Tag: vaccines

A disgraceful movie, but a good newspaper article

March 26, 2016 • 3:49 pm

by Greg Mayer

Update: The Tribeca Film Festival has pulled the film, apparently in response to widespread criticism. Details at Jezebel. Thanks to reader horrabin for the alert.

 

Jerry has taken note of the upcoming showing at the Tribeca Film Festival of a ‘documentary’ by the disgraced and de-licensed British physician Andrew Wakefield.(And  Orac has rather full coverage of the matter at Respectful Insolence.) Though the prominent woo-coddling is disheartening, there is a bright point amidst the darkness: the refreshingly straightforward coverage by the New York Times.  Reporters Melena Ryzik and Pam Belluck do not engage in the wishy-washy journalism of ‘controversy’, but tell it like it is.

They open their piece by calling the film’s anti-vaccination thesis “widely debunked”, describe Wakefield as a “discredited former doctor”, note that his 1988 study on the subject was retracted, which led to the revocation of his license for “ethical violations and failure to disclose financial conflicts of interest”, and further note that the festival website takes no notice of this essential context.

They also quote critics of the decision to screen the film. Some highlights:

“Unless the Tribeca Film Festival plans to definitively unmask Andrew Wakefield, it will be yet another disheartening chapter where a scientific fraud continues to occupy a spotlight and overshadows the damage he has left behind in the important story of vaccine safety and success,” Dr. Mary Anne Jackson, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said in an email. …

[Documentarian Penny Lane said] including “Vaxxed” in the documentary section “threatens the credibility of not just the other filmmakers in your doc slate, but the field in general…. this film is not some sort of disinterested investigation into the ‘vaccines cause autism’ hoax; this film is directed by the person who perpetuated the hoax.” …

Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical School, called the decision to show the film “particularly sad” because the Tribeca festival receives attention far beyond New York.

I am delighted to see a major news source write the plain truth, and not resort to the ‘he said-she said’ format, which leaves readers at best confused, and often misinformed. As we’ve noted before here at WEIT, too often journalists, in a misguided search for ‘balance’, give voice to thoroughly discredited ideas. But sometimes, there is only one side to the story– vaccines don’t cause autism; the global climate is warming; and evolution is true.

Something and somethinger

July 1, 2015 • 11:05 am

by Grania Spingies

There are a whole lot of reasons why people deny truths, and most of them don’t do it out of malice or contempt for humanity. In many cases they truly believe that they are doing the right thing. It is fairly self-evident that many of the anti-vaccine brigade do this because they truly believe they are saving their children from the harm of a callous conspiracy between the CDC, Big Pharma and your local GP. Ignorance may not be an excuse, but it is their reason.

It is pretty hard to win over hearts and minds on these issues, but the best that the pro science-based medicine side can do is to keep on refuting the worst myths and distortions.

But it really doesn’t help when someone with a disproportionate ratio of influence to actual facts gets up on their high horse and spouts forth.

dumb

In text form:

California Gov says yes to poisoning more children with mercury and aluminum in manditory 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 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. They are corrupt.

Oy.

dumb-and-dumber-movie-image-jim-carrey-slice

His swipe at the CDC was no doubt in response to people informing him that thimerosal is no longer used in most vaccines any more, and especially not children’s vaccines even though studies have shown to have no evidence of harm at the dosage that was typically used.

The CDC addresses this issue fairly clearly here, and has several papers on the subject available to download and read here. True Believers™ don’t read papers, of course, because they are all a part of the corrupt fascist conspiracy. But people who are genuinely undecided might. This is what the CDC actually says on the subject.

Thimerosal is a mercury-containing preservative used in some vaccines and other products since the 1930’s. There is no convincing evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines, except for minor reactions like redness and swelling at the injection site. However, in July 1999, the Public Health Service agencies, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and vaccine manufacturers agreed that thimerosal should be reduced or eliminated in vaccines as a precautionary measure.

Since 2001, with the exception of some influenza (flu) vaccines, thimerosal is not used as a preservative in routinely recommended childhood vaccines.

The line of “I am not anti-vaccine, only anti-poison” is a favorite refrain amongst the anti-vax advocates in recent years, but Dave Gorski over at Science Based Medicine has taken this claim apart with his usual attention to minute detail. The dangers of failing to vaccinate children is also comprehensively covered here: https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/category/vaccines/.

If you see the Carrey rant circulating on your social media platform of choice, maybe help out by adding a useful link to an evidence-based source.

The perils of “balanced” reporting

May 2, 2013 • 7:06 pm

by Greg Mayer

Curtis Brainard, editor of The Observatory, the Columbia Journalism Review‘s online science journalism section, has a nice article up tracing the role of the news media in encouraging and spreading anti-vaccination pseudoscience, including the role of the disgraced British physician Andrew Wakefield, and the fear mongering of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (The latter once wrote a piece for Salon, which Salon later deleted, in doing so decrying the fraud tainted “science” of those propagating ” the debunked, and dangerous, autism-vaccine link.”) He discusses the differing reactions and developments in the UK and the US, including how  anti-vaccine pseudoscience developed later in the US, and how some journalists built their careers around promoting pseudoscience.

One thing he notes is that “balanced” reporting seems to have helped encourage the spread of the bogus claims:

[T]he study [of journalistic coverage] raises the problem of “objectivity” in stories for which a preponderance of evidence is on one side of a “debate.” In such cases, “balanced” coverage can be irresponsible, because it suggests a controversy where none really exists. (Think climate change, and how such he-said-she-said coverage helped sustain the illusion of a genuine debate within the science community.)

Although Brainard did not mention it, I’m sure that WEIT readers will immediately see the parallels to coverage of creationism and “teach the controversy” campaigns. I once parodied such he said-she said coverage here at WEIT:

You’ve all read the kind of story that will have a line like, “Dr. Smith, a paleontologist at the natural history museum, said Triceratops had been extinct for more than 60 million years before the origin of man, while Dr. Jones from the institute said Triceratops had been ridden by men like horses until the recent worldwide flood drowned them all”.

I’m glad to see that media critics like Brainard are critiquing this type of reporting, and that many journalists are becoming aware of the dangers of “balance” when one side has nothing at all. Other previous posts on vaccines at WEIT here and here. For regular coverage of medical pseudoscience, see Orac’s Respectful Insolence, and Ben Goldacres’s Bad Science.

h/t Andrew Sullivan