the media seem to be more interested in sensationalism as opposed to factual & accurate journalism, I think it will be left up to skeptics to set the record straight. If we don’t, who will?

Good News: Anti-Vaccination Nuts Lose, Big Time

One of the more recent & despicable forms of woo that has come out over the last few years is that of anti-vaccination or vaccine denial. It all started back in the late 1990s when a researcher named Dr. Andrew Wakefield claimed that he had discovered a connection between administrations of the MMR vaccine and incidence of autism in young children.

At this point, I think it is very important to note that Wakefield’s work has just recently been shown to have been the product of fraud. Here are some key points at that link…

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.

Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.

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.

So the original research which supposedly showed an autism-vaccine connection was faked! And this revelation comes as no surprise considering as how literally a decade of medical research since then has clearly shown there is no connection between the incidence of autism and vaccination.

But this evidence matters little to some people who have used this supposed “connection” as a way to further their anti-science ideology – which is what is particularly disturbing about Wakefield’s fraud. When his work was publicized in 1998, it started what Dr. Steven Novella of Skepticblog refers to as the “Mercury Militia” – a pseudoscientific movement to ban all mercury (in the form of the vaccine preservative thimerisol) from vaccines. Worse yet, it also helped to spawn something even worse – the modern Anti-Vax movement which maintains that vaccines don’t work, are not necessary, and are just part of a conspiracy by “Big Pharma” and the government to get our money.

Unfortunately, the anti-vaxxers have some star power on their side. A good example is Jenny McCarthy and her boyfriend Jim Carrey – McCarthy has drunk the anti-vax Kool Aid big time and is thoroughly convinced that her son’s autism was caused by him getting vaccinated. So she has become the de facto celebrity spokeswoman for promoting the anti-vax nonsense, appearing on talk shows like Oprah, Larry King Live, etc. But despite the level of righteousness she feels in her cause, Jenny McCarthy is dead wrong!

Thanks to the efforts of idiots like McCarthy and other anti-vaxxers, the rates of childhood vaccine use have dropped significantly in both the United States and United Kingdom – with predictable results. In areas where parents refuse to vaccinate their kids, out of the false fears spread by the anti-vaxxers, diseases that were once basically wiped out have started to have a resurgence. Here’s two articles on this point…

In the United States
Vaccine refusals fuel jump in measles outbreaks

… and in the United Kingdom
Rise in measles ‘very worrying’

This is bad, folks. This is bad because this is a perfect example of how accepting pseudoscientific nonsense can actually adversely affect the health of people or even possibly get them killed.

Fortunately, in addition to the recent revelation of Wakefield’s fraud, there is some other good news. It seems that an anti-vax parent lobby was recently attempting to sue in federal court for compensation from the U.S. government because they claimed that getting their children vaccinated through government programs led to their kids’ autism. They just lost the argument – the special court, after a thorough review of all the scientific & medical research on the question of an autism-vaccine link, concluded that no such link exists…

The evidence “is weak, contradictory and unpersuasive,” concluded Special Master Denise Vowell. “Sadly, the petitioners in this litigation have been the victims of bad science conducted to support litigation rather than to advance medical and scientific understanding” of autism.

So there you have it. The anti-vax nuts have lost in two big ways: the creator of their movement has been publicly discredited as a fraud, and they have lost in court cases to push their claims. And we know why – because there is nothing to their claims, however heartfelt they may be, that vaccinations cause childhood autism.

However, I think the reaction from the anti-vaccination true believers such as Jenny McCarthy is predictable. Rather than accept the findings of the scientific & medical communities, as well as the federal courts, on this subject, the hardcore anti-vaxxers will likely spin the renewed scrutiny of Wakefield’s fraud and the court findings as part of a vast, widespread conspiracy – which is usually the last resort of true believers when their backs are against the wall.

Hopefully, those parents who are on the fence will evaluate these findings in a rational manner and get their kids vaccinated. Let’s hope so, for their kids’ sake.