Wired.com: An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All

[SemiCharmedQuark]

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.
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Before smallpox was eradicated with a vaccine, it killed an estimated 500 million people. And just 60 years ago, polio paralyzed 16,000 Americans every year, while rubella caused birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 newborns. Measles infected 4 million children, killing 3,000 annually, and a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b caused Hib meningitis in more than 15,000 children, leaving many with permanent brain damage. Infant mortality and abbreviated life spans — now regarded as a third world problem — were a first world reality.

Today, because the looming risk of childhood death is out of sight, it is also largely out of mind, leading a growing number of Americans to worry about what is in fact a much lesser risk: the ill effects of vaccines. If your newborn gets pertussis, for example, there is a 1 percent chance that the baby will die of pulmonary hypertension or other complications. The risk of dying from the pertussis vaccine, by contrast, is practically nonexistent — in fact, no study has linked DTaP (the three-in-one immunization that protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis) to death in children. Nobody in the pro-vaccine camp asserts that vaccines are risk-free, but the risks are minute in comparison to the alternative.

Still, despite peer-reviewed evidence, many parents ignore the math and agonize about whether to vaccinate. Why? For starters, the human brain has a natural tendency to pattern-match — to ignore the old dictum “correlation does not imply causation” and stubbornly persist in associating proximate phenomena. If two things coexist, the brain often tells us, they must be related. Some parents of autistic children noticed that their child’s condition began to appear shortly after a vaccination. The conclusion: “The vaccine must have caused the autism.” Sounds reasonable, even though, as many scientists have noted, it has long been known that autism and other neurological impairments often become evident at or around the age of 18 to 24 months, which just happens to be the same time children receive multiple vaccinations. Correlation, perhaps. But not causation, as studies have shown.

The anti-vaxers have already descended like a swarm of locusts on this article:




"If vaccines work and your children get vaccinated how do they contract the disease again? Oh, so they really don’t work and you just want to blame someone who didn’t go with the flow? Wow!!!! Has anyone ever heard of Russian Roulette???"




"Aren’t the odds of this vaccine doing anything useful kind of low? How do they know they picked the correct strains? Where are the studies on effect on people of this vaccine?
Oh wait….there aren’t any.

Get is line Orwellians it’s time to shut up and do what the establishment wants you to.

Mercury in your body = BAD

Wired should not even be in this debate.
Yes, I agree. Standard pull the line crap, no research done by the author.
Note….
All most every single news corp has one or more executives that are also on the boards of the vaccine makers (wonder if Wired as well). For example the folks that control Reuters, fox, associate press…etc (and those are just the ones I bothered to look at, it’s friggin scary.)Hmm……conflict of interest?

And Im not even going to get into who actually ownes the vaccine manufacturers."




"@#*& the flu shot. Drink tea."


"Traditional or not, the notion, however claimed, that vaccs prevent disease is outright blatant scientific fraud, or at best grand delusion. On the other, harsh experience and traditional science prove both correlation and cause/effect between vaccs and a Pandora’s box of health horrors, all of those claimed by the people you imply are nuts and far more. The government and medical industry have been in each other’s pants since their inception, and with pharmafraud’s help are farming us like barnyard hogs, only barnyard hogs are treated with far more compassion. And this article as well illustrates the trashy, arrogant, deformed intellect that the mass media requires to perpetuate the culture of fraud."



"Daren Gray…..Your comment said it all. The corruption in science, especially medical science where the pharmaceutical industry turns our bodies into potential profit centers and our health into a commodity to be traded in the medical industry.

Offit is on the sinking ship of corrupt science (picture Titanic). We’ve all had to get a scientific education one way or another just to protect ourselves from those who are the true masters of methodically flawed science….the vaccine medical industrial complex and those journalists who can’t seem to ask the right questions on the vaccination controversy.

Scientists alone aren’t going to kill science, they need the help of a lazy sloppy media, who just print what these scientists say.

How many of the 12 epidemiological studies that Dr. Offit cited, did Amy Wallace read? Spend some time on the science, Ms Wallace, and you will see the emperor is wearing no clothes."

ROFL on that last one. How loosely the term "scientific education" gets thrown around.


http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_waronscience/?cpage=1

[TZ]

1. Anti-vaxxers are the scum of the earth

Responsible for more death and disease than any "corrupt Pharmaceutical". I HATE THEM.

[LeftishBrit]

2. Actually, the right-libertarian 'health freedom' nuts who think that government health provision is

teh eevul, are IMO the real scum of the earth (or at least deluded by people who are). But there is considerable overlap betwewen the two. I get so pissed off with the types who think that the government are out to poison the 'sheeple' with vaccines and medicines - when even in Europe we must continually fight against Thatcherite service-cutters; when in America 45000 people a year die from lack of insurance; when 1.4 million children die every year in developing countries through *not having access to vaccines*! Talk about fiddling while Rome, or rather the entire world, is burning!