An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All | Magazine
This article in Wired talks about the trend towards parents not immunizing their children and some of the reasons for the trend. This has resulted in outbreaks of disease in certain areas where vaccination rates are especially low. The article talks about Paul Offit, a pediatrician who is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine:
Offit once got an email from a Seattle man that read, “I will hang you by your neck until you are dead!” Other bracing messages include “You have blood on your hands” and “Your day of reckoning will come.” A few years ago, a man on the phone ominously told Offit he knew where the doctor’s two children went to school. At a meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an anti-vaccine protester emerged from a crowd of people holding signs that featured Offit’s face emblazoned with the word terrorist and grabbed the unsuspecting, 6-foot-tall physician by the jacket.
“I don’t think he wanted to hurt me,” Offit recalls. “He was just excited to be close to the personification of such evil.” Still, whenever Offit gets a letter with an unfamiliar return address, he holds the envelope at arm’s length before gingerly tearing it open. “I think about it,” he admits. “Anthrax.”
So what has this award-winning 58-year-old scientist done to elicit such venom? He boldly states — in speeches, in journal articles, and in his 2008 book Autism’s False Prophets — that vaccines do not cause autism or autoimmune disease or any of the other chronic conditions that have been blamed on them. He supports this assertion with meticulous evidence. And he calls to account those who promote bogus treatments for autism — treatments that he says not only don’t work but often cause harm.
The primary example of pseudo-science discussed in the article is the tying of vaccination to autism. Combine the tendency for humans to see causation where there is correlation (autism shows up around the same time as kids are receiving a number of vaccinations), with the desire people have for answers, with the distrust that has developed of drug companies, with the viral nature of the internet, you end up with pseudo-science and a movement.
This is why I don't watch Oprah.
Or spend significant time reading the Huffington Post. Or listening to Bill Maher.
This article in Wired talks about the trend towards parents not immunizing their children and some of the reasons for the trend. This has resulted in outbreaks of disease in certain areas where vaccination rates are especially low. The article talks about Paul Offit, a pediatrician who is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine:
Offit once got an email from a Seattle man that read, “I will hang you by your neck until you are dead!” Other bracing messages include “You have blood on your hands” and “Your day of reckoning will come.” A few years ago, a man on the phone ominously told Offit he knew where the doctor’s two children went to school. At a meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an anti-vaccine protester emerged from a crowd of people holding signs that featured Offit’s face emblazoned with the word terrorist and grabbed the unsuspecting, 6-foot-tall physician by the jacket.
“I don’t think he wanted to hurt me,” Offit recalls. “He was just excited to be close to the personification of such evil.” Still, whenever Offit gets a letter with an unfamiliar return address, he holds the envelope at arm’s length before gingerly tearing it open. “I think about it,” he admits. “Anthrax.”
So what has this award-winning 58-year-old scientist done to elicit such venom? He boldly states — in speeches, in journal articles, and in his 2008 book Autism’s False Prophets — that vaccines do not cause autism or autoimmune disease or any of the other chronic conditions that have been blamed on them. He supports this assertion with meticulous evidence. And he calls to account those who promote bogus treatments for autism — treatments that he says not only don’t work but often cause harm.
The primary example of pseudo-science discussed in the article is the tying of vaccination to autism. Combine the tendency for humans to see causation where there is correlation (autism shows up around the same time as kids are receiving a number of vaccinations), with the desire people have for answers, with the distrust that has developed of drug companies, with the viral nature of the internet, you end up with pseudo-science and a movement.
This is why I don't watch Oprah.
Or spend significant time reading the Huffington Post. Or listening to Bill Maher.
