The four-alarm fire

I present to you three recent articles with a linked theme.

The first is about a study at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Australia, and describes an mRNA vaccine that appears to be capable of stopping malaria in its tracks.  The impact of malaria is astonishing, a fact that often escapes the notice of those of us who live in temperate parts of the world where it doesn't occur.  I still remember my shock, when one of my biology professors asked what species of animal has caused more human deaths than any other -- in fact, more than all the other animals combined.

Turns out, of course, it's the mosquito.  Between malaria, yellow fever, and dengue, and a host of other less-common diseases like chikungunya, eastern equine encephalitis, and West Nile virus, mosquitoes (actually several species, but lumping them together for the sake of simplicity) have by far outstripped all other animals in their negative impact on humans.  And of the diseases they carry, malaria is the worst, infecting an estimated three hundred million people per year, and causing six hundred thousand annual fatalities.

The new vaccine is, like the COVID-19 vaccine, an activated piece of messenger RNA.  In this case, it targets a gene in the malaria microorganism that is essential to the pathogen's reproduction within the mosquito.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Supyyyy, Double-stranded RNA, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In preclinical trials, the vaccine caused a 99.7% drop in transmission rates.  The potential impact of a therapy with this efficacy is astronomical, especially given that post-infection medical treatment for malaria is of limited benefit -- and has to be administered for the remainder of the patient's life.  A vaccine that could stop malaria transmission almost completely would have as great a positive effect on life in equatorial regions of the world as the smallpox and polio vaccines did globally in the twentieth century.

The second is a series of studies having to do with the use of mRNA vaccines to target cancer.  The difficulty with conventional chemotherapy is that it's hard to find chemicals that kill tumor cells without damaging your own tissues; as I'm sure many of you know all too well, chemotherapy drugs often come along with miserable and long-lasting side effects.  The effectiveness of mRNA cancer treatments is that the strand of mRNA can be designed to target tumor-specific antigens, turning them into what amount to "smart bombs" that destroy cancerous tissues without harming the rest of the body.  The therapy has been demonstrated to be useful against a variety of types of cancer, including the deadly and extremely hard to treat pancreatic cancer.  There has even been dramatic work done that has raised the possibility of a universal cancer vaccine -- something about which University of Florida researcher Duane Mitchell said, "What we found is by using a vaccine designed not to target cancer specifically but rather to stimulate a strong immunologic response, we could elicit a very strong anticancer reaction.  And so this has significant potential to be broadly used across cancer patients — even possibly leading us to an off-the-shelf cancer vaccine."

The third is that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., just announced that he's canceling five hundred million dollars in funding for the development of mRNA vaccines.

Let me be blunt, here.

This action will kill people.

Not that RFK cares.  His dangerous lies were directly responsible for the vaccine avoidance that caused a devastating outbreak of measles in Samoa that killed eighty people, mostly children -- an action for which he has yet to take responsibility.  (This, of course, is hardly surprising; "It's someone else's fault" should be the new motto of the GOP.)

RFK has built his entire stance on lies.  He called the COVID-19 vaccine "the deadliest vaccine ever made," despite the CDC finding that vaccination saved more than two hundred thousand lives during the peak of the pandemic.  He has claimed without any scientific basis that all mRNA vaccines are dangerous, and in fact has talked about it in such a way as to lead people to believe that mRNA itself is a dangerous chemical, despite the fact that anyone who passed high school biology should recognize how ridiculous this is.  (I actually saw someone post, apparently seriously, that they would "never allow mRNA in their body," to which I responded, "good luck with that.")

I know there's some stiff competition, but I think RFK would top the list of the Most Dangerous Trump Appointees.  His fear-based, anti-science policies are going to directly result in deaths -- if we're lucky, it'll only be in the thousands, but if we have another pandemic, it could well be in the millions.  The scariest part is that I have no idea what we can do about it.  Besides not taking responsibility, the other thing the Republicans seem to be awfully good at is not bowing to pressure from knowledgeable experts.  In fact, being countered makes them double down and hang on even harder.

And can I point out here that almost half of the research funding RFK cut could be offset by canceling the plans for Trump's fucking Versailles-wannabe golden ballroom?

This is a four-alarm fire, and it seems like barely anyone is paying attention.  Certainly no one who can do anything about it.  This goes way beyond whether any of us will be able to get flu and COVID boosters this fall; this is about basic medical research that can save countless lives.  But ignorance and anti-science dogmatism are winning at the moment.

I just hope that we won't have to wait until a deadly global pandemic for people to wake up and start objecting -- and getting this ignorant, dramatically unqualified ideologue out of a position he never should have been appointed to in the first place.

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Magnetic nonsense

Loony people are hardly a new invention.  Any claims that "people are crazier now than they used to be" generally springs from one of two things, the first of which is a bad memory.

The other, though, is more interesting, as well as more troubling.  In the past, when Great-Aunt Ethel started babbling in public about being visited at night by a sexy alien who wanted to take her up to his spaceship and bring her back to Zeta Reticuli to be his immortal love slave, we had the option of saying, "That's wonderful, auntie, but let's go inside and get you a nice cup of tea and watch The Beverly Hillbillies, okay?  Wouldn't that be fun?"

Now, the Great-Aunt Ethels of the world have computers with internet access, where they can connect with all the other Great-Aunt Ethels.  And influence people who are already on the borderline, so as to create the next generation of Ethels.  And because a lot of social media sites now allow you to monetize your content, they're able to make tons of money off it, extending their reach even further.

We're in a world where the Ethels have just as great a capacity for being heard as the scientists do.

And this brings us to Sherri Tenpenny.

Tenpenny is an anti-vaxx activist who was identified by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as one of the "Disinformation Dozen" -- the twelve people who, put together, are responsible for 65% of the vaccine misinformation out there online.  (Other shining lights on this list are Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Christiane Northrup.)  Tenpenny, though, brings things to a whole different level, way beyond the usual "vaccines cause autism" nonsense.  Here's one example:

The stated goal is to depopulate the planet and the ones that are left, either make them chronically sick or turn them into transhumanist cyborgs that can be manipulated externally by 5G, by magnets, by all sorts of things.  I got dragged through the mud by the mainstream media when I said that in May of last year in front of the House Committee in Columbus, [Ohio].  Well, guess what?  It’s all true.

The whole issue of quantum entanglement and what the shots do in terms of the frequencies and the electronic frequencies that come inside of your body and hook you up to the "Internet of Things," the quantum entanglement that happens immediately after you’re injected.  You get hooked up to what they’re trying to develop.  It’s called the hive mind, and they want all of us there as a node and as an electronic avatar that is an exact replica of us except it’s an electronic replica, it’s not our God-given body that we were born with.  And all of that will be running through the metaverse that they’re talking about.  All of these things are real...  All of them.  And it’s happening right now.  It’s not some science fiction thing happening out in the future; it’s happening right now in real time.

Sure it is, Great-Aunt Sherri.  Here, have a nice cup of tea.

The trouble is, Tenpenny and others like her are getting rich off this stuff.  Some social media sites -- notably Facebook and YouTube -- have taken steps to stop her from spreading her insane lies, but even so, her message is still getting out there.  Business management information provider Dun & Bradstreet reported that her clinic, the Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center, has an average annual sales total of a bit over four million dollars.

And that's despite the fact that the State Medical Board of Ohio recently revoked her medical license.

What gets me is that nothing she says, however ridiculous, seems to diminish her popularity.  In June of 2021 she stated that she had "spent over ten thousand hours studying the origins and effects of COVID since the pandemic began," despite the fact that at that point only eleven thousand hours had passed since the pandemic was declared.  She also claimed that the vaccine turns you into a human magnet:

I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots and now they’re magnetized.  They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks…  There have been people who have long suspected there’s an interface, yet to be defined, an interface between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers.

Well, I can state definitively that based upon an experiment I just ran with my car keys, this is incorrect. 

And this is considering that I've now had four COVID shots (the original two plus two boosters), and have been vaccinated against all the usual childhood diseases, as well as typhoid, yellow fever, shingles, hepatitis A and B, and a yearly flu shot since (if memory serves) 1995.  Despite all this, as the above highly scientific photograph shows, I am not even a tiny bit magnetic.

I have also not been turned into an electronic avatar or a transhumanist cyborg, which I honestly feel a little disappointed about, because that sounds badass.

Given the fact of the connectivity we have now for information of all sorts, we no longer have the option of hustling Sherri Tenpenny back into the house and getting her settled in the recliner in front of The Beverly Hillbillies.  The best thing we can do is to shine as bright a light as possible on her nonsense.  We can't let her go unchallenged, especially on such subjects as vaccination, where peoples' health and lives are at risk.

It'd be one thing if she was talking about sexy aliens from Zeta Reticuli.  She's not.  Her rhetoric is, literally, killing people.

We're not going to be able to stop her from shouting.  The important thing is that the sane people, the ones who actually know what they're talking about shout back -- louder.

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An epidemic of lunacy

Humans are odd creatures sometimes.

We have a regrettable tendency to abandon reason entirely when we're confronted with scary circumstances.  I suppose it's understandable enough; we're emotional as well as logical, and when we're frightened the emotional parts of our brain tend to swamp the more rational bits.

Still, it'd be nice if we could control that tendency, because it would help to reduce our likelihood of falling for weird counterfactual explanations at the times that it's the most critical for us to keep our  heads screwed on straight.

Take, for example, the most recent Scary Circumstance, namely, the outbreak of Wuhan coronavirus that so far has killed just over a hundred people, sickened thousands, and (by some estimates) left over a hundred thousand people at risk of exposure.

Coronaviruses [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the CDC]

Worrisome stuff, isn't it?  The potential for a pandemic is there, and the unknowns about the virus still outnumber the knows -- the rate at which it's passed on (what the epidemiologists refer to as "R0"), whether it's mutating as it spreads, what the mortality rate is, whether it's contagious while an individual is still asymptomatic.  But as I alluded to earlier, "frightening unknown virus" does not equate to "I think I'll make bizarre shit up."

Let's start with something I've now seen four times on social media, although I couldn't find a good link to the origin of the claim.  This particular flavor of nonsense is that the coronavirus outbreak is particularly dangerous to a specific subset of humanity...

... people who have been vaccinated for other diseases.

It will come as no surprise that the people who are spreading this foolishness are the anti-vaxxers.  How exactly a vaccine for (say) mumps would make you more likely to contract coronavirus they never explain.  The reason for that, of course, is that there is no explanation, because the claim itself is idiotic.  The anti-vaxxers are simply looking for another horrible thing to blame on vaccines, and the Big Bad Guys pushing vaccination -- doctors and "Big Pharma."  And since there is no actual evidence vaccines are dangerous, and ample evidence they reduce your risk of a number of deadly diseases to near zero, if you're going to claim otherwise you pretty much have to spin your argument from whole cloth.

That feeling when you're so ignorant about vaccines you end up reinventing them by mistake.  [Screencap from Twitter]

Then, there's the even more insidious approach of the insane conspiracy theory group QAnon, who have a two-part claim: (1) that Bill Gates patented the Wuhan coronavirus in 2015 and is using it to kill off the weak in some sort of bizarre eugenics experiment; and (2) that all you have to do to cure a coronavirus infection is to drink bleach.

As far as the first part, I don't know what to say except "are you fucking kidding me right now?"  The second part, though, has been around for a while -- the bleach solution ("Miracle Mineral Solution," which contains chlorine dioxide, a highly toxic compound) has been touted as a cure-all for all sorts of viral and bacterial infections.  And the claim is correct in a sense; if you have a coronavirus infection and you drink Miracle Mineral Solution, you won't be sick any more.

You'll be dead.

Lastly, from the "How Do People This Stupid Exist?" department, we have the folks who apparently think that coronavirus has something to do with Corona beer, other than the fact that "corona" appears in both names.

Corona, I hasten to point out (probably unnecessarily), is the Latin word for "crown."  The virus got that name because it's covered with spiky projections that look a little bit crown-like; the beer was given that name because its manufacturers wanted people to think it was the King of Beers (another incorrect claim, as the King of Beers is clearly Guinness).  But the similarity between the names has evidently led some people to think that there is more to it than that, and Google searches for "beer virus" have gone through the roof.

What exactly people think the connection is, I have no idea.  My hopeful side tells me that maybe people are just wanting to find out if anyone really is silly enough to think that the beer contains the virus.  But my gut tells me that it's more likely there really are people who believe the beer is transmitting the virus, or the beer cures the virus, or possibly both at the same time.

Who the hell knows?

Anyhow -- until such time as a coronavirus vaccine is developed, the best way to avoid catching or passing on infection is to do what you (hopefully) are doing already during flu season -- wash your hands frequently, cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze, and if you're sick yourself, stay home.  Other than that, try to resist the temptation to let your emotions carry you away.  Epidemics are bad enough without loopy speculation getting in the way.

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The brilliant, iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman was a larger-than-life character -- an intuitive and deep-thinking scientist, a prankster with an adolescent sense of humor, a world traveler, a wild-child with a reputation for womanizing.  His contributions to physics are too many to list, and he also made a name for himself as a suspect in the 1950s "Red Scare" despite his work the previous decade on the Manhattan Project.  In 1986 -- two years before his death at the age of 69 -- he was still shaking the world, demonstrating to the inquiry into the Challenger disaster that the whole thing could have happened because of an o-ring that shattered from cold winter temperatures.

James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman gives a deep look at the man and the scientist, neither glossing over his faults nor denying his brilliance.  It's an excellent companion to Feynman's own autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?  It's a wonderful retrospective of a fascinating person -- someone who truly lived his own words, "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

No admission

Let's establish something right from the outset.

Vaccines do NOT cause autism.

Clear enough?  If you are in any doubt, here's a site that provides links to exhaustive studies and meta-analyses that not only show no causative relationship between vaccines and autism, but that there is not even a correlation.

I.e., Andrew Wakefield was lying, and the anti-vaxxers are willfully putting their own children at risk of potentially deadly diseases that are entirely preventable.  As I've said now about 582 times.

The reason this comes up yet again is a webpage that I've now seen posted three times, with the title, "NOW IT'S OFFICIAL: FDA Announced That Vaccines Are Causing Autism!"

The article goes on to say the following:

You may be wondering: Why some of the doctors don’t say anything about the risk of DTaP Vaccine? 

That is a question that many of us, still wondering! Maybe they just is just not convenient for them that we know about the risk of these vaccine. 

To take the vaccine debacle further, most of the mandated vaccines for infants and children, contain many of the above ingredients, which must be stopped from being injected into infants, toddlers, teens and even adults! 

It’s time for Congress to rescind the “Get out of Jail Free” card for vaccine makers and stop the aggressive onslaught of the Autism Spectrum Disorder that is depriving children of a fulfilling life and ruining families emotionally, financially, and physically to the point of parents divorcing because of the stresses of ASD in a family.

The reason that "some of the doctors" (exclusive of frauds like Andrew Wakefield) aren't saying anything about the risk of autism from DTaP and other vaccines is that there is none.  There may well be kids who were diagnosed as autistic following their vaccinations; after all, most vaccines and most autism diagnoses both occur during early childhood.  But to associate the two is the Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc Fallacy -- "after this, therefore because of this."

Let me say it again: multiple studies with huge sample sizes have found that the incidence of autism is no higher in vaccinated children than it is in unvaccinated children.  And vaccinating your children will keep them getting diseases like diphtheria, which back in the days before immunization, killed children by the thousands by making them, literally, slowly suffocate to death.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So needless to say (or it should be), the FDA didn't announce any such thing.  If you bother to read the article, or (better yet) take a look at the FDA post that generated it, what you find is that the information the government published on the DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) vaccine listed autism along with a dozen or so "reported adverse effects" -- but then said, and I quote, "Because these events are reported voluntarily from a population of uncertain size, it is not always possible to reliably estimate their frequencies or to establish a causal relationship to components of Tripedia vaccine."

The important part is "reported voluntarily."  In other words, all you'd have to do is have a single parent call the FDA and lodge an official complaint that their child became autistic due to the DTaP vaccine, and it would be justifiably included on this list.  Nowhere does it says that the claim -- any of them on the list, in fact -- had been evaluated by a physician, or even confirmed to be the truth.  This isn't even at the level of anecdote.

This is at the level of "my aunt's best friend's gardener's second cousin's third-grade teacher said it was so."

If you think that I'm just a blogger with an axe to grind on this topic -- not entirely untrue, I must admit -- here's the piece that Snopes did on the subject.

It's unfortunate the FDA did that -- not that I'm in favor of suppressing information, bear you, but the last thing we (or they) really need is the anti-vaxxers to come howling out of the woodwork.  Not that they ever gave up, really, and it's amazing how much their campaign has worked, even among people who are otherwise pretty sensible.  I've seen more than one person claim they'd never get a flu shot because the year before, the vaccine gave them the flu (impossible, as the flu vaccine contains dead virus particles) and that there's no way they'd have their child receive the HPV vaccine because it can potentially cause brain damage (total bullshit, and especially horrifying given that the eradication of HPV would virtually eliminate the risk of six different particularly deadly cancers).

The message should be loud and clear.  Claiming that the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits, or that the risk is even significant, is quite simply wrong.  Refusing to vaccinate your own children constitutes child endangerment, not to mention putting at risk children who can't receive vaccines for legitimate medical reasons (e.g. having a damaged immune system).

This debate is over.  It's time for the anti-vaxxers to stop screeching about coverups and shills and conspiracies by Big Pharma, and admit that they were wrong from the outset.

And along the way, admit that this has never been about evidence; it's about irrational fear and a never-say-die adherence to personal bias.

A vote for fraud

Yesterday morning when I was reading the news, I saw a story that induced me to use say some very bad words, that for the benefit of my more sensitive readers I will leave to your imagination.

The story that generated that result appeared in The Guardian, and the gist is that disgraced British doctor and anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield is campaigning hard for an anti-vaxxer running for the Republican nomination for a seat in the Texas State House of Representatives.

Wakefield, you may remember, is the man who is virtually solely responsible for the completely unfounded claim that there is a link between vaccines and autism.  The British Medical Journal posted an editorial in 2011 that did not mince words; the title is, "Wakefield’s Article Linking MMR Vaccine and Autism Was Fraudulent."  If that's not unequivocal enough, the editorial begins with the line, "Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare."

That should have been that.  That would have been that if it weren't for the fact that being caught red-handed engaging in scientific fraud didn't induce Wakefield to do what a normal human being would do in that situation, namely to admit what he'd done and retreat in disarray.  No, after the release of the paper calling him out on his fraudulent pseudo-research, Wakefield and his followers denied it -- and claimed that the doctors who wrote the paper were shills being paid by Big Pharma (which is up there with Monsanto as a stand-in for Satan) to shut down his research to protect their profits.

And the anti-vaxxer movement is still growing.  As is recurrence of dangerous and completely preventable diseases, such as the measles outbreak that happened in Wakefield's adopted home state of Texas this January.  But Wakefield evidently decided that this wasn't damage on a sufficiently large scale, so he's trying to ramrod his foolish and discredited ideas into the state legislature, so he can enshrine his false claims into law.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Wakefield is completely up front on what he's trying to do, and how he's trying to do it.  Rather than believe the scientists and the peer-reviewed studies, he says, you should trust social media instead:

Social media has evolved, as a general comment, has evolved beautifully.  It has provided an alternative to the failings of mainstream media...  In this country, it’s become so polarized now… No one knows quite what to believe.  So, people are turning increasingly to social media.

To say this makes me furious is something of an understatement.  Distrust of intellectuals in general and scientists in particular is widespread, and that is reflected in the people we've elected.  We already have a president who is a climate change denier and more than one governor and congressperson who believe that the six-day biblical creation story is supported by science and therefore should be taught in public school classrooms.  The last thing we need is more people in positions of power who deny science in favor of their own biases and/or delusions -- and who rely on getting their information from Facebook and Twitter.

Jinny Suh, an Austin mom and activist who is attempting to counter Wakefield's message, highlights how difficult this approach is to fight.  "The biggest challenge we face is," Suh said, "if you go onto Facebook or Google and you do a search for vaccines – and we can imagine a lot of new moms do this… the anti-vaxx stuff out there outnumbers the pro-vaxx stuff by quite a bit.  It doesn’t matter how you started out thinking about the topic, when a person is inundated with that much misinformation a person can’t help but start to think it’s true."

Which is why it's so important to get the message out there, and speak plainly.  Wakefield is a proven fraud.  He continues to lie about this and to claim that the evidence against him was falsified or cherry-picked or means something other than it does.  There is zero evidence that vaccination causes autism or any of the other horrible side-effects that he and others like him claim.  Admittedly, there have been side-effects from vaccines; no medical treatment is completely risk-free.  But they are extremely infrequent, usually mild, and temporary.

And what you get in exchange is immunity against diseases that as little as 75 years ago, used to kill huge numbers of children and young adults.  I've related before that my paternal grandfather's two eldest sisters -- Aimée-Marie and Anne-Désée -- died at the ages of 21 and 18, respectively, of complications from measles, after being completely healthy up until that time.

Wakefield is not just wrong, he's dangerous.  We do not need more anti-science voices amongst our leaders.  I don't know what the chances are for his candidate to win the nomination, but I fear that this kind of unfounded rhetoric has still not reached its peak.

Pet peeve

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who also happens to be a veterinarian, sent me a message saying, "They're coming for me!" along with a link to a site entitled, "Autism Symptoms in Pets Rise as Pet Vaccination Rates Rise."

The site, which I hardly need to point out is rife with confirmation bias, claims that vaccinating pets against such diseases as canine distemper, feline leukemia, rabies, and Bordetella is triggering behavioral changes similar to the ones seen in humans that have been vaccinated.  The problem, of course, is that there are no behavioral changes in humans due to vaccination; as I have described repeatedly, there is no connection between vaccination and autism (or any other behavioral or neurological condition).  None.  Nyet.  Nada.  Bubkis.  Rien.

But a little thing like no evidence and no correlation isn't enough to stop some people, particularly people with an ideological ax to grind.  The author, Kate Raines, cites a Dr. Nicholas Dodman, who has studied compulsive behaviors in dogs.  Raines writes:

Presenting the evidence from his study at the 2015 American College of Veterinary Behaviorists, Dr. Dodman reported an autism-like condition, noting that “the vast majority of affected dogs were males, and many had other strange behaviors or physical conditions that accompanied the tail chasing, such as explosive aggression, partial seizures, phobias, skin conditions, gastrointestinal issues, object fixation and a tendency to shy away from people and other dogs.”  He and his associates were further able to establish that two biomarkers common to children with autism were also present in the affected dogs.

Which is all well and good, but doesn't establish any kind of correlation between those behaviors or biomarkers and vaccination.  The only evidence she brings out is anecdotal; that some dogs exhibit temporary increases in irritability or aggression following the rabies vaccine, and those symptoms "mimic the ones described in discussions of canine autism."

Oh, and there's the tired old Motive Fallacy argument; that since makers of vaccines profit from sales, they have a motive for covering up any bad side effects, which proves that said side effects exist.  The illogic of which you'd think would be apparent to anyone, but evidently not.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But there is something here to explain, and that's the "autism-like condition" Dodman and others describe -- and which I am in no way trying to dismiss.  Presumably it does have some underlying cause.  Raines kind of gives away the game herself by saying that the symptoms are "idiopathic... or congenital," both of which would imply that vaccines had nothing to do with it.  I have to wonder if some of it has to do with recessive genes affecting behavior showing up in inbred dog populations; Raines mentions that Dodman was studying compulsive behavior in Bull Terriers, which (like most pure breeds) have a very tightly restricted gene pool.  (The most extreme example of this is the English Bulldog, the entire breed of which is descended, over and over, from 68 individuals selected back in 1835.)

My veterinarian friend had an interesting perspective on this.  She writes:

[D]ogs don't have autism.  Most vet research shows OCD like behavior in dogs does have a genetic component, but these dogs don't have issues with being social with other dogs, being overstimulated, or anything else, and mostly recover if you give them a job to do, like flyball or herding...  Most of it we see in high energy high drive dogs (collies, guard dogs, those sorts) that are in home environments that don't stimulate them much - so they go find their own, whether that's herding small children or licking their legs until they bleed or spinning in circles for hours.  So superficially similar to some autistic behavior, but 95% of those dogs respond very quickly to environmental enrichment, and the rest to anxiolytics.

But once again, it is unlikely that the arguments of a person who is an expert in her field will sway someone like Raines, who clearly has no particular need for evidence or logic to convince her.

So the bottom line: vaccinate your pets.  You're not going to trigger them to develop autism or obsessive-compulsive disorder, but you will protect them from horrible diseases like canine distemper, which is fatal 50% of the time even with the best veterinary care. Your pets depend on you for everything -- love, food, shelter, protection, and medical care.  If you fall for Raines's claptrap, you will fail their trust in you, and in all likelihood, put them at a significant and unnecessary risk.

And, in general, don't be swayed by emotionally-charged, fact-free arguments.  Find out what the experts and researchers have to say, and think for yourself.  Don't forget that we make our best decisions with our brains, not our guts.

Study shows readers of Skeptophilia have above-average intelligence!

One rather frustrating tendency, amongst those of us who have a skeptical bent, is that people tend to believe anything they read if it begins with "Study Proves" or "Research Shows."

Even better if it says "Harvard Researchers Show."

Apparently, it doesn't matter much whether the study actually proved the claim, or who the researchers were, or if the "Harvard research" was peer reviewed.  Merely claiming that some scientist, somewhere, of whatever credentials, said something -- well, that's enough.

Especially if what the scientist allegedly said fits in with what you already believed.

I ran across a particularly good example of this in Natural News, which I will not provide a link to because Mike "Health Ranger" Adams definitely doesn't need unsuspecting people generating any more clicks or ad revenue.  Least of all if they come from here, of all places.  The headline was "Study Shows Unvaccinated Children Are Healthier," and referenced a paper at Open Access Text called "Pilot Comparitive Study on the Health of Vaccinated and Unvaccinated 6- to 12-year-old U.S. Children," by Anthony R. Mawson, Brian D. Ray, Azad R. Bhuiyan, and Binu Jacob.  So I decided to check out the paper itself.  Here's a bit of it, so you can see their basic argument:

Vaccinations have prevented millions of infectious illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths among U.S. children, yet the long-term health outcomes of the vaccination schedule remain uncertain.  Studies have been recommended by the U.S. Institute of Medicine to address this question. This study aimed 1) to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated children on a broad range of health outcomes, and 2) to determine whether an association found between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), if any, remained significant after adjustment for other measured factors.  A cross-sectional study of mothers of children educated at home was carried out in collaboration with homeschool organizations in four U.S. states: Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oregon.  Mothers were asked to complete an anonymous online questionnaire on their 6- to 12-year-old biological children with respect to pregnancy-related factors, birth history, vaccinations, physician-diagnosed illnesses, medications used, and health services.  NDD, a derived diagnostic measure, was defined as having one or more of the following three closely-related diagnoses: a learning disability, Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder.  A convenience sample of 666 children was obtained, of which 261 (39%) were unvaccinated.  The vaccinated were less likely than the unvaccinated to have been diagnosed with chickenpox and pertussis, but more likely to have been diagnosed with pneumonia, otitis media, allergies and NDD.  After adjustment, vaccination, male gender, and preterm birth remained significantly associated with NDD.  However, in a final adjusted model with interaction, vaccination but not preterm birth remained associated with NDD, while the interaction of preterm birth and vaccination was associated with a 6.6-fold increased odds of NDD (95% CI: 2.8, 15.5).  In conclusion, vaccinated homeschool children were found to have a higher rate of allergies and NDD than unvaccinated homeschool children.  While vaccination remained significantly associated with NDD after controlling for other factors, preterm birth coupled with vaccination was associated with an apparent synergistic increase in the odds of NDD.  Further research involving larger, independent samples and stronger research designs is needed to verify and understand these unexpected findings in order to optimize the impact of vaccines on children’s health.

Okay.  So, boiled down to its essence, (1) they admit that vaccines save lives, given that hardly anyone dies of diphtheria, polio, or tetanus anymore; (2) they claim that there seems to be an increased risk amongst vaccinated children of learning disability, autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, allergies, and asthma.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Here's the problem, though.  Virtually all of the increased risks they describe are for conditions in which there is a huge spectrum of severity.  About 30% of adults and 40% of children are allergic to something, but these vary from sneezing during ragweed season to dying of anaphylactic shock if you consume a crumb of residue from a tree nut.  ADHD, in my experience as a teacher, ranges from kids who are a little fidgety to students who seem to be physiologically incapable of concentrating for more than five minutes on anything.

Hell, I have a learning disability in decoding written material myself; if I were in school today, I'd probably qualify for special services.  But I get along just fine, and in fact love to read even though I'm a bit slow at it and tire quickly.  I've had students, however, whose learning disabilities profoundly impacted their ability to manage most of the tasks they were expected to master in school.

So self-reported (or, in this case, mom-reported) conditions for which there is tremendous variability already makes the study a little questionable, especially given that those data are being compared to ones which are unequivocal -- such as whether the child in question ever got measles.

But there's a deeper problem still, and that is that the authors come into this question with an axe to grind.  As physician and blogger David Gorski points out over at his wonderful blog Respectful Insolence, the lead author of the study, Anthony Mawson, is an anti-vaxxer and had shopped around without success for a home for his paper in peer-reviewed journals, and finally had to post it at an open-access site because it couldn't pass review.  He did get an abstract accepted at Frontiers in Public Health -- but they retracted it only days after it was published, saying it was "under re-review."

Hardly a ringing endorsement.

Another problem is that homeschooled children are not a representative sample, nor are their parents.  There are lots of reasons for homeschooling -- one of my best friends homeschooled her daughter for the best of reasons, and she came out of the experience with a finely-honed mind and a deep passion for learning.  But there's a significant correlation between an homeschooling parent and being an anti-vaxxer, especially given the crackdown in many states on allowing belief-related exemptions for unvaccinated children to enter public school.

So right away there are some questions about the legitimacy of the data.  As I point out to my Critical Thinking students, sample bias doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong, necessarily, but it does cast it in a rather dubious light.

Last, and perhaps most damning, is the fact that Mawson's "study" was funded to the tune of $500,000 -- by an anti-vaxx group.  You'll note that nowhere in the paper cited above was any mention of a conflict of interest vis-à-vis financial support.

Which is a major no-no for a peer-reviewed study.

So mainly what the "Study Shows" is that if you walk in with your conclusion already in hand, you can bend the data whatever way you want to support it.  Especially if your pocketbook is being filled by people who would like very much for you to prove that their pet theory is right.

The bottom line: be careful when you see anything that claims that "Researchers Prove X."  Go to the source, and ask yourself some hard questions about the veracity of the study itself.  (Especially if you're inclined to believe its conclusions; confirmation bias plagues us all, and we're much more likely to accept something unquestioningly if it squares with what we already believed.)

And that goes double if it's Harvard researchers.

The dose makes the poison

One of the most fundamental concepts in pharmacology and/or toxicology is the dose-response curve, which gives a graphic representation of how the human body responds to varying doses of chemicals.  Something that is often poorly understood by laypeople, but becomes obvious if you study the topic at any length, is that there are some substances (e.g. lead) which are unsafe at any dose, and others that are necessary at low doses but toxic at high ones (e.g. table salt).  Further complicating the matter is that some substances bioaccumulate -- small doses over a long period of time can cause a toxic increase in the body tissues.  Elemental mercury, for example, doesn't get excreted readily, so even small amounts over a long period can result in harm (giving rise to "mad hatter syndrome" if sufficient quantities are ingested).  Others are water-soluble and quickly cleared by the kidneys, so it takes a great deal more to result in harm (e.g. vitamin C).

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So the subject isn't simple.  But if you're going to read anything on toxins and (especially) vaccines, you damn well better do your homework, or you're likely to get suckered by articles like the incredibly bullshit-dense "The 7 Most Dangerous Vaccines Injected Into Humans and Exactly Why They Cause More Harm Than Good" that appeared over at Natural News a few days ago.

The article, written by S. D. Wells, would be the same tired old "chemicals = bad" nonsense trotted out by damn near everyone in the alt-med world, from Vani "Food Babe" Hari to Mike "Health Ranger" Adams, except for the fact that Wells starts going into specifics about which chemicals in vaccines are bad, why, and at which doses.  Which is unfortunate for Wells, because any time these people slide over into analysis of the facts, they immediately start making claims that anyone who passed high school chemistry would know immediately are false.

Let's start with my favorite line in the whole thing, which is how the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine contains sodium chloride, which "raises blood pressure and inhibits muscle contraction and growth."  Yes, sodium chloride, i.e., plain old table salt.  He also tells us that another vaccine, Gardasil, contains this dreaded toxin at nearly 10 micrograms.  If you can imagine.

For comparison purposes, the Recommended Daily Allowance for salt is 4 grams.  To save you from doing the math, this means that the Gardasil vaccine contains 1/400,000th of the salt you ordinarily get from your food.

But in the words of the infomercial, "Wait!  There's more!"  Gardasil also contains 35 micrograms of sodium borate, which Wells tells us is a chemical used to kill cockroaches.  What he doesn't tell us is that borate is another micronutrient in the human diet, and is only toxic at huge doses -- at least huge compared to what's in Gardasil.  Again consulting the Recommended Daily Allowance tables, the RDA for boron is 1 to 6 milligrams -- about a hundred times what you get from Gardasil.

Wells doesn't just mislead and/or lie outright about the chemical constituents of vaccines, he lies about their side effects.  Gardasil, we're told, has horrific results; he says, "many girls who get the HPV vaccine beginning at age 9 for a sexually transmitted disease (diseases they dont [sic] have) go into immediate anaphylactic shock and some into comas and die."  Which is simply untrue; a study in 2012 of 189,000 girls who had been inoculated with Gardasil showed that the most common side effect was same-day syncope (i.e., they fainted), and even that was uncommon.  If that's not enough, a study of a million girls in Denmark was so side-effect free that the authors concluded that there was “no evidence supporting associations between exposure to qHPV vaccine and autoimmune, neurological, and venous thromboembolic adverse events."

But back to Wells.  Another horror he trots out is monosodium glutamate in the MMR vaccine.  If you're wondering if this is the same chemical that's used for a flavoring in Chinese food, yup, that's it.  It's also the sodium salt of one of the most common naturally occurring amino acids, and is found in tomatoes and cheese, not to mention General Tso's chicken, in quantities that are orders of magnitude more than are in the vaccination.  Then we have polysorbate 80, which Wells claims causes sterility even though it's used as an emulsifier in ice cream and a study on rats who were fed polysorbate 80 at a quantity of 0.5% of their body weight per day showed no adverse effects whatsoever.

I did get a good belly laugh at Wells's horrified statement that the swine flu vaccine contains "inactivated H1N1 virus."  After I finished laughing, I shouted at the computer screen, "How the fuck do you think vaccines are made, you nimrod?  What do you think they contain?  Holy water and magic berries?"

Then we have the wizened old claims about vaccines and mercury, even though the only vaccines that still contain thimerosal (a mercury-based stabilizer) are multivalent flu vaccines, and the stabilizer breaks down quickly to ethylmercury which is quickly cleared from the body by the kidneys.  (A lot of the confusion over mercury toxicity comes from mistaking this compound for methylmercury, which is toxic, bioaccumulates, and causes progressive nerve damage.)

And so on and so forth.  It's the same old, same old, really, but this was such an amazingly dumb example of anti-vaxx rhetoric that I thought it worth debunking.  As for me, I'm going to go look up the dose-response curve for bullshit, because I think reading Wells's article may have given me a fatal dose.

Chemical round-up

Yesterday's post about people who are fact-resistant is an easy segue into today's topic, which is: a viral post I've now seen at least a half-dozen times on social media that claims that there's RoundUp in vaccines.

The article, written by one Catherine J. Frompovich, starts with the following:

An absolute BOMBSHELL has just hit Big Pharma's vaccine industry!

Which, in my opinion, is a phrase that means, "Nothing important has happened."  Every time we hear that there's an ABSOLUTE BOMBSHELL that's going to (1) destroy Hillary Clinton, (2) destroy Donald Trump, (3) expose the lies of Big Pharma, or (4) cause a devastating scandal in Congress, we wait breathlessly...

... and nothing happens.

Of course, the people making the claim have an explanation for that; the "MSM" (Mainstream Media), who in this worldview is second only to "Big Pharma" as a stand-in for Satan himself, has covered the whole thing up.

In this case, we find out that a research scientist named Anthony Samsel has discovered traces of glyphosate (better known under its trade name as the herbicide RoundUp) in vaccines.  Then we're given the following alarming information:

In high school chemistry aren’t students taught the importance of chemical interactions, especially when mixing several chemicals in a laboratory beaker?  What can happen?  An explosion!  A similar chemical reaction occurs within the human body — the largest living, working test tube on earth, however it causes adverse health effects, not an explosion.

So, what you're saying is: if you put "chemicals" together, they explode, except that we're talking about putting chemicals together here, and they don't explode?

But even so they're really really bad.  Because they're chemicals.  So q.e.d., apparently.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then, of course (since it's RoundUp), we immediately launch into the argumentum ad Monsantum fallacy, which is to claim that anything even tangentially connected to Monsanto must be evil.   The implication is that Monsanto is deliberately tainting vaccines with their nasty chemicals for some diabolical reason, most likely to get rid of anyone who is stupid enough to fall for their cunning plans.

The whole argument falls apart, however, when you start looking at the details.  Going to the blog that brought Samsel's research to the public eye, we find out that there have been traces of RoundUp found in vaccines, most likely due to the inclusion of animal-derived products such as glycerine, but the amounts are almost all less than one part per billion.  Still, that doesn't tell us much about toxicity -- Frompovich is correct that some substances are toxic in vanishingly small quantities.  But then you look at the end of Samsel's data table, and you find out that "gummi bears" have quantities of RoundUp that are on the order of eighty times higher than any of the vaccines studied.

Interesting that there's all of this hoopla about Big Pharma and toxins in vaccines, but there's no mention of the role of Big Gummi in poisoning our children's candy.

A further, and more serious, problem comes to light when you start digging into the background of Anthony Samsel himself, and his alleged studies linking glyphosate to every human malady except the common cold via scary-sounding biochemical pathways.  An exposé by Tamar Haspel three years ago found that the supposed peer-reviewed research Samsel and a woman named Stephanie Seneff conducted into the presence of glyphosate and its effects on human tissue almost certainly never occurred.  Haspel writes:

Samsel and Seneff didn’t conduct any studies.  They don’t seem interested in the levels at which humans are actually exposed to glyphosate.  They simply speculated that, if anyone, anywhere, found that glyphosate could do anything in any organism, that thing must also be happening in humans everywhere.  I’d like to meet the “peers” who “reviewed” this.

Worse still, neither Samsel nor Seneff is a biochemist, or even a cellular biologist. Seneff is a computer scientist at MIT; Samsel is a "consultant" who does "charitable community investigations of industrial polluters."  As Haspel put it, "I think it's fair to say that they probably went into this with a point of view."

And if you needed one further death-blow to the whole argument, the woman who wrote the ABSOLUTE BOMBSHELL article, Catherine J. Frompovich, is a staff writer for...

... The Daily Sheeple.

So to those folks who keep circulating this article and ones like it, I'm respectfully asking you to stop.  There's enough misinformation out there on health in general and vaccines in particular.  To say it for probably the 13,537th time: vaccines are safe, effective, protect you and your children from diseases that can kill you, and have a very very low likelihood of side effects.  Myself, I'll take the chance of the health effects of minuscule amounts of glyphosate rather than those from getting the measles, hepatitis A, or even the flu.

On the other hand, I am having second thoughts about gummi bears.

Vaccination vitriol

If you react to people challenging your beliefs by calling them frauds, shills, or sellouts, it's a pretty good indication that you're on shaky ground yourself.

The topic comes up because of the response the anti-vaxxers had to the shift in allegiance of a woman named Carmit, whose decision not to be vaccinated for whooping cough resulted in her newborn contracting the disease.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Carmit realized her role in her infant's illness, and made a plea for pregnant women to receive a whooping cough booster so that others would not have to go through what she and her daughter did.  "I wish I could turn back time," she said.

Her widely-publicized video brought the anti-vaxxers howling out of the woodwork.  Here's a sampling of the vitriol Carmit had thrown her way.

From someone who evidently has never heard of the No True Scotsman fallacy (or punctuation):

[I]f she's a true anti-vaxxer she'd know about viral shedding from a recently vaxxed person coming too close to her baby It's a RED HERRING The PR trolls must be getting desperate to stoop to this crap You can almost see them sitting around their table working out their next strategy to divide and conquer the "troops"

Well, to start with, whooping cough is caused by a bacteria (Bordetella pertussis), not a virus.  And even with a vaccine for a viral disease, you don't "shed" live virus after being vaccinated.  But why bother with science, right?

Then we have someone saying that there's no way that an honest person could have evaluated the facts and changed her mind:

What a crock of crap.  No anti vaxxer upon learning the truth, there is no going back... ever. 

Then she started to have accusations of being a fake, someone hired by the hospital or the pharmaceuticals industry to hoodwink people:

This woman looks so familiar im [sic] trying to find out from where...  I know I jave [sic] seen her before and thats [sic] a bit sus [sic] as i too think it might all be made up

I just wonder if it's a made up story and she's a paid pharma actor.  Can anyone get her image and use google image search to see if you can find her real name. 

Shill!  She should be ashamed of herself!

Then we heard about how the hospital set the whole thing up:

So many weeks in hospital, sleep deprived, you can be brainwashed to believe anything and they push hard at you with multiple doctors.  My suspicion is that they gave the baby antibiotics which makes whooping cough worse and they have taken advantage of her and got her to read from a script. 

After that, the accusations became even wilder -- including that Carmit's daughter in the video was actually a doll:

GC health is running a campaign to increase pregnant mum vaccines.  The lady is a paid actor with a doll.  It's going ballistic and makeing [sic] people think pregnant women need a shot to save their baby from whooping c.

I'm 95% sure she's holding a doll. 

The kids [sic] neck looks like it's about to break and you never see it move or breath during the whole video.  The lady really does have a baby but this may just be a fake to scare us all. 

Sweetie this is a fake prop baby.  I've been in the film industry for over 25 years.  She is an actress and that is a doll.  Jeez. 

Others chimed in with suggestions for what she could have done instead:

That's Bullshit she doesn't need willing [sic] cough vax she just needs to build up immune system with colloidal silver.

Right.  Colloidal silver.  Which besides being generally useless, has as a side effect turning your skin blue-gray -- permanently.

And then we hear that this is a false flag to distract us from discredited anti-vaxx researcher Andrew Wakefield's film Vaxxed, which came out on the same day as Carmit posted her video:

This story came out on the same day that Vaxxed was released.  The biggest load of crap propaganda.  Have you watched the video?  Obviously an actor.  And her "baby" doesn't move or even breathe.  I call bullshit.

And finally, we reach Conspiracy Theory Nirvana, wherein we find out that the entire story is made up -- neither Carmit nor her baby is real:

That whole story is made up.  It's part of the pro-vax campaign.  Campaigns are organised, so this story is too.  The story is full of contradictions and other absurdities.  Even if you don't know anything about the topic then still it's a very strange story that should raise a lot of red flags.

The whole thing is nauseating.  It's appalling that someone would be so desperate to cling to their counterfactual stance that they would respond to a challenge with slander, accusations of lying, and even doubts that the challenger exists.  What, are you so sure of yourself that you can't imagine anyone looking at the facts and coming to a different conclusion?

Or are you just aware you're on such thin ice that you lash out at anyone who points it out?

In any case, I'll end with a wish for continued good health for Carmit and her daughter.  I'm deeply sorry that on top of illness, you're having to put up with threats, accusations, and libel.  But at least this shows up the anti-vaxxers for what they are; anti-science, anti-fact, and more concerned with their preconceived notions than they are with truth or compassion.

A win for anti-woo

I so often write about topics that make me (and at least some of my readers) want to do repeated headdesks that it's nice to have an opportunity to write about something where the good guys came out ahead.

I'm referring to the decision by Robert DeNiro, co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival, to pull anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield's film Vaxxed from being shown at the festival.  DeNiro said:

My intent in screening this film was to provide an opportunity for conversation around an issue that is deeply personal to me and my family.  But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for. 

The Festival doesn’t seek to avoid or shy away from controversy.  However, we have concerns with certain things in this film that we feel prevent us from presenting it in the Festival program.  We have decided to remove it from our schedule.

Given that the premise of the film is antiscientific horseshit, I and other folks who value evidence and logic over hysteria and misinformation applaud his decision.  Said David Gorski, over at Respectful Insolence:

Freedom of speech means that Andrew Wakefield and anyone he’s conned “persuaded” into believing his pseudoscience can make whatever sort of propaganda film they want, provided they can find the resources to do so.  It also means that the Tribeca Film Festival can screen that same pseudoscientific antivaccine (but I repeat myself) propaganda film if its organizers so desire.  However, it also means that journalists and, yes, bloggers can criticize Tribeca for its decision, refute Andrew Wakefield’s long history of promoting antivaccine misinformation about the MMR, and pre-emptively demolish the conspiracy theory at the heart of Vaxxed.  That’s not “censorship.”  It’s just more speech.

Which is it exactly.  But given that it's conspiracy theories that started the anti-vaxxer movement in the first place, it's not to be wondered at that DeNiro's decision immediately unleashed a screeching horde of anti-vaxxers who claim that Big Pharma had threatened DeNiro into pulling the film.  Even less surprising is that the charge was led by none other than Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, of Natural News:

To try to strong-arm De Niro into pulling the film, intense shaming pressure was brought to bear against Robert De Niro by the vaccine totalitarians, who told De Niro this documentary was so dangerous that no one should ever be allowed to see it.  Vaccine safety, they insist, can’t even be allowed to be DEBATED, they insist!  Only one side of the debate may be seen by the public, and that one side must be the 100% pro-vaccine side which ridiculously claims that “the science is settled” even when no one is allowed to see the science they don’t want you to see.

"The science they don't want you to see."  Better known as "discredited studies that have been replicated over and over with no results."

Of course, Adams defines "science" as "whatever agrees with my preconceived notions," so this is a distinction I wouldn't expect him to make.

But he's not done with his ranting yet:

De Niro discovered that even declaring yourself to be pro-vaccine isn’t enough to appease the vaccine totalitarians.  The mere granting of any public platform to this explosive document is very nearly a crime in the eyes of the corrupt, fraudulent vaccine industry and all its arrogant zealots. 

As more pressure was brought against De Niro for defending the free speech of what might be one of the single most important documentaries of our modern age, he caved.  He pulled the film from Tribeca, participating in the censorship that was demanded by the vaccine totalitarians.  The film’s page on Tribeca was also memory holed — it used to be found at this link — and De Niro felt compelled to issue a follow-up statement today that appeases the demands of the vaccine fundamentalists.

"Vaccine fundamentalists."  Or, as the rest of the world calls them, "medical researchers."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It would take a stronger man than I am not to indulge in a little bit of schadenfreude over Adams's apoplectic rage.  Too often the decision goes the other way -- indulging the anti-science types because they tend to shriek the loudest.  The fact that DeNiro has swayed in the other direction should be heartening.  DeNiro has an autistic son himself, and has gone on record as indulging in some sympathy toward the anti-vaxx movement -- showing that dealing with difficult situations can lead people in either direction, toward considering evidence-based solutions or gravitating to irrational ideas out of desperation.  Not being in his shoes, I can't imagine what it's like, but it's a positive sign that he's taken a step toward rationality.

Of course, Adams isn't gonna see it that way.  To him, it's just one more Big Pharma conspiracy.  To which I say: give it a rest, dude.  The good guys won this time.

Fear, research, and Gardasil

It is a general rule of human behavior that it is way easier to make people afraid of something than it is to convince them that what they fear is harmless.

This principle works on all scales.  The dubiously-ethical "Little Albert experiment," performed back in 1920 by John B. Watson and Rosalie Raynor, showed that you can classically condition humans with no difficulty at all -- the test subject, a nine-month-old nicknamed "Little Albert," was conditioned to fear white rats.  It worked all too well.  The baby developed a fear not only of white rats, but other furry objects (including a teddy bear).

When the test subject was tracked down years later, he was found to have an irrational phobia of dogs.

You can see this same tendency working all the way up to a conditioned fear of "the other" -- other races, ethnic groups, religions, political parties -- a fear that politicians frequently capitalize on to galvanize their supporters, and which once instilled is almost impossible to eradicate.

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes some sense.  The evolutionary cost of mistakenly fearing something that's harmless is far lower than the cost of mistakenly not fearing something that's dangerous.  If from a skeptic's standpoint, the tendency is maddening, at least it's understandable.

Even knowing this, I was pretty pissed off by the reactions I saw to a recent study that was highlighted in Phil Plait's wonderful blog Bad Astronomy -- Plait's article was titled, "Gardasil: More Anti-Vax Nonsense Collapses Under the Gaze of Reality."  In it, we hear about a study that did a large-sample-size test of side effects from the anti-HPV vaccine Gardasil, and found...

... nothing.  Nada.  None of the horrible side effects you hear from the anti-vaxxers, which include complex regional pain syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia.  Any incidence of disorders following the administration of the vaccine was no higher than the background rate for unvaccinated teens.

Add to that the fact that Gardasil prevents infection by HPV, which is directly linked to cancer of the throat, cervix, penis, and vagina.  Of these, cervical cancer is the most common; of the 12,900 new cases of cervical cancer diagnosed each year, an estimated 4,100 women will die of it within three years of diagnosis.  So, no common adverse side effects from Gardasil, and the benefit of protecting your children from dying of cancers that are largely preventable.  No brainer, right?

Apparently not.  Here's a selection of responses I saw to the Phil Plait article:

• I don't care what the research says.  I'm not taking that kind of chance with my children.
• Nothing has no side effects.  The risk still isn't worth it.  The pharmaceutical companies cover up the dangers.
• Why would we believe this when the medical research changes daily?  Saturated fat is bad for you, then it's not.  Sugar is bad for you, then it's not.  So they tell us this vaccine is safe, tomorrow it won't be, and then it's too late because you already gave your kids the vaccine.
• Of course they say this.  Gardasil brings in millions of dollars a year.  They have a vested interest in convincing us it's safe.

And so on and so forth.  What, does the research only convince you when something is unsafe?

Let me put this as plainly as I know how.  There is no evidence that vaccinations are dangerous, and that they increase your likelihood of any of the various disorders that anti-vaxxers want you to believe are a result.  There have been repeated large-scale studies by different researchers in different research facilities that have confirmed this result over and over.  Further, do you really want to go back to the day when people died of measles, typhoid, and diphtheria, and those who survived polio were sometimes confined to an iron lung for the rest of their lives?  We now can prevent all of those diseases, and have for the first time come up with a vaccination that prevents cancer.

To refuse to have your children protected against these deadly diseases is tantamount to child endangerment.

And I would like it if, for once, people would overcome their tendency to believe fears more strongly than reassurances, and accept what the scientists have been saying for years.