Blogs / Bad Astronomy

These. Are. Brilliant.

Dear Media, Dear Homeopathy, and Dear Astrology are three polite letters written by, um, Science. Well, really, "the personification of the abstract concept of Science, just to clarify," as he says in his own letters.

These are funny, dead on, satirical, clever, and dagnabbit I’m ticked I didn’t think of this first. Oh well. To be honest, I’m just glad someone did. Oh– they are ever-so-mildly not safe for work, but just for language, not content.

These won’t convince any believers, of course. But they do make excellent points, and they’ll help rally the troops, I think. That’s pretty important too! I hope he writes more.

Oh, this is wonderful to hear: The Lancet — a leading UK professional medical research journal — is retracting the paper published by Andrew Wakefield back in 1998 that linked vaccines with autism.

The paper has been found to be multiply and fatally flawed, with Wakefield and his work being thoroughly discredited. As the Lancet editorial itself states:

Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al. are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation. In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.

That’s great news, especially after Wakefield had his head handed to him last week by the GMC over his unethical and irresponsible behavior that led to this horrible paper being published in the first place.

The Lancet statement is a bit bloodless… but they are a professional research journal and not a blog, so it’s not appropriate for them to call out Wakefield in more emotional — and utterly deserved — terms. It’s up to the blogs to call out Wakefield for his tireless efforts in creating of the modern antivaccination movement, which is becoming so successful that measles, mumps, pertussis, and other preventable diseases are on the rise again. And to note that not only was his research wrong, but that he may have faked his data. And to say that he has a huge conflict of interest here, since at the time he was involved in creating an alternative to vaccination that would make him very, very rich if people became scared to vaccinate their kids. And to inform people that Wakefield was in the pocket of lawyers trying to sue the vaccine industry. And to basically call out the entire antivax movement for the incredible damage they have done and continue to do to public health.

All that’s left now is for the GMC to officially sanction Wakefield, disbar him, essentially, to finish this all up officially.

Of course, that won’t even slow Wakefield or the antivaxxers. They don’t care for the real world, based on evidence and fact. They are, for all intents and purposes, religious zealots now, believing in Wakefield, Jenny McCarthy, and the rest with such fervor that there is literally no amount of evidence that can ever sway them. And they will continue to spin, fold, and mutilate the truth, while we watch as diseases rise back from the dead, infecting hundreds of thousands of people, and killing many of them.

Never forget what’s at stake here. Never.

My thanks to the many, many BABloggees who sent me email or tweeted about this.

Have no doubt, I’m a Mac guy. I don’t drink the Kool Aid, but my time with using PCs is well behind me. But y’know, Bill Gates is still my kinda guy: he and his wife are investing ten billion dollars to get vaccines to kids who need them.

That’s $10,000,000,000. Holy Haleakala. They think this can save nearly 9 million lives, and I think that’s pretty cool:

“Vaccines are a miracle,” added Melinda Gates. “With just a few doses, they can prevent deadly diseases for a lifetime. We’ve made vaccines our priority at the Gates Foundation because we’ve seen firsthand their incredible impact on children’s lives.”

Good on them. Very, very good. This is not only something desperately needed, but the publicity is, haha, a shot in the arm as well.

And if I may disagree ever-so-slightly with Ms. Gates, I’ll add that vaccines are not a miracle: they are the result of science, of clever people, of medical advances. That fact is lost on a lot of folks, including the antivaxxers. On top of this incredibly generous move, I’d love to see Mr. and Ms. Gates donate some money and effort to a good ad campaign that promotes vaccination and specifically targets the claims of the pro-disease antivax crowd, so that their work will have even more of a sustainable impact. I’m so thrilled they’re doing this, but we also need a national campaign to show people that the antivaxxers are wrong and doing significant damage to the public health.

Still and all: my congrats to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and my very sincere and hearty thanks.

While searching my blog archives for something I wrote on UFOs, I stumbled on an old article: Woo shots, about the antivax movement. It was one of the first times I wrote about the antivaxxers on the blog, and the first time I took them on directly:

If these people prevail, we are all at risk. If you’re under the age of, say, 40 do you personally remember anyone getting smallpox, or polio?

No? Guess why.

That’ll all end if the antivax people have their way. They must be stopped, and being vocal about critical thinking is the only way to do it…. and when it comes to the important stuff, the really important stuff, I’ll take all the help I can get to make sure the word gets out.

That article was written almost exactly two years ago, and little did I know then that not only would the movement grow stronger, but in the intervening 700 or so days many people — including babies — would die due to the words of those who deny vaccinations to their own children. That’s despite the 60 or so posts I’ve written about this, and the efforts of others like Steve Novella, Orac, Joe Albietz, Rachael Dunlop, and so many others. But it’s on more than individual blogs now: Daily Kos has a lengthy article up today about antivaxxers, and many other weighty websites and even the mainstream media have taken up the issue. I’m very glad to see it.

When I write about these topics, I get a handful of complaints from readers who think I should stick to astronomy. Well, that’s not going to happen. After these past two years I remain as adamant and as impassioned to spread the word that antivaxxers are dangerous, and their ideas kill. I will continue to write about this health danger, and keep you up to date as much as I can on the latest news on this.

People are dying, and it’s because of bad thinking. We must stop this, and the first step is to be aware of the problem. I can hope that two years from now I won’t have to write about this any more… but I’m a realist, and I know that this will be a problem for a long, long time to come. It’s up to us to minimize that time. Bad thinking takes lives, but good thinking can save them.

Think well.

The Shorty Award nomination process ends tonight at midnight Pacific time (08:00 UT Saturday). If you have an existing Twitter account, please help my friend and quack-fighter Rachael Dunlop beat out that alt-med gufru^* Joe Mercola. You can vote for her here, and you can get some backstory in this earlier post.

This is just the nomination process, but it simply makes my heart sing to know that someone who represents actual science and a real defender of health gets the most votes. Thanks.

Continuing a month of skeptical victories, the UK’s General Medical Council has found that Andrew Wakefield — the founder of the modern antivaccination movement — acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" when doing the research that led him to conclude that vaccinations were linked with autism. This is being reported everywhere, including the BBC, Sky News, the Yorkshire Evening Post, and more.

The GMC (the independent body of medical regulators in the UK, rather like the AMA in the US) didn’t investigate whether his claims were correct or not — and let’s be very clear, his claims have been shown beyond any doubt to be totally wrong — only whether he acted ethically in his research. What they found is that his research (involving spinal taps of children) was against the children’s clinical interest, that Wakefield was unqualified to perform the test, and that he had no ethical approval to do them.

Wow. Again, let’s be clear: that’s a whole lot of ethical damnation from the UK’s leading medical board.

Not to pile on here, but I was rather surprised that they didn’t mention the claims — supported by a lot of evidence — that on top of all that unethical behavior, he may have faked his results, too. There’s also no mention of his grave conflict of interest– at the time he published his paper slamming vaccines and which started the antivax craze, he was developing an alternative to vaccinations, so he had a very large monetary incentive to make the public distrust vaccines.

The GMC has not announced whether he (and two of his cohorts) will be sanctioned or not. I’ll be very curious to see what they do.

Will this deter Wakefield and the antivax movement? Ha! Of course not. Note that supporters of Wakefield heckled the GMC members as they read their announcements.

Also, the evidence was already overwhelming that Wakefield was wrong, just as it’s overwhelming that vaccines are totally and completely unrelated to autism. But the antivaxxers’ world is not based on evidence. It’s more like a dogmatic religion, since many of its believers will twist and distort the truth to fit their views, even, tragically, if it means babies will die.

The antivax movement is resulting in the deaths of children from preventable diseases, many of which were all but gone in the United States. We’re seeing the return of measles, mumps, pertussis, even polio — polio, which was eradicated entirely in the US by 1994. Because vaccines are so effective, people don’t remember these diseases and how they would kill, and now the antivaxxers are paving the way for their return.

This ruling against Wakefield is a step in the right direction, but the path is long and the antivaxxers will be there at every one of these steps, trying desperately to trip up reality. It’s up to us to make sure that we keep walking.

When confronted with arguments over an issue, how do you decide what to do? Especially when, to you, both sides seem to make good points?

I’ve written about this before, and won’t belabor the logic process that goes into decision making over a contentious issue — even if the controversy is manufactured, as it is for vaccinations.

Instead, I’ll give you an anecdote. When making a scientific argument anecdotes should be avoided, since they are the beginning of inquiry, not the endpoint. But I’m not trying to make a scientific argument here, I’m hoping to support the decision making process… and sometimes a good example is worth a dozen detailed instructions, so read this essay by a worried parent over his decision to vaccinate his child. It’s a wonderful tale from someone who managed to find the narrow path of reality having once been well away from it.

If you’re a new parent wondering whether to vaccinate your children, then you absolutely have to read that essay. You’re not alone out there. There are lots of people who have been through what you have, and some of them have figured out how to make the right decision.