I would love the CDC and our government to answer one basic thing: If you are so confident that vaccines are safe, why do you shield vaccine companies from all liability? Clearly you KNOW it’s not safe otherwise there is no need to take such draconian measures to shield the companies from families who have legitimate claims.

Lastly the ending in which they show a “doctor” in a white coat telling us how important it is is a joke. US doctors go through a rigid medical schooling in which they are taught not to think for themselves, so doctors for the most part do not question anything other than official positions – starting with not questioning the logic that injecting a known neurotoxin into a baby is NOT going to damage them.
Furthermore the “system” has been setup that pediatricians make a huge % of income based just on vaccination rates – so unless they push vaccines they don’t get paid.
Conflict of interest anyone?

A little bit OT, I know, but… take post no. 32 above for example. This is somebody with a bot capitalising on the fact that your site has a high Google PageRank. They’re linking this spam back to their own site (fistfulofscience dot wordpress dot com) in an effort to boost the rank of their pitiful blog (incoming links from sites ranked higher than you boost your own PageRank).

Why don’t you have your mods just delete these obvious sponging attempts?

Regards,
Steve

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/doctors/oath_classical.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/doctors/oath_modern.html

There is a simple reason why this is not relevant, take the following facts:

* children take vaccines

* autism displays its first symptoms in childhood

* children under the age of 5 make up ~7% of the population

* there are ~306 million people in the U.S.

* about 80% of children are vaccinated entirely

This means 306 x 0.07 x .8 = 1.7 million children (roughly) have been vaccinated. With the vaccination schedule being what it is, then, there are somewhere around 100,000 children getting a shot every month (that last one is hand-wavey, it assumes a lot about frequency distributions, but that’s not really germane to my point). Autism rates are estimated at anywhere between 1 in 100 and 1 in 150 children, that means we have about 17,000 diagnosis of autism. If every single one of those autism diagnosis was given to a vaccinated child (they’re not, but again for our sake here it introduces very small error), and those 17,000 have a scatter distribution of vaccination patterns, that means not one, not dozens, not hundreds, but *thousands* of those diagnosis came within days or weeks of a vaccination: yes, this means that dozens will occur within an hour of a vaccination.

Put those thousands of people together on a message board (and since autism is hard to deal with, a very high percentage of these family *do* bond together, like SMA sufferers or MS or cancer or any other family-impacting disease), you�ll have a few thousand people all saying to each other, “Gee� MY kid got a shot right before her symptoms started showing, too! There are thousands of us! THAT CAN’T BE A COINCIDENCE.”

But you can see, it actually *isn’t* a coincidence� it’s exactly what we would EXPECT to happen.

On the other hand, Tanner’s Dad shows us why ignorance is foolish. Tanner’s Dad — at least YOUR child is still alive. In some part due to falsification of facts and misrepresentation of facts about vaccines by anti-vaxxers whom you admire and follow, Dana’s Dad no longer has the privilege of seeing his child alive and well.

Tanner’s Dad, you have been duped by people who want to make you feel bad. It gives them power over you. Reject it and find out the facts — not what uneducated liars who want power over you have told you.

Moreover, if there really ARE that many children being diagnosed AND vaccines no longer have the harmful agents your anti-vax gods tell you they did, then perhaps you need to be asking people to look in other directions for the cause of autism. Much good research is being done to find the cause — but you and your crowd will never listen to anything about it because it doesn’t fit the opinions you choose to believe. Opinions that are just that: opinions NOT based on hard facts.

I’ll say it another way: I strongly suggest that you find a way to honor Dana’s Dad’s loss by looking beyond the lies you were told and the crap you CHOOSE to believe, and start taking responsibility for educating yourself about the current state of autism research being done by responsible, credible institutions and researchers. End your silly delusions. And, keep your children away from other children and pregnant women. For those who are not yet vaccinated (the very young, the unborn) you’re raising a generation of disease carriers, all to serve some useless propaganda.

Harsh am I? Yes. Ignorance, fear and wilful gullibility deserve no less than my most profound pity of you, and yes, harshness — because you and your cohorts choose to believe nonsense over common sense in the face of overwhelming evidence that puts the lie to the delusions you have.

No doubt you care for your child — no one can fault you for that. I applaud it. But, you choose a very strange and tragic way to show it.

Death of your child is a shocking thing to live through. I wish it on absolutely nobody. I live with it each day!

To suggest that the medical community would knowingly hurt our babies is ludicrous. They take an oath the protect and preserve life. If you’d seen the devastation in the eyes of the intensive care staff when my daughter died, you’d never doubt their integrity and commitment. They tried every thing possible to save her. WE HAVE SO MUCH RESPECT FOR WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY DO!! Picture 14 people desperately working together on my little girl…in tears as they failed to save her. THEY CARE!!!!

I’ll let the medical experts explain vaccinations to you. Our story is all I have to tell. Please learn from it….we are trying to help you and others understand just what happens when people don’t do the right thing!

antivax is so retarded, i cannot even think…

Perhaps scouting the CDC for someone different to be on camera, someone with more media skills. It’s not easy to learn how to do this stuff, takes a talent (maybe that’s why we call them “on camera talent”). When you get non-pros to work well, though, it’s magical! It really resonates with audiences, and the payoff is huge. Verisimilitude and all that…

I know how hard staging scenes like this is, especially when using non professional talent. You want them to look like we’ve accidentally happened upon them in the home setting but they (not being used to the cameras) tend to tense up and get stilted. Perhaps they each should’ve gotten a snifter of brandy to nurse! Works fer me!

Also, as director of this video, I would have made certain that the moms on the couch relaxed a bit and dropped their defensive body language. They appear to be trying to make as much distance between themselves and “authority” as they can. It’s a small thing but it unconsciously affects how we interpret how the mothers are receiving the information from the doctor. They should uncross their legs and arms, swivel to face the doctor and lean forward a bit towards her to communicate interest and lack of fear. If you watch the video without sound you can see the effect more clearly.

Phil, I finished reading Death From The Skies yesterday morning. It was great…but a few hours later, I found myself appreciating it even more.

See, on Monday, I got some other books, including the novelization for Revenge of the Sith. I’m more a fan of Star Wars than Star Trek (though I love both), possibly because the epic feel of the conflicts in Star Wars seems more apropos to the scale, even though wars waged at that scale should be destroying whole worlds nearly as a matter of course.

Anbyway, I read Revenge of the Sith yesterday afternoon and evening. And I was so glad I had read yours first.

There was an almost melancholy to your book in the notion that nothing lasts forever. But there was also a sort of hope without hope going on–that even once the universe is gone, something might come along after it, even if we’re no longer there for it. And, of course, the notion that the universe is still, for the foreseeable future, ours to explore some more.

As it was about the end of an era, if not the end of a civilization, Revenge of the Sith had the same general idea…but the novel brought it into sharp focus (possibly because Matt Stover is a better writer than George Lucas). The era of the old Republic was an age of heroes and great deeds. But even they couldn’t hold back the dark forever. Anakin Skywalker knew this on some level–shortly after beginning his training, a mission took him and Obi-Wan to a system with a dead star, and he realized even stars can die.

The dark always wins. But it hasn’t won yet. And the light might get another shot.If I had read both of those books on their own (not sequentially), I might have come up with the same thoughts. But they would not have had the emotional resonance I had from reading them back to back: the seeming end of the story…with a little hope for another chapter.

tl;dr Your book is, as the kids say, the tits.

Until there’s a viable infrastructure for the creation and distribution of hydrogen that doesn’t depend on fossil fuels, hydrogen fuel cells are not the answer.

Any long term goal using hydrogen fuel cells would have to treat it as an energy transport mechanism, not a source of energy, since it’s clear that it takes more energy to create hydrogen than is gained by consuming it. But if we develop renewable electricity generation much further, that power can be used to create hydrogen as a means of transporting that electricity indirectly (imagine a tidal hydrogen plant that used electricity from tides to create the gas).

The same kind of cycle could be used with methanol, too, which can be created by running a methanol fuel cell backwards (removing carbon dioxide from the air), with the electricity coming from solar, wind, or even fission sources. That converts that clean, renewable electricity into an easily transportable liquid which can even run current combustion vehicles with little to no engine modifications, and take advantage of all the existing gasoline distribution infrastructure.

Right now, the correct path is making electricity generation carbon-neutral and renewable, then modernizing the grid as much as possible. The resulting excess power generation potential can subsequently be realized to create fuels like hydrogen or methanol that serve as easily transportable power.

Looks like its ratings are getting hit on YouTube. Show it some love, peeps.