The (latest) Vaccine Song

This one's making the rounds, so I thought I'd share. Enjoy!

Antivaccine Rally in Chicago LIVE VIDEO ( 5pm Weds)

Here's live feed from the antivaccine rally going on in Chicago ... right now. So far, it's what I expected to see: a steady flow of misrepresented facts, rampant conspiracy theorizing and heaping piles of bullshit. Bon appetit.

Updated:  Show's over, so I've replaced the embedded video with Andrew Wakefield's recent appearance on the Today Show with Matt Lauer.  For a comic overview of the Wakefield controversy, click here for the "Facts in the Case of Andrew Wakefield".

I think I'll go get a flu vaccine tomorrow...

[Hat tip to Elyse @ Skepchick]

Michael Specter on the Dangers of Science Denial

Want to learn more about H1N1 flu, seaonal flu, vaccines, and who's most at risk?

Today I caught part of a radio broadcast of a special edition of Second Opinion: H1N1 Special Edition. From what little I heard, it sounds like a fantastic discussion - one I hope you'll find the time to watch in it's entirety.

Autism & Vaccines Revisted (... again)

Massimo Pigliucci's has a nice post on his blog Rationally Speaking, summarizing a recent eSkeptic article entitled "Vaccines & Autism: A Deadly Manufactroversy." It's a nice read for those unfamiliar with the history of the widespread fear that vaccines are the cause of autism, and the consequences of that belief.

In case you're wondering "Why all the fuss about the 'vaccines cause autism' scare?" I think the issue warrants attention for at least two reason: First, as countless individuals and organizations have made abundantly clear, we need vaccines to prevent the death and life-long suffering caused by preventable infectious diseases, particularly among children. Second, we need to focus on uncovering the real story behind autism so that we can more effectively treat and prevent autism spectrum disorders.


Quinn, a boy with autism, and the line of toys he made before falling asleep.
More about Quinn at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7kHSOgauhg


A boy with a rash indicative of rubella (German measles)
(click and search the CDC images for "10146" for details).
Rubella during pregnancy can cause severe birth defects.

Random Tidbits on Disease and Evolution

Swine flu is being pointed out as an example of why we need to understand evolution. Here's a few different takes on the more general subject of pathogen evolution that I thought might be of interest.

First, if you have a couple hours to kill, here's a lecture and panel discussion on the connection between viruses and cancer from Stanford University continuing education course, "Darwin's Legacy."

At the other end of the spectrum...

More on vaccination and science literacy

I just ran across a post to the blog Sandwalk, that points out the role of journalists and scientists in helping the public make informed decisions when it comes to their health. Have a look at this video (embedded below) from this post by Dr. Ben Goldacre to his blog Bad Science.

Vaccination is to Autism as Tobacco is to Lung Cancer... Ummm, What?!

Continuing this thread on vaccination against childhood diseases, a friend of mine pointed out the article Vaccine Court: Autism Debate Continues from the Huffington Post, authored by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and David Kirby. You might take a few minutes and give it a good read.

There are two big issues at play in this article - particularly within the context of vaccination legislation - that should really be presented more distinctly. These are (1) the extent to which vaccines contribute to the incidence of autism or autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and (2) the consequences of whether or not we vaccinate our population against these types of infections. What I realized in reading this article is that talking ad nauseum about the first issue without also addressing the second is, quite frankly irresponsible and dangerous.

Before I explain why, lets mention some important background information. First, I will distinguish here between the infection (i.e. simply hosting a viruses, say HIV) and the disease (i.e. the symptoms caused by that virus, which for HIV would be AIDS). This is important because not all infections lead to disease (i.e. injury or death).

We also need to understand the role of herd immunity as it relates to infections that transmit from person to person. In short, a certain percent of the population needs to be vaccinated (or otherwise resistant) to infection in order to prevent a few infections from becoming a big epidemic. If to few are vaccinated, epidemics can take off and spread through the unvaccinated portion of the population, which is bad.

Think of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals and fire-proof and flammable wooden sticks, respectively. A population then would be analogous to a pile of such sticks. With enough fire-proof (vaccinated) sticks in the pile, a single match won't start much of a fire. On the other hand, too few fire-proof sticks (too few vaccinated individuals), and whoosh! The pile goes up in flames. In the case of infectious diseases, the proportion vaccinated needs to be relatively high in order to prevent outbreaks, usually upwards of 80-90% in a given community.

Back to our two main questions. Speaking as someone with a strong quantitative background (i.e. an applied mathematics graduate student) the first thing I want to know regarding issue (1) is what evidence exists that children receiving vaccines show a significantly higher rate of ASD relative to unvaccinated children (all else being equal), and how much higher is it?

This next bit is what they leave out of the article, and is of fundamental importance to the vaccine-autism/ASD controversy: how we evaluate the answers we receive to the first question depends enormously on what we learn from issue (2). In short, if we have to pick our poison we had better know which option is worse! If we compare a sufficiently vaccinated population and one with low or no vaccination (all else being equal), how do they compare on both childhood disease and autism?

The evidence I have seen and that the experts have summarized for the rest of us suggests that there is at worst a relatively small number of cases where vaccines caused significant harm to the people that they were intended to protect. This is true of most drugs, medical treatments, safety mechanisms in automobiles, and countless other things we make and provide one another - simply put, nothing is perfect though we can usually do a little bit better and a whole lot worse.

So lets revisit the common (and very flawed) argument against vaccines that goes something like this: "vaccines cause injury and death, therefore they are bad and we should stop pushing them on the public." Sounds reasonable, right? Well, it isn't. A more relevant statement to make would go something like "if vaccines cause injury and death, we should categorize them as bad if they caused more injury and death than the diseases which they prevent."

While this comparison seems like a no-brainer, it hardly ever gets as much thought as it deserves! This is in part because of the concern (and in many cases fear) many parents have over the perceived risk of vaccines, and also because there is more anecdotal evidence on the vaccine-ASD issue floating around out there than on the vaccinated-unvaccinated issue despite the often unnoticed historical figures. We also have more control over our own individual choices about vaccination compared to our contracting diphtheria, for example, which focuses attention there instead of on the larger issue of society doing the greatest for its people.

This my friends, is why so many public health professionals and concerned citizens push so strongly to fight all the anti-vaccination rhetoric and fear that pervades that ether of public information and knowledge. Vaccines may cause great harm to a very small few - each and every case meaning the world to someone, and each deserving the appropriate level of recognition and in some cases redress.

But without vaccines, and without enough vaccine coverage to ensure we stand above the herd immunity threshold, the cost in human lives and human suffering would be much greater. And that folks, just isn't an acceptable alternative.

I'll leave you to look back to the tobacco analogy drawn in the article above, and how irresponsible it is to compare the tobacco industry with the medical industry. Tobacco products don't do much good for society (as far as I know) - and they certainly don't protect little boys and girls from the wrath of so many truly horrible diseases that once plagued our population.

Nice article on "Why We Vaccinate"

I was just browsing the blog Sandwalk and saw a like to a nice article entitled Why We Vaccinate by James D. Macdonald. Give it a read!

This article was inspired by this news story which reports on the death of one of five children in Minnesota recently infected with Haemophilus influenzae B (Hib).

To vaccinate, or not to vaccinate... is that the question?

A friend of mine posted a link to this video today, which I thought deserved some critical commentary. Before I get into it, click below to watch the clip. Even better click here to watch it in another window - I'm sure you'll want to go back and forth and review some of the video segments as you read on.

Lets start with Katie Couric's opening line in the piece, the rest of which is done by CBS's Sharyl Attkisson (whose strengths are more in matters of money and not medicine):

For years now parents have wondered if vaccines are linked to conditions like autism and ADD. Government officials and some scientists say there is no connection, and they are often backed by independent experts. But just how independent are they?

The first sentence implies those rightfully concerned parents haven't found any good answers, which is hardly the case. Plenty of answers can be found through one's local medical community, on the web at places like the National Network for Immunization Information, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and so on. The claim that vaccinations cause autism and ADD have been investigated repeatedly by the scientific community and all the evidence suggests that vaccination won't give someone autism, ADD or the like - which is good news!

Taking those findings more skeptically, they suggest that even if vaccines were capable of causing autism or ADD, the odds of it happening to any particular individual are vanishingly small. That is, you are much more likely to be killed in some kind of accident in the months after getting the shots - and much less likely to develop autism or ADD.

The second part of this opening line is the real reason this clip caught my attention. The rather harmless sounding sentence calls into question the validity of all the work that has been done to understand the safety and risks associated with vaccines - by literally thousands of skilled people trained in using state of the art tools and methods to answer these kinds of questions - all cast into doubt by whether or not some organizations and individuals truly making independent claims from what the drug companies might say.

To give you a more clearly dubious yet analogous statement, this is like saying that if you walked into a car dealership - having done your homework and concluded that a Honda Civic was the perfect car for you - you should suddenly become overwhelmed with doubt about your decision upon hearing the clearly biased salesmen tell you to go with the Civic. Whether or not some (in this case, 3) individuals and organizations have a bias in favor of an otherwise good idea does not invalidate all of the other evidence supporting the notion that it really is a good idea!

The clip then goes on to point out financial ties between drug companies and three entities that one would expect to be "independent" from the likes of Merck and Wyeth: The American Academy of Pediatrics, Every Child by Two, and outspoken pediatrician Dr. Paul Offit, M.D.

I must mention that Dr. Offit would otherwise be someone concerned parents would absolutely adore, were they made aware of his dedication to preventing childhood diseases, his work in doing just that, and his books to help inform the public on these matters. Instead, Sharyl Attkisson further vilifies him with remarks like "he has gone so far to say that babies can theoretically tolerate '... 10,000 vaccines at once.' " (This statement is a testament to the amazing capacity of the human immune system to fend of pathogens, by the way - not some expressed desire make pincushins of infants!)

So what of their examples? Questionable or not, the consequences of any bias are blown way out of proportion here - although clearly some of these associations are to be frowned upon. AAP received $342K from Wyeth ("for a community grant program"), $433K from Merck (the same year their HPV vaccine was introduced), and unnamed funds from "another top donor, sanofi aventis." Each Child by 2 admits taking money, claiming no conflict of interest. However, their former treasurers - and the word "former" was absent from the script, but shows up in the visuals - included an official from Wyeth and one "paid advisor to big pharmaceutical clients" (which might sound bad, but without knowing the nature of the advising its hard to pass a quick judgment).

We could go on and on, for example the statement that

Today's immunization schedule calls for kids to get 55 doses of vaccines by age 6. Ideally it makes for a healthier society.

"Ideally?" How about "clearly" or maybe "demonstrably"? Immunizations as part of overall improved health care do make for a healthier society than without them. If you need some evidence of this fact, consider the last time someone in your neighborhood died from or became paralyzed by polio. Even better evidence is readily available if you look for it, such as in this article, for example.

Overall, I hope you can see how a little bit of critical thought on this piece turns up a lot of other issues that are probably more worthwhile to think about than how much money Merck gave the APP for a community grant program. Before you go, watch the piece again and let me know what you think!

Finally, I'll end with a teaser for an upcoming post where I'll come back to this thread and discuss a few other question from this clip. These come from the way that Dr. Paul Offit was dubbed a "vaccine industry insider" (the implication here is of course, not positive) because his Merck-funded position at Children's Hospital, and the nature of his work in trying to prevent childhood diseases.

It begs the question: What role should industrial/commercial/any scientists play in promoting products or information that by all measures will benefit society (in this case, that save lives)? When does "independent" trump "expert"?