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New York, 6:00 AM
Fri Nov 27
11 posts in the last 24 hours
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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
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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
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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