There are times when reality is so obvious, so clear, so rock-solid 100% amazingly in-your-face incontrovertible, that it is beyond belief that anyone could deny it.

And yet, antivaccination groups exist.

Let me be very, very clear: they are wrong. Vaccines save lives. Vaccines save millions of lives. And not just directly, like they did by wiping out smallpox, a scourge that killed hundreds of millions of people. But also, through herd immunity, vaccines save infants too young to be vaccinated, the elderly with weak immune systems, and people whose immune systems are compromised due to chemotherapy, genetic issues, or because they are taking immunosuppressants for other illnesses (like arthritis).

Vaccines don’t cause autism. Vaccines don’t contain dangerous levels of mercury. Vaccines don’t contain fetal tissue. Each of these – and many, many more — is misinformation spread by antivaxxers, statements that are easily proven wrong (like, in order, here, here, and here). But many antivaxxers continue to use them.

What does that say about their willingness to tell the truth?

Yesterday, in Australia, one of the most vocal antivaxxers alive, Meryl Dorey of the grossly misnamed Australian Vaccination Network (AVN), spoke at the Woodford Folk Festival about her beliefs. However, she didn’t get quite the chance she had hoped for. Once the news got out that she was invited to the festival, the group Stop AVN went into action. A protest cry went up, and the venue was changed from her speaking solo, to her participating in a panel with a series of experts — actual, real experts — on vaccines. As I write this, I have a window open on Twitter, and I’m watching the tweets using the hashtag #StopAVN flow by. It’s a thing of beauty. Dorey’s arguments are being destroyed, 140 characters at a time.

The bottom line, repeated over and over again: Vaccinations save lives. That statement of fact is so simple, so powerful, that Stop AVN put it on a banner and had it flown behind a plane at the festival.

Wonderful! My congratulations to my friends Down Under for this impressive campaign.

But we here in America cannot rest easy. We have antivaxxers here; loud, wealthy, ones, who won’t hesitate to spread the same kind of misinformation; dangerous misinformation that poses a serious health threat.

The National Vaccine Information Center is one such group. They have a long history of antivax rhetoric, remarkable only in its breathtaking inaccuracy, and their ability to get it into the mainstream. And they’re at it again: they’ve put an ad on ABC’s digital 5000 square foot screen in Times Square in New York City, a place that will be packed with people celebrating the new year. To top it all off, Jenny McCarthy — who dispenses incredibly dangerous and incredibly wrong advice about vaccinations and other health safety issues — is slated to be a guest on ABC’s New Year’s Rocking Eve with Dick Clark… and she has stated she plans to promote her dangerous nonsense on the show.

Skepchick has an excellent post about this. My friend Jamie Bernstein has started a petition on change.org to get the ad taken down. I signed it.

Again, let me be clear: these antivax groups pose a public health threat. If you don’t believe me, then read this account by someone who knows.

And if you wonder why I feel so strongly about this, then I suggest you steel yourself — seriously — and read this account written by the parents of Dana McCaffery, who lost her life to pertussis when she was four weeks old. She was too young to be vaccinated. Because vaccine rates were so low in her area, pertussis had a place to grow. She was infected, and she died.

You want to know why I feel so strongly? This is why. She is why.

Talk to your board-certified doctor about vaccines. Find out what you might need — being an adult doesn’t mean you’re exempt from childhood vaccines; you may need a booster — and if your doctor approves, then do what needs to be done.

The solution against the antivaxxers is to make sure their misinformation is countered by facts. It’s one of life’s great ironies that vaccines have helped these people live as long as they have to spread their nonsense about vaccines. We can speak up to stop them… and at the same time get vaccinated to make sure that they — that everyone – gets a chance to be wrong for a long, long time.

Just some quick notes, to fill my quota give you some interesting reading:

1) Scientific American has a great article online about why it’s important to vaccinate, and how to talk to parents about it. [via George Valenzuela]

2) Speaking of which, the Autism Science Foundation — a non-profit that supports real research into autism, instead of trying to link it to vaccines despite all the evidence — was chosen as the number 1 startup charity in the "Disabilities" category by Philanthropedia/Guidestar. Congrats to them! [via Dawn Crawford]

3) The Discovery Institute isn’t completely honest? Unpossible!

4) Bill Nye helps create a sundial at Cornell University that glows when the Sun reaches its daily peak in the sky. [via Beth Quittman (my agent!)]

5) Frying pans that look like planets. Seriously. Very cool.

I know I just wrote about vaccine-preventable diseases on the rise once again, but even in the past couple of days there’s more news:

1) Houston is seeing the first case of measles in six years. The victim? An 11-month-old baby. Let’s hope she has a full and swift recovery, and no one else falls ill.

2) In that post linked above I talked about a school in Virginia that had to close down due to a big pertussis outbreak. Well, in Canada, they’re telling kids who are unvaccinated they can’t come to school; at least, not until they can show their inoculations are up-to-date. I have mixed feelings about forcing kids to get vaccinated, but in the end we simply cannot have schools be breeding grounds for diseases which are trivially easy to prevent. I read about this story on Fark, and the comments there are interesting, to say the least.

3) Seth Mnookin, who wrote "The Panic Virus" an exposé of the antivax movement, has posted his thoughts on these recent news stories. As usual, I find his comments to be well-reasoned and thoughtful.

Jessica Hagy has a terrific website called Indexed, where she uses simple, hand-drawn charts and Venn diagrams to make some pithy point in a funny way. She’s tackles all kinds of topics, and recently, to my heart’s delight, made a very simple point about vaccines:

Yup. Hard to be any more succinct than that.

[Speaking of succinct points, check out a strip from last week's Frazz webcomic, sent to me by my brother Sid.]

Two bits of anti-medicine news, both from the United States northwest, and both dealing with difficult situations:

1) In Oregon, lawmakers are making it harder for people to use religion as an excuse to avoid medical treatment. The Followers of Christ, a fringe Christian group, advocates faith healing and not standard medicine, and as a result several children in that group have died in recent years. Because of this, a bill has been introduced into the Oregon state legislature to remove religious belief as a defense against homicide. If convicted, a parent whose child has died because they used faith healing instead of real medicine will be charged with homicide and have a mandatory sentence.

Stories like this always leave me conflicted. As a parent myself I always want the best possible medical treatment for my child, and I don’t want other groups interfering with that decision. However, the State has a right to protect the best interests of that child in case the parent cannot. Decades worth of evidence has shown that faith healing does not work, and in many cases the children in the Followers of Christ church had easily treatable illnesses and needn’t have died.

In the end, the right thing to do is save that sick child. If the parent cannot, then the greater society has the responsibility to do that.

This opens a can of worms, I know. (more…)

The long-running comic strip Doonesbury does a lot of political humor of course, so it was no surprise he went after J. McCarthy today. After all, McCarthy used an environment of fear to terrify people into behaving contrary to their own best interests, ramping up an imaginary problem into a national concern, and putting thousands upon thousands of lives at risk of being destroyed.

No no no. Not Joseph. Jenny.

Tip o’ the syringe to the eight gazillion people who sent me that link, including my brother Sid.

… TDAP and flu shots, that is. Much to my chagrin, I found out I hadn’t had my pertussis vaccine booster in a while, so I went to the doctor yesterday and got both that (in the form of the Tetanus/Diphtheria/pertussis shot) as well as my seasonal flu shot:

[Sorry about blurring out my tattoo, but it's not clear that I am allowed to show it on the blog yet.]

Look: vaccines save lives. They don’t cause autism, or do any of the things the antivaxxers claim. And it’s a rock solid fact that babies have been dying all over the world from preventable diseases — 10 infants have died in California alone from pertussis this year. Most of them are too young to get a pertussis shot, so the best thing we all can do is make sure we’re up to date with our vaccines, and that means a periodic TDAP booster. Ask your doctor.

And the flu shot? Just yesterday, a four-year-old boy in New York died of the flu. The flu.

Talk to your doctor, and if they recommend it, get vaccinated.