A chat with grandma

The controversy and misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines have brought the anti-vaxx movement back into the spotlight, and once again raises the question of why people are more willing to believe folksy anecdote than they are sound scientific research.

Take, for example, an article over at the website Living Whole.  This site bills itself as "a landing spot for all things parenting, common sense, and healthy living," so right away it sent up red flags about veracity.  But the article itself, called "I Was Told To Ask the Older Generation About Vaccines... So I Did," turned out to be a stellar example of anti-science nonsense passed off as gosh-golly-aw-shucks folk wisdom.

In it, we hear about the author's visit to her hundred-year-old great-grandma, who still lives in her own house, bless her heart.  But we're put on notice right away what the author is up to:

I’m not sure why people in my family live so long.  It could be the organic diet, the herbs, or the fact that all of my century-old relatives are unvaccinated.  If my grandmother dies in the near future, it will only be because she’s started eating hot dogs and no one has told her that hot dog is mystery meat.  Do they make a vaccine for that?

Or it could be, you know, genetics.  As in, actual science.  My own grandma's family was remarkably long-lived, with many members living into their 90s, and my Great-Aunt Clara making it to 101.  More on them later.

We then hear about how her great-grandma got chicken pox, mumps, and German measles, and survived 'em all.  So did bunches of the other family members she knew and loved.  The author says;

Mumps, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, and even the flu were rights of passage that almost every child experienced which challenged and groomed the immune system and protected them from more serious diseases as adults.  Deaths from these diseases were rare and only occurred in the really poor children who had other “things” as well.

Oh, you mean like my two great-aunts, Aimée and Anne, who died of measles five days apart, ages 21 and 17, and who were perfectly healthy up to that time?

Hopefully this last-quoted paragraph will shoot down the author's credibility in another respect, though.  How on earth does surviving mumps (for example) "groom your immune system" to fight off other diseases?  Any tenth grader in high school introductory biology could explain to you that this isn't how it works.  Your immune response is highly specific, which is why getting chicken pox only protects you against getting chicken pox again, and will do bugger-all for protecting you against measles.  And sometimes it's even more specific than that; getting the flu once doesn't protect you the next time.  The antibody response is so targeted that you are only protected against that particular flu strain, and if another crops up, you have to get revaccinated -- or get sick.

Then, there's the coup-de-grâce:

In the last decade I have had to explain to my grandmother what Crohn’s disease is, autism, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, ADHD, peanut allergies, and thyroid conditions.  She never saw those health conditions growing up.  “Vaccine preventable diseases” were replaced with “vaccine-induced diseases.”  Can we even compare chicken pox to rheumatoid arthritis?

No.  No, you can't.  Because they have nothing to do with one another.

But you know why great-grandma didn't know about all of those diseases listed?  Because there was no way to diagnose or treat them back then.  Kids with type-1 diabetes simply died.  Same with Crohn's.  (And that one is still difficult to manage, unfortunately.)  Autism has been described in medical literature since at least the 1700s, and thyroid conditions long before that.  So sorry, but this is just idiotic.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons U.S. Secretary of Defense, COVID-19 vaccination (2020) B, CC BY 2.0]

But let me point out what should be the most obvious thing about all of this, and which seems to have escaped the author entirely: your great-grandma's reminiscences aren't relevant.  Neither is the survival of my own grandmother, and many of her brothers and sisters, into old age.  You know why?  Because it would be a little hard to have a friendly chat with the tens of thousands of people who did die of preventable childhood diseases, like my grandma's brother Clarence (died as an infant of scarlet fever) and sister Flossie (died as a teenager of tuberculosis).  Of course the survivors report surviving.

Because they survived, for fuck's sake.  What did you think she'd tell you?  "I hate to break it to you, dear, but I actually died at age six of diphtheria?"

But that didn't seem to occur to most of the commenters, who had all sorts of positive things to say.  Many said that they weren't going to vaccinate their children, and related their own stories about how their grandparents had survived all sorts of childhood diseases, so q.e.d., apparently.

I'm sorry.  The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."  There is 100% consensus in the medical community (i.e. the people doing the actual research) that vaccines are safe and effective, serious side effects are rare, and that leaving children unvaccinated is dangerous and irresponsible.  You can go all motive-fallacy if you want ("of course the doctors say that, it keeps them in business"), but it doesn't change the facts.

But unfortunately, there seems to be a distinct anti-science bent in the United States at the moment, and a sense that telling stories is somehow more relevant than evaluating the serious research.  Part of it, I think, is laziness; understanding science is hard, while chatting about having tea with great-grandma is easy.

I think it goes deeper than that, however.  We're back to Isaac Asimov's wonderful quote, aren't we?  It seems a fitting place to end.

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I'm in awe of people who are true masters of their craft.  My son is a professional glassblower, making precision scientific equipment, and watching him do what he does has always seemed to me to be a little like watching a magic show.  On a (much) lower level of skill, I'm an amateur potter, and have a great time exploring different kinds of clays, pigments, stains, and glazes used in making functional pottery.

What amazes me, though, is that crafts like these aren't new.  Glassblowing, pottery-making, blacksmithing, and other such endeavors date back to long before we knew anything about the underlying chemistry and physics; the techniques were developed by a long history of trial and error.

This is the subject of Anna Ploszajski's new book Handmade: A Scientist's Search for Meaning Through Making, in which she visits some of the finest craftspeople in the world -- and looks at what each is doing through the lenses of history and science.  It's a fascinating inquiry into the drive to create, and how we've learned to manipulate the materials around us into tools, technology, and fine art.

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

Space germs

I'm fully in support of pure research, which should be obvious to anyone who is a regular reader of Skeptophilia.  But sometimes I run into a paper that leaves me scratching my head.

This happened this past weekend when I stumbled upon a press release from the University of Exeter entitled, "Mammals Could Struggle to Fight Space Germs."  The gist was that a team led by microbiologist Neil Gow did a series of experiments exposing mammalian cells to lab-synthesized peptides containing two amino acids that have been detected in space but not found in terrestrial proteins (isovaline and α-aminoisobutyric acid), and they found that the cell cultures had a "weak immune response."  From this, they concluded that if we're exposed to extraterrestrial microbes, we might really suck at fighting them off.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Phoebus87 at English Wikipedia, Symian virus, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This seemed like a rather overblown conclusion, so I went to the original paper (always a good idea; even university press releases are often oversimplifications or miss important points).  In this case, though, the press release was pretty much spot-on.  Here it is, straight from the paper:

The discovery of liquid water at several locations in the solar system raises the possibility that microbial life may have evolved outside Earth and as such could be accidently introduced into the Earth’s ecosystem.  Unusual sugars or amino acids, like non-proteinogenic isovaline and α-aminoisobutyric acid that are vanishingly rare or absent from life forms on Earth, have been found in high abundance on non-terrestrial carbonaceous meteorites.  It is therefore conceivable that exo-microorganisms might contain proteins that include these rare amino acids.  We therefore asked whether the mammalian immune system would be able to recognize and induce appropriate immune responses to putative proteinaceous antigens that include these rare amino acids. To address this, we synthesised peptide antigens based on a backbone of ovalbumin and introduced isovaline and α-aminoisobutyric acid residues and demonstrated that these peptides can promote naïve OT-I cell activation and proliferation, but did so less efficiently than the canonical peptides.  This is relevant to the biosecurity of missions that may retrieve samples from exoplanets and moons that have conditions that may be permissive for life, suggesting that accidental contamination and exposure to exo-microorganisms with such distinct proteomes might pose an immunological challenge.

Okay, I'll admit that this is one possible conclusion you could draw; it certainly has been riffed on often enough in science fiction, starting all the way back in 1969 with The Andromeda Strain.  (You could argue that it goes back further than that, given that at the end of H. G. Wells's 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, the invading Martians are destroyed by terrestrial microbes to which they have no natural immunity.)

The other possibility, however, is that the microbes wouldn't affect us at all.  When pathogens attack our cells, they usually obtain ingress by bonding to receptors on the surface.  Those receptors can be amazingly specific; this is why there are so many strains of flu, some of which only attack birds or pigs... or humans.  The immune species, in this case, lack the surface proteins that can form bonds to the viral proteins, so they don't get in.  The result: no disease.

In fact, it's even more specific than that.  In 2006, an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu generated worries about a pandemic, until it was learned that although highly contagious in birds, it only affects humans if the virus binds deep in the lung tissue -- the receptors in the upper respiratory system aren't able to bind to the virus efficiently (fortunately for us).  The only ones who became ill were poultry workers who were exposed to dust and debris in poultry houses.  No cases of human-to-human transmission were recorded.

So my suspicion is that extraterrestrial microbes probably wouldn't be able to attack us at all.  And given that our tissues would lack the two oddball amino acids the researchers used in their experiments, it seems pretty likely that if the microbes did get in, they'd starve to death.  (Put more scientifically, our proteins would lack two amino acids they need, so we wouldn't be of much use to them as a food source.)

Of course, it's possible that Gow et al. are right, and extraterrestrial microorganisms would consider the Earth an all-you-can-eat buffet.  But given that (1) the number of extraterrestrial microorganisms we've actually studied is zero, and (2) there are equally persuasive arguments to the contrary, it might be a little bit of a premature conclusion.

Now, that doesn't mean we should be bringing outer space debris to Earth, sans quarantine.  Hell, I've read The Colour Out of Space, and last thing I want is to have a gaseous entity from a meteorite cause my limbs to crumble and fall off.  COVID-19 is bad enough, thanks.  We really don't need any more reasons to panic, however.  So for now, let's confine ourselves to dealing with threats that currently exist.

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Being in the middle of a pandemic, we're constantly being urged to wash our hands and/or use hand sanitizer.  It's not a bad idea, of course; multiple studies have shown that communicable diseases spread far less readily if people take the simple precaution of a thirty-second hand-washing with soap.

But as a culture, we're pretty obsessed with cleanliness.  Consider how many commercial products -- soaps, shampoos, body washes, and so on -- are dedicated solely to cleaning our skin.  Then there are all the products intended to return back to our skin and hair what the first set of products removed; the whole range of conditioners, softeners, lotions, and oils.

How much of this is necessary, or even beneficial?  That's the topic of the new book Clean: The New Science of Skin by doctor and journalist James Hamblin, who considers all of this and more -- the role of hyper-cleanliness in allergies, asthma, and eczema, and fascinating and recently-discovered information about our skin microbiome, the bacteria that colonize our skin and which are actually beneficial to our overall health.  Along the way, he questions things a lot of us take for granted... such as whether we should be showering daily.

It's a fascinating read, and looks at the question from a data-based, scientific standpoint.  Hamblin has put together the most recent evidence on how we should treat the surfaces of our own bodies -- and asks questions that are sure to generate a wealth of discussion.

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

CRISPR babies

One of my problems with resolving ethical questions is that I so often have a hard time deciding the difference between moral, ethical, reasonable, and justifiable, and figuring out where an issue lies on the spectrum thereof.

I've always had this problem.  There are things that in my view are always wrong -- harming or endangering a child comes to mind -- but the vast majority of issues lie in that immense field of gray areas.

Which is why I'm having a hard time deciding what to make of the bombshell announcement last week that a Chinese geneticist, He Jiankui, claims to have genetically altered a pair of human embryos -- and it resulted in the birth of twin girls who, if the gene editing was successful, will be resistant to HIV.

The technique involved was CRISPR-Cas9, a protein complex that allows for what amounts to cut-and-paste for your DNA.  What He did was to use CRISPR-Cas9 to selectively delete a gene for a  receptor called CCR5 that allows HIV to attach to cells.  Without that receptor -- He hopes -- the children will be genetically immune.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

When He made his announcement, the scientific community had a collective meltdown.  "The underlying purpose of doing the experiment was obviously to show that they could do gene editing on an embryo, but the purpose for the party involved does not make any sense," said Anthony Fauci, an HIV/AIDS researcher and head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland.  "There are so many ways to adequately, efficiently, and definitively protect yourself against HIV that the thought of editing the genes of an embryo to get to an effect that you could easily do in so many other ways in my mind is unethical."

Okay, I'm not defending He.  The real issue here, in my opinion, is risk.  "Gene editing itself is experimental and is still associated with off-target mutations, capable of causing genetic problems early and later in life, including the development of cancer," said Julian Savulescu, an ethicist at the Oxford University.  "This experiment exposes healthy normal children to risks of gene editing for no real necessary benefit."

But the problem is that at some point, scientists were going to have to take the leap and do something like this.  Ever since Jennifer Doudna of UC-Berkeley developed CRISPR-Cas9 as a gene editing protocol in 2012, it's only been a matter of time.  Once a technique like this becomes possible, it becomes inevitable.

So sooner or later, someone was going to have to accept the risk of trying it on human embryos.  Animal models only get you so far.  The potential for eradicating genetic diseases is nothing short of astonishing; think of a world without cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, Tay-Sachs disease, sickle-cell anemia, hemophilia.  All of that is well within the realm of possibility now.

But.  Once you've started down that road, what's to stop people from altering other traits?  Appearance, personality, behavior... for me, this gets out onto some very thin ice.  When this Pandora's box is opened, there's no telling what dubiously ethical practices will escape.

There's also the problem that if such a technique really becomes capable of (relatively) risk-free editing out of deleterious genes, it's almost certain that it would be available only to the rich, further widening the gap between the privileged and the non-privileged.  The brilliant (and prescient) 1997 film Gattaca dealt with this very issue -- how genetic engineering of children could result in a new lower class, people conceived the old-fashioned way who didn't have the same opportunities for jobs, education, health care, and health insurance as the smarter, stronger, healthier "Valids."

So I'm of two, or more, minds about all of this.  First, the potential of the therapy is mind-boggling.  And the idea that once developed, researchers were going to hold off trying it out on human embryos, is naively optimistic about human nature.

But it comes back once again to the quote from scientist Alan Grant in Jurassic Park -- "You were so busy trying to figure out if you could, you never gave any thought to whether you should."  The thorny ethical issues this technique brings up go way beyond the potential risk to two baby girls in China.

All of which makes me glad that I'm not on the scientific regulatory boards who are wrestling with how to respond to He's announcement.

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Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting 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.

Historical hype, government coverups, and the "Spanish flu"

At the heart of skepticism is a philosophy that says, basically, "question everything."  I would add a few "especiallies:"

• especially if the claim appeals to your personal biases and fears;
• especially if it seems sensationalized;
• especially if there is no hard data to support it;
• and especially if it's claiming that the reason there's no data is because of a government coverup.

 I ran into an excellent example of this just yesterday, with an article on The Liberty Digest titled, "U.S. Government Kills 100 Million People -- Deflects All Blame," by Truman Jackson.  My first thought was to wonder how 100 million people could have died without my noticing, but upon opening the link I found that he wasn't talking about something recent.

He was talking about the "Spanish flu."

An influenza hospital at Camp Funston, Kansas, winter 1918 (photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

What followed was such a mixture of truth, half truth, and complete bullshit that the author should win some kind of award for Best Example of Journalistic Hash, 2013.  Here's his claim, to which I've added a few annotations of my own:

Consider this a history lesson. At the time, it was an experiment in attrition and public gullibility, and both experiments proved favorable to ‘the powers that be’ as far as the outcome obtained.

It’s referred to as the Great Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 in the history books, but there was nothing Spanish about this plague that killed between 20 million and 100 million people world-wide. [True.  It was the worst pandemic in modern history, rivaling or perhaps exceeding the 14th century Black Death.]  It was 100% U.S. Government controlled and engineered.  [Bullshit.]

In a nutshell, while mass troop movements were heading to Europe during WWI, the U.S. Government, through the Department of the Army, was experimenting with this really neat, and new for the time, technology, called vaccines.  [True.]  They were injecting flu vaccine, among others, into soldiers who were on their way to fight in the “war to end all wars.”  [False, and not only false, but impossible.  The first flu vaccines weren't developed until 1931, twelve years after the epidemic, and World War I, both ended.]

As everyone knows, most vaccines have a strain of that of which they are supposed to be preventing, and in this case, a common strain of flu common for the U.S. at least.  [True in essence.]

However, the strain was not common in Europe and the rest of the world and the other people who inhabited those countries had not had a chance for their immune systems to develop any defense against the U.S. flu strain.  [True, but misleading, because this more or less happens every year -- that's why there are epidemics.  If people had a "defense" against a strain, they wouldn't get sick.  It doesn't require some sort of deliberate attempt by the U.S. to spread the disease, the virus is perfectly capable of doing that on its own.]

The result was catastrophic, and some would say diabolical. Nearly 5% of the earth’s surface population at the time was killed by the outbreak of the flu.  ["Diabolical" implies intent, so while the percent mortality is accurate, the implication is not.]

How did Spain get the blame?

Simple.

The ‘powers that be’ who were involved with the war made sure to keep a tight lid on the story of the flu. They feared world-wide riots should the populace learn the facts behind how far and wide the outbreak had spread. However, Spain was “neutral” during the war, and they openly reported on the havoc the virus was causing in their country. As a result they ended up getting the blame for the outbreak, and nothing could have pleased the ‘powers that be’ more. Remember, no good dead [sic] goes unpunished.  [Bullshit.  Although the author is correct that the identification of Spain as the origin of the epidemic was probably false, no one was trying to "blame Spain" for some sort of geopolitical reason, any more than calling the 1968 "Hong Kong flu" was an attempt to blame China.]

Many experts who have written on the “Spanish” influenza which killed upwards of 100 million people, believe the virus actually originated at an Army base in Kansas.  [Half-truth.  The origins of the virus are still uncertain.  Epidemiologists have proposed France, Austria, and China as alternate explanations, but the fact is, we don't know where it came from.]

So what we have here is the usual conspiracy nonsense, bolstered by people's fears of the side effects of vaccination due to the insidious work of such discredited nutjobs as Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy.

Of course, the timing of this article is no coincidence; the 2013-2014 flu season is just ramping up, and people are considering whether to get vaccinated.  Anti-vaxx hype is big this year, although studies debunking the supposed horrible side effects of vaccines clearly demonstrate that the risks of vaccination are vastly outweighed by the risks of contracting preventable diseases.  Flu kills thousands of people yearly, and most years the vaccine does a pretty good job of preventing the disease.  (I have to use the qualifiers "most" and "pretty good" because the flu virus is notorious for mutating, and the vaccine is based upon a best-guess of what the strains that year will be.  Every so often, the researchers don't get it right, and there's a strain prevalent that the vaccine doesn't immunize you against.  Even so, they get it right far more often than they get it wrong, and the benefit still far outweighs the risk.)

But no wonder that this article is making the rounds of social media, anti-vaxx websites, anti-government websites, and conspiracy theory websites.  It hits all of my "especiallies;" it caters to preconceived biases and fears, it's sensationalized, it has nothing in the way of data proving its points, and it claims that the reason for the lack of evidence is a conspiracy.

The nice thing about the Internet Age is that we have virtually instantaneous access to information, and with a little bit of training, anyone can learn to sift the truth from the bullshit.  Start, for example, by looking only at sources that are peer-reviewed -- it's not a guarantee of accuracy, but at least you've raised the bar from the kind of tripe published in places like The Liberty Digest.  Ask questions, especially "how does the author know this claim is true?"  Question your own biases and assumptions.

And never, ever accept what someone says without evidence.

Cures for vaccination

It's with a strange twinge of conscience that I'm writing today about an alt-med woo-woo claim that I don't think we should challenge.

It popped up on the website BabyCenter Community a couple of weeks ago, but apparently has been gaining ground since then, showing up on Facebook, Twitter, and websites devoted to anti-vaxx and holistic medicine.

The claim: putting a clay plaster on a vaccination after you get back from the doctor's office will "draw out the vaccine."

The first place I saw this -- the website linked above -- posed it as a question, where it received the following answers:

It helps to pull some of the toxins back out.  Not all though.

 

apparently it is possible to remove all vaccines, infiremiere [sic] should be a day in their vaccines in order to work in a hospital, she made all her vaccination and immediately after the injection, she had everything prepare in advance, she it [sic] absorb the vaccine in his car

with a homeopath here in France It can remove inject vaccine long ago, as soon as I have more information I will send you

One person did say that it wouldn't work, that vaccines are irreversible; but another, much more authoritative respondent came back with the following:

Hello,

For mandatory vaccines that nobody escapes, there is indeed the clay poultice can reabsorb the "poison" from his injection. The method is as follows:

You buy a clay tube (health food stores) and you present to vaccination equipped with this tube, gauze and tape. Once the vaccine was injected, you go to the toilet and you put a thick layer of clay on the vaccine + gauze + tape. Keep this poultice for 2 hours and the vaccine will be almost completely absorbed by the clay.

Upon returning home, you take the natural vitamin C (Acerola C, for example) or magnesium chloride (pharmacy: A bag of 20 grams dissolved in one liter of water and take 1 glass morning, afternoon and evening up. 'to exhaustion of a liter).

So I was reading this, and I was thinking... maybe it's better we let them think this is true.

After all, then the kids will be vaccinated and protected from disease, decreasing the likelihood of outbreaks of preventable diseases; and the adults will conclude that they've won, that they fooled us silly ol' skeptics and scientists, and in consequence, they'll shut up about it and stop trying to fight mandatory vaccination laws.

So, maybe there is a time that it's better to let the woo-woos continue in their beliefs, especially when one particular woo-woo belief cancels out the ill effects of another one.

But I do say this with some degree of guilty feelings.  Because, after all, the whole approach of a skeptic should be to follow wherever the evidence leads, to try to promote clear thinking and the scientific approach for one and all, and in any situation where the scientific approach applies.

Here, though... maybe we should let them have their clay poultices and acerola detox cleanses and homeopathic anti-vaccine remedies.  Let 'em think they've beaten the system.

And hope like hell that their children grow up to understand science better than the parents did.