I won't be convinced that Time is at all serious about their brand of stupid unless they name Glenn Beck Man of the Year. Even "The Angry American" won't cut it. #media
Have you watched the CNN online newscast? It's two college kids doing the news from the bridge of the Enterprise but with most of the props missing. #media
@TheBusinessGuy: If there was no event that I was watching on one of their live channels, I've actually been known to leave the stationary shot of the White House or some other quiet thing open, rather than listen to the newbies blather. #media
@Magister: I know what you mean. I love Blitzer's idiotic tags to stories. For example, if Earth were blown up by the Martians, Blitzer would say on the outro, "The Earth has been blown up. Certainly a tragedy, and we will be following this." Jack Cafferty always looks at him as if he's a fly in Cafferty's soup. #media
@TheBusinessGuy:
What gets me is when he's "interviewing" a reporter or analyst to provide background and asks questions which he should be able to answer, if he's half as smart as his audience, but some producer's obviously telling him there's an interesting factoid somebody, somewhere may not have heard.
The anchors on cnn.com were much the same way, except unlike Blitzer, I never expected them to know.
@Magister: After watching Blitzer for five minutes, you really don't expect him to know much of anything. Actually, the only CNN headliners with real heft are Amanpour and Zakaria--especially Zakaria, whose Sunday show always feel like the ideal seminar at the Kennedy School. #media
Our pediatricians' office policy on vaccinations didn't leave any room for dissent, any leeway in scheduling vaccinations differently. As our doctor explained, the English quack who recommended staggering or diving vacs later admitted that he'd suggested that purely out of thin air.
Thing is, there are all manner of reasons to freak out when it comes to your kids' health and safety. The cottage industry in blaming vaccinations, however, is about as scientific and reality-based as a good old witch hunt. Our pediatrician is old enough to vividly recall holding kids as they died of diseases we now have vaccines to prevent.
My kid? Healthy as a freaking horse. But I just touched wood when I said that. Tomorrow, I'm scheduling his next round of shots.
@Mediahohoho: Absolutely. The most skilled and caring peds docs that I know take that same stance: I won't help you commit child abuse because of your ignorance.
The only pediatricians that don't require adherence to the correct schedule are either the very few who actually believe that anti-vax hype (i.e. either don't understand evidence based medicine or so egotistical that they ignore it even when its reached the point of lunacy to do so) or the vast majority that don't agree with alternate vaccination schedules but go along with parents either because its easier or as a means to 'appease the customers'.
To neither type would I ever consider taking my child. The truly anti-vax ones are just plain ignorant. The appeasers are the same ones who will prescribe unnecessary antibiotics to parents who demand them and who currently are flattening the supply of tamiflu liquid by rx-ing it to every kid with a fever (regardless of whether they meet CDC criteria for being at increased risk or not.) You don't want a pediatrician who feels it necessary to appease the 'customer' because if you want the best care for your kid, you want one who sees your child as their patient; their responsibility; but never in a million years a customer.
This is Cassandra. I am not anti-vaccinations, nor was I ever. Nowhere in the column did he say I'm against vaccinations. If you read Joel's column more carefully, you'd see that I was (and am) concerned about some of the ingredients in some of the vaccines. Which is why I decided on spacing some of the vaccines out a little. (Read Dr. William Sears' very balanced, pro-vaccine book and there's a section in there about studies regarding aluminum overload in babies). Giving the Hep B vaccine at birth is a very new practice and our baby will get the vaccine soon. Long before his teen years. (Which, again: Joel did not say we are vaccinating OUR baby for Hep B when he's a teen). Get your facts straight and stop jumping to slanderous conclusions. It's really pathetic that gawker passes judgments and even blatant lies like this. But on the other hand, it kinda makes me feel like a celebrity! (P.S. Note to this commentator "NickelMD": I hope you are not really a doctor. Any doctor that would write "I should be able to piss in a cup and make them drink it after I finish beating them bloody" is clearly a disturbed person who should not be in the field of medicine).
You obviously do not understand the term hyperbole.
You are also in precisely the same camp as anti-vaccine whackjobs, with the exception that you are more subtle in your quackery. And I will admit, my hat is off to the skill at dissembling that the anti-vaccine whackjob who came up with the PR friendly slogan 'Green our Vaccines' that suggests proponents aren't 'anti-vaccine' but rather 'pro-safe-vaccine'.
I mean, hell, who isn't 'pro-safe-vaccine'? Even Satan incarnate to the anti-vax movement (Researcher Paul Offit) would be considered 'pro-safe-vaccine' (since he's spent his entire career making vaccines safer and more effective.) However, the 'pro-safe-vaccine' mantra that claims 'too many too soon' or that claims unacceptable levels of toxins are present in vaccines (which they aren't) is to the old-school purely anti-vaccine movement what holocaust minimizers are to holocaust deniers. They are the same steaming turd, but with a PR smiley face tacked on.
And while a detailed discussion of why Dr Sears' book is so incredibly dangerous is going way beyond the scope of this post, I would suggest that you read the following: "The Problem With Dr Bob's Alternative Vaccine Schedule." Offit and Moser. Pediatrics. 123: 164-169. 2009. (Of course that's the in house journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.... and we all know how much they want to poison your baby and give it to a pack of dingos.)
If you don't have access to a medical library, you could also try the following post on Orac's page at Scienceblogs: [scienceblogs.com]
@Sigerson: I'm not convinced that BC is the real Cassandra Berry, unless her hatred of Gawker has faded over the last two years. I would hope that:
a) the wife of a writer would know the difference between libel and slander (to help you remember, slander is spoken, libel is literary);
b) the wife of a writer would realize that in repeatedly using her and the kid for column material, Stein has pretty much made them into public figures of a sort, reducing the effectiveness of any claims of libel; and
c) the wife of a writer would know the difference between a commenter and a commentator.
Somehow it does not surprise me that this idiocy took place in LA. Not that NYC is any better, but going with what feels right is a uniquely LA proposition.
www.iansvoice.org - if you can stomach it. This is what Hep B at birth did to this baby. Hep B is an STD - it can be passed to baby during birth. So if you test Mom, you can know you need to vax baby. Or, you can sell a Hep B vax to every infant born in America. BTW, Canada study - delaying Hep B to 2 months cut asthma by 50%. Breathe on that for a bit. Ian's dead, by the way. Hep B = STD. Birth vax??
I think I'd personally refuse a hep-B for my baby (though I've had the vaccine myself, as I travel to developing countries quite a bit, so know I can't pass it on at birth). Does that make me a hypocrite?
@kimsama: Sure. No one wants to go through the hell of a vax injured child. And it happens every day. American babies now receive over 48 vaxes before 1st grade. They are not tested cumulatively. They are tested individually.Tylenol is great. Motrin is great. Aspirin is great. Would you take all three at once? American children are chronically sicker than ever - forget autism - how about ear infection, learning and speech delays, excema, ashtma, nut allergies, GI problems (babies are on Prilosec) in alarming numbers. No one wants polio- NO ONE. But chicken pox doesn't routinely kill in America for instance. Everyone deserves to make informed consent choices for their babies and kids. Tetanus? 25 mcg mercury. Flu given to kids over 3 AND Pregnant women? 25 mcg mercury. Does your OB tell you there's Hg in that shot he recommends? He should. Then you can choose safely and smartly. Parents who question vaxes are not loons, most of us (yes us) have been badly burned and now change diapers for 12 year olds. It's harsh. Trust me. Don't make us look like fools. You'll be paying for our childrens' care til the day they die, long after I die.
@kimsama: Oh, and my comment below isn't directed at you. No it makes you thoughtful - take the vaxes as you NEED them. And weigh the ones you don't. Read Bob Sears's "The Vaccine Book." He's mainstream - and suggested slowing down the current AAP schedule. Most healthcare workers refuse the flu shot - and are adamantly walking away from the new H1N1. Same think happened with the anthrax vax - healthcare workers said, "No way." It's easy enough to become educated. Moms spend more time checking out car seats and strollers than what the doc is injecting into their kids. Peace.
@TroisFilles: There's so much wrong with your statements that I don't even know where to begin.
But let's try the big points:
* Most importantly, correlation ≠causation. Learning and speech delays are as likely to be due to overdosing children on TV as any vaccine regimen. Likewise, you haven't accounted for other factors (such as mother's age at birth, medical history of extended family, etc.) that may affect the prevalence of the conditions you list.
* Influenza and anthrax vaccines are administered on a completely different scale than the AAP schedule; you're comparing apples and oranges.
* Thiomersal, the preservative that some blame for all of the things that you describe, was by 2002 removed from all vaccines recommended in the US for infants and toddlers (or reduced to trace amounts, that's why you're seeing the mercury level in micrograms), with the exception of some inactivated influenza vaccines. There are plenty of reasons to take a pass on influenza and anthrax vaccinations; the use of thiomersal is the least of them.
* There's no scientific proof of a link between thiomersal and autism. None, zip, nada. Read my very first statement again, if you didn't grasp it fully the first time.
* Chicken pox may not kill regularly, but it can leave adult males sterile, and unless I'm your husband, that's generally considered a bad outcome.
* It turned out that ethyl mercury (the metabolite of thiomersal) clears from our systems much quicker than methyl mercury, so the risk assessments that were done in the 1990s were conservative to a fault.
* I'm not sure where you're getting your figure of 48 vaccinations before age 6, so I call "citation needed". The CDC's schedule appears to list 27 (not counting yearly influenza vaccines) for children, with a few more for certain high-risk groups.
In short, the benefits of herd immunity outweigh the unproven risks of an aggressive vaccination schedule.
@Cynical Media Bitch: CMB, we're both slightly off, I apologize. I recounted - it's 41 vaxes (excluding "catch ups") and I did include flu because it's on the AAP list and most parents listen to their ped. As I said, no one wants polio back or to see diptheria ravage children - but a slower schedule might prove healthier overall. Dr. Healy has been outspoken on this, and she's no kook. Few countries duplicate our schedule. Dr. Sears's vaccine book has a lot of good, mainstream info. This is a divisive topic, but the goal is health and safety for our kids. I hope all our kids Gawky remain healthy and well. Night night. TF.
@TroisFilles: Please show us a citation for the "most health workers refuse the flu shot." In my experience, the people that work in doctor's offices and clinics and hospitals get the flu shot. My cousin is very upset that not everyone in her hospital will get an H1n1 shot. Maybe you are using a broad generalization of what a health worker is? I'm not counting people that work in chiropractors offices or those that specialize in craniosacral massage.
@LadybirdRamone: i don't have a link to reference, but i believe the percentage is around 42% do and the rest do not...
and again 'health care workers' is a broad term. so - anyway... that's what i've heard from my aunt who is a nurse in florida.
@dippitydoo: I've worked at 6 hospitals over the last 10 years; never have I turned down the free flu shot. My entire department went last thursday to get it.
80% of the people commenting on this thread haven't had 50% of the vaccines given to infants in the first 6 years of their lives. is it really because we need them?
varicella? really--you want to vaccinate against chicken pox because (and I am quoting the pharmacos literature on docs on this) it's "inconvenient to working parents". so they make it handy, bundling it with MMR. until they can prove that more multivalent vaccines (vaccines that "protect" agains multiple maladies) is 100% safe, why pick on those who prefer to space them out or be selective. if your child was one of the ones who's health and behavior changed dramatically immediately following a course of jabs, you'd be thinking about that, too.
don't get me started on the empty promise of the much-hyped HPV course--that's lobbying and fear-marketing at its finest.
Aren't there state laws which prohibit nonvaccinated children from enrolling in school? Didn't Jenny McCarthy cure autism? I'll hang up and listen to your answers.
@Mymoustache: I would love to have a federal law that prohibits unvaccinated children from riding on airplanes as well, but there are always going to be some exceptions made for people with sincere religious beliefs, or people who lie about having them.
Idiotic anti-vaccine bitches: whooping cough doesn't protect your kids against asthma, okay? Preventing your kids from swimming overlong in chlorinated pools protects them from developing asthma. In all likelihood, exposure to all sorts of extremely common, organ-irritating chemicals (like those found in many 1st-world homes) helps. You know, like formaldehyde, ammonia, sodium hypochlorite, chlorine -- all stuff found in common cleaners.
...or you could keep slathering the above on your house's surfaces, not get your kids vaccines, and then they'll get tons of allergies before dying of measles. Yeah, easy choice!
I wasn't vaccinated and I turned out fine, no serious case of anything except maybe the flu a couple times as a kid (and actually, usually less frequently than my vaccinated classmates).
I mean I think it's really on a case-by-case basis... some kids won't be vaccinated and will live til they're 90 without a hiccup and some will have every shot under the sun and get sick every other week. And visa versa.
@oystersporkandbeer: Yes, it really matters. You benefited from all those other kids that did get vaccinated. Polio doesn't exist in the U.S. because of the vaccine. If one kid didn't get the polio vaccine, no problem. But if 50% of kids didn't get the vaccine, polio would still exist in the U.S.
Vaccines are not about protecting a single person. They are about protecting a population. If 50% of parents didn't vaccinate, your chances of being as healthy as you are would have been much lower.
11/13/09
11/13/09
11/13/09
11/13/09
11/13/09
11/13/09
11/13/09
11/13/09
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11/13/09
What gets me is when he's "interviewing" a reporter or analyst to provide background and asks questions which he should be able to answer, if he's half as smart as his audience, but some producer's obviously telling him there's an interesting factoid somebody, somewhere may not have heard.
The anchors on cnn.com were much the same way, except unlike Blitzer, I never expected them to know.
11/13/09
09/20/09
Thing is, there are all manner of reasons to freak out when it comes to your kids' health and safety. The cottage industry in blaming vaccinations, however, is about as scientific and reality-based as a good old witch hunt. Our pediatrician is old enough to vividly recall holding kids as they died of diseases we now have vaccines to prevent.
My kid? Healthy as a freaking horse. But I just touched wood when I said that. Tomorrow, I'm scheduling his next round of shots.
09/21/09
The only pediatricians that don't require adherence to the correct schedule are either the very few who actually believe that anti-vax hype (i.e. either don't understand evidence based medicine or so egotistical that they ignore it even when its reached the point of lunacy to do so) or the vast majority that don't agree with alternate vaccination schedules but go along with parents either because its easier or as a means to 'appease the customers'.
To neither type would I ever consider taking my child. The truly anti-vax ones are just plain ignorant. The appeasers are the same ones who will prescribe unnecessary antibiotics to parents who demand them and who currently are flattening the supply of tamiflu liquid by rx-ing it to every kid with a fever (regardless of whether they meet CDC criteria for being at increased risk or not.) You don't want a pediatrician who feels it necessary to appease the 'customer' because if you want the best care for your kid, you want one who sees your child as their patient; their responsibility; but never in a million years a customer.
09/20/09
09/20/09
09/20/09
You obviously do not understand the term hyperbole.
You are also in precisely the same camp as anti-vaccine whackjobs, with the exception that you are more subtle in your quackery. And I will admit, my hat is off to the skill at dissembling that the anti-vaccine whackjob who came up with the PR friendly slogan 'Green our Vaccines' that suggests proponents aren't 'anti-vaccine' but rather 'pro-safe-vaccine'.
I mean, hell, who isn't 'pro-safe-vaccine'? Even Satan incarnate to the anti-vax movement (Researcher Paul Offit) would be considered 'pro-safe-vaccine' (since he's spent his entire career making vaccines safer and more effective.) However, the 'pro-safe-vaccine' mantra that claims 'too many too soon' or that claims unacceptable levels of toxins are present in vaccines (which they aren't) is to the old-school purely anti-vaccine movement what holocaust minimizers are to holocaust deniers. They are the same steaming turd, but with a PR smiley face tacked on.
And while a detailed discussion of why Dr Sears' book is so incredibly dangerous is going way beyond the scope of this post, I would suggest that you read the following: "The Problem With Dr Bob's Alternative Vaccine Schedule." Offit and Moser. Pediatrics. 123: 164-169. 2009. (Of course that's the in house journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.... and we all know how much they want to poison your baby and give it to a pack of dingos.)
If you don't have access to a medical library, you could also try the following post on Orac's page at Scienceblogs: [scienceblogs.com]
09/20/09
09/21/09
a) the wife of a writer would know the difference between libel and slander (to help you remember, slander is spoken, libel is literary);
b) the wife of a writer would realize that in repeatedly using her and the kid for column material, Stein has pretty much made them into public figures of a sort, reducing the effectiveness of any claims of libel; and
c) the wife of a writer would know the difference between a commenter and a commentator.
But I clearly expect too much from people.
09/20/09
09/20/09
09/20/09
09/20/09
09/20/09
I think I'd personally refuse a hep-B for my baby (though I've had the vaccine myself, as I travel to developing countries quite a bit, so know I can't pass it on at birth). Does that make me a hypocrite?
09/20/09
09/20/09
09/20/09
But let's try the big points:
* Most importantly, correlation ≠causation. Learning and speech delays are as likely to be due to overdosing children on TV as any vaccine regimen. Likewise, you haven't accounted for other factors (such as mother's age at birth, medical history of extended family, etc.) that may affect the prevalence of the conditions you list.
* Influenza and anthrax vaccines are administered on a completely different scale than the AAP schedule; you're comparing apples and oranges.
* Thiomersal, the preservative that some blame for all of the things that you describe, was by 2002 removed from all vaccines recommended in the US for infants and toddlers (or reduced to trace amounts, that's why you're seeing the mercury level in micrograms), with the exception of some inactivated influenza vaccines. There are plenty of reasons to take a pass on influenza and anthrax vaccinations; the use of thiomersal is the least of them.
* There's no scientific proof of a link between thiomersal and autism. None, zip, nada. Read my very first statement again, if you didn't grasp it fully the first time.
* Chicken pox may not kill regularly, but it can leave adult males sterile, and unless I'm your husband, that's generally considered a bad outcome.
* It turned out that ethyl mercury (the metabolite of thiomersal) clears from our systems much quicker than methyl mercury, so the risk assessments that were done in the 1990s were conservative to a fault.
* I'm not sure where you're getting your figure of 48 vaccinations before age 6, so I call "citation needed". The CDC's schedule appears to list 27 (not counting yearly influenza vaccines) for children, with a few more for certain high-risk groups.
In short, the benefits of herd immunity outweigh the unproven risks of an aggressive vaccination schedule.
09/20/09
09/20/09
09/20/09
and again 'health care workers' is a broad term. so - anyway... that's what i've heard from my aunt who is a nurse in florida.
09/20/09
09/21/09
09/21/09
80% of the people commenting on this thread haven't had 50% of the vaccines given to infants in the first 6 years of their lives. is it really because we need them?
varicella? really--you want to vaccinate against chicken pox because (and I am quoting the pharmacos literature on docs on this) it's "inconvenient to working parents". so they make it handy, bundling it with MMR. until they can prove that more multivalent vaccines (vaccines that "protect" agains multiple maladies) is 100% safe, why pick on those who prefer to space them out or be selective. if your child was one of the ones who's health and behavior changed dramatically immediately following a course of jabs, you'd be thinking about that, too.
don't get me started on the empty promise of the much-hyped HPV course--that's lobbying and fear-marketing at its finest.
09/21/09
09/21/09
09/20/09
09/20/09
09/20/09
09/20/09
...or you could keep slathering the above on your house's surfaces, not get your kids vaccines, and then they'll get tons of allergies before dying of measles. Yeah, easy choice!
09/20/09
09/20/09
I mean I think it's really on a case-by-case basis... some kids won't be vaccinated and will live til they're 90 without a hiccup and some will have every shot under the sun and get sick every other week. And visa versa.
Does it really matter?
09/20/09
Vaccines are not about protecting a single person. They are about protecting a population. If 50% of parents didn't vaccinate, your chances of being as healthy as you are would have been much lower.
09/20/09
09/21/09