Matthew Lacek become stricken with a rare bacterial infection, which is prevented through vaccines.

Must read from CNN:

The rate of vaccination for kids covered under private insurance fell 4 percentage points in 2009, according to a nonprofit association that certifies health care organizations. It was the first time a drop had been seen.

There are theories that the recent whooping cough epidemic, which has killed ten in California, is a result of lagging vaccinations. In California, 320 new whooping cough cases have been reported this week. Health authorities urge booster shots for everyone 10 years or older who has not yet received it, especially women of childbearing age and health care workers who are in contact with pregnant women or infants.

A small subset of the population, typically well-educated, white and in the upper-middle class, have grown skeptical of immunizations, said Jason Glanz, a senior scientist and epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente’s Institute for Health Research.”

There is no conspiracy over vaccines. The often cited paper by Andrew Wakefield from 1998 involved just 12 children and had conflicts of interest. It was later retracted and may have been fraudulent.

The real research? A recent study of 70,000 children born between 1994 and 1999 confirmed that there is no link between vaccines and autism. For more information see Nestor Lopez-Duran’s terrific blog post about this study*.

The dangerous storm of misinformation and pseudoscience regarding vaccines infuriates and saddens me because we are losing children to diseases that had been mostly eradicated. Short and simple, vaccinate your kids.

* Citation:  Price, C., Thompson, W., Goodson, B., Weintraub, E., Croen, L., Hinrichsen, V., Marcy, M., Robertson, A., Eriksen, E., Lewis, E., Bernal, P., Shay, D., Davis, R., & DeStefano, F. (2010). Prenatal and Infant Exposure to Thimerosal From Vaccines and Immunoglobulins and Risk of AutismPEDIATRICS, 126 (4), 656-664 DOI: 10.1542/peds.2010-0309.

I’m a bit late in doing this–I have already interviewed the guy, so you can’t pose online questions to him as with previous guests. They’ve already been asked!

Still, I’m psyched that the next guest for the program is New Yorker staff writer, Denialism author, and Daily Show guest Michael Specter.

Specter and I happen to have developed a bit of a dynamic/rapport over the past year, having done a recent panel together at the Cambridge Science Festival, as well as a Bloggingheads.tv episode and a Slate dialogue.

Indeed, and as you’ll see, we’ve been arguing for some time about the meaning of a famous John Milton quotation…er, but to say more about that would be giving too much away.

And we’ve also been arguing, in a pretty friendly way, about whether there is anything we can do about American irrationalism, whether the left is more guilty than the right–and much else.

So listen for the show on Friday–and in the meantime, if you haven’t already, get yourself a copy of Denialism by clicking the book cover….

Orac has a great post skewering an ambitious gambit over at Age of Autism: One Julie Obradovic lectures us there on how to actually save the vaccine program. Much of the advice has to do with accepting the incorrect premises of the vaccine skeptics, and humoring them.

All of Orac’s criticisms are on target, but I actually thought Obradovic wrote one thing worth listening to–at least if we take the more abstract point out of the biased context in which she introduces it. It is this:

Additionally, [vaccine skeptical parents] don’t take kindly to propaganda or threats, and they most definitely don’t like to be insulted. Telling them their choice is to go with the scientific side is juvenile in its approach, suggesting that any parent who researchers [sic] both sides of the debate, personally knows someone with a different experience, and disagrees with the one size fits all approach to vaccination is by default, non-scientific. Brilliant.

Well, they actually are unscientific when they do this. However, it probably is true that the confrontational, “you’re clueless and irrational approach” is unlikely to unclog their minds or shatter their misconceptions.

Why? Human beings just don’t work that way. We have vast bodies of social science research showing that people fight hard to cling to their worldviews and belief systems–and when it comes to vaccine skepticism and denial, we’re definitely dealing with a belief system, one rarely susceptible to rational refutation or dislodging.

Does that mean we shouldn’t refute anti-vax nonsense and set the record straight? No.

But at the same time, we should be realistic about what such debunking can achieve. It certainly isn’t going to lead to mass conversions on the other side of the aisle–not on an issue so polarized, where the vaccine skeptics have their own science to turn to and make themselves feel good and right and righteous.

If changing minds is the goal, I’m pretty sure that something beyond debunking is going to be needed. Such is Obradovic’s fairly unintentional insight.

I get smeared sometimes. As a journalist who has actually written on conflict of interest, it can be amusing to watch–but rarely this amusing:

Chris Mooney’s Pharmaceutical Influence

By Jake Crosby

He is the drug industry’s newer, trendier go-to guy in the media, replacing the role of Arthur Allen, who took a break to write about tomatoes. An ex-patriot of “Science”Blogs who now blogs for Discover, and contributing editor to Science Progress, Chris Mooney is perhaps Pharma’s newest writer who has taken on the task of spoon-feeding its message to the public.

From there it is smears all the way down. You can read the whole thing here. My favorite sentence:

Yet despite the previously described mingling with obvious denialists and plagiarists, Chris Mooney is perhaps most notorious in the autism community….

You complete the sentence. But make sure to include the word “Pharma” at least twice….

PS: Orac has more on Jake Crosby’s endeavors…..written pretty kindly, as I think this particular case deserves.

(If you haven’t yet heard the first episode of the new Point of Inquiry, you can listen here, and I also strongly encourage you to subscribe via iTunes from the same page.)

Perhaps the most alarming  part of my conversation with Paul Offit came when he argued we’re already seeing many scary diseases return, thanks to reduced vaccination rates in certain communities around the U.S. I wasn’t sure whether there was clear evidence of this yet (save the obvious case of the measles in the UK). But Offit certainly sounded sure. I asked him the following question, “The public health fear is that diseases that were once vanquished or rare will return. How much evidence is there that that’s happening?” Here is his reply around minute 25:30:

Abundant evidence. I would have said ten years ago it was theoretical. And certainly, if we had immunization rates that dropped from 98 percent to 95 percent, or 94 percent, you wouldn’t see what we’re seeing now.

(more…)

(If you haven’t yet heard the first episode of the new Point of Inquiry, you can listen here, and I also strongly encourage you to subscribe via iTunes from the same page.)

The second insight from my chat with Paul Offit involved who he felt deserved the chief blame for the now notorious 1998 Wakefield paper (which, essentially, presented a claim of correlation between getting the MMR vaccine and getting autism based on a tiny sample of children, with a rather questionable mechanistic hypothesis attached). Offit said, very candidly, that he didn’t blame the media for going gaga over the study when it was published; rather, he blamed the Lancet for publishing it in the first place. As he put it around minute 10:

I think journals are a public trust, and when that’s published in Britain’s oldest and arguably most respected general medical journal, the media is going to see that as information, they’re not going to see it just as a hypothesis raised, they’re going to see it as a study done. And for them, they’ll jump on it and say, “Here’s at least a cause of autism,” and scare the hell out of people. Which is what happened. I actually don’t blame the media for this. I think that when something is published in the Lancet, I can see where they would jump all over it. (more…)

You can watch it here. No “balance”–the guests, Dr. Snyderman and myself, strongly agree that vaccines don’t cause autism. Enjoy!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Once again, link to the segment can be found here.

(If you haven’t yet heard the first episode of the new Point of Inquiry, you can listen here, and I also strongly encourage you to subscribe via iTunes from the same page.)

There were many aspects of my interview with Paul Offit that I found very informative, even surprising, and I thought I would highlight some of them here on the blog this week. Perhaps the first was Dr. Offit’s response to my second question–when I asked him, around minute 6, about all the hate mail he receives (including some death threats). I was expecting dire tales of the extremism that had been directed at my guest; but instead, Offit opened up about the incredibly positive response his book has received: (more…)

It was just announced on their Twitter feed, so that’s pretty official.

The subject is vaccination, and I’ll be appearing with Dr. Nancy Snyderman, NBC’s chief medical editor.

My segment is around 8:40 am ET.

For those who want to check out my last Morning Joe appearance, meanwhile, you can watch it here.

You can listen here, and I also strongly encourage you to subscribe via iTunes from the same page.

The show introduction starts like this:

Recently, there was another nail in the coffin for vaccine skeptics. The British medical journal The Lancet took the dramatic step of retracting a 1998 paper that lies at the root of modern vaccine denialism. Authored by a doctor named Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues, it was heavily touted as having uncovered a new cause of autism—the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, or, the MMR vaccine.

Not so fast. Twelve years later, there are more problems with the paper than you can count—and yet somehow, it managed to spawn a movement.

In this conversation with host Chris Mooney, Dr. Paul Offit discusses the state of the vaccine skeptic movement in light of this latest news. In particular, Offit explores why the tides may be turning on the movement—as well as the grave public health consequences of ongoing vaccine avoidance.

Again, listen and subscribe here. And don’t forget to buy Paul Offit’s book Autism’s False Prophets if you don’t already own it…