Dear News Media: THIS is How You Do A 'Panel Discussion' About Vaccines.

[TrollBuster9090]

Last edited Wed Feb 11, 2015, 05:44 PM - Edit history (1)

It's a tragedy that the only rational news organizations are funded by public dollars, but I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise. Private news organizations should RECLAIM their integrity, and start doing their job again.

Follow the CBC's lead. You DO NOT set up a debate between 'both sides' of a false argument. The fact that there are three people with medical or immunology degrees who claim to have one view for the sake of selling books to naive parents, while all the other health care professionals have the opposite view does NOT mean there are 'two sides' to this. Any more than the fact that you can find three climate scientists who are being paid by the AEI who claim climate change isn't caused by human activity while all the other climate scientists have the opposite view does not mean there are 'two sides' to that science either.

I don't blame some parents for fearing vaccines. They're not experts, and when they hear that 'opinion is divided' on a complicated technical issue, what are they SUPPOSED to think? I blame the anti-vaccine movement on the private news media for NOT DOING THEIR JOB and actually doing their background research. Why should they, when they'll get more viewers and more advertising dollars for NOT doing it. It's so much easier, cheaper and more sensational to set up a televised cage match between two experts in a false debate.

THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD DO IT. (Note: Dr. Danielle Martin explains HOW this non-existent debate has gotten so far at the 14:50 mark. It's because people feel the need to be fair to 'both sides' of a debate. But sometimes that feeling is misguided, and counterproductive.)

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THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD NOT do it. DO NOT advocate 'respecting' the opinions of people who have been deliberately misinformed. Instead, why don't you try INFORMING them INSTEAD?

[proverbialwisdom]

1. Dear News Media: THIS is How You Do A Graph About Measles (top, not bottom).

PBS via AOA: [center][/center]


NYT:

[TrollBuster9090]

2. Great, the AOA web site found the MORTALITY data for the pre-vaccine era. Now could you please show

Now could you please show us the MORBIDITY data from the pre-vaccine era? If you can't find it on the AOA website (which isn't a surprise) you can find it in the documents below.

The issue was never so much the death rate, although that would be reason enough. But the death rate between 1910 and 1960 had declined because medical science had advanced to the point of being able to pull people back from the edge of death due to complications. But massive numbers of people were still becoming extremely sick due to severe complications, causing misery, and wasting billions of dollars on un-necessary hospitalizations. While these complications didn't necessarily cause death, they often resulted in permanent problems, including deafness, mental retardation, facial and body scarring etc....

From the Journal of Infectious diseases:
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S1.long

By the late 1950s, even before the introduction of measles vaccine, measles-related deaths and case fatality rates in the United States had decreased markedly, presumably as a result of improvement in health care and nutrition.


Nevertheless, in the late 1950s, serious complications due to measles remained frequent and costly. As a result of measles virus infections, an average of 150,000 patients had respiratory complications and 4000 patients had encephalitis each year; the latter was associated with a high risk of neurological sequelae and death. These complications and others resulted in an estimated 48,000 persons with measles being hospitalized every year [3].


The same study estimated total annual costs of measles in the absence of a vaccination program of $3.8 billion with 1859 deaths. The United States spends ?$45 million annually for the measles component of measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, to avoid this burden [9].

In the absence of measles vaccination, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 4.5 million children would die annually as a result of measles and its complications.

And from the Journal of Pediatrics
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/76/4/524.full.pdf+html

As a result of intensive efforts to vaccinate children, measles and its attendant complications of encephalitis and death have declined more than 99% from the prevaccine era.

In this period (20 years since licensure)it is estimated that vaccination against measles has prevented 52 million cases, 5,200 deaths, and 17,400 cases of mental retardation, achieving a net savings of$5.1 billion.

During the immediate prevaccine era, approximately 500 deaths due to measles were documented each year in the United States. Although recent detailed data are not available from the United States, information from England in 1963 indicates that measles can still have serious consequences: respiratory complications, primarily pneumonia, bronchitis, and croup, were estimated to occur in 38 per 1,000 cases; otitis media in 25 per 1,000; hospitalization in 12 per 1000; seizures in two per 1,000; encephalitis in one per 1,000; and acute behavioral changes, including irritability and confusion, in one per i,OOO. If it is assumed that similar complication rates occur in the United States, the estimated 4 million cases of measles per year immediately before vaccine licensure resulted in 150,000 cases with respiratory complications, 100,000 cases of otitis media, 48,000 hospitalizations, 7,000 instances of seizures, and 4,000 cases of encephalitis.

[Android3.14]

3. The second graph seems to address your concern

And, IMO everyone should be vaccinated.

[DeSwiss]

4. The courseness and tenor of this debate.....

...seems to me, reflective of the same level of regard that many hold toward Tea Party members and other stratum of this nation's hoi polloi - du jour. In the end instead of convincing it hardens. Instead of opening doors, it nails them shut. It only estranges the very people everyone believes needs to be engaged so they will change their ways. But it attempts to do so using shame and ignorance as a blunt objects to beat people into submission, irrespective of their ''misguided'' yet truly and honestly held beliefs. Those do not count when mobs rule.

- It is Elitism in its purest form -- a kind of malignant-intellectualism.

Are we to ignore everything? And if not, then who draws the line?

FDA lets drugs approved on fraudulent research stay on market

Misunderstanding of drug approval common: study

The FDA - Hazardous To Your Health?


K&R!

[panfluteman]

5. Thanks, DeSwiss, BUT...

Your position is at least sympathetic to the grave concerns that those of us in the anti-vaccination camp have about vaccines. And the use of what you call the blunt weapon of ridicule, which only alienates the anti-vaxxers. But I saw in a TED talk that was posted recently on manufacturing astroturf public opinion facades to mislead the public, if you see the blunt weapons of shame and ridicule being used in lieu of hard facts and solid evidence - it is right and justifiable to be highly suspicious. And such is the tenor of too much of the pro-vaccine stuff I have seen here on DU. Shame and ridicule to beat the band.

There are sound physiological, immunological and pathological mechanisms to explain the causal link between vaccines and autism and autoimmune diseases, as well as the all-too-evident epidemiological statistical correlations. The only problem is that the medical establishment is totally bought off by big pharma and the vaccine manufacturers, and will not look at the evidence - ALL the evidence - with a fair and impartial eye. The headlines in blue at the bottom of your post hold the key: abuses of the FDA and the medical / pharmaceutical industry in the name of profits over people are just too rampant. Mike Papantonio on Ring of Fire, discusses gross malpractice with hip implants and other medical devices, as well as unsafe drugs that should be taken off the market - it's all the same thing: profits over people. And this carries over into the vaccination debate, with your admittedly "elitist" pro-vaccination scientists trying to make people think that the controversy over vaccines is artificially contrived, when it isn't. What can be said rightly about manmade climate change and global warming - that any impression of controversy and an open debate is contrived - is NOT the case with the vaccination controversy!

[TrollBuster9090]

7. Can you link me to one?

"There are sound physiological, immunological and pathological mechanisms to explain the causal link between vaccines and autism and autoimmune diseases, as well as the all-too-evident epidemiological statistical correlations. "

Can you link me to one scientific journal paper that shows an 'all too evident epidemiological statistical correlation' between vaccines and autism? (It has to be an actual scientific journal.)

Because THIS study never found one, despite looking at over half a million computerized medical records.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa021134

When you use a sample size of 537,303, if there is a correlation there, you're going to find it. There wasn't one.

[EEO]

6. This is a stupid conversation to have. Vaccines are proven to save lives.

[TrollBuster9090]

8. I agree, it's stupid that we HAVE to have this conversation at this point. And the reason

we do have to have it is not the fault of naive parents who are ultimately being played for suckers by a few people who want to sell books. The reason is because the news media's behavior has been despicable on this issue. Danielle Martin explains how this non-argument has gotten so far at the 14:50 mark in the top video. Giving false equivalence to 'both sides' of a non-existent argument.