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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Ministry of propaganda

Is it too much to ask that the Trump administration simply tells the damn truth?

That's all I ask.  Just stop lying.  I'm fine with having differences of opinion over policy.  For example, claiming that unhooking from fossil fuels and switching to renewable energy would be an unreasonable burden on our economy is not the same thing as saying climate change isn't occurring.

The first is a policy question we could discuss, and perhaps, come to consensus about.  The second is a lie.  And as long as you're simply lying about the facts, there is no discussion to be had.

Take, for example, the person who would have to be included in the top five most dangerous members of this regime; Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  He is an anti-science ideologue of the worst sort, and because of him the CDC is now limiting access to COVID-19 vaccinations and canceling funding for this year's flu vaccine -- including the potentially pandemic bird flu.

All part of his "Make America Healthy Again" campaign.  Because horrible policies are just fine as long as you give them a snappy name, right?

Of course right.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the U. S. Air Force]

It doesn't end with anti-vaxx nonsense, either.  Just this week, RFK stated that gender-affirming care for individuals with gender dysphoria should be discontinued -- once again, flying in the face of scientific study after scientific study.  Ignore the science, he says; instead, listen to the directives from the government.

And what is the government suggesting instead?

Why, "conversion therapy."

Yep, the same thing that was touted to "cure homosexuality," and which (once again) study after study has shown to be (1) ineffective, and (2) psychologically damaging.  RFK's letter to healthcare providers states that they should uphold their oaths to "do no harm" by following a strategy that has been conclusively shown to do harm.

Then there's his report on "gold-standard" scientific research that allegedly supports his viewpoints on holistic health and the sins of Big Pharma -- which contains (1) dozens of citations that were identified as mischaracterized by the actual authors themselves, and (2) at least seven citations for studies that appear to be nonexistent.  In other words, RFK pulled the middle-school bibliography-boosting stunt of making up plausible-looking sources, taking others and claiming they said things they didn't actually say, and hoping like hell no one notices.

Well, someone noticed.  But did he retract the report and apologize?

Ha.  Of course he didn't.  This administration never apologizes for anything.  Confronted by their own blatant lies, they just double down, stamping their feet and saying "it is so true!", and rely on the fact that their supporters have no scientific training and very short memories.

Oh, and also this week, he promised a ban on federally-funded medical researchers from publishing in top-flight journals like Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Journal of the American Medical Association.  Why?  Because they're "corrupt."  Instead, he wants them to publish in a journal he's going to run, after vetting researchers as "good, legitimate scientists" -- meaning, of course, that they agree with him.

Look, it's not (as I've said many times before) that I'm unaware of the problems inherent in the American medical system.  My wife is a nurse, so I hear about a lot of it from her, and I've witnessed the misery that friends and family members have gone through trying to navigate their way through predatory insurance companies, inefficient and understaffed medical care providers, and ridiculously overpriced pharmaceuticals.  I have one friend who's had a ton of chronic health problems, and has gone through the wringer with misprescribed medications and unmanaged side effects.

But RFK is making a bad situation much, much worse.  His outright lies and barrage of unapologetic misinformation are going to kill people, pure and simple.  But my guess is that no one is going to pull on the reins, because we can't stop a program called "Make America Healthy Again," right?  What, do you want to Make America Unhealthy Again?

Honestly, I put the lion's share of the blame here on the members of Congress who voted to approve his appointment to the Cabinet.  It's not like his views were some kind of a secret; we knew about incidents like his lies about the measles vaccine resulting in an epidemic in Samoa that killed eighty people.  The man goes way past "unqualified," into the territory of "outright dangerous."  He should never have been appointed, much less confirmed.

So this is episode #352,981 of "We Tried To Warn You."  And now we're seeing the results of that dreadful lapse of civic responsibility on the part of our elected officials.

All I can say is that insofar as you can, take care of your health.  Take precautions, get the vaccines that are available, and educate yourself using actual scientific research and not Ministry of Propaganda doublespeak.  Even so, my suspicion is that it's going to be a rough few years.

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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!]

5G fantasies

A week ago, I got my first dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.  I was lucky enough to have the opportunity because I work part-time for a home health agency providing companion care to homebound seniors, and even though I'm currently furloughed because of the pandemic I still qualified -- and I certainly wasn't going to turn it down.  I'm happy to say that all I had as a side effect was some very minor arm soreness the next day, but otherwise, it was no big deal.

However, my mentioning this to a friend prompted an immediate concerned eyebrow-raise.  "Didn't you hear that the vaccine is being used to implant 5G surveillance microchips?" she asked me.  "You're not worried?"

I reassured her that no, I wasn't worried, and in any case if the FBI wants to surveil me, they can knock themselves out because it would be the most boring surveillance job ever.

First FBI Agent: What's he doing now?

Second FBI Agent: Same thing as for the last five days.  He's sitting at his computer drinking coffee and watching funny dog videos.

First FBI Agent: I thought this guy was a writer? 

Second FBI Agent: Supposedly he is.  Have you seen him actually write anything?

First FBI Agent: Well, four days ago he added three lines to his manuscript, deleted two of them, then told his wife that evening he'd been "very productive."

Secondly, even if I was up to no good, I'm not really that confident the FBI would catch on.  These are the same people who had several days before the Capitol riots where the far right was posting stuff all over Parler like, "Wow, that's really some riot we have planned for the Capitol on Wednesday, January 6, isn't it?" and "Here's a list of the people who are signed up as drivers when we go to the riot where we intend to break into the Capitol and threaten lawmakers" and "Here I am in my home at 512 Swamp Hollow Road, East Bunghole, Tennessee, planning to riot in the Capitol!  I bet the FBI will never know!" and still claimed they didn't have enough warning to prevent it.  And they took days afterward to start arresting people despite the fact that numerous rioters took selfies and videoed themselves breaking shit and vandalizing the place, and then posted them online.

Of course, the fact that the rioters did that sort of thing points to general low intelligence on their part, too.  I'm not saying I'm any kind of genius, but I do know that if I was inclined to break the law, I would not video myself with my phone and post it to my Twitter with the hashtag #CriminalActivityFTW. 

Anyhow, I tried to explain to my friend that there's no way you could inject a microchip via a vaccine, and she said she'd "seen it online" and that "they said it was possible."  So I said as gently as I could that it was an unfounded conspiracy theory, but that I'd look into it, and with a very small amount of digging found out that one of the most widely-circulated claims showed a circuit diagram alleged to be of the top-secret injectable microchip, but turned out to be the circuit diagram for a Boss Metal Zone MT-2 guitar distortion pedal where they'd cropped out words that would have been a dead giveaway, like "treble" and "bass" and "volume" and "footswitch."

Just for the record, I can vouch for the fact that the nurse who gave me the COVID-19 vaccine did not inject me with an electric guitar pedal.

You know, what strikes me about all this is that the caliber of conspiracy theories has really been going to hell lately.  They're not even trying to make them plausible any more.  Back in my day, you had your Faked Moon Landing Conspiracy and your Hollow Earth Conspiracy and your Roswell Alien Conspiracy and your The CIA Killed JFK Conspiracy, which were quality.  Now?  With QAnon in charge of our conspiracies, we're being told that a pizza parlor with no basement has a pedophilia ring operating out of its basement.

So I'm issuing a challenge to you yahoos to up your game.  I mean, really.  Is this the best you can do?  Because if it is, I want a refund.

But now I better wind this up and get back to watching funny dog videos.  This novel isn't gonna write itself, and besides, I gotta make the guys in the FBI surveillance van earn their paycheck.

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As a biologist, I've usually thought of myself as immune to being grossed out.  But I have to admit I was a little shocked to find out that the human microbiome -- the collection of bacteria and fungi that live in and on us -- outnumber actual human cells by a factor of ten.

You read that right: if you counted up all the cells in and on the surface of your body, for every one human cell with human DNA, there'd be ten cells of microorganisms, coming from over a thousand different species.

And that's in healthy humans.  This idea that "bacteria = bad" is profoundly wrong; not only do a lot of bacteria perform useful functions, producing products like yogurt, cheese, and the familiar flavor and aroma of chocolate, they directly contribute to good health.  Anyone who has been on an antibiotic long-term knows that wiping out the beneficial bacteria in your gut can lead to some pretty unpleasant side effects; most current treatments for bacterial infections kill the good guys along with the bad, leading to an imbalance in your microbiome that can persist for months afterward.

In The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life, microbiologist Rodney Dietert shows how a lot of debilitating diseases, from asthma to allergies to irritable bowel syndrome to the inflammation that is at the root of heart disease, might be attributable to disturbances in the body's microbiome.  His contention is that restoring the normal microbiome should be the first line of treatment for these diseases, not the medications that often throw the microbiome further out of whack.

His book is fascinating and controversial, but his reasoning (and the experimental research he draws upon) is stellar.  If you're interested in health-related topics, you should read The Human Superorganism.  You'll never look at your own body the same way again.

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

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.

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.

Pandering to anti-science

Is it too much to ask for that we have some political candidates who unequivocally respect science?

In casting about for who else might be out there running for president other than The Big Two, I initially considered Jill Stein, nominee of the Green Party.  Stein has attractive ideas about fracking (against) and renewable energy (for), and I thought she might be worth supporting, not that she has a snowball's chance in hell of winning.  But a closer look indicated that either she's pandering to the anti-science cadre on the far left, or else she's an anti-science loon herself.

Dr. Jill Stein [image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's start with her attitudes toward vaccines.  Here's a direct quote from Stein on the topic:

I don’t know if we have an “official” stance, but I can tell you my personal stance at this point.  According to the most recent review of vaccination policies across the globe, mandatory vaccination that doesn’t allow for medical exemptions is practically unheard of.  In most countries, people trust their regulatory agencies and have very high rates of vaccination through voluntary programs.  In the US, however, regulatory agencies are routinely packed with corporate lobbyists and CEOs.  So the foxes are guarding the chicken coop as usual in the US.  So who wouldn’t be skeptical?  I think dropping vaccinations rates that can and must be fixed in order to get at the vaccination issue: the widespread distrust of the medical-indsutrial complex. 

Vaccines in general have made a huge contribution to public health.  Reducing or eliminating devastating diseases like smallpox and polio.  In Canada, where I happen to have some numbers, hundreds of annual death from measles and whooping cough were eliminated after vaccines were introduced.  Still, vaccines should be treated like any medical procedure–each one needs to be tested and regulated by parties that do not have a financial interest in them.

Which sounds like waffling to me.  How about coming right out and saying, "Vaccines are safe, effective, and have saved thousands of lives.  End of discussion."  Worse still, as was pointed out over at SkepticalRaptor, she's wrong about the regulation of vaccines:

The FDA advisory committee for vaccines contains 17 members, all but two are academics with impeccable research and science credentials.  The other two, admittedly are from Big Pharma, but they also have impressive scientific backgrounds, and to impugn their character or any of the 17 others, is borderline libel. 

Does Jill Stein have any evidence whatsoever that those 17 scientists are all handed bribes by Big Pharma to vote against the safety of American children?  Well, does she? 

Then, there's the Green Party's official platform, which explicitly supports homeopathy and other useless treatment modalities:

Chronic conditions are often best cured by alternative medicine.  We support the teaching, funding and practice of holistic health approaches and, as appropriate, the use of complementary and alternative therapies such as herbal medicines, homeopathy, naturopathy, traditional Chinese medicine and other healing approaches.

But in the words of the infomercial, "Wait... there's more!"  In a recent forum, Stein went on record as saying that wifi should be removed from schools because of its effects on children's brains:

We should not be subjecting kids' brains to that.  We don't follow that issue in this country, but in Europe where they do, they have good precautions around wireless.  Maybe not good enough.  Because it's really hard to study this stuff.  You make guinea pigs out of whole populations and then we discover how many of them die.  This is the paradigm for how public health works in this country.  This is outrageous.  This is why we need to take back not just our schools, but take back the whole system of how we create health, how we protect health, and our research institutions as well, to be publicly funded and publicly accountable as well.  We've lost trust in our regulatory agencies, when the vice president of Monsanto is in charge of the... not the DEA, which is it... the FDA.

Well, no, it's actually not hard at all to study this stuff.  There have been dozens of well-controlled studies of the dangers of wifi, and all of them have found... nothing.  According to the World Health Organization:

From all evidence accumulated so far, no adverse short- or long-term health effects have been shown to occur from the RF signals produced by base stations.  Since wireless networks produce generally lower RF signals than base stations, no adverse health effects are expected from exposure to them...  Considering the very low exposure levels and research results collected to date, there is no convincing scientific evidence that the weak RF signals from base stations and wireless networks cause adverse health effects.

 And once again, her defense for her views jumps to claiming that Evil Corporations Run Everything, so q.e.d., and (of course) finishes up with the argumentum ad Monsantum -- which in this case isn't even correct.  The current commissioner of the FDA is Dr. Robert Califf, who does have ties (as a paid consultant) to the pharmaceuticals industry, but has no connection whatsoever to Monsanto.

Worse still, did I mention that Jill Stein is a doctor herself?

Look, it's not that I expect a political candidate to be perfect, or to line up exactly with my own views on how things should go.  All of politics is a compromise.  But one thing I'm not willing to compromise is that anyone I support needs to respect science.  The fact that Dr. Jill Stein is not willing to go on record as declaring support for scientific findings that have been verified over and over smacks either of pandering to a vocal minority of far-left anti-science types, or of willful ignorance.  And in neither case can I vote for her in good conscience.

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.

Shut up, Jim.

It would be really nice if we could stop giving credence to celebrities just because they're celebrities.

Just like any other slice of humanity, there are going to be some famous actors and singers and so on who are intelligent and sensible (Matt Damon seems to me to be one of those) and others who are either dumb as a bag of hammers, or else batshit insane (hello, Tom Cruise?).  Being in the limelight -- even being a brilliant actor or singer -- does not necessarily correlate with having brains.  So let's stop acting as if everything that comes out of a celebrity's mouth has to be divinely-inspired wisdom, okay?

The last in a long line of A-list stars to demonstrate a significantly low IQ is Jim Carrey, who recently went on a tirade in response to the passage of California Senate Bill 277, which outlawed personal and religious exemptions for parents trying to avoid having their children vaccinated before attending public school.  Carrey has long been anti-vaxx, and in fact was once in a romantic relationship with noted anti-vaxx wingnut Jenny McCarthy.  And now Carrey has launched into a diatribe on Twitter against the new law, saying that it legalizes "poisoning children."  Here are a few of his salvos:

California Gov says yes to poisoning more children with mercury and aluminum in manditory [sic] vaccines.  This corporate fascist must be stopped. 

They say mercury in fish is dangerous but forcing all of our children to be injected with mercury in thimerosol [sic] is no risk.  Make sense? 

I am not anti-vaccine. I am anti-thimerosal, anti-mercury.  They have taken some of the mercury laden thimerosal out of vaccines.  NOT ALL! 

The CDC can't solve a problem they helped start.  It's too risky to admit they have been wrong about mercury/thimerasol [sic].  They are corrupt.

First of all, if he doesn't like the stuff, learning how to spell it might be a good place to start for improving his credibility.  (It's "thimerosal," for the record.)  Second, although he's right that not all vaccines are thimerosal-free, all of the ones given as routine childhood vaccinations are (or are available in a thimerosal-free version).  (It's significant that the one the anti-vaxxers rail about the most often -- the MMR vaccine -- has never contained thimerosal.)

Third, of course, is that in any discussion of vaccines, we have to take a look at relative risk.  Have there been children who have had adverse reactions to routine vaccinations?  Sure.  No medical procedure, however innocuous, is completely risk-free.  There have been extensive studies of the relative risks of side effects, from mild to severe, for every vaccine that's commonly administered, and the vast majority of side effects from routine vaccinations are mild and temporary.  (Here's a summary of those studies -- oh, but wait.  It comes from the "corrupt CDC."  Never mind.)

What about the risk of childhood disease?  Again, the risk is known, and it's high.  Diseases like measles, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis A and B, and polio -- for all of which there are now safe and effective vaccines -- are killers.  It's significant that the boy that I wrote about a few weeks ago, the first person to contract diphtheria in Spain in 29 years, died last week, and that the parents are now blaming the anti-vaccination movement for their decision not to have him immunized.  "The family is devastated and admit that they feel tricked, because they were not properly informed," said Catalan public health chief Antoni Mateu.  "They have a deep sense of guilt, which we are trying to rid them of."

Interesting way of putting it.  Maybe they should be experiencing a deep sense of guilt, given that it was their decision that led to his death.  And it's hard to see how in this day and age, being anti-vaxx qualifies as not being "properly informed."  Falling for scare talk and pseudoscience isn't "not being properly informed," it's being anti-scientific and gullible, which isn't the same thing.  And there's a fundamental principle operating here, which is that you can't save people from themselves.  Humans are going to make dumb decisions and then cast around for someone to blame them on -- this is hardly a new problem.

It's just tragic when those decisions result in the death of an innocent child.

Which, by the way, is exactly why we should have mandatory vaccination laws.  Adults are going to make their own decisions, and some of them will be based in ignorance and fear, and some of them will result in people being injured or killed.  But society has a responsibility to step in and protect children when their parents won't do so voluntarily.

That's what Senate Bill 277 is about.

And as far as Jim Carrey: dude, go back to making movies.  You made some pretty good ones -- The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are two of my favorite movies.  (You also made some pretty stupid ones, but let's be as charitable as we can, here.)  You are not only not a scientist, you have shown that you can't even make an intelligent assessment of scientific research.  Hell, you don't seem to be able to spell.

So maybe it's time to retreat to Hollywood in disarray.  Or failing that, simply shut up.  That would work, too.

Giving up on convincing the pigeons

The furor over vaccinations has a long history.

The history, which is intensely frustrating to people like me who think that the anti-vaxxers' rhetoric borders on deliberate endangerment of people's lives, seems always to play out the same way.  In 1998, the now-infamous Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a study in Lancet claiming that there was a connection between the MMR vaccination and autism.  The study turned out to involve only twelve patients, so there was a bias right from the beginning that was so big you could drive a tanker truck through it.  When you add the investigation by Brian Deer that uncovered the fact that Wakefield was being subsidized by a group of lawyers who were conspiring to file lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, then... well, you get the picture.

The British Medical Journal called Wakefield's study "fraudulent."  Ten of the twelve authors of the Wakefield paper formally withdrew their support in 2004, stating, "We wish to make it clear that in [the 1998] paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient.  However, the possibility of such a link was raised and consequent events have had major implications for public health.  In view of this, we consider now is the appropriate time that we should together formally retract the interpretation placed upon [the] findings in the [1998] paper, according to precedent."

None of that mattered.  The anti-vaccination movement was off and running.  A claim was made that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative in many vaccines, was what was causing the link between vaccines and autism (which was based on a fraudulent claim from the beginning, remember?).  Many governments caved to the hype, removing thimerosal, which had been used safely since the 1930s.  Surprisingly enough, the rates of autism were unaffected.

That apparently didn't matter, either.

[image courtesy of the Center for Disease Control and the Wikimedia Commons]

Then the claim started running about that getting "natural" diseases was better for your immune system than getting "artificial" vaccines.  Apparently the idea was that getting diseases was like lifting weights for the immune system.  In 2002, the American Institute of Medicine sponsored a study to see if this was true.  They found no support for it.

Guess what effect this had on the anti-vaccination movement?

Further studies tried to find a link between vaccination and multiple sclerosis, ALS, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and sudden infant death syndrome.  Yup... no connection.  So the anti-vaxxers decided that some children were more sensitive to vaccines, and the studies hadn't taken that into account.  Other, more extreme spokespeople for the movement started claiming that the researchers, not to mention all the doctors and nurses, were shills for "Big Pharma."  "Big Pharma," they say, wants to keep people sick (or worse, make people sick) in order to keep making profits.  And people like me, who object to policy being driven by folks who evidently have no understanding of how science and peer review are done, are just plain stupid.

But the research continued to pile up, and always in favor of the safety of childhood vaccination.  So the anti-vaxxers shifted the goalposts again.  Now they went after gardasil, the vaccine against HPV, a virus shown to be one of the main triggers for cervical, oropharyngeal, vaginal, and anal cancer.  So that was studied.  Once again: the vaccine is safe and effective.  Any side effects are extremely uncommon, and the risk is far lower than the risk of contracting the virus and eventually developing cancer.  But the claims continued to circulate; I've heard more than one parent say, "I'm not having my kid get the HPV vaccine!  It's too risky!"

So more studies were done.  No connection continued to be found.  And just last week, a study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that in a study of 95,000 children, there was no link between vaccinations and autism -- being vaccinated doesn't alter the risk even in children who have a higher risk of autism from other factors.

An article about the study in Vocativ states that "this should end the debate once and for all."  But it won't.  You know why?

This is not a debate.  This is people who understand science trying to argue with alarmists who believe every damn thing a celebrity says, over the advice given by medical researchers.  This is playing chess with a pigeon -- no matter how cleverly you play, the pigeon just shits all over the chessboard and then struts around like it won.

This should have been over, as a discussion, twenty years ago.  Eliminating vaccines is dangerous and irresponsible.  The childhood diseases of the pre-vaccine period are not mild tummy aches; kids died of them.  Lots of kids.  But you know why the anti-vaxxers don't recognize that?  Here's why.

No one in the United States remembers how horrific these diseases are.  Hardly anyone dies of them any more, because nearly everyone has had the fucking vaccine.  Measles is not just "a bunch of spots," it causes sky-high fever that can leave a child deaf or permanently brain damaged.  Mumps can cause sterility, especially in young men.  Diphtheria kills you by slow suffocation.  Typhoid gives children such serious vomiting and diarrhea that they can die of dehydration, not to mention getting lovely symptoms like intestinal hemorrhage.

Vivid enough mental images for you?

Some people do change their views, but it often takes being walloped by a metaphorical two-by-four for it to happen.  Last month there was the highly publicized story of a mom from Ottawa who was an outspoken anti-vaxxer, but changed her tune after all seven of her unvaccinated children simultaneously contracted whooping cough.

Wouldn't it be nice if people could be convinced by evidence and logic, and not by their children being at risk of dying?

So my general opinion is that if the research we already had hasn't convinced people, further research won't, either.  It's time we stop wasting resources on these people.  The evolutionary biologists learned that long ago; you don't see them doing research and publishing papers to demonstrate over and over again that the Earth is not six thousand years old.  We need to treat the anti-vaxxers as what they are -- the young-earth creationists of the medical world.

And mandate that children be vaccinated, nationwide.  No exemptions, sorry.

This discussion is over.

A recall-the-idiots clause

There should be some kind of provision for removing from office politicians who unequivocally demonstrate that they are morons.

Being in public office is highly demanding, requires thinking on one's feet, and necessitates having a working knowledge of a great many different areas.  So I'm not expecting perfection, here.  Everyone makes missteps, and our leaders are no exception.  They should not be excoriated just for uttering a gaffe here or there.

But sometimes, there are examples of idiocy so egregious that they really should prompt a recall of some kind.  We need to be led by the best minds we have -- and if politicians demonstrate that their IQs are lower than their shoe sizes, they should be shown the door.

Because I'm guessing that some of these people are too stupid to find the door unassisted.

I bring this up because of four -- count 'em, four -- examples of deeply ingrained stupidity in our elected officials just from the past three days.  WARNING: put a pillow on your desk, because I'm guessing there will be multiple headdesks to follow.

Let's start with Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, who was asked at a press conference about the link between vaccines and autism.  He responded that he chose not to vaccinate his own children.  "We didn't immunize," he said.  "They're healthy."  Which is analogous to a guy saying, "Seatbelts are unnecessary.  I drive without a seatbelt, and I'm still alive."

Oh, and have I mentioned that Representative Loudermilk is on the House Subcommittee for Science and Technology?

Then we have Idaho Representative Vito Barbieri, who was in a hearing about a bill that involved the use of telemedicine -- using tiny remote devices to give doctors information, such as a little camera that could be swallowed in place of a standard colonoscopy.  Barbieri asked a doctor who was giving testimony in the hearing if the same technique could be used to give doctors information about the fetus during pregnancy.

"Can this same procedure then be done in a pregnancy?" Barbieri asked.  "Swallowing a camera and helping the doctor determine what the situation is?"

The doctor patiently explained that that wouldn't work, because a woman's reproductive system isn't connected to her digestive tract.

"Fascinating," Barbieri replied.  "That makes sense."

Is it just me that finds it appalling that we're allowing men who don't know that a woman's uterus isn't connected to her colon to make decisions regarding women's health?

Even worse is New York Assemblyman Thomas Abinanti, who wants a bill passed blocking the use of GMOs in vaccines.  Here's the language he wants passed:

PROHIBITION ON THE USE OF VACCINES CONTAINING GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS.
1. NO PERSON SHALL BE VACCINATED WITH A VACCINE THAT CONTAINS GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS.
2. “GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISM” SHALL MEAN: (A) AN ORGANISM THAT HAS BEEN ALTERED AT THE MOLECULAR OR CELLULAR LEVEL BY MEANS THAT ARE NOT POSSIBLE UNDER NATURAL CONDITIONS OR PROCESSES, INCLUDING RECOMBINANT DNA AND RNA TECHNIQUES, CELL FUSION, MICROENCAPSULATION, MACROENCAPSULATION, GENE DELETION AND DOUBLING, INTRODUCTION OF A FOREIGN GENE, AND A PROCESS THAT CHANGES THE POSITIONS OF GENES, OTHER THAN A MEANS CONSISTING EXCLUSIVELY OF BREEDING, CONJUGATION, FERMENTATION, HYBRIDIZATION, IN VITRO FERTILIZATION, OR TISSUE CULTURE; AND (B) AN ORGANISM MADE THROUGH SEXUAL OR ASEXUAL REPRODUCTION, OR BOTH, INVOLVING AN ORGANISM DESCRIBED IN PARAGRAPH (A) OF THIS SUBDIVISION, IF POSSESSING ANY OF THE ALTERED MOLECULAR OR CELLULAR CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ORGANISM SO DESCRIBED.

There's just one tiny problem with all of this.  The processes he's describing are the ones used to inactivate the viruses and bacteria used in vaccines.  If the bill passed, it would require that vaccines contain unmodified pathogens -- i.e., the strains of the microorganisms that cause disease.

Can't you hear what the doctors would have to tell parents?  "Just to let you know, Mrs. Fernwinkle.  One of the side effects of this tetanus vaccine is that your son will get lockjaw and die, because I'm injecting him with the tetanus bacteria itself."

But no one is a better candidate for the "You Are Too Stupid To Govern" award than Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is the chair of the Committee on the Environment and Public Works, and who this week brought a snowball into the Senate and threw it on the floor.  "In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, 'You know what this is?'  It's a snowball, from outside here.  So it's very, very cold out.  Very unseasonable."

Which makes me want to scream, "There is a difference between weather and climate, you illiterate moron!"  "It just snowed" is not an argument against climate change, just as "I have lots of money" is not an argument against world poverty.  And ironically, the same day as Inhofe did his idiotic demonstration, scientists at Berkeley National Laboratory in California announced that they had data directly correlating carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere with the trapping of thermal energy -- something that has been demonstrated many times in the lab, but never under ordinary conditions out in the environment.  The data -- which has been collected over a period of ten years from two widely-separated sites -- agrees exactly with climate-change models that nitwits like Inhofe think have been manufactured by evil scientists for their own personal gain.

So I really think we need to have an option for recall.  An "I'm sorry, we have to hold a revote, because we accidentally elected a blithering idiot to public office" clause.

I mean, seriously: do we want these people in charge of making decisions about our future?

Now, I have to go.  I've got an ice pack and some aspirin waiting for me.  My forehead hurts.